ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to redress the neglect of Sharon Marcus's work, but it also disputes a number of Marcus's claims. By first reading Cynthia Ozick's essay more closely and extensively than most critics, including Marcus, it argues that Ozick's claims have been misread. The chapter suggests, tentatively, that these readings illuminate one way in which Anne Frank is often represented in American literature and which the author calls 'the banality of Anne Frank'. Ozick's reliance on sardonic, exaggerated claims and ironic reversals, coupled with her praise of the Diary, suggests that her desire for the Diary to vanish is tongue-in-cheek, designed primarily to shock her readers into contemplating alternative relationships to it and its adaptations. The neighbours' capacity for the banality of evil is disclosed inadvertently, by Jean's unthinking documentation of their responses to the young man's comments.
