*Edited to Add: Today, Amazon changed the categories for this book from “romance” to “fiction.” The rest of this still applies. Amazon’s Lake Union imprint is publishing this particular book, so you’d think they would know what it was, but apparently they’ve changed their minds.
Today it was brought to my attention that there’s yet another Jewish heroine/Nazi hero romance on the horizon. No, I am not going to link to it. I’m not going to give you the title or author. You can look them up. I don’t want the author to have flags go up if she has a Google search set up for herself because she’s not the focus of this. (Well, okay, she partially is. But honestly, if you give your high-ranking Nazi hero a Dutch name, if you can’t even be bothered to understand that the Germans and the Dutch are radically different peoples, I reserve the right to point out your errors on behalf of my Dutch family and those who sheltered them.)
Let me just put this out there: there are certain periods/events/confrontations that are great, gaping, bleeding wounds in the psyches of huge numbers of people. Am I saying you can’t write about those events, can’t set your novel among them? Nope. But I am saying that there’d better be a vital reason why your story could not take place anywhere else, including in a fantasy society, on a made up world. And more than that, you’d better be deeply, personally connected to that time, place, and/or culture.
For example, what if I wanted to set a novel in a school that was in the process of being desegregated? I went to grade school and high school in an extremely diverse community in the northeast. It was taken for granted when I was a kid that I’d have Hispanic kids, African American kids, Jewish kids, etc. in my class. Yes, I’ve experienced discrimination. I’ve dealt with people who were shocked by the fact that I am Jewish. I’ve lived around people who believed that my epilepsy meant I had been touched by the devil and those who thought depression was just something I should be able to “get over.” I’ve been excoriated for my views on abortion. But none of that occurred in my formative years. I’ve lived in the contemporary Midwest and Southwest, though not the South.
Because I didn’t grow up in the culture, or even in what remains of that culture, writing such a story with an authentic voice would require an immense amount of work. The facts are the easy part. Anyone can go to the library and grab a book on the history of the time. But what did it feel like for the African American kids who were walking into formerly white schools? What was the first impression they had walking in the doors? What happened when the school day was over? How did going to that school change their neighborhood and their relationships in it? And what about the white kids? What are their memories? And the teachers? And the area around the school? What was it like to go from their homes to their classrooms? What changed in the whole community? How was it before the change, and how after? How many years did the change take? What was it like having a huge audience for everything you did? I’d need to know the sights, sounds, smells… There are a million questions I’d need answers to before I could even begin to come up with a realistic setting, realistic characters, realistic emotional depth.
Of course, you don’t have to do the work. You could choose to be Disney. To be mocked for producing utterly unrealistic depictions of every “real” character you write and only lauded for the ones that are completely imaginary. You, too, could write a ridicule-worthy version of Pocahontas, but why would you want to?
I get that World War II carries a substantial emotional wallop. It’s tempting to set your story there because it automatically adds heft. It makes your story seem “bigger.” But if you’re going to do that, you’d better have at least some kind of emotional and cultural connection. You don’t have to be Jewish (though if you’re going to write about Jews during the Holocaust, it would certainly help), or Japanese, or German…there’s no one right connection to have. But you should have a tie that calls to you. And then write from that tie. Don’t have one? Go find a synagogue and spend some time going to services. Get to know the people in that community and listen to their stories, their ancestors’ stories. Sit with their families. Eat their food. And while you’re doing that, read the history books so that the history comes to life for you in the way it has for people who live with it. Learn the facts, but also immerse yourself in the culture.
Or maybe just rethink the whole idea of writing a WWII Nazi romance.
I probably should reflect more upon your blog before responding. I have very mixed feelings as to your post. While I appreciate that you have a true connection to your stories through your ancestors and your own family and life experiences, it also appears there is an undercurrent of sour grapes toward the writer you alluded to. Many novelists have no personal experience with the subject matter of their work, yet their work is excellent. We are new FB acquaintances; please know my response is respectful and no way meant to offend you. Just hoping to open up a dialog…
I have no knowledge of this author whatsoever. But I also can tell just from the cover copy that she doesn’t know her subject matter. I would hope that novelists who have no personal experience of their subject matter are very careful in their research about it. But the fact is, if you’re writing about a mechanic and you get the type of wrench wrong, you won’t pour salt into the wounds of people who have already suffered a tremendous amount. If, on the other hand, you make a hero out of a high-ranking Nazi, you’re denying the truth that many people have lived all their lives with, that stole their parents and grandparents, that demolished their families. Essentially, the narrative is “it wasn’t that bad.”
Most of the things I write about I have no great connection with. But I don’t need to. I write about serial killers and sex toys and stuff that is really not related to my life. But I know that if I get something as trivial as whether the brand of gun my hero uses has a safety or not wrong, I will hear about it. So I research, research, research. I’ve read books about the mentality of snipers, I’ve gone to a shooting range, I’ve had a sex toy party in my house, I’ve interviewed sex toy saleswomen. And none of those things are really vital to the psyche of my readers–they’re just things that would irritate people if I got them wrong.
There is a line between writing about someone who’s different from you inside a culture you know — which means, for me, that with research I can and have written characters quite different from me but who are integrated into a culture with which I am familiar, be it small town Texas or big city New York — and writing about an entire culture that is foreign to you. There’s an African-American woman in a small town in one of my books. I characterized her, and the others’ treatment of her, by looking at what I knew from experience having seen it, having known someone like her. But I would not try to write a story set in an African American enclave of any kind, because I know nothing about what that’s like from the *inside.* And honestly, I never will. I could try, but I’d never do it properly, with an authentic voice.
World War II has facts. And the Nazi party had a structure. And an author can write something set there, but if she ignores those facts and that structure, and claims that her hero has risen to be a high-ranking Nazi doctor without knowing precisely what “science” meant in the regime, she hasn’t studied.
I am not trying to be snotty, I hope that’s coming across. I didn’t want to “name and shame” this author because this is a pervasive problem right now in publishing and because I blame the publisher for buying the book far more than I blame the author for writing it. The author doesn’t know any better. The publisher should. If this were a self-pub book, I would have left it alone, figuring it would die on the vine. But it’s not. It’s a major publisher. So I didn’t have any intention of bringing the wrath of the world down on the author or having her find this in a Google search.
The problem is that that means I can’t post the cover copy (though right now it’s all over Twitter, so it’s not as if it’s a secret) to show why it’s so wrong and offensive to people who actually grew up hearing stories and living with the never-ending, inter-generational effects of the Holocaust.
I am happy to talk about this. I believe dialogue is the only answer. So I hope that I’ve made some sense!
Maybe I’m naive, but it never occurred to me that people would write romances between Nazis and concentration camp inmates.
My grandmother was a young, beautiful blond Jewish woman in a concentration camp, and she was offered special treatment (in the form of unwanted gallantry and offers of extra food) by a Nazi because of it. She shudders when she tells that story. An added layer of torture: how does she say yes to this special treatment from this man who is enslaving her? how does she say no when the food could help her starving brothers? There was no romance.
My grandfather’s sister was a young, beautiful Jewish woman who was forced to be a sex slave for Nazi soldiers. She survived the war, but was lived with massive mental instability for the rest of her life. It was not romantic.
So there’s that.
Thank you Laura; your response helped clarify things for me. I now better appreciate and understand your blog.
Naomi, I cannot even begin to imagine the atrocities committed; I’m so very sorry that your family members had to endure such horror.
Thanks, MaryAnn– if you hadn’t spoken up, I wouldn’t have known that I needed to clarify, so it’s really important that you did. I appreciate it a LOT.
Nice comment about a not so nice thing. You’re right. Those times were not very romantic. Knowing what happened last year, I don’t know why anybody follows the same line -unless they want the scandal, of course.
And it’s something quite stupid to do in the USA, where the Jewish community will be vocal about it, because it has to do with their personal identity & family history.
I’m not sure if the reaction would be the same if they made this story with another axis power soldier (Italian or Romanian or Finnish), and another person from a camp, a gypsy, a soviet union communist, a gay or a Spanish republican, for instance.
But it will be very disgusting anyway.
What I’m not so sure about is that the author has to have some kind of emotional and cultural connection with the stories he or she writes. Did Shakespeare know anything about Dannish story when he composed ‘Hamlet’? I’m not sure but it doesn’t matter because the story is not about that.
When an American author writes about England in the Regency or Victorian times, for instance, it’s obvious they don’t have any connection with those times. You see the difference when you read a book written by a British author. Not to speak when they put Greek tycoons or Arab sheikhs, it’s so clear they know nothing about those cultures! Neither them nor their readers care about it, because they are looking for that Disney fantasy and not reality, although they can be offending someone else easily. Not about such tragic events certainly but disrespectful anyway.
It will be better if everybody stick to their own time and space. Unless they are as good as Shakespeare.