Day After Night: A Novel [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Anita Diamant (Author), Dagmara Dominczyk (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 8, 2009

Atlit is a holding camp for "illegal" immigrants in Israel in 1945. There, about 270 men and women await their future and try to recover from their past. Diamant, with infinite compassion and understanding, tells the stories of the women gathered in this place. Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought the Germans with a band of partisans. Leonie is a Parisian beauty. Tedi is Dutch, a strapping blond who wants only to forget. Zorah survived Auschwitz. Haunted by unspeakable memories and too many losses to bear, these young women, along with a stunning cast of supporting characters who work in or pass through Atlit, begin to find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience, as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves and discovering a way to live again.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Diamant's interpretation of the founding of Israel centers on several young women, many of them survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, attempting an escape from another camp, this one a British internment center in Palestine. Dagmara Dominczyk is good with the panoply of European accents evinced by Diamant's characters, and does an adequate job with the Hebrew and Yiddish gutturals, but some of the basics flummox her: the name of one of the book's protagonists should be pronounced SHAYN-del, not Shayn-DEL. These jarring mistakes notwithstanding, Dominczyk is adept at modulating her voice, using shifts in timber, intonation, and accent bring each of Diamant's heroines to life. A Scribner hardcover (Reviews, Jul. 6).
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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.

Dagmara Dominczyk's film credits are Rock Star, The Count of Monte Cristo, Kinsey, and Lonely Hearts. On television she's appeared in Five People You Meet in Heaven, and 24. Her Broadway appearences are Closer, Enchanted April, and The Violet Hour.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio; Unabridged edition (September 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743598393
• ISBN-13: 978-0743598392
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 5.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (96 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,267,911 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

91 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

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

By 

Carol Roberts (Montgomery, AL United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Day After Night: A Novel (Hardcover)

(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.

39 of 40 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 "DC" (Missouri, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Day After Night: A Novel (Hardcover)

(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.

18 of 18 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 "gloriana" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Day After Night: A Novel (Hardcover)

(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.