The horrors of editing are hinted at in Williams and Abbott’s An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies, when the authors describe what occurred to Willard Motley’s novel Knock on Any Door (bolding of text is mine): “…editors at Macmillan and then at Appleton-Century collaborated with Willard Motley to reduce his 600,000-word typescript…to 250,000 words, to eliminate parts of the novel they judged wooden, to soften the depiction of sexuality and political corruption, and to manufacture a book that they could market at three dollars a copy” (74). It is this sort of recounting, in which an artistic work is beheaded for financial gain, which dissects the nature of asking what “needs” an editor has in shaping a text. If we are to follow the logic that “every act is a political act,” espoused by the likes of artist Daniel Buren and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (amongst countless others), then the work of an editor is no exception. There will be those editors, such as the individuals in charge of Motley’s work, whose banal subservience to authority will produce capital, or those whom will edit a work to serve an individual or state ideology. For instance, I am an adherent of the latter group, for one of my ellipses above omitted Motley’s name so as to obscure the fact that Williams and Abbott made it seem as though Motley worked alongside his editors in trying to peddle his book for three dollars. Without the omission, I do not believe I could have easily introduced a critical argument of the financial workings of publishing houses.

In “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” arguably my favorite essay, writer-critic Cynthia Ozick argues that Frank’s autobiography has been “bowdlerized, distorted, transmuted, reduced…infantilized, Americanized…falsified, kistchified, and, in fact, blatantly and arrogantly denied” (77). Part of her blame falls upon the shoulders of Otto Frank, Anne’s father, who sought to magnify “Anne’s idealism” without any regard as to why this idealism was smothered and ultimately obliterated at Bergen-Belsen in 1944. Ozick blames Frank’s meddling with the autobiography on his and Anne’s disparate upbringings. Though Otto too was a victim of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for The Holocaust), his upbringing was defined by petit-bourgeois stability (an especially lasting line: “Otto Frank had breathed the air of the affluent bourgeoisie”), whereas most of Anne’s life was spent in persecution, while her final years were defined by hiding, the backdrop of her existence permeated with sounds of bombs and bullets. Fatherhood does not confer surrogacy. It was the elder Frank’s insistence in Anne’s “optimistical view of life” which allowed the following line to be torn from Anne and “define” her legacy: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart” (85). Ozick points out that in the same passage, Anne writes: “I see the world being transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions…” (85). This is the Anne whose work is a direct result of her historical context, as opposed to the Anne who makes universal and abstract calls to optimism. And what of the Anne who observes: “There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill”? Ozick argues these lines which do not “give the lie to the pervasive horror of her time.” One might find it difficult to consider Anne an optimist when her autobiography remained unfinished, her life enduring a painful end in the snow at Bergen-Belsen, surrounded by hundreds of others soon-to-be ghosts. Ozick posits Otto Frank as editor, and she responsibly builds a milieu for Otto which provides context for his actions. His upbringing was one of assimilation and avoiding confrontation, which resulted in the “diluting” of Anne’s observations of anti-Semitism, not just in Germany but across Europe, and her pulling the veil on the more monstrous aspects of human nature. The essay is a worthy read, as Ozick also writes about the various cinematic and theatre adaptations of Anne’s work, and how these too have further distorted Anne’s self-portrait. At the end of the essay, Ozick muses, with a pain residing within the margins, whether a more “salvational” act than Miep Gies’ rescuing of Anne’s work would’ve been: “Anne Frank’s diary burned, vanished, lost—saved from a world that made of it all things, some of them true, while floating lightly over the heavier truth of named and inhabited evil” (102).