Jewish Literature

After Reading What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

Among the four unidentified texts provided, I decided to look into What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, because the title of this text caught me at first sight. It is not hard to tell that this story is alluding to Raymond Carver’s short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. After analyzing the whole story, I would suggest the following concerning the identity of this text: first of all, this story was written in the last decade or so; secondly, this story was written in English in the United States by an American Jewish author; finally, this story was written mainly to stress the religious and ethnic identity of contemporary Jews both inside and outside the United States.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank borrows Carver’s style and tells a story of two couples talking while sitting around a kitchen table. However, even with a similar setting, the story goes on in a totally different direction. At the beginning of the story, the narrator says that “Mark and Lauren live in Jerusalem” and Mark asserts that “If we had what you have down here in South Florida…” (WW, 1). These simple descriptions give us the background of the whole story. Unlike the two couples in Carver’s book, the two couples in this story have their “special” identities: one couple are secular Jews who reside in Florida; the other couple are Ultra-Orthodox Jerusalemites, or in other words, Hasidic Jews who live in Israel. Their conversation starts with little daily issues, and builds up all the way until one of them brings up the “Anne Frank game.” The game alters the tone of the reunion from one of joy and lightheartedness to one that is more serious in nature: “if there is a second Holocaust going on right now, who will hide you like the family in Anne Frank’s story?”

Concerning the time period in which this piece was written, there are some data points in the text that can help...