December, 2009 - Mya Guarnieri

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The Jerusalem Post, December 18, 2009

Ordering coffee in Hebrew and taking in the view of the Old City from the Mishkenot’s restaurant, Jonathan Rosen appears comfortable in Israel.

But his easy posture doesn’t reflect his emotions—Rosen, who is happy to call himself a Zionist, doesn’t feel entirely at ease.

“I feel cut off by the language,” the American Jewish writer and editorial director of Nextbook confesses, almost wistfully. Despite Hebrew school, two years of Hebrew as an undergraduate at Yale, and additional study while a grad student at Berkley, his Hebrew, in his own words, “stinks.”

In Israel to participate in Kisufim, the Jerusalem Conference of Jewish Writers, which was held from December 7 to 10 at Beit Avi Chai and Mishkenot Sha’ananim, Rosen strikes as the embodiment of this year’s theme—exile, language, and the Jewish writer.

Despite his physical distance from Israel—Rosen lives in New York City with his wife, a conservative rabbi, and their two daughters, aged 10 and 6—he feels a deep connection with the country. “Israel is central to the survival of Judaism,” he says. And because his paternal grandfather died in Buchenwald and his paternal grandmother was shot to death by the Nazis, Rosen was “aware of the precariousness of Jewish existence from an early age.”

Continue reading “At home and abroad”

day_after_night Review of Anita Diamant’s Day After Night

Haaretz, December 4, 2009

After the darkness of the Shoah, in the last days of the British Mandate, waves of Jewish immigrants flooded Palestine’s shores. Their numbers far exceeded the quotas set by the British, and these new arrivals — most coming by boat from Europe, a few traveling by foot from the Arab world, but all of them considered illegal — were rounded up and sent to detention centers in Palestine and Cyprus, where they waited for the British to decide their fates. One such internment camp, at Atlit, just south of Haifa, serves as the setting for Anita Diamant’s latest work of fiction, “Day After Night.”

Atlit, Diamant writes in the opening pages, “offered a grim welcome to the exhausted remnant of the Final Solution, who could barely see past its barbwire fences, three of them, in fact, concentric lines that scrawled a crabbed and painful hieroglyphic across the sky.” She draws on first-hand reporting for this description — a 2000 visit to Atlit, today a museum, gave her the idea for the novel.

Diamant is best known for “The Red Tent” (1997), which became an international bestseller. That book, in which the author took as her premise the biblical story of Jacob’s daughter Dinah, recasts Dinah’s woeful tale as one of feminine strength and triumph.

Continue reading “Trauma unit”