Arnon Grunberg meets Ruth Franklin

Who was Anne Frank as a historical person, and how does her life relate to the global icon she has become? Ruth Franklin speaks with Arnon Grunberg on her book The Many Lives of Anne Frank.

Anne Frank’s diary has come to represent a universal message against hatred and prejudice. Meanwhile, her image has been drawn into widely differing and sometimes controversial political contexts, including comparisons between Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and Palestinian suffering in Gaza today. What is lost when Anne becomes a symbol for many causes at once? How do we balance the universal power of her words with the historical reality of her life as a Jewish girl targeted for extermination by the Nazis?

A conversation about how Anne Frank has been understood, misunderstood, and continually reinterpreted since the publication of her diary. How has her legacy been reshaped in an increasingly divided world, and what does it mean for a life to become a moral symbol?

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her biography Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named one of the year’s best nonfiction books by The New York Times, Time, and NPR, among others. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. Franklin has received several major fellowships and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her earlier book, A Thousand Darknesses (2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Yael van der Wouden is a writer and lecturer in creative writing and storytelling. She made her debut in 2024 with her novel The Safekeep, which was translated into Dutch as De Bewaring. The novel won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2025 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. In 2018, she wrote the essay On (Not) Reading Anne Frank, about growing up Jewish in the Netherlands, which was named on the list of Best American Essays. She is currently working on her second novel, about control, separation, and the closure of the Zuiderzee.