Two Minutes Du Jour

One relationship often connects us to new ones. Life expands. The same applies to authors and books. It’s a path of one discovery leading to another.

I love a good beach read – maybe a romance, a mystery or a thriller. Something delightful is generally my summer reading mood.

However, memoirs, biographies, and historical fiction are my favorite genres. I’m drawn to the characters and their resolve through challenging times.

Throughout my reading life, I’ve read many books about the Holocaust and World War II. This year, several titles caught my attention. They pulled at my heartstrings, including The Room on Rue Amelie and The Paris Daughter by Kristin Harmel and All The Ways We Said Goodbye by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig and Karen White.

But I’d never read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. How could it be that I never read this? Of course, I was familiar. It’s well known. For whatever reason, I never picked it up or even watched the movie.

Instead, in sixth grade, I read the historical fiction book I Am Rosemarie by Marietta Moskin, a holocaust concentration camp survivor whose family opted not to go into hiding. I’ve reread it many times over the decades, and each time, it’s as poignant and riveting as the time before.

This past weekend, I devoured Anne Frank’s diary. Aside from the overarching topic of the war and the holocaust, several themes jumped out to me: family dynamics, relationships, feelings, personal growth, mindset and resilience, and the value of writing.

I had no idea the book contained so much more than a diary of being in hiding for two years, and I never realized what an exceptional talent this teenager had for writing. It’s descriptive yet direct, honest, and thoughtful. Imagine if Anne had lived and become the journalist she dreamed of being. Nonetheless, her father, Otto Frank, carried her messages to the world.

And after reading The Diary of a Young Girl, I quickly reread I am Rosemarie. It was a solid complement – same time, same country, same teenage years, yet vastly different experiences. I started to wonder about the path to these two books, the passage of time between reading them, and the perceptions based on life stages.

Find out more on Saturday in Part 2 of this post about literary discovery and how it ties back to Two Minutes Du Jour.