Zara Meerza digs into a grim obsession.
It started at the Brooklyn birthday party of a dubious literary critic, an event where a sizable portion of the guests were cancelled men. From authors to journalists to podcasters, it was a who’s who of fallen Twitter stars crammed into a Park Slope bar garden, drinking beer and talking about themselves. As a plus-one of a friend looking for a new job, I assumed it would be an anthropological affair.
Of the two men I spoke to, one was dissolved online within days – taken to task very publicly for impropriety in his niche publishing job. The other, however, I sparked with. A few dates later, we found ourselves on the hallmark trip of a fresh New York relationship: a weekend away upstate. A tiny town, autumn foliage, tidy galleries, all ideal. After having sex, we found ourselves sitting on a sofa talking about life. Then a moment – one that all women fear – emerged. Gazing at me, he said: ‘I want to say something but it’s going to sound a little weird.’ Alone, in the woods, a non-driver, my mind raced: was he married? Was he religious? Was he about to murder me, and would my murder be the subject of one of those true-crime podcasts I despised? Of course, I demurred. ‘Go on, say!’ He trod water, not wanting to commit.
Then he came out with it, his face a picture of complete sincerity: ‘In a certain light, you really look like Anne Frank.’ Anne Frank. Now, I am an Indian-British woman in my mid-30s, so I could only respond, ‘the famously dead child?’ He doubled down. ‘It was a certain light, a certain angle. Your hair was just so. She was also a prolific writer, too!’ He scrambled for a photo on his phone.
There are a handful of photos of Anne that are known to exist. You’ve likely seen all of them. They are all in black and white, with her hair always in a dark bob, deeply parted. She sports a wide smile. She has thick eyebrows that sit over her deep-set eyes. She wears a mix of cardigans and dresses with stiff Peter Pan collars. She is very clearly a child in all of these photos.
I read The Diary of Anne Frank as a teenager – like we all did – and Anne has always held some space in my mind. However, until that moment when a Google Images page of Anne Frank photos was presented to me, I hadn’t really thought about her for some time.
When I got back to New York, I started telling the story to friends and colleagues, and some strange things started to happen.
Acquaintances started putting together side-by-side image comparisons of me and Anne’s most famous image, where she is poised at her desk. My male Jewish friends seemed to take the most pleasure in this, finding the whole thing hilarious. They presented the images at their bachelor parties and reunions and often sent me the reviews. Friends started sending me snapshots of the book in the wild from all over the world. Anne Frank-related messages would come in daily.
As she became a bigger part of my life, it became apparent how many other women had been told by men that they, too, looked like Anne Frank. On Zoom, one LA-based development executive told me how a boy in her high school had told her she looked like ‘a homely Anne Frank’. In London, an entertainment agent told me how strangers DMed her on Instagram, telling her she looked like Anne. A New York yoga teacher told me she often gets likened to Anne, which she laughed off and assumed was due to her dark circles. A friend sent me a screenshot of a woman who had liked him on Hinge, who captioned a photo of herself hiding behind a fridge with ‘Sexy Anne Frank’. In a New York magazine listicle about etiquette, writer Rachel Sugar wrote of how often she experiences this comparison, which she noted has led her to evaluate ‘the relative appeal of a pubescent victim of the Holocaust’.
That is what truly confounded me as I sat there on the sofa: why did a man I had just slept with feel the need to tell me I looked like Anne Frank? Even if you thought it, why say it out loud? And what would the desired response be?
Answers started to present themselves. My friend Max, a Jewish man floored by this story, gifted me a copy of Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer for my birthday, shortly after the Anne incident. In the story, the character Nathan Zuckerman fantasises about writer E.I. Lonoff’s mistress. The fantasy is that Amy Bellette – said lover – is, in fact, Anne Frank, a ‘severe dark beauty’ who bears a resemblance to her. Typical of Roth, the novel wrestles with the perceptions and complexity of Jewish identity, with Zuckerman imagining that Amy/Anne escaped the concentration camps alive, fled to America, became a writer, and was having to face what it meant for her teenage diaries to have been published. The chapter this story plays out in is called ‘Femme Fatale’.
Shortly after this, I was directed by Spotify’s algorithm to one of Neutral Milk Hotel’s albums. It had been a while since I had revisited In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. For those unfamiliar, it’s a kaleidoscopic symphony that fills headphones like they are rooms crowded with every imaginable instrument. Proto-Beirut if you will; big and intimate at once. As singer-songwriter Jeff Mangum’s voice boomed through songs I had heard a million times, I stopped at Ghost and Holland, 1945. These songs were clearly about Anne Frank. They had to be. A cursory search revealed that the album was indeed written after Mangum, moved by Anne’s diaries, took pen to paper. In the title song alone, he sings ‘Anna’s ghost all around / Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me / Soft and sweet.’
I restarted the album – Anne’s story is, in fact, present throughout this elegy of longing, loss and lust. Sometimes it’s juxtaposed more curiously than others. In Oh Comely, Mangum pivots from lyrics such as, ‘While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines / Smelling of semen all under the garden / Was all you were needing when you still believed in me’, to a few verses later, ‘I know they buried her body with others / Her sister and mother and 500 families / And will she remember me 50 years later? / I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine.’
More recently, new projects have sprung up like the play Anne Being Frank, which imagines her unlived future in a New York publishing house, crossing swords with the literati, who dearly wish to maintain the innocence of her diaries as she brings to light her own rewritten version.
These stories tend to share one thing in common: a desire to pull someone preserved in amber into the present day and shape who she could have been. Much like Zuckerman, these contemporary imaginings of Anne Frank seem to keep her as a form of ghost, and let the guy script her interpretation through an unlived and imagined life. (The man who told me I looked like her is, of course, a writer.)
I recently went to the Anne Frank exhibition in New York, where you walk through a replica of the Amsterdam apartment, and afterwards move through a corridor looking at countless movie posters and book covers inspired by the diary. You can even buy a large diorama of the Frank family’s building in the attached bookstore. Alongside the Anne Frank Halloween costume that was for sale until 2017, and the still-online Pinterest boards for Anne Frank-inspired outfits, this was perhaps the oddest thing I had encountered since the incident itself.
However, the most startling part of the exhibit was the presentation of the only film of Anne that exists.
It’s mesmerising seeing someone you only know from static images moving, especially once they’ve become so ubiquitous in your life. It’s only a few seconds long, but you see Anne, in sepia, overlooking a Dutch cobbled street from a balcony, watching a newly married couple set off. She has her bob, and she wears white.
After seeing the film, watching it on loop, I stopped at one of her diary entries that reads, not about war, but her inner world, her relationships: ‘These are crazy times, and even crazier circumstances.’
