The Obsession

By Meyer Levin

The WWII reporter and “most significant American Jewish writer of his time” recounts his decades-long battle to stage Anne Frank’s diaries (Los Angeles Times).

As a war correspondent in Europe during World War II, Meyer Levin was among the first to report on the horrors of Nazi occupation. Also a successful novelist, he desperately wanted to bear witness to what he saw in literary form. Then, in 1951, he read The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. It was precisely the voice he had been searching for—and he became determined to bring Anne’s story to America as a Broadway play.

The Obsession is Levin’s candid account of this ill-fated project and the mania to see it through that gripped him for twenty years. Though Levin began writing his adaptation with the support of Anne’s father, Otto, he was eventually replaced with non-Jewish writers. Refusing to let Anne’s story be sanitized, Levin fought for his version in and out of courtrooms in a protracted battle that nearly destroyed both his family and his career.

In this extraordinary memoir, Levin explores the nature of Jewishness, the price of assimilation, the writer’s obligation to himself and to his subject, and the search for identity and purpose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781625670649

Book preview

1

IN THE MIDDLE of life I fell into a trouble that was to grip, occupy, haunt, and all but devour me, these twenty years. I’ve used the word fall. It implies something accidental, a stumbling, but we also use the word in speaking of falling in love, in which there is a sense of elevation, and where a fated-ness is implied, a feeling of being inevitably bound in through all the mysterious components of character to this expression of the life process, whether in the end beautifully gratifying, or predominantly painful.

In my fall, too, there lurks the powerful sense of the inevitable. Through the years of this grim affair it has always seemed that the process had to come, that it was the inevitable expression of all I ever was, all I ever did, as a writer and as a Jew; that it was in itself virtually artistic in its construction, its hidden elements, its gradual summoning up and revelation of character both in myself and others, and in its exposition of social forces.

The long trouble contained confrontations, even a public trial, and at various points I told myself it was over with, it had to be ended, that I was ejecting the entire cancerous growth from my psyche. But to every human being there remains, I believe, one final, ineradicable motive. This is the need to unravel the three-threaded intertwinings of fate, manipulation, and one’s own will. What happened to me? is our unrelinquishable puzzle. Exactly how did it, how could it have, come about? we demand. Was all this from within myself? one asks, or from outside? Was there some hidden, secret force working on me so that no matter what I did through the normal ways of society I could not prevail?—Ah! paranoia!—But if I trace back and find that there really was such a force?—Witches! Demons! The conspiratorial view of history!

Four times I sought to trace it all out within myself, through analysis. Before beginning to write this account, a year ago, I was in session with my fourth analyst. I was telling of the courtroom trial that had taken place, already some fifteen years back, and of an incident at the close of the trial, which involved my sister Bess in Chicago. All these fifteen years I had freely told this incident. Now as I came to the key words, I couldn’t utter them. I was suddenly choked with anguish. I turned my head away, trying to regain self-control.

The case in court had arisen from my difficulties over The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Continuing from my war correspondent experiences my intense absorption with the Holocaust, I had helped Otto Frank to secure publication for the Diary in English, and had dramatized it. Mr. Frank had come to New York, to see to the authenticity of the staging, but at that point the prominent playwright Lillian Hellman and her producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, had persuaded him, he told me, that as a novelist I was no dramatist, that my work was unstageworthy, that it had to be discarded and another version written.

From the start I had strongly suspected that some doctrinaire formulation rather than pure dramatic judgment had caused Miss Hellman’s attack on my play, and after the substitute work written under her tutelage was produced, I became convinced that I had been barred because I and my work were in her political view too Jewish. The Broadway play omitted what I and others, including several serious critics, considered essential material in the Diary. But also, while my work had been flagrantly smeared as unstageworthy, the Broadway play proved identical in staging, with important scenes startlingly parallel to mine. The whole affair increasingly appeared to me as a classic instance of declaring an author incompetent, in order to cover up what was really an act of censorship. And in this, not only I, but Anne Frank was involved, as well as the public. Yet because of rampant McCarthyism, I could not then make public what I saw as the real issue: doctrinaire censorship of the Stalinist variety. Even at the trial I did not bring this issue out, for fear of supplying material to McCarthy’s inquisitors.

Continual requests, mostly from noncommercial groups, for permission to perform my version were refused by the Diary owners. Appeals from literary personalities, community leaders, and even a massive petition from the rabbinate had failed, and I had finally gone to court. I won a jury verdict awarding me a high sum for damages, but as my opponents, with virtually unlimited funds at their disposal, kept up the costly litigation, I accepted a lesser settlement, so long as it assured me moral victory. Only to find that the play remained suppressed.

Thus, I was not freed from the problem. Here I sat, seven books, fifteen years afterward, face averted from Dr. Erika.

Let it come, the analyst said unobtrusively, meaning the weeping. As a knowing repeater in analysis, I was aware that this was to be counted as a breakthrough; only once before, quite long ago, with the first analyst—also a woman—had I wept. But that analysis had begun years before the trouble, and the weeping then had come because of a clear, stark horror, the suicide of Mabel, my divorced wife. Then the source was primary. The analyst led you softly to the abyss, and you looked down in, and wept. An achievement, a natural reaction—you were human, you must feel released.

This time also I had been telling of a death—my brother-in-law, his name Meyer, like mine. (Ah, identification! One’s own death! Weeping!) On the last day of the trial in New York, as I sat in the courtroom hearing my lawyer make his summation, a message came from my sister Bess in Chicago saying that Meyer had died. His third heart attack.

I couldn’t possibly leave the courtroom, whispered my counsel at the table. Think of the effect on the jury if I walked out on our own summation! I must be here for the judge’s instruction—that was mandatory. Nor could we ask for a recess at this point; our case was difficult. If the judge explained the reason, it would sound like a play for sympathy. After the jury went out the next morning, I could leave for Chicago.

And so it was, I had been telling the analyst, that I arrived too late for the funeral. The family was back in the house. The phone rang; my nephew Martin said the call was for me from New York. As we stood there by the kitchen wall-telephone and I heard and repeated the jury’s verdict in my favor, my sister cried out, I’m sure it was because my Meyer—

I told the story that far, and couldn’t say the rest. I repeated Bess said, ‘I’m sure my Meyer—’ and choked up again. I could not bring out what my sister had said about her husband, buried that day.

I had been describing Bess and Meyer so glibly. Tell me something about your early life, your family. The fourth time around. The analyst had come to her question at the beginning of the session, as though she had prepared this aspect for today: Family.

I considered that the family material was not essential to our particular exploration; right from the first session, I had explained, and Dr. Erika had agreed to it, that our objective was an immediate and limited one. At my age—though she shrugged this aside—I felt I could scarcely expect any radical character change. To embark again on any sort of depth-analysis, to try once more to relate temper tantrums in early childhood to unquenchable fury at literary suppression? Still another time to resift recollections, like some archeologist yet again putting the discard-pile through the sieve?

Perhaps only the basic facts of my life history would have to be recapitulated? To simplify this, I had given Dr. Erika my autobiography to read; that was at least one use for the half-forgotten In Search. I had really come to her, I explained, for a specific purpose. In a few months my latest novel, The Settlers, would appear. I wanted to be under some sort of control during those months, to make certain that I would not do anything rash in this critical prepublication period that could prove damaging to the reception of the book.

This novel was my biggest effort. At my age I had to consider that it might prove to be my last work. Just as I had completed the final proofreading, the ancient devilment had sprung out at me anew, intensified—the old obsessional trouble, the Anne Frank case. Day and night, I was invaded with a buzzing of plans, new protest projects, appeals to the P.E.N. Club and further legal actions.

There was a reality situation, too; once more a community group wanted to present my play, and as so many times in these twenty years, it was forbidden.

I would go back to court, I would at last make a big scandal of the whole thing, I would succeed this time in bringing out the political side of the suppression; once and for all, I would show how the same gang had been cutting away at me during all these twenty years, denigrating my work, how one book after another had been sneered down by whispering campaigns, by passing the word on Levin.

—Paranoia! Fantasy!

—No, I had instance after instance, proof—

—Then if not fantasy, it was clearly my old masochism. The self-destructive mechanism. Here, with my new book coming out, with every chance in my favor for a great success, I wanted to provoke and arouse my enemies, granted they were real—

Yes, I do believe you about the political side, said Dr. Erika. I know quite a lot about this situation, and I believe you.

She was from Israel, so my particular subject was not strange to her. This was one of the reasons for my having selected this analyst. Another reason—she was a specialist in the analysis of writers, a happy combination for me, and she had given me to understand that she was quite well up on the intrigues of the literary world. On both counts there needed to be only a minimum of preliminary explanation. Dr. Erika had, for my situation, the exact qualifications.

We could get right to the question: the pressure in me to reopen the Anne Frank affair—was it rational or irrational? While working on The Settlers, I had, over several years, held down the obsession; now it was shouting in me: You promised, as soon as you had the book out of the way! Accusing: Your play is still suppressed! You have a duty! Fight!

Was this a cunning form of masochism, to arouse my enemies and endanger the big book itself?

On the contrary, I argued, that crowd didn’t need to be aroused. They’d go after my book anyway, as they had done on so many others, and even more poisonously this time, since The Settlers was about Zionists. Instead of keeping silent, wouldn’t it be a clever move for me to bring the whole case to public attention precisely at this time, to expose the literary politics, which people would now at last understand? In that way I could raise an alert against attacks on The Settlers.

No. By reopening the Anne Frank affair, I would simply be calling attention anew to my obsession, and so make it easy for the other side to sneer me down with my new book as well—Levin is a complainer, a loser, a freak.

Agreed, it was an obsession. Admitted. There it sat under my skull with my mind gripped in its tentacles. Sometimes dormant. Sometimes awakening and squeezing. Again I would react, send out protests and petitions. That was all very well for suppressed Russian writers, from prisons, from labor camps, that was all highly noble for a Solzhenitsyn, but for a free American writer to complain for twenty years about a so-called act of suppression was obviously obsessional.

I knew what was said. The poor fellow couldn’t write any more—all he could think or talk about was his Anne Frank case; he had become a hopeless paranoiac. Any attempt to conquer my trouble by proving the case only fed this accusation: There Levin goes again. Obsessed.

Thus put, there is logic in shipping a protesting writer off to an insane asylum! The same for a Jew-mania. For example, there was the case in Leningrad where a protesting Jew, a brilliant young mathematician, set himself on fire in protest against emigration restrictions. Under any system wouldn’t such a person—a person who set himself on fire—be sent off for psychiatric observation? A routine matter. Under all systems certain practices can seem the same. Similar causes, similar results. Here with us, the protesting writer, instead of receiving state psychiatric care, or incarceration, voluntarily betakes himself, through another kind of social mechanism, to his analyst. The fellow doesn’t seem able to accept the normal, necessary practice of a certain degree of censorship of ideas. He screams Suppression! Infantile tantrums!

Gripped by obsession, the mind nevertheless pulses, creates. In these years I had written the novel by which I was most widely known, Compulsion, and the novel by which I had hoped to dispel my whole trouble, The Fanatic, and a dozen more books, plays, films. And yet, in spite of all this product, and now with the completion of the most extensive task of all, The Settlers, I knew that if I took up the case, word would go out that Levin, hopelessly consumed, unable to write, was once more screaming his fixation.

Again and again the trouble had taken me to the analysts, reexamining the pathways of my mind, perhaps like some road map that has to be undoubled vertically and untripled horizontally before one can sort out the segment that shows one’s way.

In this choked-up moment I sat with Dr. Erika, toward whom, if I felt two positive factors, I also felt two uncertainties. The lingering uncertainty of a man delivering his worldly complexities into the hands of a woman, and the question of this doctor’s being, in years—it could also be in wisdom—so much younger than myself.

With this last misgiving, why was I here? Why hadn’t I gone back to my first analyst, Dr. A, who was also from Israel, and who was now in New York? Dr. A was my own age, and an image of wisdom as she sat with her embroidery, her head slightly bowed, her hair severely parted. With Dr. A there would have been nothing to dredge up and repeat, for I had been her patient at several intervals over the years, the last time three winters ago. All that winter, struggling to begin on The Settlers, I had remained blocked. Dr. A, perhaps trying to shock me out of the impasse, had, one evening in the analytical cubicle, raised her eyes from her embroidering, fixed her gaze on me, and declared flatly that if I went on harboring my obsession, I was succumbing to my paranoia and would inevitably deteriorate until I was lost.

Then she had agreed that I should try with someone else, perhaps a man.

I had already done this some years before. Three times each week, in that hallucinating period encompassing the Anne Frank trial, I had gone to an elegant East Side apartment, entered the cubicle, and sat beside the desk, facing on the wall that same tenderly brooding picture of Sigmund Freud, the icon of analytical cubicles. There I had talked to Dr. Sulzberger—obese, overflowing his chair, gossipy, with his casual manner of a colleague interested in the theater, the arts, with his curiosity about girls, and with his touch of the imperious. A man who bore the name of an exceedingly powerful German Jewish family, he was the maverick of the clan. Dr. Sulzberger had since died. But even were he still living, would I, in my present crisis, have gone back to him? Sophisticated though he had been about my problems in the literary and theatrical world, I had never felt more than a superficiality in our talks. But there is one admonition I cherish from him: Fight! Yes, fight them! But with joy! Enjoy the fight! Perhaps he had believed the whole time he could turn me into an Irishman.

And so from the second analyst, Dr. Sulzberger, I had returned to the first, Dr. A, and then had gone on to the third, again a man. All this time I was writing my books.—Amazing, how these writers carry on, running from one analyst to another, the way, after a pessimistic medical diagnosis, one runs to another specialist in search of a different finding!

For my third analyst I had found an elderly psychiatrist, a benign man, a father-figure to be sure, even though I myself had reached sixty. He was a Polish Jew, brought up in a Zionist family, hence not unfamiliar with the political background of my trouble. Again I had gone over my tale, and also combed over all those fearful childhood experiences in a Chicago gangland neighborhood; I had told of my mother, my father, my sisters Bess and Bertha, my first wife Mabel and the divorce, and her remarriage and redivorce and eventual suicide. I had told of my marriage to Tereska, of the terror and depression that came over her if the name of Anne Frank was so much as uttered. And then I spoke of my need to go on with my protests and of my efforts to free my work from suppression. It’s only when I actually do something, take some action, that I feel a release from the obsession and am able to go on with whatever I’m writing. Dr. Bychovsky had quite simply put me on a pill.

When I was at last making progress on The Settlers, Dr. Bychovsky suddenly dismissed me. The paranoia? The fateful deterioration? No, maestro, he had said—somewhat to my discomfiture, this therapist had from the start, with a kind of old-world courtesy, called me maestro—No, maestro, you do not have a paranoia. All artists are somewhat paranoid, but that is quite another thing than a paranoia. The enemies you tell of are undoubtedly real. The question is, are they worth all the trouble you give yourself over them?

When the trouble re-asserted itself, I didn’t go back to him. His pill helped me to finish the book and that was everything, but toward the end of the writing, I had barely been able to stave off the obsession. When I would lie on my back to let story-scenes come into my mind, there would come instead new plans, new actions to take, people to see, and all this would crowd out the images of my characters. I found myself carting out to my work-place, a barnloft near Nyack, the old cartons filled with files and folders of the Anne Frank affair, which I had kept out of sight in our basement so as not to arouse Tereska.

Just as I was finishing The Settlers I read of a conference of writers to be held at Town Hall, embracing the Authors League, the P.E.N. Club, and several more unities. Though I recognized from the usual names on the letterhead that my case would receive little help from this group, I was at it again, writing and mimeographing. I saw myself arriving early at Town Hall, putting my appeal on every seat. I had a self-addressed postcard for writers to sign, a petition for lifting the suppression from my play, in recognition, so appropriate to the Diary, that not only human beings but their works have a right to life. It had already been signed over the years by such illustrious names as Albert Camus, Norman Mailer, I. B. Singer, and all the rest. So as not to upset Tereska, I rented a post-office box in Nyack, and put this address on the cards. What if I shouldn’t be allowed to distribute my appeal? I saw myself rushing up to the platform, creating a scene—

But the other side of me—the healthy? the cowardly?—demanded, "Won’t this hurt The Settlers? Answer: Didn’t Solzhenitsyn appeal to his fellow writers? Come on! How scared can you get! Retort: Okay, Levin the custodian of the rights of man, freedom of expression and all that shit! But here is your big chance on a big book. Do you have the right to risk a new gang-up without consulting your publisher? After all, on Compulsion you took Jack Goodman’s advice to go away, and it worked out for the best." Oh, sure, Michael Korda, my present editor, had long known about the case. But the whole Anne Frank affair had taken place years ago. It was sheer fantasy to believe that some sort of politico-literary gang-up against me continued. I had no such enemies, Korda insisted, but still, I must do nothing to arouse them. Not until after the big book was published. And reviewed. And well on its way.

How, I cried with noble and genuine indignation, could the situation exist in America where the literary fate of my novel might depend on my silence about the suppression of a play? No literary Mafia existed, but I must not provoke its revenge!

No, no, that was not what he meant at all. It was just that I should not divert attention from the book itself. Why risk arousing an old animosity?

And so again in such miasmic circumstances, I had to seek help. I wanted to be careful not to risk injuring this book which had taken so long and come with such difficulty.

I didn’t go back to Dr. Bychovsky, for, knowing that he would prescribe cautionary silence, the protesting side demanded a fair chance for revolt. Despite his flattering maestro act, this side insisted, Dr. Bychovsky had never really recognized that my obsession was inbedded in the one absolute of art—freedom of expression. Raise the writer’s flag! If the heroic Russian authors could risk their lives, why shouldn’t I have the courage to risk the bestsellerdom of a book?

In my dilemma I was reminded of the Ben-Gurion slogan at the start of the Second World War, when the British imposed their White Paper terminating Jewish immigration to Palestine. To fight against the British White Paper as though there were no war, and to fight alongside the British in the war as though there were no White Paper. A fine slogan, but refugees died in the face of the immigration ban. For twenty years I had been trying to do my writing as though there were no Anne Frank case, and I had been trying to fight the suppression as though I had no other writings.

When the two conflicted, which came first? I had promised I would do nothing about the case until The Settlers was out, and here I had my protest ready for the writers’ conference. Was I really going over the border with my obsession? Was Dr. A’s grim prediction coming true? Was I deteriorating into helpless paranoia?

I must not accede to panic. Having lived with Old Obsession for twenty years, I knew it well—I knew when its demands were within reason, and when it was pressing me out of bounds. Had I not proved myself in court, before a jury? Were the jurors infected with my trouble to decide in my favor? What of the critics when the play was illegally presented in Israel? Had they too been infected, or had they written honest reviews?

It had to be recognized that there are two common misunderstandings about obsessions. The first is that they are inevitably all-devouring. Had I not gone on with my work, written my books? Everyone is, when he thinks of it, acquainted with persons who are touchy on one certain point but otherwise normal And one day it may turn out that even the touchiness was reasonable and justified. For the second common misunderstanding, the one that brings the greatest irritation to the obsessed, is a curious primary assumption that being obsessed is being in the wrong.

Examples to the contrary are part of every folklore. He was proven to have been right, the whole time! Belatedly, we praise the obsessed for integrity and perseverance. Piously, we cite them as examples. We tell our children the tales of these justice-seekers who, for principle alone, fought their cases through to the final triumph! Even if only a penny was involved! Even if it took a lifetime! From pulpits, from academic platforms, we continually call on the justice-obsessed to pursue their issues, to be the one voice against the whole world, to go to jail if necessary—while in living experience we do the opposite: the moment we sniff an obsession, we shun the culprit, the infected one; we whisper that the poor fellow is demon-ridden, an injustice collector, and we even refuse to listen to, or to examine, his cause, for the simple reason that he is obviously obsessed with it.

Worse, the obsessed individual, himself a part of society, argues to himself against his own convictions: even if in some cases a one-man fight proves justified, does this mean that all such fighters are justified? Most of them, sadly, really are cranks. Isn’t it possible that I too belong among the cranks, as my distinguished enemies proclaim with pity? Unfortunately Levin has become obsessed, they tell persons who try to intervene, as though that settles the matter. You cut off a man’s hand and then sigh, Unfortunately he has become a cripple.

So I had come to my fourth analyst. All I wanted, I said, was to be sure I didn’t go off the beam in this crucial interval before the book was out.

I had heard of Dr. Erika from a friend whom she had helped through our professional malady, the writer’s block. Her methods were unorthodox. She mingled socially with her patients, went to the same parties. Indeed, I had met her a few times. A psychological, not a medical, analyst, with her office still on the West Side. Quick, intuitive—I use laser beams, she liked to say.

So she beamed them into my issue of the moment. As to the leaflets at the writers’ conference, since I already had them prepared—okay, I could go that far.

Standing just inside the door at Town Hall, I handed one to each arrival for the session on censorship and suppression. Several of the crowd knew me, some even knew of the case and had a sympathetic word, some smirked. On the platform, Arthur Miller exhorted all writers faced with censorship or suppression, Fight! Shout! Picket! Protest! Make a nuisance of yourself! Bring your case to the P.E.N. Club!

I belonged to P.E.N. Members of the P.E.N. Club pledged themselves to oppose every form of suppression of freedom of expression in their country and community.

I had written to Arthur Miller as International President of the P.E.N. clubs. He had not replied. What was I to think? Was I really out of my mind?

In the post office box at Nyack I found my cards, signed by one out of six. An excellent statistical return, anyone would have to agree! said Dr. Erika. Still, just now I must do no more.

A letter had come from a student at Brandeis who wanted to stage the play at the university. Here was a perfect opportunity! Make a test case of it! Have him ask the Diary owners for the rights. Again would come a refusal. This time I would bring out the whole Stalinist motivation in the banning of this work. What did she think? Do it?

No! No! Tactics! Fight, but with clever tactics. I must wait a few months, as I had promised my publisher. Until the big book was out and well on its way. Again she cited the example of the war on the White Paper and the war against the Nazis. Tactics!

My new analyst too, then, was advising silence. Had she only been humoring me by letting me pass out my petitions? Did she too believe I was paranoiac, and was she only handling me more cleverly, giving me a longer leash?

Then the students themselves decided they did not want to make a test case—they simply wanted to put on the play. They would rehearse without publicity and stage the performance without asking for the rights. Once more I bottled up my anger. Galleys of The Settlers were going out to the book clubs and to important review media.

Thus we had come to the day of Tell me something about your childhood. Times four. Not counting two or three exploratory contacts with other psychiatrists at one time or another. I turned on childhood and early reationships: my father, the little tailor, my mother with her hysteria, my two sisters, and how Bess got herself a nice young Jewish doctor, and how her Meyer and I became close friends. And finally his heart attacks, the trial—and there I was, choked up.

Presently I was able to turn my head back to the analyst and repeat to her the words my sister Bess had said to me, there by the kitchen phone, just after the trial verdict came, just after her Meyer’s funeral.

But to understand what Bess said, the whole trouble must be known.

The publication of The Settlers came, with curious results. From the publishing point of view the book had to be called a success, with sales of over 50,000 copies, though more had been estimated. From readers, both Jewish and Gentile, I received the most enthusiastic letters in a lifetime of writing. Then of what could Levin complain?