Day After Night

The author of THE RED TENT creates the story of four Jewish women who fled Nazi-held Europe for Palestine, and who are being detained at a British-run refugee camp there. The horrific memories they share create close bonds of friendship. Dagmara Dominczyk's vivid characterizations and polished performance of their individual stories are compelling and bittersweet. In particular, she captures their fear when they're told to undress and shower upon arrival at the camp--a simple act that has terrifying implications for them. Dominczyk gives a feeling of realism to a fictional narrative that is drawn from actual events in 1945, when more than 200 prisoners were rescued from the British camp on the Mediterranean coast, south of Haifa. G.D.W. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

July 6, 2009
Diamant’s bestseller, The Red Tent
, explored the lives of biblical women ignored by the male-centric narrative. In her compulsively readable latest, she sketches the intertwined fates of several young women refugees at Atlit, a British-run internment camp set up in Palestine after WWII. There’s Tedi, a Dutch girl who hid in a barn for years before being turned in and narrowly escaping Bergen-Belsen; Leonie, a beautiful French girl whose wartime years in Paris are cloaked with shame; Shayndel, a heroine of the Polish partisan movement whose cheerful facade hides a tortured soul; and Zorah, a concentration camp survivor who is filled with an understandable nihilism. The dynamic of suffering and renewed hope through friendship is the book’s primary draw, but an eventual escape attempt adds a dash of suspense to the astutely imagined story of life at the camp: the wary relationship between the Palestinian Jews and the survivors, the intense flirtation between the young people that marks a return to life. Diamant opens a window into a time of sadness, confusion and optimism that has resonance for so much that’s both triumphant and troubling in modern Jewish history.

September 7, 2009
Diamant's interpretation of the founding of Israel centers on several young women, many of them survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, attempting an escape from another camp, this one a British internment center in Palestine. Dagmara Dominczyk is good with the panoply of European accents evinced by Diamant's characters, and does an adequate job with the Hebrew and Yiddish gutturals, but some of the basics flummox her: the name of one of the book's protagonists should be pronounced SHAYN-del, not Shayn-DEL. These jarring mistakes notwithstanding, Dominczyk is adept at modulating her voice, using shifts in timber, intonation, and accent bring each of Diamant's heroines to life. A Scribner hardcover (Reviews, Jul. 6).