Great Neck author and clinical psychologist Andrew Kane said he got his idea for his latest novel, “The Night, The Day,” while treating a former resistance fighter who served in Europe in World War II.
“As I was treating him, it came to me – what if he wasn’t who he said he was?” Kane said. The story just developed in my head.”
Kane, who has a private practice in Lawrence, said in his novel the man who said he was a freedom fighter turned out to be a Nazi.
“The Night, The Day” is Kane’s third novel, but the first to be set primarily in Great Neck. The book is scheduled to be released on March 31. Some of “The Night, The Day” also takes place in France in World War II, Kane said.
Kanes’s first two novels – 1995’s “Rabbi, Rabbi” and 2015’s “Joshua. A Brooklyn Tale” – both had New York City settings.
Kane said he did not have a reason for setting the novel in Great Neck and making the characters Great Neck residents other than the fact that he currently lives in Great Neck.
“I think everything’s the same everywhere you go,” Kane said.
Kane, a clinical psychologist by trade, moved to Great Neck 16 years ago with his wife and his two children, Max and Jessica.
Originally from North Woodmere, Kane said he moved to Great Neck because his wife Debbie is originally from Great Neck.
Being a writer while having a day job requires a great deal of sacrifice, he said, and he has much less time to do other things although he is helped by his schedule as a psychologist.
Most of his patients come to see him either before the go to work or after, allowing Kane to write throughout most of the day. He said he also often writes late into the night, and sometimes on Sundays as well.
Kane said while his previous novels had been more dramatic family stories, his latest work has a higher level of intrigue. He described his new work as more “spine tingling” than the rest of his work.
No matter the plot, all of Kane’s novels deal with the Jewish experience in America, and more specifically the conflict that comes from maintaining one’s Jewish traditions within the modern American culture.
He said he draws on his own experience growing up in a first-generation Jewish-American home.
“My grandparents all came from Europe,” Kane said. “I grew up in a staunchly identified Jewish home. On some level stories about Jews in America always appealed to me and fascinated me. Those were the stories I wanted to tell.”
It is difficult to have a traditional mindset in modern society, Kane said, but he said there is something positive about maintaining ones identity in a world of distractions.
He uses the example of Shabbat as an antidote to a world where people are “overconnected.” The Shabbat, he said, is an opportunity to get back to the basics
“Everywhere we go we have our cell phones, and on Shabbat we have to shut it all off for one day,” Kane said. “It’s an opportunity to turn off and turn on other things.”
The main character of “The Night, The Day” tries to find his way back to his Jewish identity throughout the novel, he said.
“At the beginning, he is a very assimilated person whose Jewish identity is not very important to him,” Kane said. “By encountering this patient his identity does become important to him in the end.
Kane said he wanted to write about the Jewish experience not because of a lack of Jewish stories, but because there was a very well developed canon of it.
“There was a plethora of Jewish writers growing up,” Kane said. “I grew up on Chaim Potok, Philip Roth. They were writing stories about the Jewish experience and I kind of wanted to continue that legacy a bit.”
Growing up, Kane said he always got a lot of positive feedback to his early attempts at writing. He said his lawyer father always told him he should be a writer when he grew up.
But, he said, he knew being a professional writer and supporting a family would not be easy so he decided to find a day job – as a psychologist.
“[Psychology] comes from my interest in people and their stories and in analyzing them and figuring things out,” Kane said.
As far as the future goes, he said, he plans to keep on writing, but won’t give any clues as to what a fourth book might look like.