A respected French novelist who spent her childhood in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania holds a solitary vigil in the Annex of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. From eight in the evening until seven the following morning, she circumambulates the former hideout, trailed by the absent-presence of the dead.
What is she doing there, this author who has long declined “to watch documentaries about the Holocaust or read books about it”? Who in adolescence when asked where she was from alluded to Russian and Polish origins but omitted the word “Jew”? Who came of age, in Paris, fighting “for all the injustices, all the tragedies, except one"? And why is she stopped by digressive thoughts on memory, silence and displacement each time she makes for Anne Frank’s vacant room?
It sounds like the premise of one of Patrick Modiano’s existential thrillers. Yet Lola Lafon’s short, moving account of her long night of hauntings is a dirge in essay form – conceived for an Éditions Stock series devoted to a night at a museum of the author’s choice – and published to acclaim, in France, in 2022 (under the title Quand tu écouteras cette chanson).
So much has been written about Anne Frank in English. Not just about her abbreviated life or the heroism of the Christian protectors who sustained the Annex’s eight Jewish residents, but also about the interplay of interests that transfigured a chronicler of murderous persecution into a winsome universalist saint.
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More than Lafon’s elegant recapitulation of the facts, what’s interesting here is how she constructs a labyrinth of looping, interlocked narratives which spiral out beyond the Annex as the night progresses. Though her remarks on craft can be terribly earnest (ie “...writing is a path without a destination”), she sustains the narrative tension throughout by splicing familiar anecdotes, insights (some prompted by Cynthia Ozick’s trenchant essay Who Owns Anne Frank?) and bits of her own family’s Holocaust cataclysm.
Toward daybreak, Lafon wonders how to end the story without bringing it to a close – and then proceeds to do so with a swerve the reader doesn’t anticipate. In fencing, she tells us, a propos of writing, “engagement refers to making contact with the opponent’s blade”. The penultimate pages of this elegiac book are a sword-thrust to the heart.
