What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank: Stories Read Online Free PDF

and it is indeed stocked, an enormous amount of food, and an enormous selection of sweets, befitting a home that is often host to a swarm of teenage boys.
    “Are you expecting a nuclear winter?” Shoshana says.
    “I’ll tell you what she’s expecting,” I say. “You want to know how obsessed she really is? You want to understand how much she truly talks about the Holocaust? I mean, how serious it is—to what degree?”
    “To no degree,” Deb says. “We are done with the Holocaust.”
    “Tell us,” Shoshana says.
    “She’s always plotting our secret hiding place,” I say.
    “No kidding,” Shoshana says.
    “Like, look at this. At the pantry, and a bathroom next to it, and the door to the garage. If you just sealed it all up—like put drywall at the entrance to the den—you’d never know. You’d never suspect. If you covered that door inside the garage up good with, I don’t know, if you hung your tools in front of it and hid hinges behind, maybe leaned the bikes and the mower up against it, you’d have this closed area, with running water and a toilet and all this food. I mean, if someone sneaked into the garage to replenish things, you could rent out the house, you know? Put in another family without even any idea.”
    “Oh my God,” Shoshana says. “My short-term memory may be gone from having all those children—”
    “And from the smoking,” I say.
    “And from that, too. But I remember. I remember from when we were kids, she was always,” Shoshana says, turning to Deb, “you were always getting me to play games like that. To pick out spaces. And even worse, even darker—”
    “Don’t,” Deb says.
    “I know what you’re going to say,” I tell her, and I’m honestly excited. “The game, yes? She played that crazy game with you?”
    “No,” Deb says. “Enough. Let it go.”
    And Mark—who is just utterly absorbed in studying kosher certifications, who is tearing through hundred-caloriesnack packs and eating handfuls of roasted peanuts from a jar, and who has said nothing since we entered the pantry except “What’s a Fig Newman?”—he stops and says, “I want to play this game.”
    “It’s not a game,” Deb says.
    And I’m happy to hear her say that, as that’s just what I’ve been trying to get her to admit for years. That it’s not a game. That it’s dead serious, and a kind of preparation, and an active pathology that I prefer not to indulge.
    “It’s the Anne Frank game,” Shoshana says. “Right?”
    Seeing how upset my wife is, I do my best to defend her. I say, “No, it’s not a game. It’s just what we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank.”
    “How do we play this non-game?” Mark says. “What do we do?”
    “It’s the Righteous Gentile game,” Shoshana says.
    “It’s Who Will Hide Me?” I say.
    “In the event of a second Holocaust,” Deb says, giving in, speaking tentatively. “It’s a serious exploration, a thought experiment that we engage in.”
    “That you play,” Shoshana says.
    “That, in the event of an American Holocaust, we sometimes talk about which of our Christian friends would hide us.”
    “I don’t get it,” Mark says.
    “Of course you do,” Shoshana says. “You absolutely do. It’s like this. If there was a Shoah, if it happened again, say we were in Jerusalem, and it’s 1941 and the Grand Mufti got his way, what would your friend Jebediah do?”
    “What could he do?” Mark says.
    “He could hide us. He could risk his life and his family’s and everyone’s around him. That’s what the game is: Would he—for real—would he do that for you?”
    “He’d be good for that, a Mormon,” Mark says. “Forgetthis pantry. They have to keep a year of food stored in case of the Rapture, or something like that. Water, too. A year of supplies. Or maybe it’s that they have sex through a sheet. No, wait,” Mark says, “I think that’s supposed to be us.”
    “All right,” Deb says, “let’s not play.