The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank: A Novel by Ellen Feldman
Imagine if the boy in hiding with Anne Frank had survived the war...
On 16 February 1944, Peter, Anne Frank's closest confidant in the Secret Annex, declared to her that if he got out alive, he would reinvent himself entirely; no one would ever know who he was, or where he had been. This is the story of what might have happened if the boy in hiding had survived the horror.
After the war, Peter van Pels leaves liberated Europe and its ghosts behind him and makes for the United States, the land of self-invention; there, he flourishes in business, marries and raises a family. He lives in the present and plans for the future; for him, the past does not exist.
But Peter's carefully constructed life is broken apart when The Diary of a Young Girl is published and becomes a sensation all over the world. As Anne Frank's words take on a strange and disturbing life of their own, enmeshed in bitter controversy and recrimination, Peter sees his past being adapted, distorted, argued over and endlessly reinterpreted, until the dissonance between his present and former lives sparks a crisis he cannot suppress. The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank is a compelling novel about the power of stories, the meaning of history and the possibility of coming to terms with an unbearable burden of memory.
On February 16,1944, Anne Frank recorded in her diary that Peter, whom she at first disliked but eventually came to love, had confided in her that if he got out alive, he would reinvent himself entirely. This is the story of what might have happened if the boy in hiding survived to become a man.
Peter arrives in America, the land of self-creation; he flourishes in business, marries, and raises a family. He thrives in the present, plans for the future, and has no past. But when The Diary of a Young Girl is published to worldwide acclaim and gives rise to bitter infighting, he realises the cost of forgetting.
Based on extensive research of Peter van Pels and the strange and disturbing life Anne Frank's diary took on after her death, this is a novel about the memory of death, the death of memory, and the inescapability of the past.