Margie Franklin is a legal secretary in Philadelphia. She is very quiet and always wears a sweater...even in the heat of the summer. Every Friday night she goes home every night to her cat and lights her Shabbot candle. In her daily life, Margie hides who she is...Margot Frank...sister of Anne Frank. Margie lives with the guilt of surviving the Nazis when Anne and her mother did not. Margie must deal with her shame at leaving her sister to die as well as not understanding Anne's reported relationship with Peter in the Annex when she knows that the two of them were in a relationship. Margie also has a crush on her employer and must figure out what to do with those feelings.

I was very hesitant to read this book. I have considered Anne Frank my hero since I was ten years old and know her story well. I wasn't sure that such a topic should be explored and what areas of Margot's life would be included.

I have read other Jillian Cantor novels and knew that she would handle the topic with respect and grace which is ultimately why I chose to finally read the book. That being said, it is not a book I would read again. While the life Cantor imagined is a lovely one and the thoughts Margot went through made sense, it is just too difficult for me to consider.
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What if Margot Frank, sister of Anne, did not die of typhus at Bergen-Belsen, but escaped, made her way to America, and settled in Philadelphia, keeping her arm tattoo hidden and posing as a Gentile - as she and Peter had planned back in the annex?

Margot Frank - now Margie Franklin - works as a secretary at a Jewish law firm in Philly; she has a quiet crush on her boss, Joshua; is friends with another secretary, Shelby; and lives alone with her cat. But when The Diary of Anne Frank is published, and the movie soon follows, Margie's traumatic memories resurface, and she begins to have trouble keeping her secret.

Margie thought her father Otto was dead, but with the publication of the diary, she learned that he was alive, remarried, and living in Switzerland - but she has yet to reach out to him. She is also tormented by the existence of a "P. Pelt," who she hopes could be Peter but fears is not (or is, but has married someone else).

Cantor handles her premise with sensitivity, not sentimentality. She exposes the anti-Semitism still present in America in the late 1950s, and examines the lasting trauma and survivor's guilt of Holocaust victims.

Quotes

[American Jews] will think they understand, because religion is religion, and Jews have always been a persecuted people. But you cannot understand what you cannot imagine, and they cannot really imagine it. (41)

"It does make you stop and think. How your life might have been different had you been born somewhere else in the world." (Joshua to Margie, 108)

And that is one of the worst things about this life. As a liar, a pretend person, you cannot really truly ever be someone's friend. (159)

Forgetting is easy. It is almost as easy as hiding, or keeping secrets. (177)

America is a good place hiding place, for Jews as well as Nazis - a faraway place where the war was something else, entirely different. (201)

But it strikes me how unfair it is, that you cannot be who you are, that you will be continually punished for the way you were born. (268)

I cannot tell you if this is the way it happened. I wish I could. But I cannot. (302)

Is it possible that no matter who you once were, what your past is, how terrible that past is, that you can somehow transcend it? (305)

Maybe nothing in the annex was meant to be any more than a story, a fantasy, a way to survive the horribleness of having our childhoods ripped away, our lives ripped away. (312) ( )

This is really a great book. While not at all based in the actual fate of Margot Frank, the narrative is compelling beyond the initial "what if" of the premise. Margie (as she calls herself) is a sympathetic, fascinating character. A vivid portrayal of American life post-war for Jewish people. ( )

I doubt that there are too many people who haven't read A Diary of Anne Frank and not cried over the loss of Anne and her family in the concentration camps of Germany near the end of WWII. First the book and then a stage play and in 1959 a movie - the story is at the top of most people's list of books about the Holocaust. Jillian Cantor takes Anne Frank's story into 'what if' territory with her book Margot! What if....Anne's sister Margot was still alive....what if she lived in Philadelphia (the city of brotherly love) as a Christian woman called Margie....what if she was still plagued with nightmares and thoughts of her family during their last years but had never contacted her father to tell him she was alive. The novel Margot takes place in 1959 as Margot struggles with how to live her life by hiding out in plain site. She has told no one who she really is but as the movie version of Anne Frank is premiering and everyone is talking about it, she finds it more difficult to hide who she is from others but most importantly from herself. Can anyone really live a contented life by denying their history and hiding who they really are? I thought that Jillian Cantor did a fantastic job of combining real history with the 'what-ifs' of fiction to make this a truly memorable novel. ( )

What if Margot Frank, Anne Frank's sister, had somehow survived? What would her life be like hiding in the shadows?

http://nicolewbrown.blogspot.com/2016/07/margot-by-jillian-cantor.html

Over and over again. Bryda, her voice, the smells of her terrible apartment, our shared horror, they are everything about my past that I am running from, all the things I try to avoid in my American life. And now I understand that these terrible things, they are only a bus ride away from the safety of the Jewish law firm, which in so many ways reminds me of the comforts of my childhood, before the war. This is perhaps the most terrifying thought of all.
-Jillian Cantor (Margot p 79)
This synagogue is a flat, square cement building and, I am relieved to see, almost unidentifiable as a Jewish place, except for the small green Star of David etched into the front of the wooden door. There are no large stained-glass windows, and maybe that is better. Nothing to shatter.
-Jillian Cantor (Margot p 177)
“What a creeper,” Shelby says. “Shhh,” I whisper to Shelby now. “He might hear you.” She shrugs. “What’s he going to do?” she asks. “Kill me?” It is such an American thing, to talk of death as if they are so far from it’s reach. Perhaps it is their inability to understand that murder, it is easy for some people. These people, they will kill, and they will kill again, and it will mean nothing.
-Jillian Cantor (Margot p 188)
Saturday is the Shabbat day, the day of rest. God created the universe in six days, and on the seventh day He rested. The seventh day, it is holy. I am across an ocean, a lifetime, housed within a second skin, no longer a Jew. No longer a believer in God. My candle, my whispered Hebrew prayer, my day of rest, they are a comfort in their steadiness, their ability to stay unchanged. Every single week. It is not religion; it is ritual. Religion is breath, Margot, Mother said. But what I have come to understand as I watch the lonely flicker of my candle and listen for the faintest echo of Mother’s voice is this: sometimes we breathe because we have to, not because we want to.
-Jillian Cantor (Margot p 225)
It is possible that no matter who you once were, what your past is, how terrible that past is, that you can somehow transcend it?
-Jillian Cantor (Margot p 305) ( )