This novel broke my heart in the quiet, reflective way only a truly human story can. Set against the backdrop of 1930s New York and the final days of World War II, it follows Benesh Burke, a young Jewish man who will do anything to fit in. He shortens his name to “Ben,” hides his faith, and joins the Army, determined to become the kind of American he thinks he’s supposed to be.

But when his unit liberates Dachau in 1945, Ben is forced to confront what he’s spent years running from: the cost of denial, the weight of history, and the faces of those who never got the chance to pretend.

It’s a short book, but one that hits deeply. The writing is spare and devastating, showing how shame and survival can twist together until you barely recognize yourself. Watching Ben’s transformation from assimilation to reckoning, feels both heartbreaking and necessary.

A powerful, introspective read that lingers long after the last page.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

An extremely thought-provoking novel…
Benesh has always lived on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His parents immigrated long ago, and eventually came to own a small grocery store. They are Orthodox Jews, observing all the Laws and rituals rather strictly. As Benesh grows up “Americanized”, loving baseball and using slang, a rift begins to grow between him and his father, who has plans for his son to eventually take over the store. Acts of anti-semitism began to become frequent, as the Depression lingers and talk of war in Europe begins. Benesh gets to the point where he feels that being labeled as Jewish will bring nothing but trouble, and has resulting fall-outs with his parents and closest friend. In the midst of the patriotic fervor that follows the attack on Pearl Harbor, he can’t wait to enlist, and finally identify as a different person, away from everyone who knows him. In the military he identifies as “Ben”, and proceeds to disguise his heritage by joining in with bullies bent on tormenting Jews, Mexicans, Negroes, and anyone else that they view as “different”. At times Benesh misses his parents, but knows he must steel himself to hide anything about his former life, to keep the haters off his own back. The war rages on, and so do the racist acts perpetuated by the whites in Benesh’s unit. All the way up until 1945, when the war ends and the Allied soldiers are expected to liberate the Nazi concentration camps. Upon the arrival at Dachau, and his first glimpses of unspeakable Nazi atrocities, Benesh feels an overwhelming sense of betrayal about discarding his heritage like trash, and it threatens to completely break him…
So heart-breakingly and realistically written, and so timely; sad that acts of anti-semitism and racism are still rampant 80+ years later.

*I received a digital copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are strictly my own.*

Thanks netgalley and Daniel Hock for this amazing story.
Benesh only wanted to play baseball he did not want to work in his parents shop, he did not want to be Jewish as he was forever being called names. As he grew up things got harder and Benesh decided to enlist in the army.
There he changed his name to Ben and never told anyone he was Jewish, he did to Jews what they had done to him and Benesh felt so guilty.
He was then sent to Dachau where he saw the people there and was horrified whst the Germans had done it really broke him.
From liberating the people Ben had a breakdown and started running and running all over America.
Until he decided to go home there he found his father had died he helped his heartbroken mother to start opening the shop again and Benesh was determined to help people wh had gone through the trauma of war.
You must read this book it’s incredible and deserves more than five stars.

In “Benesh,” Daniel Hock gives his protagonist a name that is, at first, a bruise. Benesh Burkovic (who tries on “Ben Burke” like a freshly pressed suit) wants what immigrant children have always wanted from America – to be unremarkable, to be safe, to be inside the circle rather than staring at it. Baseball is his chosen passport: a set of cards under a bed, the radiophonic cadence of play-by-play in his mind, the dream of pinstripes that feel less like clothing than absolution. From its opening pages, the novel makes clear that the cost of that dream is not only the familiar cost of assimilation, but something harsher: the slow training of a boy to distrust his own inheritance.

Hock begins with rupture: April 30, 1945, the liberation of Dachau, rendered in a blunt physical lexicon of mud, rain, bile, and eyes. The book then doubles back to the Lower East Side in 1929, where the Burke grocery store is both livelihood and sanctuary, and where Benesh’s father, Shimmel, embodies the immigrant parent’s impossible assignment – protect the old world by enforcing it, even as the new world seduces a child into believing belonging can be earned by erasure. In the store, apples become a kind of family currency: tossed like baseballs, stacked like the future, handled with the tenderness of necessity. Shimmel’s admonitions are not merely parental gruffness but fear made practical. America, for him, is not a promise but a test, and the test is whether the family survives without dissolving.

The early chapters are patient and sensory, attentive to food and language and the crowded warmth of community. A Rosh Hashanah gathering glows with chicken soup and laughter; it also constricts. Benesh wants to talk about the Yankees and is treated as an oddity by the Jewish boys around him, as if desire itself could be a kind of treason. He wanders to a baseball field and, for a few minutes, finds a different kind of belonging among non-Jewish kids who share his fandom. The scene is not sentimental; it is complicated, the pleasure of acceptance braided with the sharp, almost adult awareness of what acceptance requires him to withhold. When he says “We’re Jewish,” the moment lands like a dare – not to the other boys, who shrug and keep talking about lineups, but to Benesh himself.

When the book leaps ahead to war, that promise curdles. Hock’s Dachau sections are written with a straightforwardness that resists flourish, as if ornament would be obscene. The most chilling detail is not a set piece, but a recurrence: eyes, watching, accusing, hollow. Benesh’s memories are less cinematic than invasive; they arrive as bodily shocks, not as narrative trophies. And when he returns home to a changed city and a dead father, the book captures a specific postwar disorientation: not only grief, but the panic of discovering that the person you meant to reconcile with is now permanently unavailable. The violence of the camps is not only what happened there. It is also what it interrupts – the ordinary quarrels and repairs that make family life feel endless until, suddenly, it isn’t.

The novel’s ambition is generous and, often, moving. It is built around a question that has haunted postwar literature: what is owed to the dead, and what is owed to the living who must continue? Benesh’s arc is recognizable: a Jewish American soldier who has spent his youth sanding down his difference helps liberate a camp; in the camp’s afterlife he commits acts of moral cowardice; at home, with the patient insistence of friends, he begins to speak. But “Benesh” is less interested in the drama of liberation than in what comes after the dramatic part, when a man must wake up every morning inside a life he no longer knows how to inhabit.

Hock’s best pages are those in which ordinary surfaces buckle under pressure. A brick through a shop window in 1935, accompanied by a swastika and an antisemitic cartoon, is not merely an incident; it is the novel’s early warning system, teaching Benesh the cruel arithmetic of visibility. Later, when a swastika is painted on the glass beside the memorial display, the symbol’s wet red drips are made to echo blood in a way that is almost too on-the-nose, and yet effective. The point is not metaphor. The point is recurrence. Hatred, the book suggests, is not defeated by treaties. It waits.

If “Benesh” were only a chronicle of atrocity, it might buckle under its own weight, becoming another ledger of the unimaginable. Hock avoids that trap by making the novel equally about rebuilding. The romance with Maisy – a North Carolina widow who arrives in New York with both desire and skepticism – is, in intention, a counterargument to the camp: tenderness as practice, not escape. Maisy is drawn to the city’s dizzying variety, and Hock treats her discovery of New York like an education in possibility. The city is not simply backdrop; it is a catalyst. It makes speed feel like life again.

Maisy’s art is one of the novel’s shrewdest inventions. In New York she begins drawing and painting again, producing street scenes and quiet portraits, charcoal studies and full-color canvases. When Benesh urges her to sell them, she doubts that anyone would want them; Rose, with a shopkeeper’s practical faith, hangs three pieces in the store and sells them overnight. This subplot does more than decorate the narrative. It positions creation as a form of recovery that does not require language. Benesh writes; Maisy draws; Rose cooks; Cecil builds. The book’s theology is almost craft-based: make something with your hands and you can keep living.

Earning the book’s insistence on repair is its more difficult task, and it is where Hock is strongest when he resists tidiness. Benesh’s guilt is not only survivor’s guilt; he has done damage. His relationship with Isaac Horowitz, a Jewish soldier he once demeaned in Germany, has the charged awkwardness of a reckoning that cannot be solved by a single apology. Chaney, the friend who helps pull Benesh back from the edge, is allowed to carry his own moral compromises without becoming a lecture. The novel’s moral world is clear, sometimes too clear, but when it turns to culpability it is at its most convincing: shame does not disappear because you have decided to be good now. Shame lingers. It changes costumes. It calls itself duty.

The book’s central invention, though, is not romance or friendship. It is an institution: the Burke Grocery memory wall that expands into the Shimmel Burkovic Jewish Remembrance Center. Benesh begins by writing his own memories late at night, two notebooks filling before dawn, tears smearing pages. He then persuades a hesitant rabbi to invite survivors and their families into the office – tea, cookies, cramped chairs – and listens as testimony turns the air thick. Sofie Liebovitz’s story, filtered through Benesh’s strained compassion, is not presented as spectacle; it is presented as the kind of thing that cannot be “processed” without becoming obscene. The novel understands that there is no clean way to hear such stories. There is only the decision to hear them anyway.

From these meetings, the memorial becomes physical. Maisy mounts photographs and boat tickets; Benesh types summaries on a battered typewriter; Cecil rearranges shelves to carve out space near the shop door so passersby will see it. Soon, the store is not just a store. It becomes a local archive, a site of pilgrimage, a place where a German survivor named Hans Lieber can sit in a deli eating matzo ball soup and finally talk. The novel understands that testimony often requires a third thing: not only a listener and a speaker, but a room that can hold what is said. A room that does not flinch.

Here, the book feels pointedly contemporary. We live in a moment when public memory is both weapon and wound – when memorials are defaced, histories are contested, and the act of naming can become a political argument. The novel’s 1947 vandalism could be lifted into our own headlines without much adjustment. So could its debate inside the rabbi’s office: should survivors be left “in peace,” or is peace itself a kind of burial? In an era of book bans, curriculum fights, and cynical “both sides” language that treats truth as a negotiable preference, “Benesh” argues for something sturdier than opinion: record, artifact, witness.

The Remembrance Center also anticipates our time’s anxiety about evidence. Hock fills the room with binders, letters, photographs, and artifacts. In 1947, this is a neighborhood man doing what he can. In 2025, it reads like a rebuttal to the age of disinformation, deepfake imagery, and denial packaged for profit. The novel never mentions social media or AI, of course, but its method is the same method institutions now rush to preserve: gather primary testimony while you still can; document the mundane details as fiercely as the headline horrors; make it harder for anyone to say later that it didn’t happen.

The book touches, too, on the persistence of antisemitism after “victory.” The swastika on the window is only paint, Benesh tells Cecil; it can be scrubbed away. But the book is more honest than that line suggests. The paint is removable; the impulse behind it is not. If the Holocaust can be followed, so quickly, by vandalism in New York, what exactly does “never again” mean as a promise? Hock’s answer is not policy. It is infrastructure: keep the doors open, keep the stories visible, keep building space for people to remember together.

“Benesh” is also, quietly, a novel about assimilation. Shimmel’s coerced name change on arrival is a small parable about how nations demand gratitude in exchange for dignity. Benesh’s childhood urge to stand out less – to be “more American” – echoes contemporary pressures felt by immigrants and the children of immigrants, by religious minorities, by anyone asked to translate themselves into acceptability. Hock’s Lower East Side is drawn with affection for community, but also with clarity about its constrictions. Heritage is both shelter and demand. The tragedy is that Benesh believes he must choose between being loved and being himself.

Hock’s prose favors clarity over surprise. He is a storyteller who wants to be understood, and at times the book explains itself a beat too often. Characters deliver tidy aphorisms – “Nothing good hides in darkness” is the novel’s explicit thesis – and emotional beats are sometimes underlined rather than trusted. Maisy is written in radiant strokes that can verge on idealization, and the romantic dialogue occasionally leans on repeated declarations of perfection until the specificity that would make her feel less like a symbol is softened. The moral architecture is sturdy, sometimes too sturdy: the book is eager to show you what it means, even when what it means is already vibrating in the scene.

Still, it would be unfair to judge “Benesh” by the standards of a cooler book. Its temperature is part of its argument. Hock believes, without embarrassment, that community can be built, that testimony can heal, that a mother’s kitchen can be a theology. He is writing in a lineage that includes “Night,” “The Diary of a Young Girl,” “Maus,” “The Chosen,” “The Assistant,” “The Book Thief,” “Sophie’s Choice,” “The Pawnbroker,” “Schindler’s List,” and “The Pianist” – works that approach the Holocaust and its afterlife from different angles, and that wrestle with the same impossible problem: how to make the reader feel, without turning feeling into a substitute for knowledge.

What distinguishes Hock’s novel is its focus on the everyday machinery of remembrance. The Remembrance Center is not merely a setting; it is a character, evolving from a wall to a building, from private grief to public mission. The most affecting chapters are not the ones that pile on plot, but the ones that slow down to show the work: mounting photos, typing summaries, rearranging shelves, greeting a teenager who brings her grandfather, scheduling volunteer hours so the doors can stay open. Remembrance, the book suggests, is carpentry. It requires leases, hours, volunteers, and the willingness to be interrupted by someone else’s pain.

Structurally, Hock favors dated chapters and clear temporal signposts. The effect is diaristic, as if the book were a box of labeled photographs pulled from a drawer – 1929, 1935, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949 – each year returning like a refrain. This method keeps the reader oriented, and it allows recovery to feel incremental rather than sudden. It also lets Hock show how the same pressures return in new clothing: prejudice reappearing after war; the old father-son conflict resurfacing inside an “honor” that feels, to Benesh, like temptation. The risk is smoothness. Time jumps arrive with the tidy efficiency of summary, and a few developments that might have benefited from messier, lived-in scene work are moved along briskly, as if the novel sometimes prefers reassurance to complication.

The late baseball chapters could easily have collapsed into wish-fulfillment, but Hock uses them as a psychological set piece. When Benesh initially recoils from the Yankees’ invitation, it is not modesty; it is the old fear that happiness is irresponsible, that pleasure will invite punishment, that his father’s disappointed face is still the last word. The ceremonial pitch becomes a dialogue between the boy he was and the man he is, on the same patch of dirt. That the moment is shared with Cecil matters – not because friendship is cute, but because it clarifies the book’s real claim. Survival is not an individual achievement. It is something you do with witnesses.

There are moments when the novel’s sincerity tips into sentiment, when the emotional arc closes too neatly. Life rarely delivers such symmetrical rewards, and the book sometimes seems eager to prove that goodness will be repaid. Yet even that eagerness can be read as a response to its subject. After so much documented cruelty, after a century that taught Jews and many other peoples how fragile safety can be, it is understandable to want a story that insists on repair. Hock’s optimism is not naïveté so much as insistence. He refuses to let atrocity be the only narrative engine.

For its unwavering warmth, its accessible moral clarity, and its intermittent tendency to underline what it has already made clear, I would place “Benesh” at 78 out of 100 – a novel that may not reinvent the form, but that understands what a novel can still do: gather strangers into a room, pass around tea and bread, and make the act of listening feel like a civic duty.

Thank you NetGalley for the ARC of Benesh! WOW this was a powerful read. We are in a time where many Jewish people are feeling attacked, and some struggle with being Jewish in this world. The MMC Benesh really portrayed what I imagine many Jewish children and young adults felt growing up during the 1930’s and even in today’s world. I really appreciated the attention to drawing us in and I could feel the struggles Benesh went through. I think many can relate to his character, and the development through the book was beautiful. I laughed, cried, smiled, and wanted to yell at times. This is a MUST read in 2026! Benesh is publishing tomorrow January 6th 2026! Please read this book. 5⭐️ easily!

Set in 1930s–1940s New York, Benesh is a deeply human historical novel that explores identity, fear, belonging, and the long shadow of moral compromise. The story follows Benesh, a young Jewish American boy growing up as the son of Polish immigrants, caught between his love of baseball and his father’s insistence on education, tradition, and faith.

What makes this novel particularly compelling is its character work. Benesh is written with uncomfortable honesty—he is not idealized, heroic, or consistently brave. Instead, he is painfully real. As he becomes aware of the antisemitism surrounding him, his fear of being exposed shapes many of his choices. That fear follows him into adulthood, where his desire to belong leads him into morally fraught territory. The author does not excuse these choices, but he does allow the reader to sit with their complexity.

Thematically, Benesh grapples with assimilation versus identity, silence versus resistance, and the cost of survival. One of the book’s strongest elements is how it examines complicity—not in grand ideological terms, but through everyday fear, self-preservation, and regret. The psychological weight of witnessing hatred up close, and later confronting its consequences, lingers long after the pages turn.

The novel also handles trauma and guilt with restraint. Rather than relying on shock, it focuses on how experiences reshape a person internally—how they fracture one’s sense of self and home. Healing, when it comes, is gradual and imperfect, rooted in remembrance, reconciliation, and personal accountability.

While some sections move more slowly, the emotional payoff is worth it. Benesh is not just a coming-of-age story or a war novel—it is a meditation on what it means to live with one’s choices and still try to move forward.

This book will resonate with readers who appreciate character-driven historical fiction, morally complex protagonists, and stories that ask difficult questions without offering easy answers.

4/5 stars for Benesh
Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book