ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three 'transhistorical imaginings' pertaining to Anne Frank, arguing that the identifications they cultivate are more complex than Susan Gubar suggests. To correct and develop Gubar's and Marianne Hirsch's arguments, it offers readings of C. K. Williams's "A Day for Anne Frank" (1968) and Marjorie Agosin's poems. The chapter simultaneously tests and augments Gubar's claims by examining one transhistorical imagining of Frank that is cross-gender (Williams's) and one that is not (Agosin's). It concludes with a transhistorical imagining of Frank in a text that is not a poem but a prose autobiography; Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude (1982). A generous reading of The Invention of Solitude might claims that it aspires to the status of gift by presenting itself as something 'other' – an autobiography. It is a text that offers the reader engagement with the complicated relationships between self and other.
