Danielle Steel confronts Holocaust in her own way

Only the Brave Danielle Steel Delacorte

In 1949, Theodor Adorno declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Danielle Steel has proved Adorno's point. Not that there's anything poetic about her new Holocaust novel, Only the Brave, but using the Final Solution as the setting for a sentimental melodrama is profoundly unseemly. Only the Brave is one of seven titles Steel plans to release this year, which means she writes a book more often than most people clean their fridge.

Steel's publicist reached out repeatedly to insist I not mention the author is a 76-yearold romance novelist. As always, we're never ashamed of the right things.

Only the Brave opens in Berlin in 1937 with a typically perplexing observation: “Even at eighteen, Sophia Alexander knew things in Germany had changed in the past four years since the Nazis had come to power.” Nothing gets by our Sophia. Somehow, after Adolf Hitler established himself as a dictator, passed the Nuremberg Laws and remilitarized the Rhineland, this savvy young woman picked up a change in the air. That weird consummation of obviousness and obliviousness becomes the novel's prevailing tone.

Sophia is a shy, “dark-haired beauty with huge green eyes, and always looked serious.” Her sister, Theresa, is a pretty flirt with “little awareness her natural sexiness was an aphrodisiac to the men who wanted her.” These two schöne Mädchen live with their father, the most important surgeon in Berlin, who runs his own private hospital. Although Dr. Alexander treats high-ranking Nazis, he treats Jews, too.

Don't worry if you miss these details; they'll be repeated. Example: On Page 110, Steel writes, “Hitler's generals, led by Göring, were preparing the Final Solution, to eradicate all Jews from the face of the Earth.” On the facing page, we're told, “The Führer and his generals were obsessed with this plan, called `the Final Solution,' to obliterate all Jews from the planet.”

We learn Hitler was a bad man and the Holocaust was a disaster. Families disappear, people are murdered and prisoners are brutally beaten, but the selection of details about the Shoah sometimes feels constrained within a narrow range of genteel taste. In Ravensbrück, “bunks were in short supply, latrines and toilet facilities were inadequate” — so, like, two stars on Airbnb. Prisoners “were given boots of any random size, whether they fit or not, boots that had been worn by others who might have died in them,” which makes the camp sound slightly worse than a bowling alley. Even the most wellknown historical horrors must contend with Steel's oddly banal tone. An early chapter reports that in Krakow and Warsaw, “it was the Nazis' hope to wipe out over a million Jews.” That, is “an incredible number of men, women, and children to annihilate” — a helpful appraisal for readers new to morality or math.

Brave Sophia is a selfless woman compelled by her Christian faith. While her flighty sister marries a wealthy man and pursues a life of pleasantries and parties, Sophia works as a nurse in her father's hospital and aspires to become a nun. When the Nazis insist Dr. Alexander turn his hospital into a euthanasia centre for undesirables, Sophia redoubles her efforts to save doomed patients and begins spiriting Jews out of Germany.

Sophia never abandons her devotion to God, even when tempted by the adulation of adoring men. First, there's Claus — “tall, blond and handsome” — who recruits her to the work of smuggling Jews across the border. Then there's Hans. “He was tall, blond and would have been movie-star handsome if he hadn't been a Nazi.”

Steel spends a number of pages trying to spin this encounter into a cute Beatrice-and-benedick romance, but, “no matter how nice he seemed, he was a Nazi officer at a concentration camp. She hadn't lost sight of that, no matter how handsome he was.” Sorry, Hans, genocide is one of Sophia's turnoffs!

Finally, there's the American Army captain Theodore Blake, “a young, very handsome man” with “short blond hair.” Will he be able to give Sophia the life every woman desires? Only the brave readers will find out.