A Place to Hide
A Novel
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4.5 • 14 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the winner of the National Jewish Book Award
Theodore “Teddy” Hartigan is the scion of a wealthy Washington, D.C. family who place him into a comfortable job at the State Department and a placid diplomat’s career. In 1938, as Hitler’s inexorable rise continues, Teddy is re-assigned to the US Consulate in Amsterdam to replace fleeing staff.
Teddy’s job is to process visa applications, and by 1939, refugees from Nazi-conquered Poland, Austria, and other countries are desperate to secure safe passage to America. As Hitler sweeps through France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Holland, the screws tighten and law after virulent law is passed to threaten the lives, indeed the very existence of the Jewish people. When Teddy and his girlfriend Sara are introduced to an orphaned young girl named Katy, who has been abandoned on the grounds of a nursery school, they agree to adopt her. Teddy comes to realize that he holds the key to saving lives, whether five, fifty, or five hundred—and makes the dangerous and selfless decision to join with underground groups and use his position at the Consulate to rescue those with no other avenue of escape.
Powerful and dramatic, National Jewish Book Award winner Ronald H. Balson’s A Place to Hide explores the deeply-moving actions of an ordinary man who resolves, under perilous circumstances, to make a difference.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Jewish Book Award winner Balson (The Girl from Berlin) delivers a middling portrait of an altruistic American diplomat in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and the woman who meets him decades later during her search for her long-lost sister. In 2002, crotchety Teddy Hartigan, who lives at an assisted-living facility, agrees to meet with freelance journalist Karyn Sachnoff, who was born into a Jewish family in Amsterdam shortly before the Nazi occupation, to help her find out what happened to her long-lost sister, Annie, when both girls were adopted by separate families. Teddy has one condition: that Karyn write his life story as a legacy for his grandchildren. After much buildup, Teddy recounts the central narrative. In 1938, Teddy is tapped to process visa and travel applications at the U.S. embassy in Amsterdam, where fears of a German invasion have led to a huge backlog. As Hitler continues his belligerence, Teddy is forced to improvise to protect his new love interest, a Jewish teacher named Sara, and to save as many Jews as he can. The dialogue rings false—Teddy says of Hitler, "He may have the world's largest army, but I wouldn't bet against the rest of the free world"—and most of the plot developments are predictable. It's a superficial and hackneyed treatment of the period.
