D
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.
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well. Thanks!
To the commenter who said she didn’t know Esther wasn’t romantic….
Esther’s story is widely considered a tragedy. Sure, we celebrate the Jews’ salvation. But Esther herself is lost to her people, and married forever to a brutish, piggish king. This is the guy who slept with a woman a night and each woman was sent to the harm thereafter to never be with any other man again. Jewish sources are split on whether the king was evil or just really stupid with regards to the genocide haman planned, but those are the options available. After signing the order to have the Jews murdered he and haman threw a party. Oh, and this is a guy who regularly gets blackout drunk and has fits of rage when in that condition. He’s never redeemed or changes in any way. He can’t even decide whether the genocide is wrong until he sees Haman seemingly molesting His Woman, that’s the thing that bothers him, not the death of countless innocents.
A real romance.
This book sounds hideous. But the RITAs are peer-nominated and peer-judged. In order to enter the RITAs, you have to judge a RITA category, but there are no other criteria besides the entry fee. I’m not sure how to filter out every terribad idea for a romance from making it into the contest, but for my two cents, I’d start with ditching the Inspie category altogether. RWA’s mission is to promote the romance genre, and nowhere in that genre is there a shibboleth for religious affiliations. Technically, IIRC, the “Inspirational” category in most contests is supposed to refer to any work that is inspirational in nature, but in reality, all the judges know that “inspirational” is synonymous with evangelical Christianity of a certain, narrow stripe, because the traditional market for such works is that same, narrow stripe. Put in the best light, those publishers/adherents are the best judges of whether or not a work is “inspirational” enough. Put in more practical light, the rest of RWA and the RITA judges don’t have to go through the mental gymnastics required to make allowances for that worldview’s special category.
Athena, I agree and I disagree. 😉
I feel the problem is the category. And the problem is us. We the peers. I entered a book this year, and when I signed up to judge, I requested *no inspirational.* Well, if we all step up to judge all categories, including inspy, this wouldn’t have happened. No one outside that narrow band of judges would have answered the romance/HEA answers in the positive.
Next, few of us bother entering anything into that category. Inspirational doesn’t necessarily mean Christian…or religious. I have a friend who jokingly calls her books “erotic m/m insprational” and while she says it tongue in cheek, many of her books do suit the category. And the book I entered this year…it actually could have gone into that category, though it also was erotic.
So we need to stop worrying about what RWA is going to do to fix the problem and take action ourselves. The first step is to volunteer to judge, not just the RITAs, but other competitions as well. The next step is to enter, or to encourage others to enter appropriate books in the Inspirational category.
I’ve just started the book and found two glaring errors so I can’t agree that she’s done her research well. I’ll be blogging about the book. I also don’t think it’s well written, but that’s a matter of taste. I know some people think Gillian Flynn writes beautifully; I don’t.
For Such a Time just won best first book from The American Christian Fiction Writers. Sigh.
Again, the only way to prevent this from happening again is to get involved with the RITAs and other awards. Enter and judge. If you are entering the RITAs or are a member of PAN, please consider judging the inspirational category. And if you have a book that might qualify as Inspiration, whether its Christian or not, consider entering it in that category.
What makes this worse is the fact that there were Jewish women who had relationships with SS Officers not because they wanted to but because they didn’t have a choice.They did it to save their lives and those of their families. As you would imagine those relationships were often warped and abusive. Rape and sexual abuse were not uncommon just the opposite in fact not to mentioned the forced ‘sterilizations’ and abortions. That book makes a mockery of our tragic history including a conversion to Christianity adds insult to injury. You know what those poor Jews really need? JESUS!
Welp, my local library just got a copy of this book. Same cover, same blurb from Debbie Macomber, but at least the cover copy doesn’t call the heroine a “Jewess” anymore. I don’t want to challenge For Such A Time‘s inclusion in the collection because I don’t believe the public library should bow to censors – even if I’m the one calling for it – but I’m dismayed the librarians thought it would make a good addition to the collection in the first place. I do know that Christian fiction is popular in my community, so the librarians probably figured that the people who read inspirationals would also read FSAT too; they probably didn’t know about the controversy.