Meyer Levin: A Forgotten American Jewish Writer and the Controversy Over Anne Frank

American Jewish literature has produced an extraordinary range of celebrated writers. Many became central figures in American culture, their books turning into bestsellers, translated around the world and adapted for stage and screen. Yet among these towering names, one writer is largely missing from public memory: Meyer Levin.

He was born in Chicago in 1905 to a family of immigrants. His talent for writing emerged during his studies at the University of Chicago, while his connection to Zionism began at an early age. In the 1920s he traveled to Mandatory Palestine, and during one of his visits lived at Kibbutz Yagur. He later drew on those experiences in his novel Yehuda.

Levin returned to the United States in the 1930s and published six novels before the outbreak of World War II. During the war he worked as a journalist and filmmaker for the US Office of War Information, before joining the Overseas News Agency as well as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA).

He arrived in Europe fully aware that the continent’s Jewish population had been almost entirely destroyed. He saw it as his mission to document the survivors and help shape the memory of the catastrophe for future generations. Accompanied by a cameraman, he was among the first journalists to enter Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. The horrors he witnessed there only deepened his sense of purpose.

In the years after the war, Levin devoted himself to documenting the lives of Holocaust survivors, using the medium he knew best: film.

He produced two films. The first, My Father’s House, tells the story of a young Holocaust survivor who arrives in Palestine searching for his missing father. The second, The Illegals, was even more ambitious. Produced in 1947, it was what today would be called a docudrama, blending documentary realism with scripted drama and actors. The film follows Mika and Sarah, a young couple married in postwar Poland who join the underground Bricha movement and make their way to Italy, where they board a ship bound for Palestine. The British intercept the vessel and deport the passengers to detention camps in Cyprus. The film ends with hope, the dream that one day they will be able to build families and raise children in the Land of Israel. Its lead actress, Tereska Torrès, a young French woman of Polish Jewish background, later became Levin’s wife.

The Illigals — Advertisement for the film *The Illegals*

When The Illegals premiered in the United States in 1948, it received widespread acclaim. Levin later reflected on his wartime experiences and Zionist beliefs in his autobiographical work In Search.

And yet, all of this would ultimately be overshadowed by the affair surrounding The Diary of Anne Frank.

In 1950 Levin received a French translation of Anne Frank’s diary and was deeply shaken by it. He believed he had encountered the authentic and definitive voice conveying the horror of the Holocaust itself, the testimony of an innocent girl writing from within the darkness of her hiding place.

Levin contacted Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the sole surviving member of the family, offering to help introduce the diary to English-language readers. He also proposed adapting it for the stage. Otto Frank, already familiar with Levin’s work and reputation, trusted him. Levin, for his part, promised to preserve the diary’s essential character and emotional truth in any theatrical adaptation.

The English edition appeared in 1952 through Doubleday. Around the same time, Levin moved to New York and wrote a glowing review of the diary for the front page of The New York Times Book Review. The review played a major role in turning the diary into a bestseller.

Doubleday also held the rights to adapt the diary for the stage, and Levin was convinced he would be chosen to write the play.

The New York Times Review — Meyer Levin’s review of *The Diary of Anne Frank*, *The New York Times* *Book Review*, June 15, 1952

At this point, however, the story took a painful turn.

The publishers were uncertain whether Levin was the right fit for Broadway and suspected producers might prefer a playwright more aligned with the commercial theater world. Levin was willing to collaborate as long as the production remained faithful to the story as it had been published.

Then came the devastating blow: the project was handed to renowned producer Cheryl Crawford, who rejected Levin’s adaptation entirely.

Levin was shattered and deeply offended. From that moment on, he launched what became a years-long crusade against the production, convinced that the play had deviated from the original story. When his attempts to revise the script were rejected, he threatened legal action. Otto Frank found himself torn between loyalty to Levin and his desire to see the play successfully produced. Efforts at compromise failed.

Levin later discovered that Crawford had assigned the adaptation to a non-Jewish playwright, a decision that sparked a broader public debate: Was Anne Frank’s story fundamentally Jewish, or universal?

Anne and her family were assimilated German Jews who had fled to the Netherlands, and many argued that her story transcended any single identity. Broadway producers, naturally, preferred a more universal narrative with broader commercial appeal.

But Levin saw Anne Frank first and foremost as a Jewish girl persecuted because she was Jewish, one of the six million Jews murdered in the Nazi campaign to destroy the Jewish People.

Crawford herself eventually withdrew from the production, which passed through several more hands before finally reaching the Broadway stage.

Levin refused to let the matter go. In early 1954 he took the extraordinary step of purchasing a full-page advertisement in the theater section of the New York Post, demanding the chance to present his version of the play to the public. His adaptation, he argued, remained faithful to Anne Frank’s original voice and to the way she herself would have wished to be remembered.

The ad only deepened the rift.

Determined to continue the fight, Levin turned to the courts. Another figure soon entered the story and further inflamed his anger: playwright Lillian Hellman, whose left-wing political associations led Levin to see her as a central force behind what he viewed as the distortion of Anne Frank’s story. At the end of 1954 he sued both Otto Frank and producer Cheryl Crawford, seeking financial damages from Crawford and demanding that Frank honor their original agreement.

In the end, the Broadway production moved forward in a far more universalized form.

The romantic tension between Anne and Peter, the boy hiding alongside the Frank family, was heightened. Comic moments were woven into the claustrophobic darkness of the annex. Anne herself was reshaped into something resembling an all-American teenage girl, filled with hopeful dreams of the future. Margot Frank’s interest in Zionism disappeared entirely, while the Hanukkah scene became little more than a generic celebration of “eight days of presents.”

But for Levin, the deeper problem lay beneath these visible changes. He believed the play subtly erased the specifically Jewish nature of the Holocaust itself. This was reflected in lines inserted into Anne’s dialogue that never appeared in the original diary – sentiments along the lines of: “We are not the only people who have suffered.”

To Levin, this represented a dangerous blurring of historical memory. He connected it to broader Soviet efforts to suppress the Jewish dimension of Nazi atrocities, such as the massacre at Babi Yar.

To his great despair, the play was a tremendous success.

Critics praised its warmth, optimism and gentle humor. Audiences embraced it enthusiastically, and it was soon staged across the world, including in Israel and Germany. Still, there were dissenting voices. Hannah Arendt criticized the production as “cheap sentimentalism” built upon catastrophe, while psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argued that it encouraged audiences to identify with the victims without confronting those responsible for the crimes.

Levin achieved only partial victory in court. The judge accepted his claim that elements of his work had been used without permission, but rejected his other major arguments. After years of legal proceedings and appeals over compensation, he was ultimately awarded $15,000.

By then, however, the damage had already been done. Levin emerged from the affair emotionally devastated and financially drained. He later transformed the experience into an autobiographical work whose title captured the all-consuming nature of the struggle: The Obsession.

After the controversy faded, Levin turned once more toward his first great passion: Israel

In 1958 he moved to the Jewish state with his family. They initially settled in the moshav of Beit Yannai before relocating to Kfar Shmaryahu and later to a home they built in Herzliya Pituach. Levin continued writing throughout these years, though exclusively in English.

Near Beit Yannai, he discovered an abandoned British guard post dating back to the Mandate period and rented it as a writing studio, spending much of each week there. There was a certain irony, perhaps even poetry, in the fact that he carried out his literary work inside a structure originally built to help prevent Jews from reaching the Land of Israel.

During this period, he wrote Eva, the story of a daring young Jewish woman who escapes Nazi-occupied Poland and survives by hiding in plain sight within the Nazi establishment itself, constantly reinventing her identity and outwitting her persecutors.

After the Six-Day War, Levin and his family returned to the United States and settled once again in New York, though he continued visiting Israel regularly.

The relationship between American Jews and Israel increasingly preoccupied him. Would the two communities draw closer together and become one people, he wondered, or gradually drift apart?

Living between both worlds, Levin sensed the widening distance between Israelis and American Jews, each shaped by profoundly different realities. He believed both sides needed to acknowledge each other’s viewpoints and perspectives, without illusion. Bridging that divide became, in his eyes, a mission of immense importance, and he ultimately came to see fostering understanding between Israelis and American Jews as his life’s calling.

In 1981, during a visit to Israel, Levin arrived at his writing room in Beit Yannai and suddenly fell ill. He was taken to Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, where he died shortly afterward.

Further Reading