The Obsession

In 1951, Meyer Levin’s wife gave him a copy of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, which had just been published in France. Levin was already a successful writer in his mid-forties, searching for a way to bear witness to his experiences as a war correspondent in Europe. In Anne Frank’s diary, he found the voice he had been waiting for.


The Obsession, widely regarded as one of Meyer Levin’s finest works, is a candid account of his struggle to bring his version of Anne Frank’s diary to Broadway. Levin’s adaptation, begun with the support of Anne’s father, Otto, was eventually deemed ‘unstageworthy,’ and he was supplanted by non-Jewish writers. To Levin, it was a clear case of sanitizing Anne’s story in favor of mass appeal. He battled for his version in courtrooms and out, but the fallout nearly destroyed both his family and his career.


In recounting the mania that gripped him for twenty years, Levin spares neither himself nor others. Like all his best work, this extraordinary memoir encompasses larger themes—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.