What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank

This chapter considers how humour functions as a central component of irreverence in Shalom Auslander's novel Hope: A Tragedy and Nathan Englander's short story, "What We Talk about When We Talk about Anne Frank". The central conceit of Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy is simple and compelling: An American Jewish man, Solomon Kugel, moves from New York to a small town, Stockton. For Mark, Americans like the narrator and his wife do not appreciate the 'prosthetic reach' of the American empire or its consequences. The chapter suggests that Frank herself has prosthetic reach. The Anne Frank game in both texts is marked in numerous ways by the anticipatory feature of paranoia; most obviously, it envisages the 'bad surprise' of another Holocaust. Edward Portnoy's comments suggest that many texts that deal with Frank in irreverent ways may ultimately exhaust or erase their capacity for humour.