Ghost Stories Newsletter

The voice on the phone was my father’s, but I had never heard him sound like this. “I need you to come over right away,” he said. “Your stepmother is leaving me for another man.” It was a scorching morning in July. I had been on my way to the pool to cool off my toddler and my heavily pregnant self. Instead, I left my child with my husband and the friends we had planned to spend the day with, hastily explaining what little I knew of the situation.

“If Anne Frank was a teenager today, would she be waving a Palestinian flag?” an acquaintance recently asked me. The question isn’t as counterintuitive as it might seem. When Anne’s diary was first published in the United States in 1952, Otto Frank, her father, advocated for its message to be understood in the broadest sense possible—not just as a story about the persecution of Jews, but as a cautionary tale about the consequences of persecution for anyone, anywhere.

There’s a long strange period at the beginning of working on a project where you think there is a book here or a story or an essay, but you’d be hard put to say what it is. You couldn’t possibly explain it in a few sentences. Yet there’s a pull, there’s something. It’s almost like a divining rod. You’re walking around like, Is there water somewhere? After graduating from college, Rachel Cohen decided to spend a year driving around America.

A few years ago, I came across images of a zine—yes, a zine!—online. WHERE ARE THE WOMEN?was printed in bold capital letters across the top of the cover. Below was a woman with curly dark hair and heavy brows, her Auschwitz number visible on a placard on her chest. The subtitle, “Women’s Voices of the Holocaust,” was positioned diagonally, covering her mouth. The woman in that picture was Charlotte Delbo, a Frenchwoman who survived the camps and later published the memoir Auschwitz and After.

Dear friends, I turned in revisions to my book manuscript—an experimental biography of Anne Frank, for those who haven’t been following my journeyhere—at around 6 p.m. on October 6. I had dinner with my family and went to bed early. I woke up on October 7 and opened Instagram. (No, I’m not proud.) The first image I saw was of bodies on an Israeli highway. My mind initially could not process it. Are they camels? I thought.

Ghost Stories A peek behind the scenes at my book-in-progress about Anne Frank and the process of writing biography, plus other reading and writing.

Dear friends, If you grew up in the 1980s, like me, you can probably recognize Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” from the first few notes: da-da-da-DAH, up and down and up again. When Chapman’s contralto comes in, it’s so rich and deep that the first time I heard it, I couldn’t tell if the singer was a man or a woman. But even before the line about working as a checkout girl, as the song progresses it becomes clear that the story it tells is a woman’s story. Or did it just sound that way to me?

Dear friends, I’m in limbo. The first draft of my book manuscript, as I triumphantly told you last month, is complete. The research and the creative work are over, mostly. But the next phase—revising the book and seeing it through to publication—hasn’t really begun. I’m still waiting for feedback from one reader. A final decision needs to be made about the publication date.

Dear friends, It has been a week! My littlest child left for her first time at sleepaway camp. My middle child graduated high school last Monday and left for college on Friday (yes, this soon!) all the way across the country. And on the plane trip there, from 30,000 feet in the air, I submitted a complete draft of THE MANY LIVES OF ANNE FRANK. That’s the working title of the book you all have already heard so much about.

When people talk about whether the United States could have intervened to stop the Holocaust, the question is usually a military one: should we have bombed the supply routes to Auschwitz, for instance. But in The U.S. and the Holocaust, the documentary that aired on PBS last fall and is now streaming, Ken Burns and his team ask it differently. What if America had prevented the mass murder of the Jews of Europe before it happened—by welcoming the thousands of refugees who tried to flee Hitler?