To take on a subject that has been extensively written about requires a degree of both daring and ambition in an author. When I started to read The Many Lives of Anne Frank by Ruth Franklin, I thought there was little that I didn’t know about Anne and her circumstances. I had read her world-famous diary (eventually published in more than 75 translations), of course, and had tried to emulate it by starting my own diary. (This exercise lasted all of a week.) I had also visited the secret annex in Amsterdam at Prinsengracht 263 and been astonished by the restricted space, hidden by a bookcase, in which eight people had managed to conduct their daily lives for two years, from 1942 to 1944, in relative civility.

I knew that 13-year-old Anne, with her shiny dark hair, lively eyes, and beguiling smile, was spunky, with a romantic streak a mile long; that she and her older sister Margot were close; that she had negative feelings about her mother, Edith, while adoring her father, Otto. During my visit to the annex, I had been especially moved by the charming postcards—Franklin mentions one “with a photo of chimpanzees having a tea party”—and photos of movie stars like Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers. She had also pasted pictures of the British royal family on the wall, as though she were for all the world living in a bedroom in Scarsdale that she could decorate as she pleased.

Her death from typhus in Bergen-Belsen the same month her sister succumbed, in the winter of 1945, after Auschwitz had already been closed down and within months of the end of the war, seemed almost implausible. I didn’t know if I completely bought into the idealized version of Anne as a beacon of hope for mankind—in the most famous line from her diary, she avows, “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”—but I warmed to her feistiness and found her acute in her perceptions of the other inhabitants of the annex and often wise beyond her years.

None of which is to say that I am an expert, but rather to suggest that being a Jewish girl from an observant background as I was, with German Jewish parents who had escaped Hitler, and with a burgeoning wish to myself become a writer, Anne was part of my consciousness growing up. It is all the more surprising, then, that Franklin has written a book that is gripping in its telling of a much-told story, adding nuances and details that weren’t known before. She focuses less on Anne as a person with a heartrending life than on what we, her readers, have made of that life: The idea of Anne Frank, Franklin writes, “has become a mirror of broader cultural and political preoccupations,” so that when we talk about “Anne Frank,” we’re not talking about a person as such, but about the constellation of ideas, based on our own experiences, that swirl around her image.

The transformation of Anne Frank “into an icon,” Franklin argues, “has had the effect of obscuring who she really was. She becomes whoever and whatever we need her to be.” The Many Lives of Anne Frank aims to convey a sense of the artistic growth of Anne as a serious writer and to show her diary as more than an incidental find that just happens to speak to many readers, but rather as a very specific creation, an artifact of her literary imagination as much as an immediate record of life in the annex.

Anne Frank’s comfortable, upper-middle-class childhood in Frankfurt before the Nazis came to power at the beginning of 1933 makes a striking contrast with the cloistered household described in her diary after her family went into hiding. The details of these years make clear the enormity of the change from an open and gregarious engagement with the “inhabited world,” as Anne once phrased it, to an immensely constricted perch. The Franks lived in a five-room duplex, decorated with antiques, green velvet curtains, and Persian rugs. Otto Frank ran Opekta, a spice business, and both he and his wife, whom he had married in middle age, were doting parents.

As the Nazi vise began to tighten around Europe, an influx of German Jews sought refuge in Amsterdam, including the Franks, who moved there in 1934, when Anne was four years old. In early May 1940, Hitler’s army invaded the Netherlands, and the Dutch surrendered within days. In April 1942, Jews were commanded to wear the yellow star, and in June, Adolf Eichmann ordered the first deportations of Dutch Jews to Ausch­witz. After attempting unsuccessfully to arrange for emigration papers, Otto put together an ingenious plan to hide his family within Amsterdam. They would live on the third floor of the back section of the gabled eighteenth-century building, on a canal, where his business was housed. In preparation for the move, Otto and two associates had carted food, bedding, and furniture, including dining room chairs, to the annex, which had two levels connected by a “steep and rickety” staircase. He “even managed to bring Anne’s collection of film star photographs without her noticing,” Franklin notes.

At daybreak on Monday, July 6, 1942, the Franks moved to their new quarters, wearing all the clothes they could bring; Anne wore........

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