Benesh: A Historical Fiction Novel of 1930s New York, WWII, and the Holocaust

by Daniel Hock

What happens when you try to escape who you are?

Growing up in 1930s Manhattan, Benesh Burke will do anything to fit in—even if it means abandoning everything his immigrant Jewish family holds sacred, including his religion. Desperate to blend into American society, he reinvents himself as "Ben" and joins the Army, befriending the very soldiers who torment minorities.

But in 1945, when his unit liberates Dachau concentration camp, Ben comes face-to-face with the ultimate cost of his betrayal. Surrounded by the bodies of those who died for the faith he casually discarded, his carefully constructed identity crumbles.

Can someone who has denied his own people ever find redemption?

Genres: Historical Fiction

292 pages, Paperback

Published January 4, 2026

About the author

Daniel Hock is the author of Benesh, a historical fiction novel about identity, Jewish family tradition, and redemption, set in 1930s–1940s New York City and World War II.

Daniel Hock lives in Northern Virginia with his wife of 32 years and their cat Jack-Jack. When he’s not writing, he’s either watching British crime dramas with his wife, perfecting homemade lasagna that would make Garfield proud, or sampling every pizza within a 50-mile radius with their son. Before turning to fiction, Daniel spent decades in business, founding and running companies in import and distribution, real-estate investment, retail, e-commerce, product development, and consulting.

Reviews

[Courtney Pityer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benesh is a historical fiction novel which follows the story of a young Jewish boy named Benesh growing up in New York. I will say I found this story to be very facinating. In a way it is a coming of age story and trying to find your idenity on your own rather than the one you are born with. However, sometimes escaping your problems only delays them for the future.

As mentioned our main character Benesh has a different vision for his life opposed to the one his parents have for him. One day he decides he's had enough and walks away from everything and forges a new path for himself. He goes around traveling and meeting new people. Eventually he ends up enlisting in the war.

However, later on in the War he comes across a concentration camp which really opens his eyes to what he left behind. It is after that he realizes that it is time to go home and do the best that he can do to make amends. Overall this was a very moving story.

[TH Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I really enjoyed reading Benesh. I found myself going through an array of emotions, especially during the scene in Dachau. Benesh brings to light the cost of becoming someone you're not and how to eventually seek forgiveness. It is a powerful novel and I would definitely recommend it.

[Sally Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved this story. It’s about self-redemption, community, and staying true to yourself. I love that Benesh found joy and light amid darkness. It was more about forgiveness than pain. Benesh’s struggle not to become his parents, and then rediscovering the value of his culture and religion, felt deeply relevant both historically and today. It’s a story with broad appeal, and I’d definitely recommend it. Thanks to the staff at Anticipation Press for providing an advance copy!

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Alicia Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

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!

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the beginning of the novel dealing with identity (religion, second generation of immigrants) was promising I was rather disappointed in the rest of the novel. The tone changed dramatically from trauma, sense of selflessness to an unrealistic and illogical development, psychologically speaking. Too much lightness in the second part of the plot which makes this novel a light read which does not fit (for me!) the storyline. I definitely expected more depth in the characters. Shame , as I had read the first part with real interest.
I received a digital copy of this novel from NetGalley and I have voluntarily written an honest review.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Cindy Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Benesh is the only child of Jewish immigrants from Poland who settle in a Jewish neighborhood on the Lower East Side. Growing up in the 1920s-1930s, Benesh is enamored by baseball and alienated from Judaism. He is in constant conflict with his strict father who wants Benesh to take pride in his religion and heritage and work in the family's grocery store. But Benesh thinks that hiding his Jewish background will keep him safe from growing antisemitism. When he enlists in the military, he lists himself as Baptist and takes on the name Ben. Then he becomes part of a racist group of soldiers who torment Jews and people of color.

The struggle of children of immigrants in the US is one that has been told in novels and films for many years. In this book, we read of Benesh's arc of redemption after he witnesses the carnage and death as part of a group of soldiers who liberate Dachau.

The impact of Benesh's hiding his background and alienation from his family, and his shame and guilt after witnessing the horror of Dachau are strengths in this book. Once Benesh is back in NYC, the story unfolds rather effortlessly and becomes less engaging. On the whole, the writing is not very strong, with limited description and simple dialogue.

If permitted, I'd go with 3 1/2 stars, but instead I'm rounding up to 4.

I was provided an ARC by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Kelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benesh is a powerful, introspective exploration of identity, faith, and the haunting consequences of assimilation. Daniel Hock captures the tension of 1930s Manhattan and the psychological weight of a man torn between belonging and betrayal.

Through Benesh Burke’s transformation into “Ben,” Hock gives readers a portrait of a young man caught in the impossible struggle between acceptance and authenticity. The story unfolds against a backdrop of historical realism that feels immediate and deeply human. When Ben’s journey takes him to the liberated horrors of Dachau, the narrative delivers a profound reckoning, a moment that confronts not just the protagonist, but the reader, with questions of morality, guilt, and redemption.

Written with haunting clarity and moral precision, Benesh asks what it means to deny one’s roots and whether the soul can ever truly recover from that denial. It’s both a historical narrative and a timeless meditation on identity, memory, and the cost of silence.

[Christine Stanson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher and thoroughly enjoyed this read! Through the main character, Benesh, the reader embarks on a complex journey of self-discovery. He loves his family while also not wanting to become his parents, he prefers to blend in rather than stand out, he resists his culture and religion and tries to reinvent himself - only to return full circle to embrace who he is and from where he came. The themes of community, helping others, celebrating and being true to yourself are relatable on many levels. There is joy and beauty amongst the horror, light in the darkness, ownership of mistakes, forgiveness of wrongdoings all woven into captivating storytelling. There are some heavier, more serious parts of the story which forced this reader to slow down and sit with the expected emotional response which made the read all the more impactful. I would recommend this book to anyone who loves to immerse themselves in great character development.

[Suzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benesh invites readers to examine the ways we mask or reveal our identities when faced with the demands of belonging and self-preservation. The emotional resonance of his struggle highlights the enduring importance of truth, memory, and self-acceptance.

Through his internal conflict, the novel thoughtfully probes the complex interplay between personal identity and cultural legacy, offering a nuanced exploration of the Jewish-American experience.
Daniel Hock emerges as a distinguished storyteller, blending emotional depth with vivid, meticulously crafted prose. His writing animates every chapter with remarkable clarity, immersing readers fully in Benesh Burke’s world.

Each scene carries an undeniable authenticity, allowing readers to witness the chaos of war and the weight of Benesh’s choices as though we are standing at his side. This novel serves as a powerful and evocative tribute to one of history’s most turbulent eras.

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't typically read this genre, but as someone who grew up Modern Orthodox and has had a complicated journey with my Jewish identity, I knew I needed to read this. In this book we're following Benesh, who later goes by Ben, as he tries to blend in to American society while being Jewish in the 1930s.

This was a very impactful story that left me crying. A lot. Many of my own family members were victims of the atrocities that occured during the Holocaust, so reading this really hit home.

Regarding the novel itself, there were parts of the book, espeically towards the end, that wrapped up a little too nicely in my opinion. Overall, this was an incredible book and I highly recommend it.

Thank you to the publisher who sent me this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Allison Buehner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benesh, a hauntingly relevant historical novel, refuses to look away from uncomfortable truths. Daniel Hock's debut follows Benesh, the American-born son of Polish Jewish immigrants, as he navigates a quest for belonging in 1930s-1940s New York.

What makes this novel remarkable is its unflinching portrayal of a protagonist who is painfully human. Benesh's fear of antisemitism drives him to hide his Jewish identity, eventually leading him to align himself with the very hatred he sought to escape. When he witnesses the devastation at Dachau, the full weight of his choices crashes down on him.

For readers drawn to character-driven historical fiction that grapples with moral complexity without offering easy answers, Benesh is a thought-provoking read.

[Stephanie Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.*

[Heather Walrath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Benesh is a poignant and reflective novel about identity, generational differences, self-discovery and forgiveness. As a lifelong baseball fan, I enjoyed the historical references about the game, as well as the symbolism surrounding it. I look forward to reading Daniel Hock's next book!

[Rachel Sharp · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novel tells a circular, reflective story centred on Benesh, a young man raised in a strict Jewish household. His father, a Polish immigrant, holds tightly to his faith, traditions and sense of family pride. From an early age, these expectations weigh heavily on Benesh, who feels confined rather than comforted by them. As he grows older, his desire to escape this world becomes overwhelming.
Rejecting his upbringing, Benesh joins the army and deliberately distances himself from his Jewish identity. He hides who he is in order to fit in, believing that survival and acceptance depend on silence and conformity. However, this denial of self is challenged when he encounters the aftermath of Dachau at the end of the war. The experience is deeply unsettling and forces him to confront not only the horrors inflicted on others, but also his own choices and the identity he has tried to erase.
After the war, Benesh becomes lost, both literally and emotionally. He drifts from place to place with no real sense of direction or purpose, haunted by guilt, grief and unanswered questions. His life during this period feels suspended, as though he is unable to move forward or return to what he once knew. Gradually, a series of encounters begins to shift his perspective. These moments, small but significant, push him toward reflection and ultimately back to his Jewish roots and the family he left behind.
At its core, the book is about identity, shame, and the long path toward self-forgiveness. Benesh’s eventual reconciliation with his past is quiet rather than dramatic, but it carries emotional weight as he learns to accept who he is and where he comes from.
That said, the novel sometimes feels too light for such heavy subject matter. The character development can be thin, and the transitions between time periods are not always seamless, which can make the emotional impact feel muted. Despite these flaws, it remains an interesting historical read that touches on important themes of faith, belonging and survival, even if it does not explore them as deeply as it might have.

Many thanks to Reedsy Discovery and the author for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

[urmothersbookshelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was so lucky to be able to read an advanced copy of Benesh, and, can I just say, wow.

Following Benesh through his life, and the darkest pieces of it, was truly such an emotional process. His growth, despite and perhaps informed by his trauma, felt real and raw in a way I haven't often experienced from a novel, especially one that covers such a long period of time.

This easily earned my five stars! Thank you to the author and publisher both for this ARC and this story.

[Joe Camareno · Rating 5 out of 5]

I received an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest assessment. I have to say that I was impressed by this freshman debut. It is an impressively woven tale of identity, acceptance, and, ultimately, forgiveness.

We meet our would-be hero, Benesh, as a child and follow his journey through manhood. He is an impressionable boy caught between two worlds: that of his immigrant Polish and Jewish parents and his own struggles to fit in as an American in 1930s New York.

This universal story is poignantly told and has something for everyone. I believe anyone who reads 'Benesh' will walk away with a greater understanding that we, as part of the human race, have more in common than not. The arresting imagery conjured up by Hock's words left an indelible mark. I found myself entirely engrossed in the story and wanting more, and as I neared the end of the book, I subconsciously slowed my pace, finding reasons to save as much as I could for "tomorrow". His characters are vivid and evocative of the time, never distracting, and sometimes surprising.

While historical fiction, the story in 'Benesh' is topical and resonant for our current times. It is a solid and worthwhile read.

I look forward to Daniel Hock's next book with anticipation.