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How did you come to write Day After Night?
Day After Night began in the spring of 2001. My daughter was a high
school sophomore spending a semester in Israel and my husband and I went
to visit her there, our first trip to Israel. We spent a good part of
the week going on class field trips with the other parents, and one of
our stops was at the Atlit detention camp, which had been turned into a
living history museum. There we learned how Holocaust survivors were
imprisoned by the British authorities, and about the breathtaking and
completely unfamiliar story of the October 1945 break-out, when all of
the prisoners were taken to safety in the nearby mountains. I remember
thinking, "Now there's a novel."
How much of the book is based on historical accounts?
Although the rescue from Atlit is a well-known story in Israel, the more
I looked, the more I found contradictory accounts of exactly what
happened that night, including different stories about where the freed
prisoners ended up. I worked from generally accepted facts (accounts in
the English-language Jerusalem Post, for example), however, I wrote the
novel from the point of view of my characters, which permitted great
leeway in terms of details and perceptions.
Though it is historical fiction, Day After Night is more contemporary
than your other historical novels (The Red Tent, The Last Days of
Dogtown). How does writing about recent history differ from writing
about the distant past?
Writing about the ancient Near East in 1500 B.C.E. means that no one can
really challenge my recipe for goat stew. The closer you get to modern
times, the easier it is to make mistakes. In my second novel, Good
Harbor, which describes treatment for breast cancer in the present, I
was acutely aware of the need to be factually and emotionally accurate.
With Day After Night,
I worked to avoid factual errors and anachronisms.
I expect there may be objections to my portrayal and interpretation of
various events and locations, but I'm comfortable with that because I
read and heard differing accounts from people who were there.
How did you create your four central characters—Leonie, Tedi, Shayndel,
and Zorah?
Creating characters is a long process. They develop on the page and
unfold over time as I write, rewrite, and revise. I really can't come up
with a tidy answer to this question, but for some reason, getting the
names right is a big first step.
I started out wanting to create four women with very different
experiences of the war; only one experienced a concentration camp, for
example. I was interested in exploring how people survive great trauma
then and persevere and, to some extent, reinvent themselves.
As you slowly reveal the hidden history of each of these women to the
readers, the characters do not all tell one another their stories. Why
was it important for some of them to keep their stories secret?
There was a great deal of silence and secrecy about the horrors of the
Holocaust after the war. That was a world filled with guilt: survivors
who felt they didn't deserve to be alive when their loved ones had died;
and for Jews who lived in Palestine or America, guilt and also shame at
not having known more or done more to save those who perished. The
notion of talking about pain as healthy and therapeutic was not so
widely accepted. I think there was also a sense that it was, in fact,
unhealthy to look back; better to face the future and move beyond what
had happened. It wasn't until the Eichmann trial in 1961 that frank and
public conversations about the Holocaust began in earnest, continuing to
this day.
You write both fiction and non-fiction. Do you find one easier to
tackle than the other?
I find nonfiction writing much easier, probably because I have more
experience and thus more confidence in that form. Fiction is much
harder: so many choices, so many possible paths to follow. I like the
clarity of nonfiction but I also enjoy the challenge of fiction. In some
ways, however, they are not all that dissimilar, especially in terms of
revising and rewriting and refining the language to the kind of simple
force I'm after. One of my editors said that fiction and non-fiction use
different sides of the brain. I don't know if that's true, but I think
the difference is good for me.
Would you make some suggestions for further reading for those interested
in learning more about the period in which Day After Night takes place?
I would recommend the works of Primo Levi. An Italian chemist who
survived Auschwitz and returned to Turin after the war, his memoir The
Reawakening tells the story of his liberation and journey home. He is a
beautiful writer. Tom Segev's One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs
Under The British Mandate is a comprehensive and very readable history
of the years from 1922-1948.
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