An Anne Frank Exhibition in New York

Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at a new Anne Frank exhibition opening in the city today, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A new Anne Frank exhibition will open at the Center for Jewish History in New York today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and will remain there for three months before moving on to other cities.

“Anne Frank the Exhibition” is a full-scale re-creation of the annex where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis from July 1942 to August 1944 in Amsterdam, and where she wrote her diary. The show has more than 100 original artifacts and examines Anne’s life and death. This is the first time the annex has been completely reconstructed outside Amsterdam, my colleague Laurel Graeber reported.

The exhibition aims to show “how this history, how this memory will go into the 21st century,” Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, said in an interview with Laurel. It comes to New York as antisemitism is rising in the United States and abroad.

The reconstructed annex has five rooms. Each room has the exact details and dimensions as its counterpart at the Anne Frank House, which more than 1.2 million people visit each year. Unlike the original space, which has been intentionally left empty, each room in the exhibition is filled with furniture and possessions, including books and a board game. It also has a facsimile of the diary; the original is in Amsterdam.

The presence of furniture and other possessions in the exhibition could stir controversy. Agnes Mueller, a professor and fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, said her instinct told her that when Otto Frank, Anne’s father, decided to keep the original annex empty, he was worried about commercialization and universalization of her persona.

“He actually emphasized absence as a way to represent that which is not representable,” Mueller told Laurel. The sight of an annex room filled with possessions, she said, “might induce us to feel way too good about things that we should not feel good about.”

Anne was 13 when she went into hiding, and the installation follows a chronological path, tracing her family’s life in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s through their flight to Amsterdam. One of its introductory rooms uses a montage of film and photos to recreate the atmosphere of Amsterdam in the early 1940s. After that, visitors enter the annex.

“We all know that the diary is about the two years in hiding,” said Tom Brink, the head of collections and presentations at the Amsterdam house and the traveling exhibition’s curator. “But of course, the story is much bigger than that. It starts earlier, it ends later, and that entire story and entire journey deserves to be told.”

The exhibition also chronicles Anne’s father’s return from Auschwitz. He was the sole survivor of the eight Jews who hid in the annex, and pursued the publication of Anne’s diary. In the New York installation, 79 editions of it in different languages are on display, along with memorabilia from theatrical and film adaptations.

Leopold said the immersive elements of the show were meant to take people, especially youths, back in time. The Center for Jewish History has already booked more than 250 school tours of the show, and weekday tickets for visitors under 18 years old are available for $16. The exhibition, a nonprofit venture whose revenues support the missions of its two presenting partners, also provides curriculum materials to classes and free admission to students attending as part of New York City public-school field trips and to those from schools nationwide receiving federal education funding.

There will be programming for adults as well. Tomorrow evening, the author Ruth Franklin (“The Many Lives of Anne Frank”) will be interviewed at the center. On Feb. 9, the novelist Alice Hoffman (“When We Flew Away”) will appear there, and the center will also host a film series. (An extension of the show in New York is under consideration; more venues will be announced in the spring.)

Leopold said that he hoped the show would inspire engagement as well as reflection.

“If this exhibition is doing anything, it’s not just teaching history,” he said. “It is also teaching about ourselves.”

Weather

Expect sunny skies with a high near 39; the wind will make it feel colder. Tonight, there will be high winds with a cloudy sky and a low near 32.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Tuesday (Lunar New Year’s Eve).

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METROPOLITAN diary

Bathtub in the Kitchen

Dear Diary:

Now he’s sleeping the sleep of a dead man,

In a flat on the Lower East Side.

Oh, we tussled and wrestled,

Then we spooned and we nestled.

He’s a master of love, and I’m satisfied.

But I’m leavin’ that boy on 10th Street,

There is something that I cannot ignore

Much too glaring and numbing,

Has to do with the plumbing.

Turns out it’s an undeniable flaw.

He’s got best sellers and electronic toys,

He likes clean fun and connubial joys.

Now I don’t care he’s not rich an’ —

Still it breaks my heart.

He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.

(I have to wash my back with a roasting rack.)

What a daunting dilemma,

After scarfing up the lamb vindaloo.

It just isn’t nice ’cause when I scrape off the rice,

Gotta move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.

Yeah, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,

Our steaming pizza fresh right outta the box.

All of our dinners are quite bewitchin’

But it tears me up —

He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.

(Gotta wash my toes with a rinsing hose.)

It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,

I know for sure that I won’t ever be back.

He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,

Don’t want bathroom water in the kitchen pipes.

Now, I’m no stranger to heartache,

Trouble has knocked at my door.

But I’ll go it alone and I won’t answer the phone,

Leave his gritty Ajax and his strange décor.

Adios my man, keep your fryin’ pan.

Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.

You’ve got a bathtub in the kitchen.

— Lou Craft