Frank Exchange

There was an interesting edition of BBC Radio 4's Front Row recently, when Mark Lawson pulled together interviews with young Jewish writers who have been grappling in their recent work with the Anne Frank Stoff (as we literary theorists say), sometimes in a way that is deliberately provocative to the pieties of older generations (careful now).

I normally find listening to Lawson trying to negotiate delicate topics rather like listening to a car crash (why does he get so creepily insistent about sexual matters?), but he handled this one well.  The authors included Ellen Feldman, Shalom Auslander and Nathan Englander.  Auslander's novel Hope: a tragedy deals with the conceit of a man who discovers the aged Anne Frank hiding out in his attic, and poses questions that non-Jews of a liberal persuasion would never dare ask.  Such as putting these words into the mouth of Anne Frank: "I think never forgetting the Holocaust is not the same thing as never shutting up about it". Yikes.

It struck me as amusing, therefore, to find these posters for current productions at the Nuffield Theatre juxtaposed:

What Anne Frank thinks about...

Thinking about Anne Frank...

It amused me, anyway.  The posters are for the three productions, "At Swim Two Boys", "Souvenir d'Anne Frank", and "Lalita's Big Fat Asian Wedding".