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.