Shira Nayman :: Awake in the Dark

Awake in the Dark

A novel by Shira Nayman

Description

Bold and deeply affecting, Awake in the Dark is a provocative and haunting work of fiction about who we are and how we are formed by history. These luminous stories portray the contemporary lives of the children of Holocaust victims and perpetrators as they struggle with the legacy of their parents -- their questions of identity, family, and faith. In "The House on Kronen-strasse," a woman returns to Germany to find her childhood home; in "The Porcelain Monkey," the shocking origins of an Orthodox Jewish woman's faith are revealed; in "The Lamp," the harrowing experiences of a young woman leave her with the perfect daughter and a strange light; and in "Dark Urgings of the Blood," a patient is convinced that she shares a disturbing history with her psychiatrist.

Rendered in powerful, unaffected prose, Awake in the Dark is an illuminating and startling book about the disguises we don, the secrets we keep, and the consequences of our silences.

Reviews of Awake in the Dark

San Francisco Chronicle

It is to Nayman’s great credit that her subtle handling of extremely dramatic material allows the reader to be deeply moved without feeling manipulated.

The language is beautifully restrained even as it renders scenes of horrific agony, thus inviting readers to bear witness to traumatic circumstances, with both intimacy and sensitivity. “Awake in the Dark” quietly and forcefully insists that despite every wish to remain asleep, comforted by unconsciousness, we are all much better served by opening our eyes to the truth.

To be awake is to shine light into the shadows, making their outlines more visible, and therefore more recognizable. In revealing what has been hidden, no matter how many bones are disturbed by opening the graves, we may yet find a way not only to repair ourselves but also to heal the troubled world around us.

Newsday
"Our Favorite Books of 2006"

The bleak, beautiful and deftly plotted stories in Shira Nayman's "Awake in the Dark" (Scribner) are like nothing out there, taking as their theme the collateral damage of Nazism, delivered in many cases with an O. Henry twist.

Library Journal Starred Review

In the four stories that make up Awake in the Dark, Nayman explores the lives of children whose parents were Holocaust survivors. She delves into the psyche of her protagonists as they struggle with their own identities and the need to ferret out their parents' secrets. In "The House on Kronenstrasse," for instance, a woman buries her German mother in New York, travels back to Heidelberg, and uncovers an unbelievable past-she is not the person she thought she was. Further and more unusual unraveling of the past occurs in "The Lamp," "Dark Urgings of the Blood," and "The Porcelain Monkey." There's breathtaking storytelling here, replete with psychological detail and stunning clarity; recommended for all libraries.

Book Passage

Nayman's stories hauntingly and beautifully unveil the depths of her characters. Each story is full of twists and secrets, yet each has an openess that makes history immediate. Without ever preaching about the Holocaust, Nayman shows how good and evil actions reverberate through the generations.

BookPage Feature
"First-time writers test the waters with outstanding collections"

A feature on four new story collections, including Awake in the Dark, that "will help rejuvenate the form and attract a new generation of readers."

Download the entire article in pdf form >

Book Sense October Pick

"The even, plainspoken prose of this collection turns evocative and haunting upon reflection. Filled with the children of Holocaust victims and participants, these are tales of almost mystical connection that look back to a time that was, indeed, haunting."

MORE Magazine "First Book" Pick

Shira Nayman's debut collection of stories, Awake in the Dark, has received an unusual amount of praise prepublication. And rightly so. Soulful and deftly plotted, these stories about the children of Holocaust survivors remind us that we're each the sum of personal histories, known and unknown. Nayman, 46, is a clinical psychologist, a marketing consultant, a wife and the mother of school-age children in New York City. How is she handling the sweet smell of success?

"In my office I have piles of other fiction—a novel that's almost complete and several collections of stories. I overextend myself! I want everything. I don't get enough sleep. Sometimes I wind up sick. Once, when I was in the hospital with meningitis and a high fever, I started ordering things on television. I wound up with a Turbo Jam exercise CD—it's that exercise program out of California. Now, I absolutely swear by it."

Houses and Souls, Haunted by Holocaust Ghosts
By Dinitia Smith, The New York Times, Oct. 10, 2006

''In this memory, which has haunted me the whole of my life,'' begins ''The House on Kronenstrasse,'' the first story in Shira Nayman's collection about the Holocaust, ''I am perhaps 2 1/2 years old, and dressed in a special dress made of maroon velvet and lace. I am playing in a fountain that is ornate.''

Within this memory is embedded a strange secret, part of the twisted legacy of those times, waiting to be uncovered by the narrator, who is not the ordinary young American woman she thinks she is.

The collection, ''Awake in the Dark,'' out today from Scribner, will celebrate its publication in a very unusual way: a performance of portions of ''Kronenstrasse,'' which has been set to music by the composer Ben Moore. The piece will be presented tonight at St. Francis College Theater in Brooklyn Heights, with the actress Andrea Masters and a trio of viola, clarinet and piano.

What began as an effort to publicize ''Awake in the Dark'' has turned into a full-blown artistic effort. Mr. Moore, who has composed theater music, as well as songs for Deborah Voigt and Susan Graham, will play the piano. Jimmy Bohr will direct. The other musicians are the clarinetist Todd Palmer and the violist David A. Carpenter, winner of the Philadelphia Orchestra's 2005 student competition. All are performing without pay. The piano store Klavierhaus is lending a Steinway.

The essential subject of ''Awake in the Dark'' is memory, as the characters gradually discover the truths of their pasts, revealed to them like Chinese boxes: boxes within boxes within boxes.
Ms. Nayman, a nonobservant Jew, grew up in Melbourne, Australia, in a community of mostly Holocaust survivors. Her family had escaped Eastern Europe during the pogroms at the turn of the 20th century. She is a clinical psychologist and marketing consultant who lives in Brooklyn with her husband, a college professor, and two children.

''The houses were haunted,'' Ms. Nayman said of Melbourne. ''There were two sets of ghosts. The ghosts of those who were murdered, and of the survivors' own past, which were never mentioned.''

One of her friends, she remembered, found out as a teenager that her mother had had another family. She ''had had two babies, a 1-year-old and a 2-year-old, who perished in a camp,'' Ms. Nayman said. Another friend's mother had a concentration camp tattoo on her arm. ''The only thing she would talk about was how beautiful it was when it snowed in Poland,'' Ms. Nayman said. ''She had tears running down her face.''

''Awake in the Dark'' is full of odd twists. Several stories involve a blurring of identity between German and Jew. In ''The House on Kronenstrasse'' the American woman rents her family's old house in Germany and discovers her mother's true identity.

''The Porcelain Monkey'' is about a woman, a Jewish convert, whose adored father was a concentration camp guard. Woven through it is an account of Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish philosopher. His grandson, Felix, was the composer, a Christian who inherited from Moses a porcelain monkey, a symbol of Jewish subservience.

Why the preoccupation with mixed identity? ''We are all brothers, are we not?'' Ms. Nayman, 46, asked rhetorically. ''I was distraught that people could do that to one another. I thought if I can bring the two, German and Jew, together, it would be interesting to pose the moral quandary, to put the two sides in the same room.''

When the idea of putting some of the book to music was suggested, Ms. Nayman asked her friend Mr. Moore to compose the score. He said he told her, ''Let me live with this story for a couple of weeks.''

At first, he said, he ''was a little despairing of finding a main tune to begin the piece.'' Then, five months ago, as he was exiting the subway, ''these melodies came to me,'' he said.

The score begins with an overture, a fanfare, a tumult of dissonances that fades into a melody in a minor key for viola. For a section in which the narrator discovers a false wall in her family house, Mr. Moore created what he called dream music.

It ''contains the excitement about what she may discover,'' he said.
''It builds to a climax, and a kind of haunting little waltz comes in,'' he continued. ''It's a dream of what these people were like when they were free and happy.''

Ms. Nayman asked Mr. Moore to incorporate into the score echoes of German culture, which, she said, ''was full of beauty, truth, transcendence,'' before it ''became brutally murderous.'' For a section in which a Jewish family hides in a secret part of a house, Mr. Moore added intimations of Beethoven and Schubert.

''It's full of panic and alarm and grandeur,'' Ms. Nayman said, adding, ''We take a pickax to Beethoven and destroy it, and pull out one of the shards, a beautiful piece of glass that pierces your heart.''

A woman holds her dying child in her arms; for that Mr. Moore composed a lullaby for viola and piano.

''To be in a room when someone has entered my space,'' Ms. Nayman said, ''and taken my words, and put them into music is almost too much to bear. They are joining me, and it is so much less lonely.''

Jewish Book World

This collection of four mysteries may seem like a good choice for bedtime reading, but it led this reader into an "all-nighter." The primary characters of these stories, which are primarily set in America, are the children of Holocaust survivors, or think they are. Each tale begins with a provocative sentence and ends with a shock. The adventures take place in the middle of the story, in which the author frequently uses the device of passages alternating between the present quest and its solution in the German past, which the main character uncovers after finding hidden evidence. The daughter of a dying mother senses that something doesn't ring true and goes back to Germany to find out what it is, in "The House on Konenstrasse," while in "The Porcelain Monkey" Rinat, the eldest daughter of an Orthodox mother of seven, questions her mother why she, Rinat, has blue eyes while the rest of her family are brown-eyed. In "The Lamp," a loving daughter respects her dead mother's need to keep the secrets of who her father was, and why her mother bothered to carry a heavy lamp to America when the two fled from Germany. The fourth story, named "Dark Urges of the Blood," is the longest and most convoluted. Despite similar techniques among the stories, each is suspenseful and beautifully written.

Waking up to Holocaust's long reach
by Karen Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Nov. 26, 2006

Connoisseurs of short fiction are feasting this fall, with strong new collections out from Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Mary Gordon. I would love to be in the room when any of these celebrated writers picks up "Awake in the Dark."

Shira Nayman's brave and bracing first book reminds me most of O. Henry. Much of "Awake in the Dark" is plotted in that perfect way that stops our breath even as our brain hums with pleasure at the inevitable, internal logic. We shake our heads in surprise even as we sigh, "Of course."

The lions of literature may be onto Nayman already - the first story here, "The House on Kronenstrasse," caused a stir when the Atlantic printed it in 2005. Composer Ben Moore saw it and was inspired to write a new piece of classical music, which debuted last month.

In "Kronenstrasse," a woman leaves New York City for Heidelberg, Germany, to investigate an address whispered in her mother's dying words. "The past presses its shoulder to the present," Christiane thinks as she takes a leave from her job and rents the strange house her mother mentioned. Decades earlier, the pair had fled Heidelberg, but the house does not match Christiane's earliest, fragmentary memory.

As Christiane sinks into the mystery, Nayman cuts back to the war for sections narrated by Hilde, Christiane's mother. Despite the goodness of both women, their years together were strained. Neither had much success making friends. When Christiane crawls toward the source of this dual estrangement, rummaging in the house on Kronenstrasse, she thinks, "Through much of my life I have been sleepwalking. And here, in this frightening enclosed space, the dust thick in my nose, I am perhaps about to awaken."

She does, in a stunning revelation, left to her by the Holocaust. For Nayman, it is the smoldering demon that reaches across generations, scraping its talons into the interior lives of children and grandchildren who were, metaphorically and literally, left in the dark.

Holocaust literature is dangerous because it risks trivializing the unspeakable. In Nayman's harrowing novella "Dark Urgings of the Blood," a character catches his American daughter and her girlfriend talking excitedly about the nature of God and evil.

He rolls up his sleeve to reveal the tattooed forearm: "This says one of two things," he tells the silenced teens. "Either that there is no God, or that the Devil and God are one. There's nothing more to be said on the subject."

Yet, one of Shayman's themes is the wages of silence. And one of the American best sellers this year - thanks to Oprah's book club - is Elie Wiesel's "Night." I imagine Wiesel will find kinship in Nayman's precise prose. Her sentences are clipped, her word choice exacting as her disturbing stories bore into the reader.

Nayman, an Australian living in Brooklyn, N.Y., has a doctorate in clinical psychology. The reverberations from her day job are clear: characters beset by sleeplessness; the loss of their ability to pray; submerged, tripwire memories.

Catching a glimpse of her mother's hatbox, another deracinated daughter observes, "The sight of the box sets off flashes of visceral memory which I cannot describe but which hold the texture and feel of my early life."

Nayman is a master of those moments when you know before you know. The least successful story here is "The Lamp" because our lurid guess about the central object turns out to be true.

Occasionally, Nayman repeats herself - her characters are forever sniffing flowering trees in the air - and she teeters once or twice at the way station of despair. It requires guts to read her; and surely "Awake in the Dark" required guts to write.

But we hold out for the "awake," for these memorable, smart characters who are "far-seeing and deep-feeling." I was altered by them and am keen to see what Nayman does next.

A Long Night’s Journey Into Day
by Sandee Brawarsky, Jewish Week

The characters in Shira Nayman’s debut collection of stories have few if any relatives, scant clues to uncover their history. These are stories that begin in the present and reach back to World War II and the Holocaust, reclaiming memory. “Awake in the Dark” (Scribner) is a work of quiet power, with haunting twists and feelings that linger.

Other writers who are themselves the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors have turned their experiences growing up amidst unfathomable loss into fiction.

As Nayman explains in an interview, she is the descendant of Jews who left Europe “Lithuania, Russia and Poland” in the early 1900s, fleeing pogroms for South Africa, where she was born.

As a young child, her family moved to Melbourne, Australia, where she grew up in a close-knit Jewish community of exiles. Almost all of her friends were the children of Holocaust survivors, and she lived amidst their stories and their silences. The trauma of the Holocaust was a large presence in her childhood, leaving a deep imprint on her psyche and her heart. She knew which of her friends’ parents had had previous families that they lost, who had numbers carved into their arms and who never spoke of that time. It’s as though she has inherited their memories.

The title seems fitting in many ways; many of the characters are wide awake and searching amidst dark secrets; they are energetic insomniacs, determined to unlock mysteries. For some, horrors occur in the blackness of night, and they have no choice but to be awake. The title could also be inverted, for they also face darkness in the daytime hours, burdened by things both known and unknown. Like the stories, the title also has a mystical quality.

The well-written book includes a novella and three stories. They feel almost interconnected by their themes, with motifs repeated between them, but each story features distinct characters and circumstances. In each piece, daughters yearn for the hidden facts of their parents’ lives and their own identities; they sense that the pieces they have learned over the years don’t add up to the truth. In the opening story, “The House on Kronenstrasse,” first published in The Atlantic Monthly’s fiction issue, a young woman in New York follows her mother’s deathbed wish that she return to a house in Heidelberg.

There, she discovers a hidden crawl space, and learns that her own origins were different than she had believed.

Nayman, whose English still carries the ring of Australia, has a master’s degree in comparative literature and a doctorate in clinical psychology; her educational work and experience enriches these pages. She explains that with her interests and sensibilities, she has been “a psychologist since the day I was born. The training sharpens your instruments.”

In the novella, “Dark Urgings of the Blood,” a psychiatrist tries to treat a religious woman having postpartum symptoms, and the patient believes that their histories are linked. That story, she says, is the most autobiographical in its descriptions of the therapist’s childhood, particularly her involvement in a Jewish youth movement and the depiction of her friends’ parents and their traumas.

While working on other fiction projects, Nayman had the “life-altering experience” of reading Amos Elon’s book “The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany, 1743 – 1933”and was inspired to write these stories.
“It was such an amazing, brilliant book, not just the historical analysis, but it was like an emotional archaeology of the homeless Jews. It was related to my own background, and to that of many Jews in Australia, a story of displacement, from one non-home to another non-home,” she says.
“Elon was writing about Jews who were very cosmopolitan, the opposite of being ghettoized. They were citizens of the world.” She was moved to tears by the issues of Jewish identity raised by the book, and by the tensions of alienation.

To Nayman, the past is far from over.

“My life is infused with memory at every moment, in a fluorescent-heightened way. Writers strive to write about the fluorescent aspects of their experience, and memory is often in that realm. It really fascinates me, troubles me, pains me,” she says.

She has learned from her patients that memories of trauma, when they are vivid, are not only remembered but are relived. Her next book, a novel, takes up this theme.

In the stories in “Awake in the Dark,” time is fractured, with time frames shifting back and forward. She says that she writes in the present tense because she wants readers to feel it’s happening now.

She adds, “It’s happening in Darfur and other places.”

Religious Jews appear in several of the stories, and she admits that while her own lifestyle is not one of Jewish practice, she is intrigued by people of unshakable faith, who seem in touch with deep meaning. Nayman, who attended a Jewish day school in Melbourne, says that in her own childhood, the Holocaust was a huge shadow, and she experienced her Jewish heritage as full of pain. As a parent, she made the decision “not to impose that on my children.” But she is writing about it, and she admits that she’s full of contradictions.

Works by German philosophers often appear on bookshelves in these stories, and these works are indeed an interest of the author. As a fiction writer, she’s particularly drawn to novelists who are philosophical and intellectual.

When she talks about her writing life, she echoes the theme of displacement. Nayman, 46, has a home in Brooklyn that she loves, and which she shares with her husband and two children. But finding too many distractions to be able to write there, she moves about the city with her computer, in search of a comfortable corner in which to work. She finds that the café’s of her Cobble Hill neighborhood have become wall-to-wall writers, and she prefers to be alone. In recent years, she has also worked as a marketing consultant, but now is taking a leave to write full time.

Until recently, Nayman hadn’t heard the expression “2G,” which many grown-up sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors have come to use to describe themselves. While on her book tour this fall, she has encountered several 2Gs who tell her that she has channeled their experiences.

In the stories in “Awake in the Dark,” characters bury their parents, wash dishes, drive their cars at high speeds and confidently use tools to literally crack open places they shouldn’t be looking; they live daily lives that are at once altogether ordinary and astonishing. The stories also have elements of coincidence, when characters’ pasts and present come together, when events within the stories and in separate stories seem to run on parallel tracks. Nayman also depicts moments of kindness, hope, redemption and, ultimately, truth.

Holocaust binds family secrets
By Elizabeth Rosner, San Francisco Chronicle

The recent admission by German author Gunter Grass that as a 17-year-old he was drafted into the Waffen SS is a sobering reminder of just how much shame persists in the post-World War II era. While some are willing to acknowledge his lack of choice at the time, the majority are reacting with shock and outrage, with the most vociferous accusations focusing on his six decades of secrecy regarding his past.

Covering up for one’s crimes, even the crime of naive complicity, seems unforgivable, especially when the world is watching. Given that Grass has been such an outspoken critic of anyone else’s denial of guilt, his own belated confession is at best an excruciating disappointment. Secrets, silences, deceptions, disguises. Actions too awful to admit, decisions too shameful to confess. These are the subjects of Shira Nayman’s aptly titled story collection, “Awake in the Dark.”

A collage of characters and episodes, set both during and after the Holocaust, are gathered here to expose what happens when an insistent voice says, “I want to know.” Indeed, this demand urges writers forward, not to describe what they already know but to investigate what they want — need — to discover, unravel, and perhaps to explain. The motivations in these stories range from a desire to understand one’s family legacy to a wish to reconcile with the past so that it might not be repeated. And to make peace with what cannot be undone.

One narrator, in the novella length “Dark Urgings of the Blood,” asks herself, “What good is there in any of this? Why must I upset the bones of the past?” This anxiety over the possibility that some secrets are best left hidden casts a long shadow across these pages. A familiar dilemma for the descendants of Holocaust survivors, questions about parents’ histories are ultimately impossible to stifle. Even when she recognizes that “it was too late long before I was born. There is no undoing any of it,” it’s clear both to her and to the reader that despite terrible revelations, the consequences of silence are worse.

The first story in this collection, which appeared in the 2005 Fiction Issue of the Atlantic Monthly, depicts both a literal grave opening as well as a psychological autopsy. In “The House on Kronenstrasse,” a daughter searches in the aftermath of her mother’s death for her own true identity. The story examines what it means to come home or to be unable to return; what it means to reinvent oneself or to reclaim oneself. In war, are lives interchangeable? What are the blurry boundaries of moral behavior when immorality is the prevailing code? Sometimes, as this story suggests, unearthing the truth can be a literal task, requiring tools metaphorical and actual.

In “The Porcelain Monkey,” desperate and nearly pathological efforts are made to compensate for loss, to compensate for a crime. This may be the weakest of the collection’s stories, but it is still potent in its depiction of history as a palpable force acting upon the present. Nayman’s repeating format of interweaving time frames — in dated sub-sections labeled with a character’s name for focus — serves to reinforce the sense of reverberation between past and present.

Each story is replete with echoes and repercussions of what took place Before, and how After carries on. The use of this literary time travel emphasizes the narrative pull of questions demanding answers, as objects and discoveries link secrets with truths. It is to Nayman’s great credit that her subtle handling of extremely dramatic material allows the reader to be deeply moved without feeling manipulated.

Here is a description of a daughter saying goodbye forever to a departing mother: “I study the way her body moves — the roll of her shoulders, the way she dips into each step, the distinctive swivel of her hips. I have known these movements all my life. I feel world slamming shut.”

Here is rape victim and young mother surviving the bombing of Dresden: “I take my baby in my arms, close my eyes and wait for world to extinguish.” The language is beautifully restrained even as it renders scenes of horrific agony, thus inviting readers bear witness to traumatic circumstances, with both intimacy and sensitivity.

“Awake in the Dark” quietly and forcefully insists that despite every wish to remain asleep, comforted by unconsciousness, we all much better served by opening our eyes to the truth. To be awake is to shine light into the shadows, making their outlines more visible, and therefore more recognizable. In revealing what has been hidden, no matter how many bones are disturbed by opening the graves, we may yet find a way not only to repair ourselves but also to heal the troubled world around us.

Join Me On
Facebook >

Book Club Information >