Day After Night: A Novel [Hardcover]

Anita Diamant (Author)

Book Description

Release date: September 8, 2009

Just as she gave voice to the silent women of the Old Testament in The Red Tent, Anita Diamant creates a cast of breathtakingly vivid characters -- young women who escaped to Israel from Nazi Europe -- in this intensely dramatic novel.

Day After Night is based on the extraordinary true story of the October 1945 rescue of more than two hundred prisoners from the Atlit internment camp, a prison for "illegal" immigrants run by the British military near the Mediterranean coast south of Haifa. The story is told through the eyes of four young women at the camp with profoundly different stories. All of them survived the Holocaust: Shayndel, a Polish Zionist; Leonie, a Parisian beauty; Tedi, a hidden Dutch Jew; and Zorah, a concentration camp survivor. Haunted by unspeakable memories and losses, afraid to begin to hope, Shayndel, Leonie, Tedi, and Zorah find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience even as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves in a strange new country.

This is an unforgettable story of tragedy and redemption, a novel that reimagines a moment in history with such stunning eloquence that we are haunted and moved by every devastating detail. Day After Night is a triumphant work of fiction.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Diamant's bestseller, The Red Tent, explored the lives of biblical women ignored by the male-centric narrative. In her compulsively readable latest, she sketches the intertwined fates of several young women refugees at Atlit, a British-run internment camp set up in Palestine after WWII. There's Tedi, a Dutch girl who hid in a barn for years before being turned in and narrowly escaping Bergen-Belsen; Leonie, a beautiful French girl whose wartime years in Paris are cloaked with shame; Shayndel, a heroine of the Polish partisan movement whose cheerful facade hides a tortured soul; and Zorah, a concentration camp survivor who is filled with an understandable nihilism. The dynamic of suffering and renewed hope through friendship is the book's primary draw, but an eventual escape attempt adds a dash of suspense to the astutely imagined story of life at the camp: the wary relationship between the Palestinian Jews and the survivors, the intense flirtation between the young people that marks a return to life. Diamant opens a window into a time of sadness, confusion and optimism that has resonance for so much that's both triumphant and troubling in modern Jewish history. (Sept.)
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About the Author

Anita Diamant is the bestselling author of the novels The Red Tent, Good Harbor,  and The Last Days of Dogtown, as well as the collection of essays, Pitching My Tent. An award-winning journalist whose work has appeared regularly in The Boston Globe Magazine and Parenting, she is the author of six nonfiction guides to contemporary Jewish life. She lives in Massachusetts. Her most recent novel is Day After Night. Visit her website at www.anitadiamant.com.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (September 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743299841
• ISBN-13: 978-0743299848
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (114 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #571,577 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In my first novel, The Red Tent, I re-imagined the culture of biblical women as close, sustaining, and strong, but I am not the least bit nostalgic for that world without antibiotics, or birth control, or the printed page. Women were restricted and vulnerable in body, mind, and spirit, a condition that persists wherever women are not permitted to read.

When I was a child, the public library on Osborne Terrace in Newark, New Jersey, was one of the first places I was allowed to walk to all by myself. I went every week, and I can still draw a map of the children's room, up a flight of stairs,where the Louisa May Alcott books were arranged to the left as you entered.
Nonfiction, near the middle of the room, was loaded with biographies. I read several about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, and Helen Keller, with whom I share a birthday.

But by the time I was 11, the children's library was starting to feel confining,so I snuck downstairs to the adult stacks for a copy of The Good Earth. (I had overheard a grown-up conversation about the book and it sounded interesting.)The librarian at the desk glanced at the title and said I wasn't old enough for the novel and furthermore my card only entitled me to take out children's books.

I defended my choice. I said my parents had given me permission, which was only half a fib since my mother and father had never denied me any book. Eventually,the librarian relented and I walked home, triumphant. I had access to the BIG LIBRARY. My world would never be the same.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

105 of 113 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Universal in its Humanity July 27, 2009

By Carol Roberts VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

The year is 1945. European Jews are evacuating their former homelands and heading for the British Mandate of Palestine by foot, by leaky boats, by any way they can find. The British stand at the borders, ready to turn them back. Not to be denied, the "illegal" immigrants find ways around the blockaded roads or have to be rescued from floundering boats. For those caught or rescued, the Atlit detention camp becomes their new home.

Anita Diamant examines these double survivors in her new book, Day After Night. She focuses on four women, each from a different country, a different situation, but all intensely avoiding the memories of the past years. The life of the camp and the interactions of the immigrants make a compelling story interwoven with the pasts and the futures of these people determined to make a new life in a land that welcomes them.

The tale is straightforward, never melodramatic, and finally satisfying as the survivors struggle to find their way to safety. This is a story set in the distant past but universal in its humanity and a story that can not be told too often.

46 of 47 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A hopeful testament to the resilience of the human spirit...choose life. August 6, 2009

By Denise Crawford TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I have spent much of 2009 reading excellent novels that relate different perspectives of the horror that was WW II and the effects of the Holocaust on people from different countries. In Sarah's Key, I read what happened at the Vélodrome d'Hiver in France, in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Random House Reader's Circle), I discovered what happened during the war on an island I'd never heard of, in Skeletons at the Feast: A Novel, I accompanied a family fleeing westward ahead of the advancing Russians, in Those Who Save Us, I read what desperate men and women did in occupied Germany. This novel is another wonderful testament to the strength of the human spirit in the face of unspeakable guilt -- the guilt of being a survivor of the ravages of the Nazis and the Final Solution.

This story takes place in Atlit -- the internment camp south of Hafia, Israel, after the war is over when thousands of Jews escaped Europe for their promised land, only to be imprisoned and held by the British military instead of being allowed to join the kibbutzes established there. Four remarkable young women from different backgrounds meet there and attempt to adjust to life and to deal with the consequences of what they did to survive the fates that claimed the lives of their friends and families.

I loved the women -- Shayndel, a Polish Zionist with a heroine's reputation; Zorah, the concentration camp survivor who hides the tattoo on her arm; Tedi, a Dutch girl who escaped most of the ravages of war by being hidden; and Leonie, from France, who avoided the roundup due to her looks and her wartime occupation. The experiences that the girls had during the war are revealed in vignettes as we get to know each one and her secrets very slowly as they suffer a day to day existence in the camp. The jobs they do, the contacts they have, and the relationships that manage to thrive despite the collective horror are heartwarming and inspiring. Both realistic and desperately hopeful, the girls do whatever they can to find some explanation or reason why they did not perish.

Anita Diamant is a superb writer whose prose rings true in every sense. This is a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Haunting image of both bitterness and hope July 20, 2009

By Elizabeth G. Melillo VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

The dimensions of this treatment of the experiences, range of emotions, and attitudes of characters provides an exceptionally vivid, painful, and enlightening image. Characters all survived the Holocaust in different fashions, and the scope of memories is wide - attitudes not being bitter towards the Nazis alone, to put it cryptically. This is not a 'good guy, bad guy' treatment of the war years - one can see the understandable attitudes towards those of various nations. Nor is the British camp glorified, to put it mildly, for women devastated by horror in the recent past.

The author's style is superb at its best - vivid, with a striking use of language, ranging from beautifully evocative to appropriately gritty and crude. It is not sustained throughout. At times, the characters seem more like 'types' than individuals, and some of the sections do become tedious.

Nonetheless, this gripping book provides history beyond what we learnt in most texts or scholarly works. Thankfully, characters' recollections are not sanitised by political correctness - one can see the experiences of (mostly dead) family members and related comments, as well as the extent of anti Semitism beyond that of a raving German chancellor and his associates. One cannot come away from this book without a broadening of perspective, and widened understanding of the many influences that affected Israel's coming into being as a State.