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Genre: Historical: European, Inspirational, Romance
This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Rachel. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Best First Book category.
The summary:
In 1944, blonde and blue-eyed Jewess Hadassah Benjamin feels abandoned by God when she is saved from a firing squad only to be handed over to a new enemy. Pressed into service by SS-Kommandant Colonel Aric von Schmidt at the transit camp of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, she is able to hide behind the false identity of Stella Muller. However, in order to survive and maintain her cover as Aric’s secretary, she is forced to stand by as her own people are sent to Auschwitz. Suspecting her employer is a man of hidden depths and sympathies, Stella cautiously appeals to him on behalf of those in the camp. Aric’s compassion gives her hope, and she finds herself battling a growing attraction for this man she knows she should despise as an enemy. Stella pours herself into her efforts to keep even some of the camp’s prisoners safe, but she risks the revelation of her true identity with every attempt. When her bravery brings her to the point of the ultimate sacrifice, she has only her faith to lean upon. Perhaps God has placed her there for such a time as this, but how can she save her people when she is unable to save herself?
Here is Rachel's review:
The four initial facts you absolutely need to know about For Such a Time by Kate Breslin are as follows:
1) It is an inspirational romance. God, faith, and the Bible (actually, a ‘magic’ Bible** that seems to show up whenever the main character needs to see it most) make regular appearances.
2) It is set almost entirely in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II, and deals extensively with the horrors of the Holocaust, with particularly unflinching consideration of the atrocities committed against children.
3) It is a retelling of the story of the Book of Esther. For those unfamiliar with that text, it is the story of how a young Jewish woman appeals to her husband, the not-Jewish King of Persia, in order to save her people from the genocidal designs of his abhorrent adviser.
4) You may see the writing on the wall already, but the combination of facts two and three above mean that this is a romance set between a Jewish woman and a high-ranking Nazi during the Holocaust.
Specifically, the romance is between half-Jewish prisoner, Hadassah, and Aric, an SS officer who saves her from execution at Dachau, then brings her to Theresienstadt (which he runs), to serve as his personal secretary– believing the whole time that she was raised by a Jewish family, but is not actually Jewish herself.
That initial briefing may be enough to tell you if this book is just Not For You. And honestly, it should have been enough for me to realize that. In particular, I knew going into the story that a Nazi-Jewish prisoner romance was almost certain to be a dealbreaker for me. I’m not a historian; I can’t say such a relationship never happened. And I can’t say that a fictional treatment of such an imagined relationship couldn’t, in the right hands, be a fruitful source for difficult and meaningful meditations on mercy, forgiveness, and what love truly requires. But if you want me to believe that a relationship between the top official at a concentration camp and his prisoner truly is a love story, rather than a story about heinous disparities in power and something like Stockholm Syndrome — well, that would take a lot of convincing. This book just didn’t get there for me.
Let me be clear that despite the low grade, quite a lot of the book is very good. Breslin is a wonderful prose writer: While some of the themes and things her characters did made me side-eye (or, you know, go into a livid meltdown), her prose never did. Her descriptions are both beautiful and horrible (which seems appropriate given the subject matter), and she has a particular gift for conveying the painful, imploding sense of frustration that Hadassah feels watching her people be tortured and killed, and knowing that there is nothing she can do that won’t reveal her true identity and get her killed.
Breslin also seems to have done quite a lot of painstaking research — both into Holocaust history and the Book of Esther. I was particularly impressed that Breslin managed to parallel not just the broad sweeps of the Book of Esther in her novel, but also translated the smaller plot points as well.
And she has a gift for well-drawn support characters who the reader believes have challenging and important stories of their own going on offscreen. Hadassah’s dignified, wise, quietly witty Uncle Morty– who is the sole surviving Jewish elder at the camp, cruelly (not nearly a strong enough word) tasked by the Nazis with deciding who will be deported to the death camp at Auschwitz– is, for me, the best thing about the novel.
Despite all those good things, this book simply did not work for me. And the reason is its central romance — or, more specifically, its romantic hero, Aric. Full disclosure: I knew going into this book that almost nothing would make me get on board with the head of a concentration camp as the hero.
Perhaps this was a failure of compassion on my part, but I simply am not able to get past the number of war crimes, human rights abuses, and general atrocities Aric commits both before and during the story. I’m glad that by the end of the story he finally does some truly good and courageous things, but that doesn’t mean I think he’s relationship-ready. (He’s super not.)
The reality of Aric’s relationship with Hadassah is that, at all times, he holds her life in his hands — and they both know it. In that context, his repeated expressions of desire for Hadassah and his penchant for grabbing and kissing her aren’t just your standard romance dubious-consent hash, but are an incredible, intolerable abuse of his power.
Breslin tries to make Aric’s behavior look good in comparison by making virtually every other Nazi officer who encounters Hadassah overtly rape-y, but ‘better than a cartoonishly evil Nazi’ should, in my view, be a prerequisite for a hero, not a selling point. (Breslin’s treatment of Aric’s role as an SS officer is similar: While he does not spout the same kind of anti-Semitic vitriol the other characters do and shows compassion to several Jews even before his Big Redemption Arc, that doesn’t change the fact that he joined up with the Nazis of his own free will and oversees mass incarceration and murder.) Aric is brooding, taciturn, grabby, extremely possessive, convinced that his lover will ‘save him’ from his shit choices, and almost always unwilling to let his lover make her own decisions (although Hadassah finally calls him on that one toward the end of the book). In short, he is all the things I usually abhor in an alpha hero. Stuff all that into an SS uniform, and you can guarantee that I will be flipping my crap in anger every couple of pages.
As for Hadassah, I never fully understood how and why she falls for Aric. Yes, he is damaged (both spiritually and physically thanks to a war injury), and yes he clearly wants her, and yes, the grabby-hands kissing seems to work for her. But her transition from “He’s my captor who is participating in the destruction of 6 million people” to “He’s my captor and he’s broody-hot but I shouldn’t” to “I love him!!!!” was too early and abrupt for me to really make sense of it; it felt more like a narrative prerequisite than an organic development. As a result, Hadassah’s attachment to Aric always struck me more as a naturally loving person (her main character trait throughout the story is being incredibly maternal to every child she comes across) who has been demeaned, degraded, and left out in the cold, understandably clinging to any bit of mercy or affection she can find, rather than an Inspiring Love Story. And honestly, I’d rather read a novel that acknowledges and respects the former reality (deeply sad though it may be), rather than insisting on the latter fantasy.
**Yes, the Bible, New Testament and all, guides Hadassah and helps her find her faith again. Did I find it troubling that, particularly in a novel about the Holocaust, the specter of conversion to Christianity was so central in ‘saving’ the Jewish heroine? Uh. Yes. To be fair, Breslin treats the New Testament, and the sacrifical story of Christ in particular, as a supplement to Hadassah’s Jewish faith, rather than a replacement for it. But every time that Bible popped up, I became extremely uncomfortable. Fair warning.
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That sounds like such a hard sell as a romance that I’d be curious to read it just to see how she tried to pull it off.
Yeah… no. An entire story about a Jewish woman in a concentration camp who finds peace again thanks to the Christian Bible? I’m not saying it never happened (I have no idea, but given the sheer numbers, I don’t know, I suppose it must have at some point?), but making it the point of a story about it seems outright disrespectful to me. Those people actually died because of their religion. They don’t need to be used as props in the personal evanglical endeavours of modern Christian writers. I’ll skip that one, thanks.
There are not enough nos, hell to the nos, or no-freaking-ways to make this work for me. My visceral reaction to this book (utter horror) left me hoping that this was not real. This can’t be real, can it? The “hero” ran “Theresienstadt?” No and no and no and no. I am happily violating my “don’t criticize a book you haven’t (and will never) read rule to say that this is emphatically not.for.me.
My face hurts from the contortions it was in reading this review.
Inspirational Christian Holocaust romance between a Jew and a Nazi. Yeah, I’m out.
As a Jewish woman who lost many ancestors in the Holocaust (and whose father was a U.S. serviceman wounded in WWII) I am deeply offended and shocked that Bethany House would publish this book. I hope this doesn’t win a RITA and start some kind of horrifying trend.
Holy cats that sounds terrible! Good for you for getting through it!
Yeah, the setting is hard enough–I’d have a really difficult time reading something with that kind of power imbalance and believing it, but to have it be a Christian inspirational?!? No. That takes it from “difficult” to “offensive”. Damn.
Since I haven’t read the book, I’m not commenting on it. However, if someone is interested in what may have been a real-life inspiration (but I’m *so* not calling it a romance), there’s this memoir by Edith Hahn-Beer and Susan Dworkin: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/42027548.
Wait. The heroine’s name was Hadassah Benjamin? That’s pushing the “This is an Esther story!!!” thing really hard. However, for a story pushing the Esther thing so much, the magical Bible is really out of place. The word “God” doesn’t even appear in Esther.
I mean, I can be impressed with the author’s attention to biblical accuracy. As a Jew (middle name Esther!) I am very familiar with the book of Esther and many commentaries on it, including that Esther was actually married to Mordechai her uncle. Esther being married to Achashveroush was a forced marriage at best and all out kidnap and rape at worst, so yeah, see the Nazi parallels, especially cause Achashveroush was totally down with Haman’s plot to kill the Jews.
But I ain’t never seen a commentary that says Esther had the hots for her oppressor / abuser / rapist, so, um, yeah.
I think I speak for world history when I say: Nazi romantic leads? Too soon. Call me in a few hundred years.
Sorry I keep commenting. Here’s the thing. Had this same story been set in a sci-fi universe where the hero was helping to exterminate an alien race but Has His Mind Changed By Love and his half-alien, hot indentured secretary, it could have been great. But it’s like writing Gone With The Wind with Rhett Butler working for Isis…. It’s just, no.
@Anony Miss: This “Had this same story been set in a sci-fi universe where the hero was helping to exterminate an alien race but Has His Mind Changed By Love and his half-alien, hot indentured secretary, it could have been great.” gave me a much, much needed laugh, as I can’t get over the awful premise of this book! I noticed after i originally posted that the publication date was April 1, 2014 and I thought perhaps this was some sort of sick and twisted horrible joke, but no. I feel like we should all start suggesting better options for readers who like heroes tortured by their past mistakes, but who aren’t running concentration camps. I start with The Traitor by Grace Burrowes — hero is half french and fought for Napoleon, tortured British officers for french intelligence (but saved many from death), now back in England dealing with the fall out.
@Mochabean Happy to bring a smile. I keep thinking about this. Despite being Jewish, I usually like a LOT of Bethany House’s inspirational romances. This is a let down.
Gosh, it keeps getting worse the more I think about it. Traditionally Haman and the Nazis are both explained to be decendants of Amalek. I mean, this author researched this hard.
Oh well. If you’re reading this, author, please turn it into shapeshifting aliens. Kthxshalom.
Another Bethany House publication, “While We’re Far Apart” by Lynn Austin is, for example, an excellent inspirational that deals with Christians and Jews and common faiths in the face of WWII. It’s truly excellent.
In 1998 Joan Ringelheim conducted an interview with Edith Hahn-Beer, to whose story Katie referred above, for the United Stated Holocaust Memorial Museum. Edith Hahn-Beer describes her meeting with Werner Vetter in video 4 (around 26 minutes into the film): http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn506448
While Vetter was a member of the NSDAP, he was not an SS officer running a concentration camp. I really can’t wrap my mind around the fact that somebody would want to make a man running a concentration camp a romantic lead.
I’ve been so impressed and very appreciative of this year’s RITA Reader Challenge reviews, but for this one in particular I’m very thankful. My reaction would have been nonstop semi-incoherent nuclear-level rage splutter.
This is so appalling – Christian romance about a Jewish heroine who falls in love with someone who murdered untold numbers of her co-religionists – that I wouldn’t even want to touch this book physically! As for the retelling of the Book of Esther, Esther in fact was married to King Achashveros before Haman’s plot was uncovered. The only time her life was in his hands was when she went to his audience room uninvited against Persian law to ask him to come to a dinner where she planned to reveal the plot.
@Anony Miss – Just so you know, many of the commentaries you allude to here about Esther being actually married to her uncle, having been kidnapped by the king, etc., are not supported very well in the text. They are generally desperate attempts by Orthodox commentators to somehow provide an explanation to account for the unpalatable fact that the text indicates that she was married to a non-Jew.
@JaniceG That’s the gemarah’s conclusion, and frankly it’s good enough for me. The text is obscure which makes perfect sense to me – Esther and Moredechai wrote it while Esther was queen, clearly it couldn’t say “the evil king kidnapped Esther away” etc.
Anyway, no one says Esther’s case was not exceptional in every way; it’s not difficult for me to accept that this was one more way. In general, the medrashim and gemarah about the entire story (including Haman and Mordechai’s history before the events of the megilla) is mindblowingly fascinating.
Getting back to this book, the author seems to have merged Achashverous and Haman into this one Bad Guy Who Turns Less Evil Sorta. Unless Hitler is Haman? Whatever.
I can’t even.
When this came up at NetGalley I found it easy to resist, despite the lovely cover.
This isn’t the only award it’s a finalist for, but I think you’ve articulated what bothered me when I read the blurb (as a Christian reader and reviewer of Christian fiction), and confirmed why I don’t want to read this, no matter how many prizes it is nominated for.
@Anony Miss Actually, saying these commentaries are in the Gemarah doesn’t contradict my previous assertion 🙂 Just wanted to clarify that those explanations are not in the text itself.
Many thanks for your review, Rachel. I can’t even count the ways I’m horrified, but I still think it’s better know that this sort of thing exists, and thank you genuinely for getting through it & sharing…
I have nothing to say about the book itself that hasn’t already been said above (will just add a hearty “AARGH, wtf?? for good measure), but I really want to know after reading the review: Does “inspirational romance” invariably mean Christian? (refraining from saying “is it a code word,” therefore also refraining from asking “why does it need a code word.”)
I do assume it invariably means “religious elements,” and perhaps also “rated PG”. But I have no experience with the genre, and little idea of how it is marketed.
I am actually sputtering in confusion and horror and from some kind of inner recoil.
A “concentration camp Christian inspirational”??
The hero is the HEAD OF THE CAMP
The heroine is his freezing, malnourished prisoner and thus, victim. She is his victim!
There’s just…I could say so much…I… I have to let “Grey” off the hook for worst romance I’ve read about this week.
Just as a side note, there were Christians of Jewish blood in the concentration camps. Being Christian did not save you if your ancestry was Jewish. OTOH, I grew up as the lone gentile in a Jewish neighborhood where many parents and grandparents had numbers tattooed on their arms. I think I would have a hard time reading something like this.
Aside from the profound ick-Ick-ICK! factor documented so well above, this gets all my Hebrew book studies hackles up. Esther as a romance? This is an appalling misreading of genre… to see romance as a main feature of a book that is all about power imbalance/abuse is very distasteful, IMO. That would be like making a buddy comedy between Moses & Pharaoh. I assume this got published in hopes that it would be as successful as Redeeming Love, the puzzlingly popular hatchet job on Hosea. This is why I avoid inspies…
I understand why authors of inspirational romance would be interested in writing books set in this period, but there are vastly less offensive ways of doing so. If someone does the research and then sees nothing wrong with this setup, I just don’t know what to say.
AAR once gave a romance an F- grade. If I were the one reviewing this, I might have been tempted to do the same. Thank you, Rachel, for your good work with this review.
I’m disgusted and sickened by this, but I some thoughts…
(As a Catholic, I don’t know my bible that well but) I was unaware that the book of Esther is not considered romantic. In Christian tradition (Esther is part of the old testament of our bible) it is often shown that their (Esther and her husband’s) relationship develops into one of love and respect. I believe at some point in my religious education I was shown a film that said as much. It’s possible something was lost in the translations. I would interested in hearing more about why not write Esther as a romance (minus the concentration camp angle)?
Two then again this particular historical interpretation is an awful idea. Any book that centers around the head of a concentration camp is VILE or evil. Sorry. A member of the German resistance movement, yes. An ordinary german soldier (one who fights at the front) with no party affliations could work, I think. Anybody involved in the German side of the camps is not a romance character in my opinion. It matters not the identity of the heroine. Anyone who isn’t like him is too good and two people like him is vile as mentioned.
three I wonder if this sheds light about power imbalances in other forms of romance. As I am under thirty, I do read a lot of romance, but not a lot of old skool. As it is there is so much power imbalance, and I know the old school had more. This feels to me like someone was trying to imitate an older writer who had sort of crazy sauce plots, that old school style. I can’t really speak to who exactly I mean, but I could see this being true.
fourth It’s the final straw for me that the heroine converts. There are those who wish to convert Jewish people, and I am not one of them. If Jews wish to convert, it’s their business, but it’s disturbing to see it in a fictional context particularly one aimed at Christians. I could see her with a Christian bible since the Torah is part of it (and if that were the focus) and I could believe the Nazis were keeping the Jews from their culture and it might be easier to find Christian bible. It’s completely tone-deaf and disrespectful to have her convert to Christianity and focus on Jesus.
This book would have been better never having been published. I can’t imagine it winning a RITA, considering the judges aren’t necessarily Inspy authors.
@Emily – I can relate to viewing the book of Esther as a romance because I was influenced when young by a YA romance based on it by Gladys Malvern written in the late 1950s called Behold Your Queen! 🙂 (She did a few other Bible-based YA romances as well, including The Foreigner, based on the book of Ruth.) However, the only parts of the text that could be construed as supporting such a view are the king sparing her life when she comes to him to invite him to the banquet and his showing her clear favor during the events of the banquet.
Rose wrote: “I understand why authors of inspirational romance would be interested in writing books set in this period”
To be honest, I find setting Christian inspirational fiction in Nazi Germany extremely problematic given that as institutions, both the Protestant and the Catholic church cooperated with the Nazi regime. Yes, there were Catholics and Protestants who worked against the regime because of their religious beliefs, but they acted as individuals and when they were sent to prison or concentration camp, the church typically didn’t do anything to help them.
@ Sandra Schwab – I was referring to the time period, not to using Nazi Germany and/or occupied areas as the location (let alone having concentration camp commanders as romantic heroes). But Christian inspirational fiction featuring people working for the resistance or serving with the Allied forces? There’s a lot of scope there for authors to explore themes of both love and faith, and how they were tested during that time.
What I would separate is using WW2 as a setting for inspy romances as opposed to the Holocaust as a way of raising the stakes for a story that in which Christian faith is central. In the case of the book reviewed here, it’s obviously offensive. But I remember DA publishing a review of an inspy in which the Quaker heroine had escaped from Sobibor – that’s more subtle, but still problematic. I imagine that these are not the only two examples of inspy authors writing in this time period in ways that I consider insensitive and inappropriate.
Could someone who knows something explain the RITA nomination process? Because I can’t even understand how this premise could get nominated above the hundreds of inspirational romances that must have been published last year.
@Dot, Redeeming Love was originally published for the general market. I haven’t read the original, but my understanding is the faith themes were less explicit, while the sexual scenes were a lot more explicit.
@Rose, while I didn’t read the DA review, I did read (and review) the book you’re talking about where the Quaker heroine escapes from Sobibor. That one really had my blood boiling – quite apart from the historical inaccuracies, what was an American civilian doing in Germany in 1942? She’d been there since 1933. Surely that was long enough to work out Hitler was a Bad Guy. I felt she took TSTL to an all-time low.
As a result, I’m cautious about reading WWII romances. But I did recently judge the General Fiction category of the INSPY Awards … and found myself picking a historical novel set in WWII Germany as the winner – Saving Amelie by Cathy Gohlke.
I read this review and the comments some hours ago – and I am still profoundly disturbed by all this. How has this book not been noticed and commented on earlier? Like Grey has been?
And she converts? In that situation? OMG. Maybe the writer and her readers (look I am stretching here – trying to understand how their brains could process this as in any way okay) are really young? So that WWII, Judaism and the holocaust are abstract and distant enough from their own reality for them to find some romance in the situation? All I can think is that Judaism has no reality or validity for the writer. Or some how the writer doesn’t think any reader or the book will take it seriously, as more than a little fairy tale.
All I can think of is the time I was staying in a hotel in Bali and the nice Balinese boy behind the counter in the hotel shop was cheerfully reading Mein Kampf behind the counter. He clearly had no idea that some people might have an issue with it, or why. It was “just a book”.
My eyebrows were raised at “Jewess” (seriously?) and it just got worse from there. My little bit of online research (and vague understanding of the word) is that it’s an old-fashioned offensive slur that people are now attempting to reclaim. Combined with the plot, this book is not just insensitive, but outright offensive.
…and yet, with all that, it has many great Amazon reviews. Like a lot of them.
Like Rachel said in her review:
“But if you want me to believe that a relationship between the top official at a concentration camp and his prisoner truly is a love story, rather than a story about heinous disparities in power and something like Stockholm Syndrome — well, that would take a lot of convincing.”
…I guess the fact the author DID convince people it was enjoyable is really impressive.
@janeish
Yes, in practice all inspirational romances are Christian. There was an article in the RWA magazine a couple of years back in which the author equated inspie with Christian and the editor added a note to point out that inspirationals could of course feature any religion. But they don’t. Inspies tend to be published by Christian publishing houses (and Harlequin) and they have a very specific target market with a very specific kind of Christianity in view. I’ve done a fair amount of searching and asking for inspies featuring characters of other religions and drawn an almost complete blank. There are a few romances with characters of other religions (though not very many) but they don’t tend to fit the other criteria for an inspie – especially that the faith journey is an important part of the plot in some way.
Just returning to add my thanks to Rachel for doing the work to review this book in a thoughtful way, and to say how much I always appreciate the great discussions here.
I’m supposing this author didn’t preview her intent to pen this tome on social media? Because I am also supposing that if she had, the idea would have gotten shut down just like the sick one for a “totes hilarious” (not my words) “50 Shades of Grey” take on the on-going RAPE and BONDAGE of slave Sally Hemings by founding father Thomas Jefferson. Wow! Are subjects to explore so scarce to write about? Anyway, once that trainwreck idea was brought to light on Twitter by its author, it got derailed. With the quickness. Possibly, an editor/beta reader could have advised the same here?
@lola: That is indeed the case… after converting, Rivers rewrote Redeeming Love for the Christian market, using the book of Hosea as thematic source material.
@Ros: We need to narrow the category even more from generally “Christian”… the overwhelming majority of inspies are written by and for the conservative evangelical market. It’s very rare to see, for instance, a Catholic inspie. They have a specific religious function in those communities. I highly recommend Lynn Neal’s sociological assessment in “Romancing God.” A very interesting book about inspies and their function in conservative evangelical subcultures.
To Kate at comment #22:
As other mentioned there is at least one other concentration camp Christian inspirational, the one with the Quaker heroine who escapes from Sobibor which is also problematic. It was called Simple Faith and the author is Anna Schmidt.
There was also the Aleksandr Voinov and L.A. Witt m/m romance in which one of the heroes was an SS officer, titled Unhinge the Universe. That one wasn’t set in a concentration camp, thank God. I tried to read it but couldn’t get past the SS officer as romance hero.
@Dot at #24
This also isn’t the first example of a Christina inspie based on the Book of Esther. Joan Wolf wrote one too, titled A Reluctant Queen: The Love Story of Esther.
@Emily at #26:
To Emily at #26:
I’ll take a crack at explaining this. Judaism is a religion that celebrates escape from persecution — for example Hanukkah is a celebration of the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire. The Seleucids tried to force Jews to convert to worshipping the Greek gods, and the Jews refusal to do so could result in death. Passover celebrates the escape of Jews from enslavement by the Egyptians.
Purim, the holiday that celebrates the Jews survival under Ahasuerus (said to be a Persian king) is based on the Book of Esther. In the context of Judaism, Ahasuerus is viewed as similar to Pharaoh and Antiochus, one of the villains of the story. Not, perhaps, as vile a villain as Haman, who instigates the plan to genocide the Jews, but still horrible, because he not only considers Haman’s plan but embraces it, fully intends to carry it out, and even schedules it to happen on the thirteenth of Adar (a month on the Jewish calendar).
To understand why this is a bad idea for a romance should be clear, I hope. It’s not because Esther isn’t heroic — she marries this guy to save her people — but because of Ahasuerus’ genocidal tendencies.
Taking a Jewish story, one in which the Jews survive persecution at the hands of those who hate them for being Jewish, and using that story as a basis for a Christian romance in which the Jewish heroine is “saved” by Christ, by her conversion away from Judaism, also makes me very uncomfortable.