Margot by Jillian Cantor

Margot by Jillian Cantor – 328 pages

Book Blurb:

In the spring of 1959, The Diary of Anne Frank has just come to the silver screen to great acclaim, and a young woman named Margie Franklin is working in Philadelphia as a secretary at a Jewish law firm. On the surface she lives a quiet life, but Margie has a secret: a life she once lived, a past and a religion she has denied, and a family and a country she left behind.

Margie Franklin is really Margot Frank, older sister of Anne, who did not die in Bergen-Belsen as reported, but who instead escaped the Nazis for America. But now, as her sister becomes a global icon, Margie’s carefully constructed American life begins to fall apart. A new relationship threatens to overtake the young love that sustained her during the war, and her past and present begin to collide. Margie is forced to come to terms with Margot, with the people she loved, and with a life swept up into the course of history.

My Review: 4.5 stars

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A welcome addition to the world of fictionalized Anne Frank novels and revisionist historical books. I adored The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank by Ellen Feldman and I enjoyed this one equally if not more. This story focused on survivors and how they melded into society while bearing their tattoos, hiding their constant fear and most likely dealing with PTSD. Margot’s personal experiences mixed with the publishing of Anne Frank’s diary and motion picture debut questions her own memories and beliefs of her relationships with both her infamous sister and with Peter. This books is an easy and quick read that offers history, a sprinkle of romance and a dollop of insecurity as Margot deals with her identity of today, not of the past.

I highly recommend this book and look forward to reading more from this author.

Quotes I liked:

I do go with her even though I don’t drink alcohol, but just because she is my friend and her laugh can be so much like water that I want to swim in it, to close my eyes and float away.”

“My sister went just after me, and her number was one digit higher than mine.” “It doesn’t mean anything,” Mother said afterward. “It is nothing. It cannot mean something. We cannot make nothing mean something, girls.”

“You have to love someone to yell at them so intensely; you have to care so unbelievably much that your anger explodes and burns across the sky like the Soviet’s Sputnik I’ve read so much about. My sister always thought they fought because Mother hater her, but I knew better.”

“Perhaps he would look at me and say that now he understands, that you really cannot hide forever, even in your mind. A hiding space can only remain secret for so long. That always, eventually, you are discovered.”

“What is religion,” I asked him, “if it cannot protect you? If it kills you?”

“It was just that we all knew, all of us. My sister belonged to our father, and I belonged to our mother. We were split that way, two and two, and we always had been.”