FRIDAY: We took two books to the medical place!

FRIDAY, MARCH 27, 2026

We've advised you to pity the child: With trepidation, we'll admit that we took two books today to the medical mission. It occurred to us, only today and down in that place, that each of these books tells the story of the upbringing of a child:

Mary L. Trump
Too Much and Never Enough 
Simon & Schuster, 2020

Francine Prose
Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife
HarperCollins, 2009

As a courtesy, we're omitting the subtitle to Mary Trump's book. We plan to return to her general subject matter at the start of the week. 

That said:

Prose's book always consumes us. The fuller story of Anne Frank's famous book—of the way the book was written; of the way the book was saved—does include magical elements. 

Prose's book is also the story of a child who was lucky enough to be loved within her family and within her Amsterdam neighborhood, until the madness fully arrived. 

Prose says she was a "challenging" child. One anecdote goes like this:  

A demanding and often sickly baby, Anne grew into a challenging child—mercurial, moody, humorous, alternately outgoing and shy. A natural performer, she liked to pop her elbow out of its socket to get her friends’ attention. She was bossy, theatrical, and outspoken. She was only four when she and her beloved grandmother Oma Hollander boarded a crowded Aachen streetcar, and Anne demanded, “Won’t someone offer a seat to this old lady?”

In Amsterdam, she grew close to Hanneli Goslar, the “Lies” about whom Anne would later have the waking nightmare she describes in the diary. (“I saw her in front of me, clothed in rags, her face thin and worn.”) A German refugee who had arrived in Holland around the same time as Anne, Hanneli met Anne in a grocery store; their mothers were glad to find someone with whom they could speak German. The Franks called on Hanneli Goslar’s parents every Friday evening, and the two families celebrated Passover together. Eventually, Hanneli’s mother, Ruth, would say about Anne, “God knows everything, but Anne knows everything better.”  

A beloved grandmother too! 

Meanwhile, Anne knew everything better? For that, we'll give thanks to the gods! In our view, that was her job, as a young developing human person. She was encouraged by her parents—by her neighbors and by her various neighborhood friends.  

Prose holds that Anne Frank, who died at age 15, has never received her due as a precocious developing writer—as someone who was determined to become a writer. She rewrote what had started out as her personal diary, turning it into "a memoir in the form of diary entries," in the final year of her life. 

She hoped that the (famous) book thus produced would be read by people around the world. We'll reproduce one other anecdote: 

Interviewed by Ernst Schnabel, a novelist and dramatist who served in the German navy during World War II and who wrote the 1958 book Anne Frank: A Portrait in Courage, the mother of Anne’s friend Jopie van der Waal...also remembered making dresses for Anne. But what she mostly recalled is Anne’s forceful personality, her desire to be a writer, and her precocious sense of self. The phrase, “She knew who she was,” recurs, like a refrain, throughout the conversation, during which Mme. Van der Waal described the ceremony and the theater with which Anne arrived to spend the weekend:

“When Anne came to stay with us, she always brought a suitcase. A suitcase, mind you, when it wasn’t a stone’s throw between us. The suitcase was empty of course, but Anne insisted on it, because only with the suitcase did she feel as if she were really traveling.”

She wanted to feel she was really traveling! Six million others (and many more) were lost to the world in the astonishing madness which followed. 

We'll return to Mary Trump's general subject matter next week—to her uncle's possible medical situation. In our view, no other topic is more important at this particular time. That strikes us as fairly obvious.

In our view, obvious danger is present there. Also, we've advised you to pity the child.