In August 2021, the French Lola Lafon spent a night in the Annex of the Anne Frank Museum, in Amsterdam, in order to write this book which is added to the charming collection My night at the museum, of the publishing house Stock , and which won the December prize and the Les Inrockuptibles novel prize, at the end of October in Paris.
The Annex is the few cramped rooms where Anne Frank, her family and four other people holed up for 25 months to escape the Nazis. The author reflects on the fear and anguish witnessed by these walls. She also revisits excerpts from the teenager’s diary in the very places where she wrote it.
But the experience opens a breach in its own past; while she spends the night avoiding Anne Frank’s room, which she cannot bring herself to enter because of the diffuse feeling of disturbing her intimacy, she plunges with dismay into a story which is also that of her own. Of his Jewish grandparents who fled persecution in Eastern Europe before finally settling in France. From his childhood in Ceausescu’s Romania. Of everything that made her a trilingual “everywhere”, without accent or belonging. We thus learn the reason which pushed her to choose this particular museum, and which weighs on her conscience.
The story of that night at the museum and the preparations that preceded it is a moving set of reflections on collective memory and memories, those that we bury deep within ourselves as well as those that the mind distorts in order to live with the unspeakable.
By tackling one of the most horrific chapters in history, going so far as to explore the aftermath of the publication of the Diary of Anne Frank and quoting a large number of authors who have dwelled on it, including Philip Roth, Lola Lafon touches with great sensitivity on this delicate question of the rage carried by those who remained and those who came “after”. “The ravage, in my family, was transmitted as elsewhere the color of the eyes”, she writes.
And it is when the book takes a completely unexpected turn that she concludes her story, while we are still under the influence of emotion, with words that give goosebumps and envy to dive back into the heart of the text.
When you listen to this song
Lola Lafon
Stock
249 pages