Book Review: Day After Night

Day After Night: A Novel

About the Book:

Just as she gave voice to the silent women of the Hebrew Bible 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 who 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 hope, the four of them 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.

Diamant’s triumphant novel is an unforgettable story of tragedy and redemption that reimagines a singular moment in history with stunning eloquence.

My Comments:

I found this on the bargain rack at a bookstore near my hotel in Lexington last weekend.  Since I loved The Red Tent,I thought I'd give it a try and I'm glad I did.  It is hard to imagine the horror the Jews of Europe endured during WWII, and easy to understand why they wanted a place of their own.  I don't really know the history of the Middle East during that era, but I know that the people of  Israel have not really been at peace since then.

This book tells briefly of the wartime experiences of the four main characters and then follows them into and out of Atlit. They are women tortured by the past, but women looking to the future.  They love--and they hate.  They are victims; yet they are survivors too.

I highly recommend the book and  give it an A.

Books by Anita Diamant