Wolves stalk the edges of “When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary,” Hoffman’s researched imagining of Frank’s life in Amsterdam from 1940 to 1942.
Handout/Scholastic Press/TNS
When an editor asked Alice Hoffman to write a novel about Anne Frank, the prolific author didn’t think of the complexity of the research or the enormity of the subject matter.
She just thought of herself at age 12, discovering Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.”
That was the book that taught her that a young Jewish girl could be a writer. That a book could be brave. That she was not alone.
“So I said yes, without really thinking,” Hoffman said via Zoom from her Cambridge, Massachusetts, home. But she knew: “This is what my grandmother would want me to do.”
Her grandmother had been her biggest champion and first storyteller. Sitting together on a bus in New York City, Lillie spun tales of her childhood in Russia and Ukraine, of breaking river ice to scoop water, of witches and birds and wolves.
Wolves stalk the edges of “When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary,” Hoffman’s researched imagining of Frank’s life in Amsterdam from 1940 to 1942.
“It was May 11, the day after the unexpected had already happened,” she writes in the book’s beginning, after the bombs drop. “They listened to the radio, they heard what sounded like stars crashing to earth, and when night fell and the black moth appeared at the window, no one saw it, no one heard it tapping on the glass.”
It wouldn’t be a Hoffman novel without a bit of magic. But with this young adult novel, out this month, the mythic elements help capture a reality too terrible to be true. The 72-year-old author’s bestsellers include “Practical Magic” and “The Dovekeepers.”
It was, of course, a tall order — to reframe Anne Frank’s journal, which Frank wrote while she and her family were hiding from Nazis during World War II, and which Frank’s bereaved father, Otto, published after her death. For months, Hoffman had run up against the project’s constraints. Among them: It didn’t make sense to write in first person, her natural inclination, because “Anne is the best first-person voice in literature.”
Then she started treating the story like a fairy tale.
Hoffman had always felt, growing up, that “nonfiction was a lie and fiction was the truth, and fairy tales were really the deepest truths.” Not Disney but the “more brutal, more bloody, more honest, more psychologically true” stories of the Brothers Grimm.
Recently, Hoffman read about a study that some 85% of the heroes in fairy tales are girls.
“As a child reader, that’s what attracted me to them, that they were active participants,” Hoffman said. “Yes, there’s Sleeping Beauty. But there is also Gretel.”
