Anne Frank

At some level, all countries push new citizens to integrate and that’s where civics and language citizenship tests come in. But when you take a longer look at how citizenship exams are developed worldwide, you realize they can have less to do with methodology than promoting a strict cultural identity.

In the 1960s, Poland was short on funds to digitize and maintain its paper archives. They approached the Mormon Church and got its help in doing just that. But somewhere in the intervening years, the Momon Church used those archives and other to posthumously baptize Holocaust victims. That’s caused a rift between the Mormons and the Jewish community.

Several decades ago, Poland approached the Mormons in Utah for help with its archives. The Mormons modernized the Polish records, but some used those records to posthumously baptize Jewish Holocaust victims.

What if Anne Frank had lived? That’s the premise of the new novel by Shalom Auslander, who made his name with the dark comic memoir Foreskin’s Lament.