Four Women in a Strange Land

Day After Night By Anita Diamant Scribner 2009, $27.00, pp. 304

Historical fiction is a demanding genre for any writer to tackle. Beyond commanding the standard requirements of plot, pacing and character development, the amount of research needed to ensure a sense of verisimilitude can be daunting. Sometimes, however, it is the fresh or unorthodox lens through which novelists choose to view an earlier period that makes their work most intriguing.

Anita Diamant’s Day After Night falls into this latter category. Like her previous novels—Good Harbor, The Last Days of Dogtown and the international bestseller The Red Tent—her latest offering is written from a feminist perspective and woven around the relationships among its protagonists—almost exclusively women. There’s more than a whiff of the iconoclast in Diamant. In The Red Tent, she gamely defied the entrenched, conventional view of a terse biblical episode by depicting the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34:2-3) as a lovers’ tryst. Now she approaches the dramatic period between the end of World War II and the creation of the State of Israel from an uncommon angle by evoking not the romantic sabra fighter celebrated half a century ago in Leon Uris’ blockbuster novel and film, Exodus, but courageous figures of a different sort: Young Holocaust survivors whose heroism entails battling their demons while caught in a strange limbo in an equally strange land.

Unfolding between August and October 1945, the novel is set in the detention camp of Atlit, on Palestine’s Mediterranean shore. There, Jewish refugees arriving fresh from the horrors of wartime Europe have been interned by the British authorities for attempting to enter Palestine illegally. The plot focuses mainly on four women who experienced the war in different, though universally traumatic, ways.

Zorah, who came from a religious home but lost her faith in Auschwitz, joined up with a group from the Zionist-socialist Young Guard youth movement headed for Palestine because it offered a quick way out of her dead-end DP camp. The tall, blonde, blue-eyed Tedi spent two years in hiding on a farm in her native Holland but, being wholly beholden to her hosts, found that safety came at a price—and was ultimately betrayed to the Nazis. Leonie, a 17-year-old Parisian who was saved from deportation to a concentration camp by a Christian neighbor, was similarly helpless to protect herself from criminal exploitation. And though Shayndel, 20—the only Zionist in this quartet—spent the war fighting with a group of Jewish partisans and is regarded with a fair measure of respect in Atlit, she cannot stop blaming herself (apparently unjustly) for the deaths of her closest comrades.

What we learn of the women’s past is largely courtesy of the omniscient narrator, for they are spare, at best, in revealing to each other the details of their survival that cause them shame. The desire to repress the pain of loss, humiliation and violation—to erase the past and focus wholly on the future—was a coping mechanism prevalent among Holocaust survivors. And here Diamant chooses authenticity over poetic license, resisting the temptation to explore her characters’ troubled souls or create cathartic moments through the instrument of shared confidences. In fact, the bulk of the plot is carried by quotidian affairs—encounters and conversations during classes and while assisting in the kitchen, the infirmary and the like—with the high drama (read: “action” scenes) postponed to very late in the novel. Still, given Diamant’s breezy narrative style and the repartee that often rolls off the tongues of her characters, the book can comfortably be commended to young adult readers.

As various service jobs in the Atlit camp were staffed by Palestinian Jews, Diamant sets these savvy, self-confident natives as foils for the bemused newcomers. Her portrayal of the local males as smart aleck, chauvinist pigs pretty much punctures the old noble-sabra stereotype. And she even takes a swipe at the Zionist enterprise itself, by having the refreshingly subversive Zorah put down a nationalistic teacher who disparages Palestine’s Arabs as “illiterate, dirty, backwards” and gripes that they did nothing with the country for centuries. Now that the Jews had built factories, schools and hospitals, the teacher complains, “[they’re] crying that we are taking over their precious birthright.”

“It sounds like the story of Esau and Ishmael,” Zorah quips dryly, adding: “The rabbis taught that our misery was caused by [their] mistreatment.... ”

Although such sentiments smack of the current zeitgeist rather than the prevailing Jewish mood in 1945, conceiving the past through the filter of a later sensibility (or, perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight) is a novelist’s prerogative. As this approach is Diamant’s forte, her fans will welcome the latest addition to her canon.

Ina Friedman is the Israel correspondent of the Dutch daily Trouw and the coauthor of Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Itzhak Rabin.