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Book Review of Day After Night

Day After Night
Day After Night
Author: Anita Diamant
Genre: Literature & Fiction
Book Type: Paperback
reviewed on + 289 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


As with her most widely known work, The Red Tent, Anita Diamant focuses on the women in her latest novel based on the Atlit detainee camp preventing persons without papers from freely entering British-ruled Palestine. Day After Night might refer to the detainee's experiences of surviving WWII in Europe, or the October 1945 escape from Atlit. However, it did not describe my experience reading this book after The Red Tent.

Whereas Dinah was a strong central character in The Red Tent, much of Day After Night describes mostly the listless days in the camp, slowly leading up to the escape which no one really knew about until the end. The narrative alternatively focuses on four women (Tedi, Zorah, Leonie, and Shayndel), slowly revealing how each survived the Holocaust in different ways. The women don't talk about their experiences with each other, and it was unclear until the end that they were particularly close. The action was slow-moving, almost like watching a black-and-white film of a flowing stream. Moreover, the somewhat anti-climatic escape leaves some loose ends about other characters whom Diamant spent time developing. Although it brought to light an aspect of the Holocaust not usually emphasized, as well as the British Mandate of Palestine and Israeli statehood, Day After Night did not show off Diamant's storytelling talent so evident in The Red Tent.