A girl i knew jd salinger pdf Continue Stuart Mitchner Ann Frank was born 90 years ago today. When she turned 13 on June 12, 1942, she was given a diary. A week later, after a long record of her birthday and her friends, and before she and her family began life in a secret app, she imagines that later neither I nor anyone else would be interested in the reflections of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Writing about the thoughts of a schoolgirl in Anne Frank's book: The Book, Life, the Afterlife (2009), Francine Prose reflects on the fact that the most read and enduring masterpiece of that brutal era (1942-1945) was written by a girl between the ages of 13 and 15. In GhostBuster (1976), Philip Roth calls Anna Frank a wonderful young writer, comparing her to some passionate little sister of Kafka. C.K. Williams says: I thought of you at this age, the little sister in her poem The Day for Anne Frank, which begins with children running back and forth in a muddy alley, the screams of girls suspended behind them with their hair... feet pounding wildly on the sidewalk. Meet Ann, Reading Salinger As the average all- American sports crazy 16-year-old pagan growing up in Bloomington, Indiana, I don't think Anne is like a younger sister or a wonderful writer. I didn't read the diary, read Kafka, and I didn't know that his sisters were dead in the camps either. I dreamed of girls with her face before I saw it on the cover of the book. I saw her secret baby Joseph Cotton meets in Central Park in a portrait of Jenny and the dark-haired, dark-eyed girls smiling flirtatiously out of the windows of passing cars. In the summer before my senior year in high school, the real Anna arrived, fresh from New York, the daughter of an artist who could talk about poetry and jazz and film and theater, and who changed my life in one day. During a recent renovation of my research, I discovered a rough project of cringe-inducing emails I sent her, first in an exchange that led to the wrong theatrical date in Manhattan the following summer. There are suggestions like I've written lots of stories and poems, and the best ones are about you. One story, inspired by Holden Caulfield, describes the adventures of a boy from Indiana who hitchhiking to New York to see a girl he fell in love with, only to find that she is not home. She called Give Her My Respect what he was telling her parents when they closed the door in his face. As it happened, another life-changing experience coming my way from New York that same summer was J.D. Salinger Catcher in the Rye - which not only explains the voice in my story, but why, now that I'm finally reading a diary and getting to know the witty, personable, inventive, mischievous, mind-taking, thrilling The girl who wrote it, I sometimes feel Holden Caulfield reading over his shoulder. I see Anne in Holden's affection for his premature younger sister Phoebe (If you tell old Phoebe something, she knows exactly what you're talking about) and even more in his love for Jane Gallagher, who he lived next door to one summer and played checkers with, she, who would never move her kings because she loved the way they looked When they were all in the back row: She was a funny girl, old Jane.... She was kind of nasty mouth. I mean, when she was talking and worried about something, her mouth kind of went about fifty directions, her lips and all that. It killed me. I also see Anna in Salinger's fictional younger sister Franny Glass, an English girl who saves soldier's sanity in For Esma, with love and squalor, and above all in a Jewish teenager whom the author knew before the war and remembers in The Girl I Knew, one of the stories he never put between the covers. Date with Anna by all rights, I have to take on Holden's voice to describe what happened when I took my Anna Frank for a prize play based on her diary. It was a tragicomedy of errors, not unlike one of Holden's Manhattan misadventures, when he tried to enter the human race and there was no human race, as William Faulkner observed, expressing his admiration for Catcher in the Rye. Except that the human race was there, sitting next to me that night on the balcony at the Court Theatre. The problem was, I didn't know her. We talked about everything under the sun last summer, but didn't get around our deepest feelings. I had no way of understanding the visceral electricity between the girl who changed my life and the one who wrote the diary. Maybe she didn't really understand it herself until the curtain rose and she heard the voice of her invisible soulmate say: We had to wear yellow stars. I had to pass the bike, I could no longer go to Dutch school. I couldn't go to the movies, or drive a car, or even a tram, and a million other things. Later in the first act, Anna in the play (Susan Strasberg) lectures about demonstration and talk too much, and is generally a nuisance; When she is told that the perfect girl is someone who likes to cook and sew, she shouts: I would slit my throat first! I'd open the veins! I'm going to be great! I'm going to Paris to study music and art. To be a famous dancer or singer ... or something wonderful. By then, I was sure that the only Anne in the world was an actress playing her. If you really want to know what Holden would say, Susan Strasberg knocked me out. She killed me. So much so that I forgot of the tense, trembling, tear-reduced girl next to me, who seemed to feel these hope of defiance as her own deepest thoughts were voiced, as if she and Anna on stage were one being, alive and all on their own in one little room. It was only then that I began to understand the spiritual identity of the person I had taken to the play, the revelation that both had moved and confused me. To this day, I shudder to think how close I came to putting my hand around her or giving her a hand squeeze to show her what I understood. Maybe she'd taken this gesture as something better than some kind of hickey teen making an ignorant guy move, but I doubt it. When the lights went out at the end, she was shocked by a stranger, and like strangers, we sat on the bus heading downtown. I knew better than trying to talk. She was polite. She thanked me for a good time when we said good night. I never saw her again. I didn't have to. She became a mythical creature, a girl who changed my life, a man who made me want to be a writer whose pictures I kept in my wallet all the way to India and back and chatted with whenever I needed to either check the reality or proof that life was worth living no matter whether people were like the girl in the play eventually decided, well at heart. What it took me all my life to realize that it was just as likely that upset her wasn't that she had so much to do with the doomed girl, but that the play failed to pay tribute to the Anna she knew from the diary as others complained, and that she herself, my Anna, a girl from New York, left the theater feeling passionately at odds with the idea that people were good at heart in the world where unthinkable disasters such as the Holocaust and Hiroshima can happen. Holden and Ann Salinger have been on my mind since D-Day is not only because of the connections I mentioned and the fact that this is his centenary, but because of George Will's book put down in the June 2 issue of the New York Times Book Review. When asked to name a disappointing, overrated, just not very good book, he mentions The Catcher in the Rye, which, like Holden Caulfield, should have been smothered in the cradle. Just what the world doesn't need: another sullen teenager. It's precisely that wicked bookchat nastiness that is so nasty and repelled by Salinger and is one of the many reasons he refused to enter the publishing arena for the last half of his life. This probably makes Will too much credit to suggest that he forgot or never knew that soldier author Catcher was writing his book, The Birth of Holden Caulfield, during his progress from D-Day through a battle to bulge to the liberation of death camps like Bergen-Belsen, where a girl he knew and loved in Vienna before the war was burned along with the rest of her family. At the end of Salinger's Viennese story, published in 1948 before was translated into English, an American soldier told what happened to the girl and said: Yes? Is she Jewish or something? In the last diary entry, on August 1, 1944, Anne Frank writes, I am divided into two parts.