Day After Night

Book No: 43
Title: Day after Night
Author: Anita Diamant
Genre: Historical Fiction
Completed: 8/2/09
No. of Pages: 292
Rating: 3/5*****

Anita Diamant’s latest book focuses on an aspect of WWII history that I think many of us know little about. After the end of the war and the liberation of the prisoners from the concentration camps thousands of survivors went to Israel; most of them no longer had homes or families and chose to start anew in The Promised Land. Upon arrival most of these people were placed in internment or refugee camps because they were ‘illegal aliens’ with no paperwork- an irony that is almost laughable in its stupidity. Nevertheless, these people found themselves once again prisoners, although treated far more humanely than where they came from.

The book focuses on four women who slowly form friendships, something they are afraid to do, having lost so much during the war hope had become one more thing to put aside. Little by little Tedi, Leonie, Shayndel and Zorah come together to help each other face each new day, while slowly trying to shed the unspeakable past. As each day passes in boredom and loss of expectation, an escape plan begins to be put into motion.

Over the years I have complained that books seem to be getting longer and longer and editing seems to have disappeared. In this particular case I wish the story had been longer, because I never felt an attachment to these women. Bits and pieces of their back story are revealed, yet none of them felt substantial to me; I frequently had to look at the back blurb which gave brief descriptions of the characters because they would blend together in my mind, they never took on lives of their own. There was so much more I wanted to learn of them and some of the secondary characters, Tirzah the kitchen aide in particular. When the escape finally occurs it is anti-climatic and we only learn the fates of the four women in a small epilogue; there was so much more I would have liked to have known about these women and their lives.

For a look at a little known footnote in history I found the book interesting, I just wish I was more engaged in the characters.