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The Waiting Room
Leah Kaminsky’s powerful fiction debut—a multi-generational novel perfect for fans of The Tiger’s Wife and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena—unfolds over a day in the life of a young physician in contemporary Israel, who must cope with modern threats in the shadow of her parents’ horrific wartime pasts.
A young doctor in Haifa, Israel, must come to terms with her family’s painful past—and its lingering aftermath—as the conflict between Palestine and Israel reaches its height and the threat of a terrorist attack looms over the city....
Born to two survivors in the smoky after-haze of WWII, Dina has never been able to escape her parents’ history. Tortured by memories of Bergen-Belsen, her mother leaves Dina to inherit her decades of trauma.
Dina desperately anchors herself in family—a cherished young son, a world-weary husband, and a daughter on the way—and her work as a doctor, but she is struggling to cope, burdened by both the very real anxieties of her daily life and also the shadows of her parents’ ghosts, who follow her wherever she goes. A witty, sensitive narrator, she fights to stay grounded in the here-and-now, even as the challenges of motherhood and medicine threaten to overwhelm her.
In taut, compelling prose, The Waiting Room weaves between Dina’s exterior and interior lives, straddling the present and the past—and building towards a profoundly dramatic climax that will remind readers of the fragility of human life even as it reassures them of the inescapable power of love and family.
A young doctor in Haifa, Israel, must come to terms with her family’s painful past—and its lingering aftermath—as the conflict between Palestine and Israel reaches its height and the threat of a terrorist attack looms over the city....
Born to two survivors in the smoky after-haze of WWII, Dina has never been able to escape her parents’ history. Tortured by memories of Bergen-Belsen, her mother leaves Dina to inherit her decades of trauma.
Dina desperately anchors herself in family—a cherished young son, a world-weary husband, and a daughter on the way—and her work as a doctor, but she is struggling to cope, burdened by both the very real anxieties of her daily life and also the shadows of her parents’ ghosts, who follow her wherever she goes. A witty, sensitive narrator, she fights to stay grounded in the here-and-now, even as the challenges of motherhood and medicine threaten to overwhelm her.
In taut, compelling prose, The Waiting Room weaves between Dina’s exterior and interior lives, straddling the present and the past—and building towards a profoundly dramatic climax that will remind readers of the fragility of human life even as it reassures them of the inescapable power of love and family.
190 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 1, 2015
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May 10, 2017
Update: WOW!!!!!!!! This is a $1.99 Kindle Special today! --its soooo good!!!
I paid full price for it after Esil told me to read it. I was never sorry! Its a page-turning thought provoking read!!
Read Esil's review --and most --treat yourself --- (best $1.99 you'll spend all week!)
When you live in Israel and have a six year old son, it's a normal thought that in
twelve years your son will be in the army holding a gun.
Dina, a wife, mother of six year old Shlomi, pregnant with her 2nd child, and a medical doctor, is in her kitchen during the breakfast hour. Her husband Eitan is making sandwiches for Shlomi's lunch. Shlomi is eating a bowl of Coco Pops with his hands in the cereal box looking for a Pokémon giveaway. Eitan, who has is lived in Israel his entire life-( grew up on a Kibbutz as an only child), drinks only the best coffee. Every morning he follows the ritual of boiling up a special brew from 'hel', cardamon.... he wouldn't think of drinking the instant Nescafé that Dina drinks.
Dina has lived in Israel for ten years --but feels like a "galutnik", a Dispora Jew. "To many Israelis, the word also means coward, and eternal victim as opposed to the strong 'sabra' Jew born in Israel".
Both Dina's parents were Holocaust survivors. she herself wasn't born in Israel. She grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne--not particularly a Jewish. neighborhood. However, as a child of Holocaust parents-- Dina inherited offspring survivors guilt.
I have several friends whose parents were Holocaust survivors--they all live with sadness and grief for their parents...in a way that is hard to explain to others who have not been in their shoes. My 'best' friend mother's escaped the camps when she was only 9.... gave birth to my friend at age 16. These type of mother/daughter relationships are complicated. Heck - my friends mother yelled at me, too, when we were teens, (her way was the only right way in life). I felt guilty and sad for her too -- and usually tried to do anything she asked of me. She wasn't even My mother!
Dina's phantom mother's voice is like another guest in the house. She can hear the words of her dead mother so clearly it's as if she is sitting in the same room with her. "The dead were the lucky ones", her mother told her. I HEARD THIS SENTENCE TOO GROWING UP. WHO DIDN'T? It was almost a Holocaust survivors mantra.
During the day, Dina s mother follows and speaks to he daily -hourly - 24 hours a day - there is no escape.....lectures like, "don't shave your legs in the shower while pregnant, Dina, you might cut yourself and get an infection". Gotta laugh! Dina's phantom mother also tells her stories she has heard a zillion times. Some quite charming - some wise.
Dina is both haunted and comforted with her mother's shadow. She is both comforted and sometimes 'haunted' by her own husband, too. There are days Dina wishes she was back living in her peaceful country with other Aussies....but Eitan would never live in any other country. Israel is his home - his roots - he's not going anywhere. They fight, ( Eitan speaks in Hebrew when he fights), about Israel, Jewish mother's, their son, conserving water, etc. etc. ..Dina loves her stubborn husband...well
she did when she married him---tensions have been developing.
Oh my gosh - I felt the tensions intimately in this story. Can you imagine having a six-year-old child, being pregnant, a demanding job, constant ongoing loss & grief for your deceased mother,... missing her so much it hurts....and feeling lonely in your marriage and country? Whew!!! That's an over-size worry plate!!!
NOTE: I can't even being myself to share about the horrific - powerful prolonged in this novel.....so I'm dancing around the topic....
As EVERYTHING else I read in this book was deeply affected from the prologue: ( difficult to be reminded of horrors that have taken place in cities in Israel).
All in one day.......
During the morning breakfast routines - a terrorist attack warning comes through the radio:
"Boker Tov. Good morning to all our listeners. This is Radio Haifa. An alert has been issued for a possible terrorist attack in the city. People are advised to watch for suspicious packages. The weather will be partly cloudy today, with a chance of light shower".
Haifa used to be considered the one city in Israel where people lived in harmony....
Muslims, Christians, Jews, Baha'is, Druze. I remember this myself-- I studied at Haifa University in the 70's....about 6 months after the Yom Kippur War. Haifa was probably the safest city to be in -- but things have changed. No place in Israel is a protected bubble.
This book was very very important to me -- I can't thank Esil enough for telling me about it. I pre-ordered it the day Esil recommended a book for me. I have not read one review. ( not even Esil's yet). I knew NOTHING of what this book was going to be about when it arrived last night - on my kindle at midnight ( first day it was released on Amazon to the public). This book could have been about hoopla hoops -as far as I was concern- I simply trusted Esil. I knew Esil would not have sent me one more book to add - respecting I already have a pile of books to read unless it was important or very special -- ( many NetGalley readers have a long list), so THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!! I've little tears....I'm so so soooo glad I read it Esil ( this review is kinda a special note to you). Sometimes we just gotta THANK a friend when they give us a gift. This is a book that will sit with me a long time.
Powerful -- and sad - The issues in this story are REAL...
Esil, my own cousin ( first cousin) moved to Israel a few years ago. Honestly- I think she's nuts. The battle continues between she, her husband - and extended family members. I've nephews who moved there less than 10 years ago. I've uncles ...
THIS WAS NOT AN EASY BOOK TO TAKE IN.....
I had no idea what I signed up for.... but I now have a few other people who 'must' read it.
By the way.... I found out that the author, Leah Kaminsky will be in SF - Berkeley- and LA --- this week. A fast book tour ...( 17th to the 20th)... but I know myself now --unless somebody else would drive me into the city... I just won't go. Yet - I'd sure love to meet her - since she is 'here'- talking about this book.
Publishers need to start sending authors to the SOUTH BAY!!!
Thanks again Esil. ( and to the rest of the community- forgive me for this sloppy review)... Yeah, yeah, it's not the first time I've written a sloppy review!
I'm just kinda emotional at the moment!!! A meaningful book -- for those whom it would be meaningful for!
Congrats to Leah Kaminsky!!!!!! REALLY WONDERFUL!!!
I paid full price for it after Esil told me to read it. I was never sorry! Its a page-turning thought provoking read!!
Read Esil's review --and most --treat yourself --- (best $1.99 you'll spend all week!)
When you live in Israel and have a six year old son, it's a normal thought that in
twelve years your son will be in the army holding a gun.
Dina, a wife, mother of six year old Shlomi, pregnant with her 2nd child, and a medical doctor, is in her kitchen during the breakfast hour. Her husband Eitan is making sandwiches for Shlomi's lunch. Shlomi is eating a bowl of Coco Pops with his hands in the cereal box looking for a Pokémon giveaway. Eitan, who has is lived in Israel his entire life-( grew up on a Kibbutz as an only child), drinks only the best coffee. Every morning he follows the ritual of boiling up a special brew from 'hel', cardamon.... he wouldn't think of drinking the instant Nescafé that Dina drinks.
Dina has lived in Israel for ten years --but feels like a "galutnik", a Dispora Jew. "To many Israelis, the word also means coward, and eternal victim as opposed to the strong 'sabra' Jew born in Israel".
Both Dina's parents were Holocaust survivors. she herself wasn't born in Israel. She grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne--not particularly a Jewish. neighborhood. However, as a child of Holocaust parents-- Dina inherited offspring survivors guilt.
I have several friends whose parents were Holocaust survivors--they all live with sadness and grief for their parents...in a way that is hard to explain to others who have not been in their shoes. My 'best' friend mother's escaped the camps when she was only 9.... gave birth to my friend at age 16. These type of mother/daughter relationships are complicated. Heck - my friends mother yelled at me, too, when we were teens, (her way was the only right way in life). I felt guilty and sad for her too -- and usually tried to do anything she asked of me. She wasn't even My mother!
Dina's phantom mother's voice is like another guest in the house. She can hear the words of her dead mother so clearly it's as if she is sitting in the same room with her. "The dead were the lucky ones", her mother told her. I HEARD THIS SENTENCE TOO GROWING UP. WHO DIDN'T? It was almost a Holocaust survivors mantra.
During the day, Dina s mother follows and speaks to he daily -hourly - 24 hours a day - there is no escape.....lectures like, "don't shave your legs in the shower while pregnant, Dina, you might cut yourself and get an infection". Gotta laugh! Dina's phantom mother also tells her stories she has heard a zillion times. Some quite charming - some wise.
Dina is both haunted and comforted with her mother's shadow. She is both comforted and sometimes 'haunted' by her own husband, too. There are days Dina wishes she was back living in her peaceful country with other Aussies....but Eitan would never live in any other country. Israel is his home - his roots - he's not going anywhere. They fight, ( Eitan speaks in Hebrew when he fights), about Israel, Jewish mother's, their son, conserving water, etc. etc. ..Dina loves her stubborn husband...well
she did when she married him---tensions have been developing.
Oh my gosh - I felt the tensions intimately in this story. Can you imagine having a six-year-old child, being pregnant, a demanding job, constant ongoing loss & grief for your deceased mother,... missing her so much it hurts....and feeling lonely in your marriage and country? Whew!!! That's an over-size worry plate!!!
NOTE: I can't even being myself to share about the horrific - powerful prolonged in this novel.....so I'm dancing around the topic....
As EVERYTHING else I read in this book was deeply affected from the prologue: ( difficult to be reminded of horrors that have taken place in cities in Israel).
All in one day.......
During the morning breakfast routines - a terrorist attack warning comes through the radio:
"Boker Tov. Good morning to all our listeners. This is Radio Haifa. An alert has been issued for a possible terrorist attack in the city. People are advised to watch for suspicious packages. The weather will be partly cloudy today, with a chance of light shower".
Haifa used to be considered the one city in Israel where people lived in harmony....
Muslims, Christians, Jews, Baha'is, Druze. I remember this myself-- I studied at Haifa University in the 70's....about 6 months after the Yom Kippur War. Haifa was probably the safest city to be in -- but things have changed. No place in Israel is a protected bubble.
This book was very very important to me -- I can't thank Esil enough for telling me about it. I pre-ordered it the day Esil recommended a book for me. I have not read one review. ( not even Esil's yet). I knew NOTHING of what this book was going to be about when it arrived last night - on my kindle at midnight ( first day it was released on Amazon to the public). This book could have been about hoopla hoops -as far as I was concern- I simply trusted Esil. I knew Esil would not have sent me one more book to add - respecting I already have a pile of books to read unless it was important or very special -- ( many NetGalley readers have a long list), so THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!! I've little tears....I'm so so soooo glad I read it Esil ( this review is kinda a special note to you). Sometimes we just gotta THANK a friend when they give us a gift. This is a book that will sit with me a long time.
Powerful -- and sad - The issues in this story are REAL...
Esil, my own cousin ( first cousin) moved to Israel a few years ago. Honestly- I think she's nuts. The battle continues between she, her husband - and extended family members. I've nephews who moved there less than 10 years ago. I've uncles ...
THIS WAS NOT AN EASY BOOK TO TAKE IN.....
I had no idea what I signed up for.... but I now have a few other people who 'must' read it.
By the way.... I found out that the author, Leah Kaminsky will be in SF - Berkeley- and LA --- this week. A fast book tour ...( 17th to the 20th)... but I know myself now --unless somebody else would drive me into the city... I just won't go. Yet - I'd sure love to meet her - since she is 'here'- talking about this book.
Publishers need to start sending authors to the SOUTH BAY!!!
Thanks again Esil. ( and to the rest of the community- forgive me for this sloppy review)... Yeah, yeah, it's not the first time I've written a sloppy review!
I'm just kinda emotional at the moment!!! A meaningful book -- for those whom it would be meaningful for!
Congrats to Leah Kaminsky!!!!!! REALLY WONDERFUL!!!
November 11, 2016
Thank you to Bianca for bringing this book to my attention with her enthusiastic review. I would have never noticed it otherwise. This book won't be for everyone, but I felt like I fell right in step with its deep morass of sadness, occasional humorous touches and complex human and historical sensibility. Dina is a doctor living in Haifa, Israel. She grew up in Australia, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. She moved to Israel as an adult to marry her Israeli husband. She has a young son and is eight months pregnant. She lives in fear of terrorism, and she is haunted by her parents and their past. The story takes place over one day in Dina's life, including many digressions into her past and conversations with her dead mother. The day is chaotic and Dina's emotions are complicated. She seems unhinged and she seems brilliantly perceptive all at once. Kaminsky does a superb job of conveying vivid emotions, flawed complicated characters, and the weight and cost of history -- and she does it all in a short novel that ostensibly spans a single day. I will enthusiastically look for Kaminsky's next book. Thank you to the publisher and Edelweiss for giving me access to an advance copy.
November 22, 2016
3.5. "She was determined to find the document that would reveal
she was someone else's child, desperate to prove that she had
been born unstudied, rather than carry the dark pages of her
parents' life in her veins."
I usually don't start a review with a quote but I believe this quote sums up much about this novel.
The day in the life of Dina, married with one child, another on the way, married and a doctor herself. Now living in Haifa, Israel where bomb warnings have been posted. The threat of violence in a place she had believed safe with continue the unraveling she experienced after living with her very vocal Holocaust survivor mother. Even though dead, her mother and her words linger on.
A difficult book, but a pertinent one on the later effects of the next generation born to those who had already experienced horror and violence. How it is to live with a fear of the violence that is always present, always possible. This is also difficult because of the way it is presented. Well written though it is, the back and forth in memories, the scattered thoughts of the character herself made this read less than easy. Giving a spectral vision to her unraveling could be disconcerting, yet this book does convey an important message and even though the Holocaust has ended, its effects linger on and so does the fear so many experience living in violent ridden countries today.
ARC from publisher.
she was someone else's child, desperate to prove that she had
been born unstudied, rather than carry the dark pages of her
parents' life in her veins."
I usually don't start a review with a quote but I believe this quote sums up much about this novel.
The day in the life of Dina, married with one child, another on the way, married and a doctor herself. Now living in Haifa, Israel where bomb warnings have been posted. The threat of violence in a place she had believed safe with continue the unraveling she experienced after living with her very vocal Holocaust survivor mother. Even though dead, her mother and her words linger on.
A difficult book, but a pertinent one on the later effects of the next generation born to those who had already experienced horror and violence. How it is to live with a fear of the violence that is always present, always possible. This is also difficult because of the way it is presented. Well written though it is, the back and forth in memories, the scattered thoughts of the character herself made this read less than easy. Giving a spectral vision to her unraveling could be disconcerting, yet this book does convey an important message and even though the Holocaust has ended, its effects linger on and so does the fear so many experience living in violent ridden countries today.
ARC from publisher.
November 22, 2016
4+ stars
"Good morning to all our listeners. This is radio Haifa. An alert has been issued for a possible terrorist attack in the city. People are advised to watch for suspicious packages. The weather will be partly cloudy today, with the chance of a light shower."
The announcement, as nonchalant as the weather forecast starts Dina's day. This wasn't Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but where Dina thought it would be safe for her family especially her six year old son and her unborn child due in a month. Dina , the daughter of holocaust survivors , haunted by their past and the ghost of her mother who she converses with . Through these conversations we see some of the horrors of holocaust and its impact on her parents and consequently on Dina. We hear the heartbreaking stories, of her mother and grandmother, her father's life before he married her mother and the shoemaker's heart wrenching story as Dina , a physician moves through her day. A day in the life of a woman in Haifa but it is more than that , it is also the days of the past, her parents' past that are a part of this day , it's also the days of the future that she fears ,that are in the back of her mind when in 12 years her six year son could have a rifle in his hands.
Throughout the day we see Dina is coming unhinged or is it just too much to cope - eight months pregnant, her marriage falling and fear of what might happen. Certainly this is about the holocaust and the daughter of these survivors and about what it must be like in the present day to live in a place where terrorism is a possibility every minute. Also at the heart of the story is the the love of mothers and fathers for their children and how they would do anything to keep them safe . A well written , emotionally evocative story , an important one reflecting the realities of history and the present day.
I received an advance copy of this book from HarperCollins through Edelweiss.
"Good morning to all our listeners. This is radio Haifa. An alert has been issued for a possible terrorist attack in the city. People are advised to watch for suspicious packages. The weather will be partly cloudy today, with the chance of a light shower."
The announcement, as nonchalant as the weather forecast starts Dina's day. This wasn't Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but where Dina thought it would be safe for her family especially her six year old son and her unborn child due in a month. Dina , the daughter of holocaust survivors , haunted by their past and the ghost of her mother who she converses with . Through these conversations we see some of the horrors of holocaust and its impact on her parents and consequently on Dina. We hear the heartbreaking stories, of her mother and grandmother, her father's life before he married her mother and the shoemaker's heart wrenching story as Dina , a physician moves through her day. A day in the life of a woman in Haifa but it is more than that , it is also the days of the past, her parents' past that are a part of this day , it's also the days of the future that she fears ,that are in the back of her mind when in 12 years her six year son could have a rifle in his hands.
Throughout the day we see Dina is coming unhinged or is it just too much to cope - eight months pregnant, her marriage falling and fear of what might happen. Certainly this is about the holocaust and the daughter of these survivors and about what it must be like in the present day to live in a place where terrorism is a possibility every minute. Also at the heart of the story is the the love of mothers and fathers for their children and how they would do anything to keep them safe . A well written , emotionally evocative story , an important one reflecting the realities of history and the present day.
I received an advance copy of this book from HarperCollins through Edelweiss.
June 28, 2016
5★ for a compelling, insightful story
What a talented writer Leah Kaminsky is. From what little I know of my friends’ experiences, I think she has captured the dilemma of many Jews who choose to live outside Israel. In this story, Melbourne-born Dina, who is a doctor and daughter of Holocaust survivors, falls in love with and marries Eitan, an Israeli-born Jew (a sabra) raised on a kibbutz.
The soundtrack of Dina’s youth was continuous, bitter recitals of Holocaust horrors and of the endless, universal persecution of Jews.
“Silence seemed to linger in the streets where Dina grew up. Melbourne was a city that absorbed the highest number of Holocaust survivors per capita after the war, outside of Israel. It didn’t matter if Dina walked to school, or to the shops to buy cigarettes for her mother, or even over to her friend’s house to hang out for the afternoon, for her Caulfield felt like a place hope went to die.”
Most of this takes place over the course of a hot May day in Haifa, where very pregnant Dina and Eitan are raising their little boy.
Living with them is the ghost of her mother, a persistent, constant, judgmental presence who haunts Dina’s days and nights, appearing in the car, across the table, and in her waiting room. Dina both adored and hated her mother, remembering the affection but being driven mad by her suspiciousness and badgering. She argues aloud with her mother, furious that she can’t escape the negativity.
“Dina glares at her mother, who hates Arabs, Nazis, goyim, wasted food, unworn shoes stuffed in closets, loudmouths, silent bystanders, the child who feels too much, the man who doesn’t feel enough, politicians, journalists, those who have confessed and those who have lived without war. She died disgusted with them all.”
Eitan has agreed to live in Haifa, as it seems the safest place in Israel, but as reported bomb threats come closer to where they live, she becomes an embarrassing helicopter parent. Eitan tells her:
“‘You are such a galutnik.’
Galutnik: a Diaspora Jew. To many Israelis, the word also means coward, an eternal victim as opposed to the strong sabra Jew born in Israel.
‘There are hundreds of warnings every day in this country,’ he says. ‘The kids get used to it; life goes on. You’re the doctor. You should know how people can adapt to even the most grinding of pains. It’s simply a matter of attitude.’ "
She wants to escape – go home – but he reminds her this IS home. And she’s too pregnant to go anyway.
“She storms out of the kitchen, fed up with his tough sabra image. She is tired of this country and its new breed of Jew, outwardly strong and so in-your-face. But more than that, she’s sick of herself: the clichéd, cowering Diaspora Jew, always waiting for some catastrophe.”
As for Eitan, she knows he belongs in Israel.
“And in his eyes she sensed the memory of exile, of stones and cities and prophets she had scorned. She smelt the scent of fruit ripening, remembered desert winds and spilled blood.”
She is truly torn, and this story shows why. If only there were a way to stop the bombs. . .
Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House for giving me the chance to review this wonderful first novel.
What a talented writer Leah Kaminsky is. From what little I know of my friends’ experiences, I think she has captured the dilemma of many Jews who choose to live outside Israel. In this story, Melbourne-born Dina, who is a doctor and daughter of Holocaust survivors, falls in love with and marries Eitan, an Israeli-born Jew (a sabra) raised on a kibbutz.
The soundtrack of Dina’s youth was continuous, bitter recitals of Holocaust horrors and of the endless, universal persecution of Jews.
“Silence seemed to linger in the streets where Dina grew up. Melbourne was a city that absorbed the highest number of Holocaust survivors per capita after the war, outside of Israel. It didn’t matter if Dina walked to school, or to the shops to buy cigarettes for her mother, or even over to her friend’s house to hang out for the afternoon, for her Caulfield felt like a place hope went to die.”
Most of this takes place over the course of a hot May day in Haifa, where very pregnant Dina and Eitan are raising their little boy.
Living with them is the ghost of her mother, a persistent, constant, judgmental presence who haunts Dina’s days and nights, appearing in the car, across the table, and in her waiting room. Dina both adored and hated her mother, remembering the affection but being driven mad by her suspiciousness and badgering. She argues aloud with her mother, furious that she can’t escape the negativity.
“Dina glares at her mother, who hates Arabs, Nazis, goyim, wasted food, unworn shoes stuffed in closets, loudmouths, silent bystanders, the child who feels too much, the man who doesn’t feel enough, politicians, journalists, those who have confessed and those who have lived without war. She died disgusted with them all.”
Eitan has agreed to live in Haifa, as it seems the safest place in Israel, but as reported bomb threats come closer to where they live, she becomes an embarrassing helicopter parent. Eitan tells her:
“‘You are such a galutnik.’
Galutnik: a Diaspora Jew. To many Israelis, the word also means coward, an eternal victim as opposed to the strong sabra Jew born in Israel.
‘There are hundreds of warnings every day in this country,’ he says. ‘The kids get used to it; life goes on. You’re the doctor. You should know how people can adapt to even the most grinding of pains. It’s simply a matter of attitude.’ "
She wants to escape – go home – but he reminds her this IS home. And she’s too pregnant to go anyway.
“She storms out of the kitchen, fed up with his tough sabra image. She is tired of this country and its new breed of Jew, outwardly strong and so in-your-face. But more than that, she’s sick of herself: the clichéd, cowering Diaspora Jew, always waiting for some catastrophe.”
As for Eitan, she knows he belongs in Israel.
“And in his eyes she sensed the memory of exile, of stones and cities and prophets she had scorned. She smelt the scent of fruit ripening, remembered desert winds and spilled blood.”
She is truly torn, and this story shows why. If only there were a way to stop the bombs. . .
Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House for giving me the chance to review this wonderful first novel.
November 27, 2016
“We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.”
----Peter Høeg
Leah Kaminsky, an award winning Australian author, has penned a terrific and extremely soul touching story in her debut book, The Waiting Room that revolves around a Jewish woman who is also a doctor living with her husband and son in Israel whose ordeal through out a single day after the warning about a possible bomb threat is strikingly captured by the author, as the woman whose deceased mother's ghost keeps haunting her about the days that she underwent during the Holocaust, and as her mother's voice runs through her head, her fear grips her completely, making her question her life in such an unsafe place.
Synopsis:
Leah Kaminsky’s powerful fiction debut—a multi-generational novel perfect for fans of The Tiger’s Wife and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena—unfolds over a day in the life of a young physician in contemporary Israel, who must cope with modern threats in the shadow of her parents’ horrific wartime pasts.
A young doctor in Haifa, Israel, must come to terms with her family’s painful past—and its lingering aftermath—as the conflict between Palestine and Israel reaches its height and the threat of a terrorist attack looms over the city....
Born to two survivors in the smoky after-haze of WWII, Dina has never been able to escape her parents’ history. Tortured by memories of Bergen-Belsen, her mother leaves Dina to inherit her decades of trauma.
Dina desperately anchors herself in family—a cherished young son, a world-weary husband, and a daughter on the way—and her work as a doctor, but she is struggling to cope, burdened by both the very real anxieties of her daily life and also the shadows of her parents’ ghosts, who follow her wherever she goes. A witty, sensitive narrator, she fights to stay grounded in the here-and-now, even as the challenges of motherhood and medicine threaten to overwhelm her.
In taut, compelling prose, The Waiting Room weaves between Dina’s exterior and interior lives, straddling the present and the past—and building towards a profoundly dramatic climax that will remind readers of the fragility of human life even as it reassures them of the inescapable power of love and family.
On the morning of bomb threat in her homeland, Dina, a Jewish-pregnant general physician and mother of one young son, becomes skeptical of her life, of her day, of her security and of her son's security. Firstly she is reluctant to send her son to the school, next she is reluctant to see her patients, then she gets paranoid at the shoemaker's shop upon hearing the sirens, all the while dealing with her mother's ghost from the mother's past during the Holocaust period, when the mother and the father spent their days in the concentration camps. As terrorism and fear of Holocaust seeps into her mind, Dina questions her marriage and her shift from Australia to Israel to be with her husband's family. The bond of the marital relationship becomes to weaken with Dina's skepticism who wants to escape to Australia to provide security to her son and to her unborn child. But as secrets start to unravel before her soul, it shocks the hell out of Dina. Can Dina handle the bomb scare as well as the buried secrets from her past?
The author has strikingly captivated the state of mind of a pregnant Jewish woman, her cynicism and her skepticism for living outside the safe cocoon of her birth land, Australia. The ghost that keeps haunting her through the ages, with whom she constantly argues and at the same time, misses that ghost, is perfectly depicted by the author. The readers can actually feel the cold and harsh voice of the ghost of Dina's mother into their heads and with the story's depth, that voice will actually grip them. Moreover, Dina's fear will make the readers stand face-to-face with the brutal honesty of the society's fractures.
The author's writing style is excellent, laced with deep, heartfelt emotions that will make the readers feel its depth. The narrative is engaging enough to make the readers sty glued to the story line. The evocative prose along with a moderate pace makes it even more interesting for the story line to evolve through many layers and folds of this tale. The story is arresting right from the very first page itself as the epilogue reflects a deep meaning of after life.
The characters are well developed, but slightly marred by their dull daily chores which overshadowed the real voice of the main character. The main character is like I said before, paranoid and scared about her life, yet holds on to it, even though she is constantly reminded of her mother's past. So her struggle with the insecurity will make many readers contemplate with her, especially being a mother and fearing the safety of her children's lives. The rest of the supporting characters are also well drawn with enough sentiments.
In a nutshell, the story is heart touching, thoroughly poignant and extremely engrossing that will make the readers keep turning the pages of this book.
Verdict: A must read story of fear of war, terrorism, love and marriage.
Courtesy: Thanks to the author, Leah Kaminsky, for giving me the opportunity to read and review her book.
----Peter Høeg
Leah Kaminsky, an award winning Australian author, has penned a terrific and extremely soul touching story in her debut book, The Waiting Room that revolves around a Jewish woman who is also a doctor living with her husband and son in Israel whose ordeal through out a single day after the warning about a possible bomb threat is strikingly captured by the author, as the woman whose deceased mother's ghost keeps haunting her about the days that she underwent during the Holocaust, and as her mother's voice runs through her head, her fear grips her completely, making her question her life in such an unsafe place.
Synopsis:
Leah Kaminsky’s powerful fiction debut—a multi-generational novel perfect for fans of The Tiger’s Wife and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena—unfolds over a day in the life of a young physician in contemporary Israel, who must cope with modern threats in the shadow of her parents’ horrific wartime pasts.
A young doctor in Haifa, Israel, must come to terms with her family’s painful past—and its lingering aftermath—as the conflict between Palestine and Israel reaches its height and the threat of a terrorist attack looms over the city....
Born to two survivors in the smoky after-haze of WWII, Dina has never been able to escape her parents’ history. Tortured by memories of Bergen-Belsen, her mother leaves Dina to inherit her decades of trauma.
Dina desperately anchors herself in family—a cherished young son, a world-weary husband, and a daughter on the way—and her work as a doctor, but she is struggling to cope, burdened by both the very real anxieties of her daily life and also the shadows of her parents’ ghosts, who follow her wherever she goes. A witty, sensitive narrator, she fights to stay grounded in the here-and-now, even as the challenges of motherhood and medicine threaten to overwhelm her.
In taut, compelling prose, The Waiting Room weaves between Dina’s exterior and interior lives, straddling the present and the past—and building towards a profoundly dramatic climax that will remind readers of the fragility of human life even as it reassures them of the inescapable power of love and family.
On the morning of bomb threat in her homeland, Dina, a Jewish-pregnant general physician and mother of one young son, becomes skeptical of her life, of her day, of her security and of her son's security. Firstly she is reluctant to send her son to the school, next she is reluctant to see her patients, then she gets paranoid at the shoemaker's shop upon hearing the sirens, all the while dealing with her mother's ghost from the mother's past during the Holocaust period, when the mother and the father spent their days in the concentration camps. As terrorism and fear of Holocaust seeps into her mind, Dina questions her marriage and her shift from Australia to Israel to be with her husband's family. The bond of the marital relationship becomes to weaken with Dina's skepticism who wants to escape to Australia to provide security to her son and to her unborn child. But as secrets start to unravel before her soul, it shocks the hell out of Dina. Can Dina handle the bomb scare as well as the buried secrets from her past?
The author has strikingly captivated the state of mind of a pregnant Jewish woman, her cynicism and her skepticism for living outside the safe cocoon of her birth land, Australia. The ghost that keeps haunting her through the ages, with whom she constantly argues and at the same time, misses that ghost, is perfectly depicted by the author. The readers can actually feel the cold and harsh voice of the ghost of Dina's mother into their heads and with the story's depth, that voice will actually grip them. Moreover, Dina's fear will make the readers stand face-to-face with the brutal honesty of the society's fractures.
The author's writing style is excellent, laced with deep, heartfelt emotions that will make the readers feel its depth. The narrative is engaging enough to make the readers sty glued to the story line. The evocative prose along with a moderate pace makes it even more interesting for the story line to evolve through many layers and folds of this tale. The story is arresting right from the very first page itself as the epilogue reflects a deep meaning of after life.
The characters are well developed, but slightly marred by their dull daily chores which overshadowed the real voice of the main character. The main character is like I said before, paranoid and scared about her life, yet holds on to it, even though she is constantly reminded of her mother's past. So her struggle with the insecurity will make many readers contemplate with her, especially being a mother and fearing the safety of her children's lives. The rest of the supporting characters are also well drawn with enough sentiments.
In a nutshell, the story is heart touching, thoroughly poignant and extremely engrossing that will make the readers keep turning the pages of this book.
Verdict: A must read story of fear of war, terrorism, love and marriage.
Courtesy: Thanks to the author, Leah Kaminsky, for giving me the opportunity to read and review her book.
January 18, 2016
The Waiting Room is a small novel that feels like a big book, as it grips you and never lets you go.
Dina is a 8 month-pregnant general practitioner. She's an Australian Jewish, a "galutnik", who lives in Haifa with her Israel-born husband, Eitan, and their son, Shimo. She's on the edge, as she's coping with the last month of pregnancy, her home duties, her job, and the ghost of her mother always present.
Most of the story takes place in one day, more like one morning, in May 2001 in Haifa. The authorities are issuing constant warnings about an imminent terrorist attack. This makes Dina even more apprehensive, while her husband is very blase about it.
Dina is feeling suffocated and anxious. She is having doubts and concerns about living in Israel and her marriage is on rocky ground. But what is she to do? So many things pull her in different directions. She's unable to decide. Besides, she's about to have another baby. What was she thinking? The inescapable feeling of doom doesn't leave Dina.
Having grown up with her parents' Holocaust stories, Dina feels like she can't listen to one more sad story. She just can't! One gets the sense that pretty much every adult in Israel has a tragic, sad story.
I couldn't help wonder why would anyone choose to live in the melting pot that Israel is if given other (better) options?
Leah Leminksy is a very talented writer, who interweaves Dina's present with her mum's past stories and also with other people's experiences. The writing is exquisite and very polished. There are a lot of Idish and Arabic words, some would probably be put off by that, I personally thought it gave the story a more authentic feel, not to mention I enjoy languages. I hope I'll remember at least a few of the more common words.
The Waiting Room is intimate, raw, heartbreaking and very realistic.
Highly recommended.
I've received this novel via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Random House Australia for the opportunity to read and review this novel.
Dina is a 8 month-pregnant general practitioner. She's an Australian Jewish, a "galutnik", who lives in Haifa with her Israel-born husband, Eitan, and their son, Shimo. She's on the edge, as she's coping with the last month of pregnancy, her home duties, her job, and the ghost of her mother always present.
Most of the story takes place in one day, more like one morning, in May 2001 in Haifa. The authorities are issuing constant warnings about an imminent terrorist attack. This makes Dina even more apprehensive, while her husband is very blase about it.
Dina is feeling suffocated and anxious. She is having doubts and concerns about living in Israel and her marriage is on rocky ground. But what is she to do? So many things pull her in different directions. She's unable to decide. Besides, she's about to have another baby. What was she thinking? The inescapable feeling of doom doesn't leave Dina.
Having grown up with her parents' Holocaust stories, Dina feels like she can't listen to one more sad story. She just can't! One gets the sense that pretty much every adult in Israel has a tragic, sad story.
I couldn't help wonder why would anyone choose to live in the melting pot that Israel is if given other (better) options?
Leah Leminksy is a very talented writer, who interweaves Dina's present with her mum's past stories and also with other people's experiences. The writing is exquisite and very polished. There are a lot of Idish and Arabic words, some would probably be put off by that, I personally thought it gave the story a more authentic feel, not to mention I enjoy languages. I hope I'll remember at least a few of the more common words.
The Waiting Room is intimate, raw, heartbreaking and very realistic.
Highly recommended.
I've received this novel via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Many thanks to Random House Australia for the opportunity to read and review this novel.
September 11, 2015
2.5★s
Eight months pregnant Dina was feeling the pressure – living in Haifa, Israel with her husband and son, she didn’t expect to be confronted by terrorism. But the announcement over the radio that morning had her worried. Dina and her husband were arguing a lot; she felt as if she was smothering her son with her worry and as a doctor, her patients were starting to drive her up the wall.
Finally she had had enough of the constant pressure – she left the surgery with its waiting room full of complaining people and rushed away on the pretext of purchasing apples to make a dessert for her son’s dinner. But her mother wouldn’t leave her alone – Dina felt on edge; she argued with her mother; tried to quieten her and told her to leave her alone. The thing was; her mother was dead…
I’m afraid I was very disappointed by The Waiting Room; the blurb led me to believe something completely different to what this novel portrays. The author continually went off topic; pages and pages of memories making it difficult to remember what was originally occurring. Plus the ongoing conversations with Dina’s dead mother were very off putting.
With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy to read and review.
Eight months pregnant Dina was feeling the pressure – living in Haifa, Israel with her husband and son, she didn’t expect to be confronted by terrorism. But the announcement over the radio that morning had her worried. Dina and her husband were arguing a lot; she felt as if she was smothering her son with her worry and as a doctor, her patients were starting to drive her up the wall.
Finally she had had enough of the constant pressure – she left the surgery with its waiting room full of complaining people and rushed away on the pretext of purchasing apples to make a dessert for her son’s dinner. But her mother wouldn’t leave her alone – Dina felt on edge; she argued with her mother; tried to quieten her and told her to leave her alone. The thing was; her mother was dead…
I’m afraid I was very disappointed by The Waiting Room; the blurb led me to believe something completely different to what this novel portrays. The author continually went off topic; pages and pages of memories making it difficult to remember what was originally occurring. Plus the ongoing conversations with Dina’s dead mother were very off putting.
With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy to read and review.
December 15, 2016
In short, this was an emotional roller coaster. Still processing, will come back with a review later...
September 2, 2015
The Waiting Room is the debut fiction novel from Leah Kaminsky, a physician and best selling non fiction author.
Dina is a family doctor living in contemporary Israel with her husband and young son. Haifa is a world away from the Melbourne suburbs where Dina grew up, the only daughter of holocaust survivors. Eight months pregnant with her second child, Dina is exhausted and increasingly anxious. Her marriage is strained, she is tired of her patients needs, and she is terrified by an escalated terrorist threat in the city.
As Dina struggles to simply get through a single day, overwhelmed by traffic, a broken heel, demanding patients, and a promise to procure apples for her son, her behaviour becomes increasingly irrational. She finds no comfort in the casual assurances of her husband, nor the ghostly opinion of her long dead mother, who berates, cajoles and nags her daughter for her failings.
The sentiment of The Waiting Room is haunting and moving, relieved only by a rare glimpse of dark humour. The prose and dialogue is sharp and articulate. The pace builds until Dina's day reaches an explosive conclusion.
The Waiting Room is a short but powerful novel about survival, terror, love and death.
March 13, 2017
Dina is a doctor in Haifa, Israel. Married, mother of a boy, about to become a mother for a second time and the sole practitioner of the clinic, she is under constant stress. When a radio announcement casually mentions a bomb threat as she is making coffee in the morning, Dina is further rattled. Thus, as she prepares to face the day, she does so with great hesitation.
This novel was nothing like I expected. The blurb in the back of the book certainly painted a different picture. Dealing with the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and survivors of great tragedies, the author took on a hefty task and did not deliver. Dina is the only child of two Holocaust survivors and deals with the ghosts of her family daily. As she is trying to figure out her own life, she must also deal with her past. Something about the tone of the book was off-putting. What surprised me the most was how a doctor and daughter of Holocaust survivors could appear to lack empathy. Living in a war zone cannot be easy but her personal life hardly appears to be as bad as she makes out to be (especially in contrast to the life of her patients and ancestors). The novel deals with turmoil, both internal and external. The idea is good but not the execution. Gotta say, this was disappointing and the comparisons to ´A Constellation of Vital Phenomena´ are unwarranted.
This novel was nothing like I expected. The blurb in the back of the book certainly painted a different picture. Dealing with the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and survivors of great tragedies, the author took on a hefty task and did not deliver. Dina is the only child of two Holocaust survivors and deals with the ghosts of her family daily. As she is trying to figure out her own life, she must also deal with her past. Something about the tone of the book was off-putting. What surprised me the most was how a doctor and daughter of Holocaust survivors could appear to lack empathy. Living in a war zone cannot be easy but her personal life hardly appears to be as bad as she makes out to be (especially in contrast to the life of her patients and ancestors). The novel deals with turmoil, both internal and external. The idea is good but not the execution. Gotta say, this was disappointing and the comparisons to ´A Constellation of Vital Phenomena´ are unwarranted.
October 4, 2015
My View:
Compelling, moving and societally relevant.
“Dina wasn’t there to see the ashes when the war ended, but she was born into a smoky after haze. She had never known war, but its tendrils gripped her from a young age, as she tried to make up for everyone her mother had lost. She had to be a good girl: fill her mother’s sadness with love.” In this instance Leah Kaminsky is specifically discussing the legacy of the Holocaust and the effects on the Jewish survivors, and in particular Survivors Guilt; she could however be talking about any people living in crisis, living with conflict, living in refugee camps, living with war or the survivors of war, in any region of our modern world. The effects of war and conflict are far reaching and disturbing, and time does little to ease the pain and burden of such actions.
Beautifully written, poignant, lyrical; “‘the dead were the lucky ones, you know.’ Her mother smoothes a few strands of hair back from her forehead. ‘After we were liberated, there was silence for a while.’ Dina imagines a soft sighing seeping up from the earth, melting into windless air. The murmuring of the dead. Their voices becoming a steady whisper that followed her mother everywhere.” Such sadness is articulately conveyed.
This narrative is intelligently written, haunting, evocative, explosive…unforgettable. There are lessons for us all to learn, for our politicians to hear and to note.
Compelling, moving and societally relevant.
“Dina wasn’t there to see the ashes when the war ended, but she was born into a smoky after haze. She had never known war, but its tendrils gripped her from a young age, as she tried to make up for everyone her mother had lost. She had to be a good girl: fill her mother’s sadness with love.” In this instance Leah Kaminsky is specifically discussing the legacy of the Holocaust and the effects on the Jewish survivors, and in particular Survivors Guilt; she could however be talking about any people living in crisis, living with conflict, living in refugee camps, living with war or the survivors of war, in any region of our modern world. The effects of war and conflict are far reaching and disturbing, and time does little to ease the pain and burden of such actions.
Beautifully written, poignant, lyrical; “‘the dead were the lucky ones, you know.’ Her mother smoothes a few strands of hair back from her forehead. ‘After we were liberated, there was silence for a while.’ Dina imagines a soft sighing seeping up from the earth, melting into windless air. The murmuring of the dead. Their voices becoming a steady whisper that followed her mother everywhere.” Such sadness is articulately conveyed.
This narrative is intelligently written, haunting, evocative, explosive…unforgettable. There are lessons for us all to learn, for our politicians to hear and to note.
March 21, 2016
I thought this was a very uneven book. Dina is 8 months pregnant and still works as a GP in Haifa. She has a very capable receptionist but her morning is in chaos after seeing just 3 patients, including avoiding telling a mother she had 3 months to live, avoiding seeing a hypochondriac, insulting an elderly lady and talking to her mother's ghosts. Even getting a carton of milk was a drama. There are a lot of flashbacks especially around her parents who both survived the Holocaust and fled to Australia to start a new life. Lily Brett writes about life as a daughter of Holocaust victims so much better.
Dina spends the day in a panic, starts to think her family is going to be blown up in a terrorist attack and is not sure whether she wants to stay in Israel, stay married or stay sane.
Dina spends the day in a panic, starts to think her family is going to be blown up in a terrorist attack and is not sure whether she wants to stay in Israel, stay married or stay sane.
September 1, 2015
A beautifully rendered, deeply considered exploration of the contemporary Jewish experience played out in my favourite Israeli city, Haifa. Aussie expat Dina has made a life for herself in Israel; husband, child (with another on the way), successful medical practice. But all is not well in her world. Her marriage is on the rocks, she is suffering compassion fatigue and she is haunted, quite literally, by the ghost of her Holocaust survivor mother. Taking place over the space of a single day, at the end of which there is a suicide bombing, Kaminsky's debut is a brave and compassionate novel that wrestles with some very difficult demons without ever taking the easy way out. 4.5 stars.
August 2, 2016
This totally charmless book deals with a heavy topic (the Holocaust and its survivors and their children), in a heavy setting (Israel) in such an appallingly inept way that I had to stop reading.
I so wanted to find value in this book. From Melbourne to Israel via the Holocaust in Europe, this book seemed to be an intriguing tale of one woman's journey to find herself out of the ashes of her parents horrific experiences in Bergen-Belson during WWII.
Sadly, no. Nothing remotely like it.
The author is simply not a skilled enough writer, and possibly she does not possess enough insight to start with, to pull off a book of this magnitude. This is a clumsy, clueless and charmless attempt at a weighty topic and a complex main character, and the author really should have been dissuaded from continuing with writing it the first time anyone read a piece of her appalling prose, let alone publishing it. How can a book this terrible get published? Where were the editors? It's just full of dreadfully bad writing.
The main character, Dina, is simply appalling. She is dim-witted, ignorant, impetuous in the way you expect 12 year-old boys to be, and utterly unsympathetic. She's utterly awful, unlikable in the extreme, and incapable as the story's (or stories') narrator of drawing us in and making us believe in (first of all) and sympathize with (secondly) the horrors being recounted and her own attempts to reconcile a flawed childhood and her adult choices which she's not so enamoured with anymore. Including a husband she's fallen out of love with, a job she's clearly too fatigued to do with any empathy or even skill, and living in Israel, a country she's not sure she wants to be a resident of anymore. So some weighty stuff. And in the right hands, would have been a gripping read.
But no. Not the right hands.
The author lurches from one unlikely, madcap, lunatic situation to the next... we follow Dina as she flounders from the breakfast table to a cafe to pick up coffee where she spills water all over the waiter, to the supermarket (I forget why she went there) through never-ending traffic, finally to the clinic, where Dina works as its sole general practitioner, all the while with her dead mother as ghost riding shot gun in the back of the car. It's not only absurd, it's boring. At the clinic, Dina seems to be both terrified of and mortified by everyone there, including every patient and her long-suffering but vain receptionist (whose leopard print g-string "prowls" around the top of her pants). She "finally gets the nerve" to step out from behind a coat rack where she's been hiding for 10 minutes, to call her first patient into her consulting room. Oh dear, it's all just too absurd. I won't drag you through any more of the "action", as it's all a heaving jerking mass of ridiculousness. Interspersed with flashbacks to either her courtship with her now-husband, he who is now the unspecified object of her dissatisfaction, or to the lives of her patients, all of whom have survived horrible abuse by the hands of governments or husbands (or both), or of her parents. It's a hot stinking mess.
There's a reason why Styron's "Sophie's Choice" is both a prize winning novel and a long one (approximately twice the length of this one). And that is because Styron was an incredibly gifted author who knew that his topic (again the Holocaust) took great dexterity to bring it to life in a way that had us understanding (as best we could), that had us sympathizing, that had us climbing into the lives of those three people and becoming engrossed in them.
Sadly, Kaminsky, author of this appalling book, has no such skill. Her writing is shabby, ham-fisted, and in her hands, Dina's laments that her only way out of her childhood was for her mother to die, that she wished she'd terminated her (8-month) pregnancy earlier, that she finds her child a "dirty little tyrant", just to name a FEW of the awful thoughts she has, strike the reader as being off-colour at best. Dina is so unlikable in the hands of this author, when she's not being utterly unbelievable.
Our main gal Dina isnot a victim (albeit in the second degree), a casualty of a horror that has left her damaged and suffering. She is certainly not someone we can sympathize with. She's simply a mean-spirited, intelligent-yet-ignorant, awful woman you wouldn't want to sit next to on a bus, let alone have be your doctor.
I wanted to stop reading this book after the first couple of chapters (I usually give each new book at least 3 chapters), but I kept going. It wasn't until Dina lurches from her clinic after abusing one of her elderly patients of being a "bigoted old bitch", abandons her waiting room full of patients and her receptionist to head to the market to have her shoes fixed.... then rushes blindly to her son's school because she "feels in her bones" he is not safe, barging into the principal's office without even knocking on the door to tell her there's a suicide bomber on the premises, only to discover the man in the jacket whom she is sure she saw wires coming out of the back of his jacket is a suicide bomber intent on blowing up the school, that he is, in fact, carrying toffees for the children in that jacket... all of this done in bare feet because she has not waited for the cobbler to fix her shoes but has grabbed them off his bench as he was finishing up... only THEN did I say ENOUGH OF THIS HORRIBLE, BADLY WRITTEN BOOK.
Charmless. Clumsy. Incompetent. Avoid at all costs.
I so wanted to find value in this book. From Melbourne to Israel via the Holocaust in Europe, this book seemed to be an intriguing tale of one woman's journey to find herself out of the ashes of her parents horrific experiences in Bergen-Belson during WWII.
Sadly, no. Nothing remotely like it.
The author is simply not a skilled enough writer, and possibly she does not possess enough insight to start with, to pull off a book of this magnitude. This is a clumsy, clueless and charmless attempt at a weighty topic and a complex main character, and the author really should have been dissuaded from continuing with writing it the first time anyone read a piece of her appalling prose, let alone publishing it. How can a book this terrible get published? Where were the editors? It's just full of dreadfully bad writing.
The main character, Dina, is simply appalling. She is dim-witted, ignorant, impetuous in the way you expect 12 year-old boys to be, and utterly unsympathetic. She's utterly awful, unlikable in the extreme, and incapable as the story's (or stories') narrator of drawing us in and making us believe in (first of all) and sympathize with (secondly) the horrors being recounted and her own attempts to reconcile a flawed childhood and her adult choices which she's not so enamoured with anymore. Including a husband she's fallen out of love with, a job she's clearly too fatigued to do with any empathy or even skill, and living in Israel, a country she's not sure she wants to be a resident of anymore. So some weighty stuff. And in the right hands, would have been a gripping read.
But no. Not the right hands.
The author lurches from one unlikely, madcap, lunatic situation to the next... we follow Dina as she flounders from the breakfast table to a cafe to pick up coffee where she spills water all over the waiter, to the supermarket (I forget why she went there) through never-ending traffic, finally to the clinic, where Dina works as its sole general practitioner, all the while with her dead mother as ghost riding shot gun in the back of the car. It's not only absurd, it's boring. At the clinic, Dina seems to be both terrified of and mortified by everyone there, including every patient and her long-suffering but vain receptionist (whose leopard print g-string "prowls" around the top of her pants). She "finally gets the nerve" to step out from behind a coat rack where she's been hiding for 10 minutes, to call her first patient into her consulting room. Oh dear, it's all just too absurd. I won't drag you through any more of the "action", as it's all a heaving jerking mass of ridiculousness. Interspersed with flashbacks to either her courtship with her now-husband, he who is now the unspecified object of her dissatisfaction, or to the lives of her patients, all of whom have survived horrible abuse by the hands of governments or husbands (or both), or of her parents. It's a hot stinking mess.
There's a reason why Styron's "Sophie's Choice" is both a prize winning novel and a long one (approximately twice the length of this one). And that is because Styron was an incredibly gifted author who knew that his topic (again the Holocaust) took great dexterity to bring it to life in a way that had us understanding (as best we could), that had us sympathizing, that had us climbing into the lives of those three people and becoming engrossed in them.
Sadly, Kaminsky, author of this appalling book, has no such skill. Her writing is shabby, ham-fisted, and in her hands, Dina's laments that her only way out of her childhood was for her mother to die, that she wished she'd terminated her (8-month) pregnancy earlier, that she finds her child a "dirty little tyrant", just to name a FEW of the awful thoughts she has, strike the reader as being off-colour at best. Dina is so unlikable in the hands of this author, when she's not being utterly unbelievable.
Our main gal Dina isnot a victim (albeit in the second degree), a casualty of a horror that has left her damaged and suffering. She is certainly not someone we can sympathize with. She's simply a mean-spirited, intelligent-yet-ignorant, awful woman you wouldn't want to sit next to on a bus, let alone have be your doctor.
I wanted to stop reading this book after the first couple of chapters (I usually give each new book at least 3 chapters), but I kept going. It wasn't until Dina lurches from her clinic after abusing one of her elderly patients of being a "bigoted old bitch", abandons her waiting room full of patients and her receptionist to head to the market to have her shoes fixed.... then rushes blindly to her son's school because she "feels in her bones" he is not safe, barging into the principal's office without even knocking on the door to tell her there's a suicide bomber on the premises, only to discover the man in the jacket whom she is sure she saw wires coming out of the back of his jacket is a suicide bomber intent on blowing up the school, that he is, in fact, carrying toffees for the children in that jacket... all of this done in bare feet because she has not waited for the cobbler to fix her shoes but has grabbed them off his bench as he was finishing up... only THEN did I say ENOUGH OF THIS HORRIBLE, BADLY WRITTEN BOOK.
Charmless. Clumsy. Incompetent. Avoid at all costs.
December 19, 2015
I was all set to wait patiently for the U.S. release of Leah Kaminsky's debut novel THE WAITING ROOM (which will happen next fall). But then, the author—an Australian whom I’ve yet to meet in person but with whom I’ve developed another of those wonderful “online friendships” I’m so grateful for—sent me a gift copy of the original Australian edition, which was published this past September. And how pleased I am that she did.
There’s so much that’s noteworthy about this book, beginning with the subject matter. What I realized only a few pages in is that THE WAITING ROOM brings together two topics that are often categorized separately among Diaspora readers. First, there’s its Holocaust thread. Protagonist Dina Ronen, Australian-born, is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Her father died during Dina’s childhood; her mother has passed away by the time the novel opens, with Dina a married mother of one young son and another baby about a month away from delivery. But her mother’s ghost speaks throughout the book, and we return often to her parents’ histories in flashbacks.
Second, this is a novel that is set in Israel, in Haifa, where adult Dina has built a life with her sabra husband and pursues her work as a physician. The book’s narrative present unfolds over a single morning in May 2001; a brief prologue and epilogue aside, the central action takes place in the hours leading up to and in the immediate aftermath of an horrific terrorist attack that has taken many lives. As with her childhood, Dina’s life in Israel prior to that life-changing morning is depicted clearly and powerfully.
Others have written far more thoughtful, in-depth reviews of the book than I can manage at the moment here. Perhaps my favorite discovered thus far is one by Alice Nelson for the SYDNEY REVIEW OF BOOKS (http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/th...). Nelson does a magnificent job considering THE WAITING ROOM on its own merits, but also situates it alongside Kaminsky’s other published work (notably, her 2010 poetry collection STITCHING THINGS TOGETHER) as well as in relation to works by Australian, Israeli, and other writers. I urge you to read it; if I haven’t already induced you to add THE WAITING ROOM to your list of books to be read in 2016, Nelson’s piece surely will.
There’s so much that’s noteworthy about this book, beginning with the subject matter. What I realized only a few pages in is that THE WAITING ROOM brings together two topics that are often categorized separately among Diaspora readers. First, there’s its Holocaust thread. Protagonist Dina Ronen, Australian-born, is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors. Her father died during Dina’s childhood; her mother has passed away by the time the novel opens, with Dina a married mother of one young son and another baby about a month away from delivery. But her mother’s ghost speaks throughout the book, and we return often to her parents’ histories in flashbacks.
Second, this is a novel that is set in Israel, in Haifa, where adult Dina has built a life with her sabra husband and pursues her work as a physician. The book’s narrative present unfolds over a single morning in May 2001; a brief prologue and epilogue aside, the central action takes place in the hours leading up to and in the immediate aftermath of an horrific terrorist attack that has taken many lives. As with her childhood, Dina’s life in Israel prior to that life-changing morning is depicted clearly and powerfully.
Others have written far more thoughtful, in-depth reviews of the book than I can manage at the moment here. Perhaps my favorite discovered thus far is one by Alice Nelson for the SYDNEY REVIEW OF BOOKS (http://www.sydneyreviewofbooks.com/th...). Nelson does a magnificent job considering THE WAITING ROOM on its own merits, but also situates it alongside Kaminsky’s other published work (notably, her 2010 poetry collection STITCHING THINGS TOGETHER) as well as in relation to works by Australian, Israeli, and other writers. I urge you to read it; if I haven’t already induced you to add THE WAITING ROOM to your list of books to be read in 2016, Nelson’s piece surely will.
October 28, 2016
I was very intrigued when I read the summary for this book. I enjoy stories in the WWII era. When I started reading this book I was fine with it. Yet, the more I read I realized that I was more like an outsider attempting to look in. What I mean by this is that I was not connected to Dina or her parents' history. I felt that Dina's voice was monotone. It did not have any energy or was a loud voice. I understand part of this had to do with Dina's struggles but still I tried to find some connection with Dina and the story as a whole but could not. This is one book that did not leave me waiting for more.
May 18, 2018
Very good book.
The Waiting Room spans one day in the life of a young, pregnant physician woman who has relocated from Australia to Israel. She is Jewish and the survivor of holocaust victims. This unforgettable day takes us through many emotions as the doctor tries to reconcile feelings of her long deceased mother who is not quite gone to her. Certainly a winner with me.
The Waiting Room spans one day in the life of a young, pregnant physician woman who has relocated from Australia to Israel. She is Jewish and the survivor of holocaust victims. This unforgettable day takes us through many emotions as the doctor tries to reconcile feelings of her long deceased mother who is not quite gone to her. Certainly a winner with me.
September 10, 2015
We follow Dina on one day in her life. She is eight months pregnant with her second child, her marriage is strained and her profession as a GP is taking a toll mentally. The last straw seems to be the warning of a bomb alert in her relatively safe city of Haifa, especially since she was raised to fear the worst by her mother, a holocaust survivor.
Adding to the fact that she hears the voice of her dead mother chatting to her constantly and questioning her life.
This is a relatively short novel, I could feel Dina on the end of her tether, the empathy and frustration that she felt for her patients and her need to feel safe and protect her children.
The story is told in the present with Dina thinking of episodes in her past and talking to her mother. It's a story that is quite difficult to articulate but I found it to be compelling and easy to read, for me it was about choices and learning to live with them.
Adding to the fact that she hears the voice of her dead mother chatting to her constantly and questioning her life.
This is a relatively short novel, I could feel Dina on the end of her tether, the empathy and frustration that she felt for her patients and her need to feel safe and protect her children.
The story is told in the present with Dina thinking of episodes in her past and talking to her mother. It's a story that is quite difficult to articulate but I found it to be compelling and easy to read, for me it was about choices and learning to live with them.
January 27, 2016
Kaminsky captures the stress & angst of GP, Dina, very well. Australian born of Jewish Holocaust survivors, she is living in Haifa, Israel, heavily pregnant, struggling to cope with the demands of her practice & she also is aware that her marriage is failing. The constant worry of terrorist attack & the ever-present ghosts of her parents' past, see her spiralling out of control. The book culminates in her realisation that "she can't go on straddling a fault line between her future & her past". The book creates a realistic situation of desperation but I found Dina's neuroses a bit much at times. And I wasn't really into the talking to her mother's ghost, although it was obviously integral to the whole story
March 23, 2017
I received a copy of this book through the Goodreads First Reads giveaway program in the hopes that I would leave an honest review.
This book transported me to a place I didn't expect to go; namely a war zone. I'm not sure why I didn't expect that. I read the blurb, and on a basic level understood what the words meant, but somehow that didn't translate into my idea of where I would be going with this story. That is purely my own fault, but it threw me for an immediate loop that I needed to recover from before I could really settle in with Dina.
Then once I did feel a bit settled in, I was still left reeling.
Read the rest of my review on my blog. --> http://justanothergirlandherbooks.blo...
This book transported me to a place I didn't expect to go; namely a war zone. I'm not sure why I didn't expect that. I read the blurb, and on a basic level understood what the words meant, but somehow that didn't translate into my idea of where I would be going with this story. That is purely my own fault, but it threw me for an immediate loop that I needed to recover from before I could really settle in with Dina.
Then once I did feel a bit settled in, I was still left reeling.
Read the rest of my review on my blog. --> http://justanothergirlandherbooks.blo...
September 4, 2015
The Waiting Room is a powerful novel that is full of emotion. You feel nothing but empathy for the main character Dina, as she struggles through decisions about what she wants from life. At times, her behaviour came across as irrational to those that loved her as they didn't understand how she was haunted by the dead. Dina and her ghostly mother asked each "What would you do in my shoes?" Well if I was in Dina's shoes, I don't think I could of been as patient and understanding as her character. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free kindle copy.
November 15, 2016
THE WAITING ROOM (HARPER) by Leah Kaminsky takes place over the course of a single day, but the story it tells spans five decades, three continents, and one family’s compelling history of love, war and survival.
Dina is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her mother survived the Displaced Person’s camp in Bergen-Belsen. Her father survived Auschwitz as a tailor to SS officers. Dina is a doctor, trying to heal, mend and in some way, straddling past and present to make up for the horror of her family’s past. She has emigrated from Melbourne, Australia to be closer to the land of her people, but in many ways she’s viewed a “Galutnik” or Dispora Jew. Her husband and others think she’s unable to truly understand the reality of being hunted by an enemy that wants Jews exterminated.
Her husband, Eitan was the first man who understood the ghosts and voices that took residence in Dina’s mind and life. But being a mother, busy doctor, wife and bogged down with voices is stretching her thin. The stress of living under the constant threat of terror is pushing her coping skills to the limit. They live in Haifa, which is considered a safer city in Israel, but on this day, terrorists will carry out their threat.
Leah Kaminsky tells a compelling story literally has you in the driver’s seat with Dina. From page one until the end, the narrative keeps readers hearts pounding, while holding their breath. I certainly had an eye-opening experience when it came to learning about living under daily security procedures in Israel. Leah has a background in poetry and the brevity and musicality of her prose rang through.
leah_4
Leah Kaminsky, a physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel The Waiting Room is published by Vintage (2015) and will be released by Harper Perennial US in 2016. We’re all Going to Die is forthcoming with Harper Collins in June 2016. She conceived and edited Writer MD, a collection of prominent physician-writers, which starred on Booklist (Knopf US 2012). She is co-author of Cracking the Code, with the Damiani family (Vintage 2015). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.You can contact her on her website http://www.leahkaminsky.com or at twitter @ leahkam
Dina is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her mother survived the Displaced Person’s camp in Bergen-Belsen. Her father survived Auschwitz as a tailor to SS officers. Dina is a doctor, trying to heal, mend and in some way, straddling past and present to make up for the horror of her family’s past. She has emigrated from Melbourne, Australia to be closer to the land of her people, but in many ways she’s viewed a “Galutnik” or Dispora Jew. Her husband and others think she’s unable to truly understand the reality of being hunted by an enemy that wants Jews exterminated.
Her husband, Eitan was the first man who understood the ghosts and voices that took residence in Dina’s mind and life. But being a mother, busy doctor, wife and bogged down with voices is stretching her thin. The stress of living under the constant threat of terror is pushing her coping skills to the limit. They live in Haifa, which is considered a safer city in Israel, but on this day, terrorists will carry out their threat.
Leah Kaminsky tells a compelling story literally has you in the driver’s seat with Dina. From page one until the end, the narrative keeps readers hearts pounding, while holding their breath. I certainly had an eye-opening experience when it came to learning about living under daily security procedures in Israel. Leah has a background in poetry and the brevity and musicality of her prose rang through.
leah_4
Leah Kaminsky, a physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel The Waiting Room is published by Vintage (2015) and will be released by Harper Perennial US in 2016. We’re all Going to Die is forthcoming with Harper Collins in June 2016. She conceived and edited Writer MD, a collection of prominent physician-writers, which starred on Booklist (Knopf US 2012). She is co-author of Cracking the Code, with the Damiani family (Vintage 2015). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.You can contact her on her website http://www.leahkaminsky.com or at twitter @ leahkam
December 4, 2015
No, this is not a cheery book that you could drop into someone’s Christmas stocking. It is harrowing reading which will leave you drained by the experience. But it’s an important book, and superbly well-written. In The Waiting Room, debut novelist Leah Kaminsky has captured fear, guilt and unresolved anguish in a novel that will wring your heart.
Almost all of the story takes place in a single day. The novel opens in Haifa, in 2001, in the aftermath of a suicide bomb. Dina is a doctor who is picking her way through the bodies and the rubble, and trying to process what has happened. Little details distract her, as does the kicking of her unborn child. At this point in the novel the reader does not know how or when she arrived on the scene, or anything about the bodies strewn about. The scene is abstract, impersonal, with emergency services efficient amongst the chaos – as in the safety of our homes we often observe these scenes to be in the aftermath of atrocity.
Dina’s emotions are suppressed, but her body rebels:
The baby kicks violently again. Pain rips through Dina’s side. She feels the air close in on her, the thick stench of burnt flesh and blood invading her nostrils. She can taste the bitterness of charcoal in her mouth. Tearing herself away from the man, she stumbles over to the corner, just in time to heave her insides onto the floor. As she turns back to look at the carnage, the last thing she sees before she passes out is a mangled body lying in a heap over in one corner. Red lipstick still perfectly frames the dead woman’s lips. (p.6)
The focus then shifts to earlier in the day, and the events that have led up to the bombing.
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/12/04/th...
Almost all of the story takes place in a single day. The novel opens in Haifa, in 2001, in the aftermath of a suicide bomb. Dina is a doctor who is picking her way through the bodies and the rubble, and trying to process what has happened. Little details distract her, as does the kicking of her unborn child. At this point in the novel the reader does not know how or when she arrived on the scene, or anything about the bodies strewn about. The scene is abstract, impersonal, with emergency services efficient amongst the chaos – as in the safety of our homes we often observe these scenes to be in the aftermath of atrocity.
Dina’s emotions are suppressed, but her body rebels:
The baby kicks violently again. Pain rips through Dina’s side. She feels the air close in on her, the thick stench of burnt flesh and blood invading her nostrils. She can taste the bitterness of charcoal in her mouth. Tearing herself away from the man, she stumbles over to the corner, just in time to heave her insides onto the floor. As she turns back to look at the carnage, the last thing she sees before she passes out is a mangled body lying in a heap over in one corner. Red lipstick still perfectly frames the dead woman’s lips. (p.6)
The focus then shifts to earlier in the day, and the events that have led up to the bombing.
To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2015/12/04/th...
November 2, 2016
2.5 stars. For me, a little bit of a rambling messy read. The problem I think I had too was that this was a PDF so I had to read it on the iPad using the Kindle app. PDFs are never formatted properly and therefore no chapter breaks, no real paragraph breaks. I really don't like that ARCS are sent in PDF format. So, it was a bit difficult to discern the breaks in storyline.
But overall, the filler and the rambling nature of the story had me feeling disconnected from it.
I just finished but there was a great deal of skimming done and I wished more of this was a tighter read.
But overall, the filler and the rambling nature of the story had me feeling disconnected from it.
I just finished but there was a great deal of skimming done and I wished more of this was a tighter read.
August 29, 2017
I have mixed feelings about this book. Some parts were absolutely riveting and very well written. But the book was so scattered it felt quite disorganized (although maybe that was the point). The characters were all portrayed (even the dead ones) as so flawed as to be unredeeming. Also, the main character walks around Haifa 9 months pregnant and barefoot for a good portion of the book, which was anxiety producing and also unrealistic. I guess I just didn't like or empathize with anyone. The flashbacks to Holocaust were important but didn't actually seem to fit. Overall, just OK.
October 8, 2015
A really important work, a novel that touches on all the big, important themes - love for children, parents and lovers; suffering and its impact on subsequent generations; the power of history to transform individual lives and more and more. The language is visceral, the tone is tragicomic. I couldn't put this book down.
January 23, 2016
A short book the spans one day in the life of Dina, an expat-Melbournite doctor living in Haifa with her husband and child, but haunted by the tragedies her parents lived through in the holocaust. The book wrestles with the migrant experience, the conflict in the Middle East (although there is little sympathy or humanity given to the Palestinian perspective) and the lingering impacts of trauma.
December 13, 2016
What a pleasure this book was - a day in the life in the style of Virginia Woolf and yet completely different, resonant with history (Jewish, Australian, Israeli) yet deeply intimate and personal for the characters, and a wise musing about sadness, horror, dislocation, marriage, children, parents. This is a doctor-writer who reads more like a writer who happens to be a doctor.
December 26, 2016
This really could have been an excellent book- the premise has so much potential. The character was awful. The book meandered.
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