Awake in the Dark

By Shira Nayman

Awake in the Dark is a fitting book to read in the darkening days of autumn as the pagans go searching for goblins, ghosts and witches.

You’ll find plenty of monsters in this collection of short stories, but you’ll also find plenty of people surviving the impossible with courage and strength. Every character in these stories is pushed into facing a truth about themselves and their origins that has either been kept secret – or which they have hidden from the world.

An address mumbled by a dying mother, a daughter's insistent questions about her mother's -- and thus her own -- origins or straightforward instructions left following a death, tear away the veil of secrecy and force the main characters in these tales to discover or reexamine who they are.

In some cases, the protagonists can never know the full truth; the reader knows only because the stories are told with alternating points of view that juxtapose a child's understanding with a parent's experience.  These are Holocaust stories -- but told from the perspective of children left with fragments of memory and imperfect understandings of what has happened to them.

In Nayman’s beautiful, unadorned prose, ordinary objects symbolize great horrors, a dreidel dropped in a gas chamber, a heavy-based lamp that glows with an other worldly light, a garish porcelain monkey owned by both the Jewish German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn and his grandson the Christian German musician Felix Mendelssohn.

The three short stories are stronger works than the novella, "Dark Urgings of the Blood," which relies on not entirely realistic coincidences. That said, the novella is fascinating and tragic. The story involves a delusional and violent patient, Dvorah Kuttner, and her psychiatrist Deborah Erick. Mrs. Kuttner appears to be suffering from postpartum depression after giving birth two weeks earlier to her seventh child.

She continually suggests to Dr. Erick that they have shared knowledge and experiences that the doctor doesn't recognize or understand at all. As with other stories in this collection, hope rises like a phoenix from the ashes of loss and the suffocating burden of hidden secrets.  That ultimate hopefulness is what makes these otherwise dark stories so wonderfully haunting.

Awake in the Dark was named by Newsday as one of the best books of 2006.

About the Author:  Shira Nayman (1960 - )

Shira Nayman was born in South Africa and moved to Melbourne, Australia, as a young child. She was raised in a community of mostly Holocaust survivors.  That, and the fact that her own family escaped from Eastern Europe during the pogroms of the early 20th century, has inspired her fiction.

After graduating with honors from Melbourne’s Monash University with a bachelor’s degree in physiology and psychology, she spent a year studying literature and history at Hebrew University in Jerusalem before moving to the United States. She earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University and did a two-year fellowship in psychology at New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center.  She earned a master’s degree in English and comparative literature at Columbia University in 1990.

She also wrote A Mind of Winter, her first novel, and The Listener. A Mind of Winter deals with the intertwined lives of three characters and the effects of World War II and its horrors on their lives after the way. The Listener deals with the blurry lines between psychiatrist Dr. Harrison and the brilliant charismatic Bertram Reiner, whom he is treating for battle fatigue. The book was listed as an Editors Choice in the New York Times.

In addition to the books listed above, she has published fiction and nonfiction in The Atlantic, The Georgia Review, The New England Review and Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought. NPR commissioned the short story “Moon Landing,” which was broadcast in December 2010 and chosen as one of eight stories to appear in its “Best of Hanukkah Lights” broadcast.

She has taught psychology, literature and fiction writing. She currently has her own consulting company . In her prior work in marketing, she developed positioning strategies for major brands and product launches for Fortune 100 companies such as Microsoft, Hershey, AOL and political campaigns including Hillary Clinton’s United States Senate campaign.