{"id":1536,"date":"2015-08-30T11:12:41","date_gmt":"2015-08-30T11:12:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/?p=1536"},"modified":"2024-04-02T14:17:17","modified_gmt":"2024-04-02T18:17:17","slug":"when-do-you-mistrust-an-author","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/when-do-you-mistrust-an-author\/","title":{"rendered":"Nazi Kommandant + His Jewish Prisoner = Romance?"},"content":{"rendered":"

There’s been a lot of controversy<\/a> about Kate Breslin’s romance For Such a Time<\/em> which brings together a blonde, blue-eyed Jewish woman and a Nazi concentration camp Kommandant. Seriously.<\/p>\n

As the back cover describes him, he’s a man “of hidden depths and sympathies.”\u00a0 Isn’t that special? This Jew-killer is ultimately redeemed and forgiven at the end, and the Jewish heroine converts.\u00a0 It’s “inspirational.”<\/p>\n

The hardcover’s book jacket describes the beauty as a \u201cJewess,\u201d an outdated term many people find offensive.\u00a0 There’s more.\u00a0 For Such a Time<\/em> earned a starred review from Library Journal<\/em> and was nominated for two Romance Writers of America awards, prompting a protest letter<\/a> to the RWA board from Jewish romance novelist Sarah Wendell.\u00a0 Other romance novelists objected, too.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t heard anything about Breslin’s novel or the controversy around it until Marion Stein sent me her thoughtful blog<\/a> about it via Twitter, and I was curious to see what kind of book it was. Badly written was my first reaction. It’s quilted with clich\u00e9s. A hand is squeezed gently, nostrils flare–you get the idea.<\/p>\n

To me, that’s “automatic writing\u201d: when an author just picks the most obvious words and images in the English language and doesn’t even bother coming up with anything that feels even vaguely original or interesting.\u00a0 Writing that ordinary would usually be enough to turn me off.\u00a0 But I wondered: did the book evoke the period authentically? Could I trust this author beyond the incongruity (or obscenity) of the basic situation to at least make the story real?\u00a0 Would I read the book for that much, at least?<\/p>\n

Well, no.<\/p>\n

She goofed in her German early on.\u00a0 I’ve studied German and traveled in Germany a lot, and when you ask someone if they understand, you don’t say Verstehen?<\/em> If the relationship is formal, you say Verstehen Sie?<\/em> (Do you understand?).\u00a0 And if the relationship is informal, or you’re speaking to a child, an inferior, or a pet, it’s Verstehst du?\u00a0 <\/em>That’s pretty basic.\u00a0 I’m assuming the author just googled the word “understand” and found verstehen<\/em> without bothering to discover that it’s the infinitive. That also means her editor and copyeditor were sloppy, too. Or lazy.\u00a0 or both.<\/p>\n

Then there’s a major historical blunder when the heroine\u2019s papers are supposedly stamped JUDE.<\/strong>\u00a0 I’ve taught Holocaust literature more than once and immersed myself in histories and memoirs from the period for years. As far as I’ve been able to determine, and based on all my reading and research, ID papers of German and Austrian Jews were simply stamped J<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The author could have said that and explained it to the reader (\u201cthe dreaded J for Jew\u201d or something like that).\u00a0 Unless she didn’t know.\u00a0 But getting back to Google, I found the ID papers stamped that way in seconds. Stamped with a Gothic J.<\/strong><\/p>\n

As a reader and reviewer, when I see gross errors like that at the beginning of a book and it’s indifferently written to begin with, I’m not encouraged to go on. Not even out of morbid curiosity to see how the story plays out.\u00a0 Maybe other readers don’t know or care about these errors.\u00a0 But there are probably enough readers out there who do, and when it comes to writing historical fiction set in any period, sloppiness in small details in the opening of the book says a lot.\u00a0 This is an author I can’t trust to get history right, whatever her story is.<\/p>\n

The novel is supposedly a retelling of The Book of Esther<\/em>.\u00a0 Well, I’ve read and studied the Book of Esther<\/em>, and been in synagogues when it’s read aloud at Purim<\/a>, and this is no Book of Esther, <\/em>as more than one commentator has explained<\/a>.\u00a0 The Book of Fester, <\/em>maybe….<\/p>\n

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery which you can find on Amazon<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s been a lot of controversy about Kate Breslin’s romance For Such a Time which brings together a blonde, blue-eyed Jewish woman and a Nazi concentration camp Kommandant. Seriously. As the back cover describes him, he’s a man “of hidden depths and sympathies.”\u00a0 Isn’t that special? This Jew-killer is ultimately redeemed and forgiven at the … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[298,497,148,5,460,457,455,475,463,496,112,510,456,458,462,506,459,495,132],"class_list":["post-1536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-fiction","tag-advice-for-writers","tag-authors","tag-book-reviewing","tag-books","tag-controversial-books","tag-historical-accuracy","tag-holocaust-fiction","tag-kate-breslin","tag-marion-stein","tag-publishing","tag-reviewers-2","tag-reviewing","tag-romance-fiction","tag-romance-writers-of-america","tag-sarah-wendell","tag-social-media","tag-the-book-of-esther","tag-writing","tag-writing-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1536"}],"version-history":[{"count":48,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7977,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1536\/revisions\/7977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.levraphael.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}