The Waiting Room

Author Leah Kaminsky has written a book that shows how even though the generation who lived through the Holocaust first hand is passing away, they have left their indelible mark on the next generation.  Kaminsky writes a powerful novel pulling the voices of the dead into the lives of the living by writing a continuous conversation between the past and the present, from this world to the next.

The Waiting Room, is a story of the day to day existence of Dina, a young family physician, wife and mother.  She grew up in Melbourne, Australia and after her parents, survivors of the Holocaust passed away, she tried to escape her past by coming to Israel.  She married an Israeli and has a young son, Shlomi and is about to deliver her second child.  Though she thought she had run away from her past it continues to follow her.  Her mother follows her around in her mind and carries on a conversation explaining the past.   Dina also still asks her mother for advice in these imagined conversations.

Interestingly, Dina is trying to escape the history of the Holocaust, the sadness and heartache of living with her mother's stories all her life.  She realizes that the fear and anguish her mother thrust upon on her was a weight too heavy to bear, yet Dina herself has run to Israel, to a land that is under attack daily and where she now continues to live in fear for herself and now her children.  She starts to empathize with her mother, to understand her and wonder if she is becoming more like her mother, "Perhaps she should pity her mother, rather than blame her.  Was this the sense of hopelessness the same her mother had felt throughout her life, bathed in the fear that the end could arrive at any instant?"

Kaminsky examines the survivor guilt when Dina's mother talks to her about how she was able to survive the concentration camps.  Dina replays the same stories she grew up listening to her mother tell her including the one about how she chose life instead of death with her own mother, "I'll tell you the answer, Dina, she hears her mother whisper.  If you had been in my shoes, there in that line instead of me, you would have done exactly what I did.  You would have stepped to the right. Because the only person you can ever truly save is yourself."

She also wonderfully presents the life of living under the bomb threats that plague Israel on a regular basis.  Her descriptions of the city of Haifa and the feelings of native Israelis and Arabs to these threats is realistic.  Eitan, Dina's husband, is a native Israeli and feels her fears are extreme.  Her son, Shlomi, is humiliated by her extreme reaction to the ideas of terrorist bombings at his school.  "She is losing him.  For too long she grasped him tight, trying to keep him safe.  But she has been playing out her false tragedies at her son's expense."

In each of the stories we hear Dina listen to from her mother, we see Dina learning that her mother had no choice in how she reacted to life after the Holocaust, and that Dina can make it to the other side of her own conflicts and choose a happier life.