An Anne Frank exhibition in New York

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’re looking at a new Anne Frank exhibition opening in the city today, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A new Anne Frank exhibition opens at Center for Jewish History in New York today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and will remain there for three months before moving on to other cities.

The “Anne Frank Exhibition” is a full-scale recreation of the annex where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis from July 1942 to August 1944 in Amsterdam and where she wrote her diary. The show features more than 100 original artifacts and examines Anne’s life and death. This is the first time that the annex has been completely reconstructed outside of Amsterdam, my colleague Laurel Graeber reported.

The exhibit aims to show “how this history, how this memory will go into the 21st century,” Ronald Leopold, executive director of Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, said in an interview with Laurel. It comes to New York as anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States and abroad.

The reconstructed annex has five rooms. Each room has the exact details and dimensions of its counterpart in the Anne Frank House, which more than 1.2 million people visit each year. Unlike the original room, which has been intentionally left empty, each room in the exhibit is filled with furniture and possessions, including books and a board game. It also has a facsimile of the diary; the original is in Amsterdam.

The presence of furniture and other belongings in the exhibition could create controversy. Agnes Mueller, a professor and fellow in Jewish studies at the University of South Carolina and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, said her instincts told her that when Otto Frank, Anne’s father, decided to keep the original annex. empty, he was concerned about the commercialization and universalization of her person.

“He actually emphasized absence as a way of representing the unrepresentable,” Mueller told Laurel. The sight of an annex full of belongings, she said, “can make us feel way too good about things that we shouldn’t feel good about.”

Anne was 13 when she went into hiding, and the installation follows a chronological path tracing her family’s life in Frankfurt, Germany in the 1920s through their escape to Amsterdam. One of its introductory rooms uses a montage of film and photos to recreate the atmosphere of Amsterdam in the early 1940s. Visitors then enter the annex.

“We all know the diary is about the two years in hiding,” said Tom Brink, head of collections and presentations at the Amsterdam House and curator of the traveling exhibition. “But of course the story is much bigger than that. It starts earlier, it ends later, and that whole story and that whole journey deserves to be told.”

The exhibition also tells about Anne’s father’s return from Auschwitz. He was the only survivor of the eight Jews who hid in the annex and pursued the publication of Anne’s diary. In the New York installation, 79 versions of it in different languages ​​are on display along with memorabilia from theater and film adaptations.

Leopold said the immersive elements of the show were meant to take people, especially young people, back in time. The Center for Jewish History has already booked more than 250 school tours for the show, and weekday tickets for visitors under 18 are available for $16. The exhibit, a nonprofit project whose proceeds support the missions of the two presenting partners, also provides curriculum materials for classes and free admission to students participating as part of New York City public school field trips and to those from schools nationwide that receive federal education funding.

There will also be programming for adults. Tomorrow nightthe author Ruth Franklin (“Anne Frank’s many lives”) will be interviewed at the centre. On 9 Febnovelist Alice Hoffman (“When We Flew Away”) will appear there, and the center will also host a film series. (An extension of the New York show is under consideration; additional venues will be announced in the spring.)

Leopold said he hoped the show would inspire engagement as well as reflection.

“If this exhibit does anything, it’s not just to teach history,” he said. “It’s also learning about ourselves.”


Weather

Expect sunny skies with a high near 39; the wind will make it feel colder. Tonight there will be strong winds with cloudy skies and a low temperature close to 32.

ALTERNATIVE SIDE PARKING

Valid until Tuesday (Lunar New Year’s Eve).


Dear Diary:

Now he sleeps a dead man’s sleep,
In an apartment on the Lower East Side.
Oh, we tumbled and fought,
Then we spooned and we snuggled.
He is a master of love and I am satisfied.

But I leave that boy on 10th Street,
There’s something I can’t ignore
Too glaring and numbing,
Has to do with plumbing.
It turns out that this is an undeniable mistake.

He has bestsellers and electronic toys,
He likes pure fun and connubial pleasures.
Now I don’t care that he’s not rich…
Still, it breaks my heart.
He has a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my back with a grater.)

What a terrifying dilemma,
After scarfing down the vindaloo.
It’s just not nice, because when I scrape off the rice,
I have to move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.
Yes, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,
Our steaming pizza fresh straight out of the box.
All our dinners are quite enchanting
But it tears me up –
He has a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my toes with a hose.)

It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,
I know for sure I will never go back.
He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,
Don’t want bath water in the kitchen pipes.

Now I’m no stranger to heartache,
Trouble has been knocking at my door.
But I go alone and I don’t want to answer the phone,
Leave his coarse Ajax and his strange decor.

Adios my husband, keep your frying pan.
Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.
You have a bathtub in the kitchen.

Lou Craft

Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Submit a post here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.


Nice that we could meet here. James Barron is back tomorrow. LF

PS Here is today’s Mini crossword and Spell Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.