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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/40840/full/40840/diamants-day-after-night-brings-human-drama-to-surface/ <br /><br /> <b>Diamant’s ‘Day After Night’ brings human drama to surface</b> <br /> Thursday, December 17, 2009 | by akin ajayi <br /><br /><p>On the night of Oct. 9, 1945, security at the Atlit Detention Center near Haifa — a camp for “illegal” Jewish immigrants in the British Mandate of Palestine — was breached. Some 200 detainees, mainly Holocaust survivors and recent arrivals from Europe, were released in a daring operation launched by the Palmah, an elite military force.</p> <p><img alt="Aday" class="left" height="329" src="http://www.jweekly.com/images/uploads/z_photos_2009/a12_18_09/Aday.jpg" title="Aday" width="216" />While accounts of the remarkable escape are still recounted today, they are told mainly in connection with the principal actors — the operation was coordinated by Yitzhak Rabin — and within the context of the broader struggle against British hegemony in the last days of the Mandate. Historically significant accounts often overlook the true impact of momentous events, concentrating on the big picture at the expense of the detail that sets the scene.</p> <p>Thus, there is something apt in the focus of Anita Diamant’s new book, “Day After Night,” which instead points to the untold personal narrative. Diamant’s fiction concentrates on the exceptional capacity to form kinship and community under trying circumstances; historical detail plays a supporting role to the emotional tales of the otherwise anonymous people freed from the camp.</p> <p>Of disparate backgrounds, her protagonists are brought together by a shared destiny, and Diamant attempts to shape out from their shared suffering a redemptive human story of hope and optimism.</p> <p>“Day After Night” concentrates on four female inmates of the camp. The Polish Zionist Shayndel; the French Leonie; Tedi, who was saved from the fate that befell her Dutch family by being hidden away during the war; and Zorah, a survivor of the death camps.</p> <p>Diamant — best-selling author of “The Red Tent” and “The Last Days of Dogtown” — has a knack for juxtaposing public fact with private truth, a skill she manipulates to good effect. From the grossly insensitive reception of new inmates (barbed wire, guard towers, herded into communal showers) to the tensions that play out between prisoners and their captors, Diamant skillfully coaxes out a poignant reality from the abstractions of dry historical narrative.</p> <p>Fiction based on fact always labors under the disadvantage of having the ending pretty much known to all at the beginning. But by placing the relationships stage center, Diamant nonetheless succeeds in teasing out a suitably dramatic tension in the lead-up to the escape.</p> <p>Perhaps even more satisfying is the emphasis on the contradictions that abounded at the time. The inmates were in limbo, in the Promised Land but yet not free. They alternated between anger and distrust toward the volunteers in the camp, whom they expected to be more forthcoming in facilitating their freedom.</p> <p>The sabras, in turn, considered the former with a combination of condensation and pity.</p> <p>Not that many of the inmates had the language with which to tell their stories. Diamant sensibly shies away from creating heroes and heroines, instead sketching honest portraits of everyday people trying their best in challenging circumstances.</p> <p>“Day After Night” is not always an unqualified success. Diamant’s prose is occasionally uncertain, veering between gross understatement and arch overelaboration. And her principals at times present more as calculated composites than as fully formed individuals.</p> <p>The latter, at least, can be understood if not fully appreciated. Diamant herself has acknowledged intent beyond simple storytelling in the development of her characters: “Celebrating women’s friendships remains oddly counterculture. The media embraces stories of mean girls and competition between women, but I think cooperation and community among women is at least as if not more normative of women’s lives.”</p> <p>One cannot deny the moral authority in which they vest.</p> <p>Diamant’s protagonists must all find a way to look to the future. Far better together than alone, and as one puts it after the rescue, while sequestered in nearby Kibbutz Beit Oren: “How can I help but hope among such people?”</p> <p><br /><strong>“Day After Night”</strong> by Anita Diamant (304 pages, Scribner, $27)</p> <p> </p>

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