She gripped my hand in the doorway of the church,
following the Good Friday service, “I’ve never really liked Jews.”
I had just finished decrying present-day harassment of Jews
in the Ukraine and noted that we are kidding ourselves if we thought we would
treat Jesus better now than he was treated then. We prayed. We grieved. I again
felt the chasm between the religion of my heart (Christianity) and the religion
of my blood and my ancestors (Judaism). Always the tension between betrayal and
the realities for anyone of Jewish ancestry or culture, here I was, being told
by a parishioner I love deeply something that amounted to, “I’ve never cared
for an entire race of people [to which you belong through your mother and
her parents and your grandparents].”
Gripping her hand in that doorway, I looked her in the eye
and said, “Do you know any Jews?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Well, now you do.”
This story comes to mind as I watch the turmoil around Kate
Breslin’s For Such a Time (Bethany House, 2014). Nominated for a 2015
RITA, For Such a Time tells the story of a blonde, blue-eyed Jewish woman
who is rescued from a firing squad by a Nazi commandant and becomes his
secretary. She hatches a plot to save people from the trains to Auschwitz and
her uncle, Morty, foils a plan that would have killed the commandant. The
commandant pressures her to kisses and into an engagement. And, in the way of
magical realism, a Bible continues to appear unexpectedly and she learns to
find some consolation in the New Testament, instead of in the Hebrew Scriptures
of her childhood. All ends as most romances do with a happily ever after with
our lovely Jewess marrying the Nazi commandant, who helped Jews escape the camp
in question. Presumably, they raise lovely blonde Christian children.
I think I need to wash my hands after typing that. The
to-do over this book is that many, many people- Jews and non-Jews- believe that
romance between a Jewish prisoner and a Nazi commander violates any spirit of
consent. In the portions of the book when Stella/Hadassah wrestles with her
feelings about Aric, I was reminded of the guilt rape survivors sometimes feel
when their bodies responded to the act of violation in a different way than
their heads and spirits were. No matter how humane the Nazi in question
was made to seem- he had the power to kill her or those she loved at any time.
This retelling of Esther misses a critical piece of the
story. We never hear that Ahasuerus and Esther had a great love story because
she was property, a girl more beautiful than the others who were culled from
the countryside to see who would please the king. She made the best of a bad
situation and, in so doing, saved her people.
For Such a Time is not the same thing. It is what I
will call “supercessionism porn”, wherein the ultimate happily-ever-after for a Jew would certainly be to
become a Christian. Breslin and her publisher, Bethany House, have received criticism for the book on the grounds that it violates consent at best and allows
for a kind of truth of the Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism at worst. These
criticisms have generated their own backlash to the backlash, with such
authors as Anne Rice arguing that speaking against For Such a Time is a kind of
censorship.
If one must write a romance about the Holocaust, one could
write about the impossibility of one occurring between Jews in a ghetto, in a
camp, or in the Russian front. One could write about two German non-Jews, who
fall in love as members of the Resistance. One could write about a French,
British, or American soldier or nurse rescuing non-Jews from a concentration
camp (they were there) and falling in love through the healing process. Some of
those stories could adequately include an aspect of Christian faith that would
satisfy the audience of an inspirational novel. Any of the scenarios and a
number of others allow for an equality in the relationship that would never,
never be the reality between a Jewish woman and a Nazi camp commandant.
What it means to live as a Jew in modern America is to have
complex feelings about history, about G-d, about Israel, and about one’s own
practice. It also means, at a certain level, a wariness. No country has ever
allowed us to stay, unharmed, permanently. We cannot take anything for granted.
You never know when someone will say to you, “I’ve never liked Jews”. And you
can’t always be sure what will follow that statement.
Arguing that anyone can write anything about anyone at any
time, or else it is censorship, is the publishing equivalent of #AllLivesMatter.
Would a book about a Yazidi woman “falling in love” with her
ISIS rapist be nominated for romance awards?
Would we hope for a movie based on a relationship between a
police officer employed by Bull Connor and a young black woman?
Would ratings soar for a novel about a Cherokee teenager
being “wooed” by the soldier escorting her family along the Trail of Tears?
Some stories belong to the people who lived them, the people
who still grieve them, the people in whose bones they rest. Leave the Holocaust
and its survivors alone. They’re not there as easy emotional background for
your novel. If you aren’t sure, ask a Jew.
If you didn’t know any, now you do.
