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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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Reading this review, I was expecting something more akin to the film “The Night Watchman” rather than an inspirational romance.
Look, I will admit to a penchant for dark stories, but this is making my brain scream that warning sound our ancestors must have heard when running from predators.
@PJ Dean – I doubt it. As Dot and others have pointed out, Christian romance is essentially conservative evangelical. This is a definite market, of people who are mostly Americans with no cultural or personal ties to Europe, so the entire Second World War is just a never-never-land play of good and evil for them, with no real connection to their lives. Since the market doesn’t extend beyond those readers, there’s no real point in saying that other people would find it offensive. Those are people who wouldn’t buy the book anyway (and are also going to hell, so why bother with their opinions).
Personally, I thought Paul Verhoeven’s film “Black Book” was borderline offensive in terms of moral equivalence and annoyingly stupid, but it did deal with a romance between a Jewish spy (NOT a prisoner) and a Nazi officer (Wehrmacht NOT SS) in occupied Holland in way that was relatively subtle compared to this train wreck. Spoiler: they do not have a happy ending, though it’s not the obvious unhappy one. But Verhoeven isn’t filtering everything through a phony redemptive lens. No one gets redeemed in awful situations. That’s part of his point (though I thought he made it poorly).
Not that I recall much redemption in the Book of Esther. It’s a brutally violent story, ending with a victory in which the Jews get to go on a five day rampage throughout the kingdom killing all of their enemies and anyone alleged to have supported Haman. Because nothing says love and forgiveness like legalized lynch mobs. (And a dictator who gets rid of his first wife because she refuses to appear – possibly in the nude – so he can show her off to his drinking buddies.)
I am back because I have finally been able to identify why I had such a visceral reaction to this (apart from the obvious, I mean). In addition to being a concentration camp in which approximately 144,000 men, women and children (as many as 15,000 children by some reports) were imprisoned (of which approximately 88,000 were sent on to death camps like Auschwitz and Treblinka), Theresienstadt was used by the Nazis as wartime propaganda – after the D-Day invasion the Nazis invited the International Red Cross to tour their “Model Ghetto” and see how well they treated their “political prisoners.” They created facades (with slave labor), fake cafes, fake apartments for “prominent” Jewish leaders, had the kids perform an opera, etc,. This tour was such a success that the Nazis even commissioned a film to highlight this “model resettlement” (the director and his crew were all murdered at Auschwitz after it was completed). Of course it was all a sham, and thousands and thousands of people died there as a result of horrible conditions, abuse etc. So to use this is a setting for a romance between a Jewish woman and a Nazi, and not just any Nazi but the leader of the camp, just strikes me as even more oblivious to the implications of this history. It seems to me that this story almost willfully twists the truly depraved history of Theresienstadt to serve another form of propaganda.
The book blurb would have been enough to put me off this book. I just don’t see how it would be possible to pull it off. Also having read the Book of Esther many times, I just don’t think an SS officer is a convincing stand-in for Ahasuerus, aka Xerxes I. Nor Hitler as a modern-day Haman.
While I can believe it is possible that some of the SS officers were human beings who hated what they were forced to do, I found it hard to believe that would ever be true of any of them who ran one of the camps. Maybe I’ve been prejudiced. I also think this book will be perceived by the Jewish community as a huge insult. I wonder if the author thought this through.
But what I really wonder is this. Considering how difficult it is for a writer to come up with a truly unique romance plot these days, I wonder if that was this author’s motivation?
@Rebecca Just for the record, your recall about the ending of the Book of Esther is faulty: the Jews do *not* “get to go on a five day rampage throughout the kingdom killing all of their enemies and anyone alleged to have supported Haman.” The Haman-inspired decree that the Amalekites got to go on a five-day rampage and kill all the Jews without them being allowed to defend themselves supposedly can’t be nullified because the king can’t countermand his own decrees, but it is at least amended so that they’re allowed to defend themselves. (From the NKJ version: “By these letters the king permitted the Jews who were in every city to gather together and protect their lives—to destroy, kill, and annihilate all the forces of any people or province that would assault them, both little children and women, and to plunder their possessions”)
How is “to destroy, kill, and annihilate all the forces of any people or province that would assault them, both little children and women, and to plunder their possessions”
not a rampage? Are we assuming that the little children (and women and possessions) of the Amalekites are a serious threat? Plundering possessions isn’t “defending yourself.” It’s vengeance. You can dress it up as self-defense, but the Bible is generally more ok with vengeance than we like to acknowledge.
@Mochabean: yes, this. @GloriaMarie: The SS were an elite group, similar to Green Berets (in terms of being elite, obviously, not implying other comparisons), and were generally politically conscious, unlike the regular German army, who were conscripts. By 1945 there were teenagers with good grades who opted for the SS because it was a slightly less deadly military assignment when they finished high school (the writer Gunter Grass, for example), but anyone who was a senior officer there was a firmly committed Nazi, not someone caught up as a conscript who hated what he was doing.
As I suspect. But please allow me to point out that it is Gloriamarie, lower case “m.” Thank you.
@Gloriamarie – sorry, my bad. Should have looked more closely. (redfaced) Actually, as a fun fact, I know the son of one teenager who was recruited by the SS when he finished high school in 45. He did the initial training and then announced that he was horrified and that he wished to drop out and refused to be part of what they were doing. His commanders told him that if he tried to withdraw he’d be sent to the Russian front (which had appallingly high casualty rates). He said fine, send me there then, and they did. So there were SOME German kids who ended up in the SS and basically decided they’d rather die than stay there. Which tells you something about the unit.
Thank you, you are forgiven. WOW! The Russian front was horrible. Just horrible. Really took bazongas to go there rather than the relatively easier jobs in Germany. Just more revolting. I find the premise for this story untenable.
As for Amalekites in Esther, I always wondered about that because when the Hebrews crossed the Jordan River under the leadership of Joshua and Caleb, we read in the Book of Joshua about the Hebrews slaying the Amalekites, every man, woman, child, oxen, goat, and sheep. Which is definitely one of my least favorite parts of the Bible. So I daresay Amalekites hanging around Persia would be pretty ticked off at the Jews there. What with the long memories people have and all.
@Rebecca You apparently missed the key phrase “that would assault them” – the new decree merely allowed the Jews to respond in self-defense, which was not allowed in the previous and still in force Haman-inspired decree.
@Anony Miss, I’m glad you pointed out that the general premise could have been interesting if it were used in a SFF-type setting, one totally removed from our reality. But this particular scenario just hits too close to home.
I’m not Jewish, so I can’t identify directly like a lot of other posters. But I am getting on in years, so this isn’t ancient history for me; it’s still fairly fresh and vivid. I suspect that there’s no amount of time that would make this palatable. It gives me a pain in my chest just thinking about it.
I am really loving the quality of discussion. Just cause we’re used to a high-level of discourse around here doesn’t mean it’s not wonderful.
Gloriamarie said:
As for Amalekites in Esther, I always wondered about that because when the Hebrews crossed the Jordan River under the leadership of Joshua and Caleb, we read in the Book of Joshua about the Hebrews slaying the Amalekites…
…I actually use this with my children all the time as an example. Follow me here: as Jews, it is easy for children growing up aware of Jewish history and current events to make blanket statements that ALL Arabs are bad or ALL X are Y, etc. When these conversations come up, I remind my own children that there is only one people that God has told us is intrinsically bad – namely, Amalek – and that all others (including the Arabs) are never ALL one way or another, but must be judged by their actions like anyone else.
And BTW, only God has the chops to say anyone is intrinsically bad.
And (because this is the internet) let me just add that Jews today do not try to fulfill this mitzvah by hunting down Amalekite descendants and killing them. In case that wasn’t understood. 🙂
You know, I want to respond to all the wrongness of this book, but honestly I can’t get past the fact that she set it in Theresienstadt. I learned a few years ago that my great great grandmother died in Theresienstadt. And obviously, all I knew of her was her portrait, but just the idea of setting a romance novel there makes me feel kind of weird and ill.
70 years is a long time ago but it is also living memory for some people. I don’t know when it becomes ok to use a tragedy or a horror from history as the setting for something like this, but I can say this is weirdly upsetting. And Christianising a Jewish character in this context feels almost obscene.
(also, who in their right mind thinks Esther is romantic? She has no real power and is trying to survive…)
Thank you so much, Kate, for reviewing this. I am so glad the random Inspie I picked to review wasn’t thus one. I’m horrified just thinking about this.
Sorry, I meant to say, thank you Rachel. I’m a bit discombobulated…
In addition to the content of the book, the cover is also deeply problematic – and that’s on the publisher, not the author. I was not familiar with the specific image used in the bottom part of the cover, but it’s obvious those pictured are Jewish women and children standing on a train platform. A search revealed that the image is from the Auschwitz Album (http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/album_auschwitz/index.asp), so their likely fate was a tragic one.
To put that kind of image on the cover of an inspirational romance shows an appalling lack of understanding and sensitivity.
Wow. That settles it – the writer and publishers clearly see it like it’s a sci fi setting. You know, this book would cause a diplomatic incident in at least 2 countries I can think of.
@Rose: And the title banner is a reference to the yellow stars Jews had to wear during Nazi occupation. The whole image of the cover makes me kind of ill.
Reading all the new comments makes me thinks two things (1) the author really must have been desperate for a new idea for a romance novel and (2) this idea was so desperately wrong. What was she thinking?
As for the cover of this book, it has been my understanding for quite some time that authors get approval of their covers, if not some actual imput into them. Am I mistaken?
AnonyMiss, please allow me to go on record, that when I read in the Book of Joshua about the Hebrews slaying those Amalekites, every man, woman, child, oxen, goat, and sheep, my own personal interpretation has nothing to do with whether or not the Amalekites are evil. Seems to me the issue is that they were in the way of the Hebrews takeover of the Land of Canaan. I am also deeply troubled by the idea that God would ever have ordered such a wholesale slaughter of a whole race of people. Can’t jive that with what I read later on in the Christian Scriptures that “God is love.” So I think myself that the Hebrews assumed that is what God would have wanted and in that way we humans of attributing to God some of our worst ideas, did so in that instance.
But that is my own personal idiosyncratic interpretation. OTOH, I can completely understand why only a few hundred years later, Amalekites in Esther would be all too happy to get some revenge back.
Gloriamarie, thanks for the reply! Actually, it stems back earlier than that. Amalek is the grandson of Esau, who himself was not a great guy but had some good characteristics. But the Amalekites were the first to attack the Hebrews in the desert after the events of the Exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Torah, and so on. If you’d like to read more about it, this rabbi’s article is a pretty good overview.
That said, yes, it is certainly a human foible to seek to interpret God through our own emotions, can’t agree with you more. I live here in Israel where there have been several shootings, stabbings and whatnot against Jews in just the last week – so yeah, that idea is still current events.
Ah! Esau and Jacob! Can we spell “dysfunctional family?” I am not going to go into Near Eastern politics here, except to say that on more than one occasion I have wanted to take the heads of all the major players and bang them together to get them to see the horrible things everyone is doing to each other and just screech “Stop! Share! Get along already! Be nice to each other! The entire world is sick and tired of the way you guys treat each other.” Anything for an end to the killing. It makes me weep every time I hear about another death over there, any death.
Amen, sister. Amen. You have my full permission to do figurative head bashing should the opportunity arise.
If you wanted to set an inspirational romance novel during World War II, there are so many ways you could do it without being offensive. For example, there are documented cases of French women risking their lives to help downed American and British pilots escape. A novelist could easily base a novel on one of these women and have her fall in love with the pilot she is helping escape.
@AnotherD – I think part of what makes this book so profoundly offensive is the implicit assumption that the heroine needs to be “saved” from anything other than her hellish situation, and the hidden thought that the hero somehow has some moral advantage because he is Christian (Sure, he’s a mass murderer, but his belt buckle says “Gott mit uns” – God is with us – so he must be a swell guy. /sarcasm) In a huge irony, Sir Nicolas Winton died yesterday, at 106. He was also in Prague, and saved almost 700 children from Terezin (Theresienstadt). And never wanted to talk about it afterward. THAT is a man worthy of being a novel’s hero, and you could certainly base a book around rescue efforts, though frankly I’m not sure how good an inspirational it would be, since the common denominator of most rescue efforts is that basic humanity was MORE important than religion, which is kind of not their message. (Maybe the protestant pastor of the village of Le Chambon, profiled in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. But even there, the thing that struck the ethicist who interviewed him later was how little he explicitly expressed his morality in religious terms.)
Dear Rebecca, It doesn’t get more religious that doing it in secret. The mitzvah is a very Jewish doctrine that Jesus cited when He says “do not let your right hand know what your left hand is doing.” It is the mark of the deepest humility to do something wonderful for God, for humanity and to never want any recognition for it.
Surely the reason our churches are emptying out is because the word “Christian” is all too often associated these days with actions that stick in folks craw rather than with acts of unselfish love? Surely if the word “Christian” and “unselfish love” were linked together in the mind of the general public, it would be almost impossible to have enough pews in our churches? Well, obviously for those of us from Christian backgrounds. There are people from other faiths who demonstrate some pretty spectacular unselfish love so I wouldn’t want anyone to think I think only the Judaeo-Christian folk have a monopoly on that. No, siree, I’ll take unselfosh love wherever it is found and thank Whosoever for inspiriting it.
So, basically, the hero sweeps the girl out of a pogrom.
And brings her to his mansion, a humble death camp. (A humble death camp known as Thereisenstadt. What, was Auschwitz *too* tactless?)
And it’s an Esther analogue. And the *hero* (please gag me) sets everyone free. Yep. That exists. Thereisenstadt. The stopover for Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Andersonville of civilian camps. A real place with a death toll pretty damn close to 80,000-100,000.
And someone nominated this for an award? A romance award, no less. Do they also not reflect in mirrors and drink the blood of virgins or something? Or like to wear red and wield pitchforks?
Seriously? What kind of maniac says, ‘Yes, I will write in and nominate the death camp romance book for this award’?
@ notenoughfrownsforthis – Thereisenstadt was not a death camp; Yad Vashem categorizes it as a ghetto/transit camp and reports a death toll of 35,440 (mostly due to the appalling conditions in the camp), with a further 88,000 deported to be murdered.
Of course, that the setting isn’t Auschwitz or Treblinka doesn’t make this any less offensive. It’s been several days since I first saw this review, and I am still at a loss as to how this was written, published, and nominated for a RITA without anyone realizing how offensive the premise was.
The only inspirational book I’ve read that was set in a concentration camp was a memoir, The Hiding Place.the author was a middle-aged spinster sent to the camp for sheltering Jews in Holland. The author wrote a lot about trying to be a good Christian, but it never seems to have occurred to her to convert the people she was sheltering. She practiced her beliefs; she didn’t impose them.
Over the last few days I have been reading the reviews and other posts on this site as I usually do, and have had to resist the impulse to add to their comments (and to book reviews on other sites) “THIS BOOK GETS 10 000 POINTS FOR NOT FEATURING THE HEAD OF A CONCENTRATION CAMP AND HIS JEWISH SECRETARY IN WWII” mainly because I don’t want to spread the negativity of this book and the distress it causes any further than here.
[…] review of For Such a Time by Kate Breslin makes you wonder how on Earth anyone could possibly think that it was a good idea. (Content notes: […]
I don’t personally have a problem with a Jewish woman converting to Christianity in this setting. I don’t think there is ever an appropriate or inappropriate time for religious conversion, if it happens out of sincere and genuine belief and not some kind of coercion. Certainly some Jewish people became Christians during WW2-are we to say they were wrong for doing so? As for the SS officer being the hero, that is far more problematic for me but I will say that I have read books that have the ‘hero’ (I use the word loosely because they are not romances) being an SS officer. The Angel of Zin is excellent, one of the best books I’ve read set in a concentration camp, and also Those Who Save Us which is *definitely* not a romance and more about Stockholm Syndrome, but thought provoking as the heroine feels desire for her Nazi officer lover who has forced her into a sexual relationship. Anyway while this book *sounds* problematic I don’t think it’s fair to condemn it out of hand if you haven’t read it. Plenty of books challenge stereotypes and tropes and are all the better for it. This book might fall into that category.
Kate, I read your comment and went to bed thinking about it.
We are all responding to the review. I am now going to do a Great Big Generalisation: this subject area is incredibly sensitive. It is a great big wound in the soul/psyche/families/peoples/countries. Yes the Holocaust can be written about in fiction, but as with any wound/injury, great thought, care and respect must be taken. Such care and respect were not disclosed in the text of this book. The author treated the subject matter and the setting as if it was a bunch of aliens in a scifi novel (just events in a story), whereas to the readership commenting here. it is all Real, personal. and painful.
For instance the pic on the cover is a real pic of people waiting to be put on the train to Auschwitz. I might accept that on the cover on a non-fiction book about the holocaust, but to sell a romance? Inexcusable.
I don’t feel it’s fair to judge the author about the cover, because authors rarely have any input into the cover. I’ve had very little with my books. I think people could take the real photo on the cover in different ways–as an offence, but also potentially as a tribute. It just depends how you see these things, and how the events are portrayed in the book. I absolutely agree that great care and sensitivity must be taken when writing about the Holocaust or any other mass genocide or major tragedy, especially one that has happened relatively recently. (By that I mean if she’d set this book in the Holocaust-like events of the thirteenth century, when Jews were expelled from England, we probably wouldn’t react to it so viscerally.) I haven’t read this book, so I can’t and do not want to defend the story or the author. I am just uncomfortable with everyone jumping to condemn the author and book in very strong terms when no one except the reviewer has read it.
Kate, I don’t blame the author for the cover. But I do find the cover offensive. I also find the premise of this story offensive. I don’t have to read the novel to be offended by the idea of a Jewish woman in a concentration camp falling in love with a Nazi officer running the concentration camp, knowing what I know of what Jews endured in concentration camps and especially knowing how many Jewish women were compelled to serve in sexual capacities to the Nazis.
The men that ran the concentration camps had to be a very horrible level of disgusting. The idea that one of them could possibly be a romance hero is an assault. That one of their victims could fall in love with one of the monsters is a very horrible level of deranged. Over six million men, women, and children were murdered by the Nazis.
No, I have to disagree with you most vehemently. I don’t have to read this book to know this is an unsuitable subject for a romance novel. In fact, given the incalculable damage done to the Jewish people, I would say this is an indefensible premise for a romance novel and never even should have been accepted for publication. There are some lines one just doesn’t cross. Sadly, too many people crossed this one.
@Des Livres: the cover photo is of Hungarian Jews on the platform at Auschwitz. Women and children – unlikely to have fared well.
@Kate Hewitt: I put the responsibility for the cover image on the publisher, and no, it’s not a tribute. They copyright page refers to “European Jews, no mention of the context. It demonstrates a lack of sensitivity and undrrstanding.
And of course, even if she does not like the cover, the author is responsible for writing this story. I am Jewish, and I have zero interest in keeping an open mind about a Christian inspirational romance featuring a Jewish woman in a concentration camp falling in love with its humanized SS commandant. The subject matter in itself is offensive. Using a Jewish tragedy as backdrop for a Christian romance is out of line. Clearly the author and her publisher do not understand how problematic this is, and they need to educate themselves.
The more I think about this book, the more offended by its existence I am. I went back to double check and I see it is was nominated by someone in the Best First Book category. I have to say, in my opinion, nominating this book demonstrates monumental bad taste and poor judgment.
I m glad to be part of the community of SMTB which for the most part agrees that this is a book that was a mistake. I really wish Ms. Breslin well and hope she finds less offensive material for her second novel.
@Kate Hewitt,
“I don’t think there is ever an appropriate or inappropriate time for religious conversion, if it happens out of sincere and genuine belief and not some kind of coercion. Certainly some Jewish people became Christians during WW2-are we to say they were wrong for doing so?”
Members of my maternal grandfather’s family who lived in Italy converted from Judaism to Christianity around this time. They did so in order to survive Mussolini. I can’t call them “wrong” for choosing to protect themselves, but to suppose that setting a conversion from Judaism to Christianity during this time period does not cast huge doubt on whether that conversion could have been made out of “sincere and genuine belief,” and not coercion, shows a profound lack of understanding of Jewish history.
No one here is objecting to the issue of religious conversion. I think I can speak for all of us when I say that. If I am out of turn, I apologize. As I read the comments it seems to me the objections to this book clearly stress the obnoxious idea that a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp would fall in love with the SS officer running the camp. That is just a disgusting idea.
…especially since, moreover, conversion was unimportant to the Nazis- if your parents or grandparents were Jewish, that was enough, no matter what you yourself did.
And I just have to mention again how much I love the respectful tenor of this dialogue.
Yes, the Anglican priest attached to the British embassy in Vienna even Spoke to the Jewish community in the late 1930s saying that he would be happy to baptise anyone who showed up and would recite the Lord’s Prayer – very much as a protection against the Nazis rather than a sincere conversion. My grandmother and her mother (and I think other family members too) did so, but of course, it wasn’t enough. Though my grandmother did wind up a staunch Anglican in the end, so that part seems to have stuck…
I have read and enjoyed books written by Debbie Macomber, but based on her blurb for this book, she’s going on my DNR list.
I can imagine a romance novel about a Jew being expelled from England in the reign of King John with a Christian Englishman as being plausibly romantic in a way that this book cannot be. The reasons for this have nothing to do with how long ago the events occurred. The reasons are because “random English Christian guy during the expulsion” and “commandant of a concentration camp” are not morally equivalent categories.