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A review by amyinthewind
Day After Night by Anita Diamant
5.0
A British detainment camp for undocumented people trying to enter Israel after WWII is the backdrop for Anita Diamont's book, Day After Night. The focal point of the book is the development of relationships between people in the camp, four women in particular. The characters are well-developed, multi-dimensional and believable. Each woman's story unfolds over the course of the book, each having experienced the horrors of WWII in different ways and each coping and healing in different ways. I appreciated the variation between the women, since it becomes easy sometimes to lump people together when we know they come from the same time period, same ethnic background, same horrible set of political circumstances. Diamant makes the singular event of the Holocaust, plural and personal. We understand things so much better when we see the individual people and hear their individual stories.
I've read criticism that the book does not address historical events well and doesn't go into each woman's story in great(gruesome) detail. I agree that it seems possible that Diamant didn't do her homework enough to have the historical details. On the other hand, I think it's possible that those things were not intended as the focus. In some ways, she seemed to be making the point that most women didn't/don't disclose their most painful and gut-wrenching stories in any detailed or graphic kind of way. It's human to gloss over the painful parts. Perhaps this is Diamant's short-falling, and she herself didn't wish to get into the details, or, perhaps, she was recognizing this human condition and writing her characters in kind.
I've read criticism that the book does not address historical events well and doesn't go into each woman's story in great(gruesome) detail. I agree that it seems possible that Diamant didn't do her homework enough to have the historical details. On the other hand, I think it's possible that those things were not intended as the focus. In some ways, she seemed to be making the point that most women didn't/don't disclose their most painful and gut-wrenching stories in any detailed or graphic kind of way. It's human to gloss over the painful parts. Perhaps this is Diamant's short-falling, and she herself didn't wish to get into the details, or, perhaps, she was recognizing this human condition and writing her characters in kind.