Margot

Jillian Cantor

2013 • 425 pages

Ratings2

Average rating3.5

In the spring of 1959, The Diary of Anne Frank comes to the silver screen to great acclaim, and a young woman named Margie Franklin works in Philadelphia as a secretary at a Jewish law firm. She lives a quiet life, but Margie has a secret: a past and a religion she has denied, and a family and a country she left behind. Margie is really Margot Frank, older sister of Anne, who did not die in Bergen-Belsen as reported. And now, as her sister becomes a global icon, Margie's carefully constructed American life begins to fall apart.

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Susan Scribner

I appreciate the author's good intentions, but I think she ends up trivializing a tragic piece of history by giving Margot Frank a fictional escape and a new life in America. You can't give the Anne Frank story a happy ending. You just can't. Six million Jews died under Hitler, and among them were Anne and Margot Frank. Cantor's message about the courage to be true to who you are is admirable, and her portrayal of American anti-Semitism rings true. But she basically reduces this important historical figure to a Harlequin romance of a secretary pining for her boss (complete with a stereotypical bitchy girlfriend who doesn't understand him). I read Harlequin romances, and there is nothing wrong with them - but this isn't the right setting for one.

The entire book left me feeling very uncomfortable. You can't re-write or re-imagine some pieces of history and I'm afraid this is one of them.

October 28, 2013