Holocaust fatigue has given way to Holocaust farce.
Like when an extant Anne Frank is found hiding in a modern-day attic in Shalom Auslander’s novel, “Hope: A Tragedy.” But, beware. The bright, wide-eyed heroine we met in a World War II-era diary is now a decrepit, angry old woman. In Auslander’s telling, “She stank like decay, like death.” This Anne Frank has “gnarled bones,” “withered hands,” “sallow and gray skin”; she is “insouciant,” “hideous,” “wiry and unkempt.”
“I don’t know who you are, or how you got up here,” Auslander’s protagonist, Solomon Kugel, says when he finds Frank hiding — and furiously typing — in his attic. “But I’ll tell you what I do know: I know Anne Frank died in Auschwitz ... And I know that making light of that, by claiming to be Anne Frank, not only is not funny and abhorrent but it also insults the memory of millions of victims of Nazi brutality.”
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