(Simon & Schuster, $37)
I never read Jewish writer Anita Diamant’s first novel, The Red Tent, but it was a sleeper hit back in 1997 and put her firmly on the map. My book club then read her subsequent book, Good Harbor, which was a contemporary story about friendship and the humps it can get you over. I loved it so leaped at the chance to review this, her latest.
It’s 1945 and Holocaust survivors Shayndel, Leonie, Tedi and Zorah have separately escaped Europe but are interred by the British at an “illegal immigrant” camp on the coast of Israel.
Without the proper paperwork, they cannot be released to get on with their lives on the other side of their barbed wire barracks in Palestine. Instead they must wait. And wait. And wait. Each of the four women has lost her home, her family and much more after surviving different unspeakable horrors and, although they are fed and clothed in the internment camp, they are still far from free.
Until, that is, a daring rescue is attempted. After that, perhaps, their futures can begin. The women in Day After Night are a product of Anita’s imagination but the camp and the nail-biting rescue attempt are not. As much as the book is about this true story of picking up the pieces after the Holocaust, it is more about friendship and the way women will forge powerful bonds even in the most gruelling circumstances.
This is a recurring theme in Anita’s books and that’s no accident – she believes that the enduring strength of female bonds often gets lost in the current media maelstrom of mean girls, bad bosses and women fighting each other. The truth, she believes, is that most of us depend on our girlfriends, our sisters, our cousins, our mothers and our aunts for support.
“Without women’s friendships, I think the world would fall apart,” she says, “and I think that is an under-told story.”
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