The Dressmaker’s Daughter by Linda Boroff; Solana Beach, California: Santa Monica Press LLC © 2022; ISBN 9781595-801074; 239 pages; $12.99
SAN DIEGO – This is a sexually explicit novel set in Romania during the Holocaust. The protagonist, Daniela Mielstone, is 15 years old when the novel begins and still a teenager when the Holocaust ends.
A pretty and precocious Jewish girl, she willingly and repeatedly engages in sexual relations with her math tutor in the months before the Nazis and their Romanian allies destroy her town, kill her family, and subject her to the first of a series of rapes that she will endure throughout the war years. Although the Nazis forbade their soldiers from fraternizing with Jews, much less having sexual relations with them, that didn’t stop the troops from raping and brutalizing girls like Daniela.
Later, a Romanian major took a shine to her and forced her to serve as his bed partner. Constantly the victim of sexploitation, Daniela learned to disassociate her mind from her body. At times, she yearned for death, so she might rejoin her murdered family.
When the fortunes of war turned and the Germans were being chased back to their homeland by the Russians, the Romanian major detailed her to a field hospital – a scene of gore and agony – to tend to German soldiers who had been maimed and wounded on the Russian front. Though she seethes with fantasies of revenge, she is not a killer.
And then, she is rescued by a unit of Jewish Partisans that includes her former lover.
Far from a “happily ever after’ story, the novel delves into the impact that the abuse had on Daniela. While she feels herself defiled and degraded by her rapists, and imagines herself unworthy of ever being loved again, the Jewish partisans try to convince her otherwise. What was important, they told her, was that she survived. Only her former captors bear blame and the shame, not her.
However accepting they are, that does not prevent Daniela from suffering from what today we recognize as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Her tortured dreams are lurid. The world today knows how dramatically soldiers suffer from their memories of battle and the unspeakable agony and bloodshed they saw all around them. The world also needs to recognize that sexually brutalized women also are irreparably traumatized. If there is anything of lasting value in this novel, it is that.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor emeritus of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com