Kristína Royová, The Heiress, trans. Martha Tenjack (Westchester, IL: Good News Publishers, 1979 [1909], 592 pp.
In many ways, this review marks a triumph: the completion of my quest to locate and read all of Kristína Royová’s books in English! (See the now-complete bibliography at the end of this post.) The title is not literal—in Slovak the book is called Moc svetla, “The Power of the Light,” with an epigraph from John 1:5. A whole seventy years passed between in its initial publication in Slovak and its translation into English.
It was no small thing to add this last Royová novel to my collection. The only used copies I could locate online originally cost upwards of $200! I wrote a few pleading emails to the vendors to broker a deal. None of them ever responded, but not long after, one dropped the price to $60. Still a bit much for a faded mass market paperback, but I wasn’t going to let the chance slip away. Collectors are always at the mercy of dealers!
I wish I could say that this almost 600-page book was worth the 10¢ per page. Unfortunately, I have to admit that the 3-star rating for The Heiress is awarded on the same arbitrary grounds that I gave the same rating to Bellevue: a split between a 5 for the book achieving its intended purpose and a 1 for the enjoyment I took in reading it.
It’s pretty funny, actually, that I would have the same issue with these two particular Slovak novels in English, because they are about as diametrically opposed in outlook as humanly possible. Bellevue is bleak and nihilistic; The Heiress is chirpy and optimistic. In truth, the best characterization I can think of for The Heiress is “religious soap opera.”
the only image I’ve been able to find of the original 1909 edition
To spare anyone else the chore of slogging through this painfully sincere book, here’s the story in short. A woman of a Polish (possibly Silesian) family, Johanna, has grown up in America but is the titular heiress of an estate back in the home country. For various poorly explained reasons, it’s arranged for her to marry one of her distant cousins who has grown up on that estate, Bohus (really Bohuš, but I’ll follow the unaccented English version of the names as they appear in the translation). She is extremely pious; he is barely observant of his inherited religion at all. Neither of them is thrilled at the prospect of marriage—Johanna in particular had hoped to become a missionary. But she quickly realizes that as a returning heiress she can undertake “inland mission,” the old term for re-evangelizing the indifferent members of folk and state churches in Europe. And she hopes maybe she can convert Bohus, too, in the process. (You can see where this is going.)
Bohus, however, played a dirty trick when they underwent the state marriage ceremony in the U.S. before returning to Europe: he signed the name of his younger brother, Stanislav, in place of his own. Because the wedding pair would not consummate the marriage before a church ceremony anyway, Bohus hoped that he could basically swap places with Stanislav once he got home. A bunch of engineered problems puts off the wedding, giving Johanna and Bohus ample time to fall in love, and Bohus himself to come to faith, though not without Stanislav developing a bit of a crush on Johanna himself. Spoiler alert: the all-too-holy Johanna is shot to death at the end, which is explained as the Lord taking her away lest the locals who have come to faith through her place more value on Johanna herself than on Christ. Yikes.
Meanwhile, a bunch of other subplots unfold. One is the gradual realization of Conrad, a Catholic priest related to the main family, that his church is fatally at odds with Christ and the Scripture. Plus, he kind of falls for a girl, which obviously Catholic priests shouldn’t do—but hey! the Protestants will bless that. So needless to say, by the time it’s all over, he switches sides. Then there are all the Jews, who are variously reviled by the Christians or evangelized and embraced by them (there doesn’t really seem to be a middle ground available). Among the most heroic characters of the book are the Jews who come to Jesus—hoping thereby to be cleansed of their hereditary “blood curse,” which I must admit made my own blood curdle to read—while one of the two villains is a Jew who refuses to convert… he, in fact, is the one to shoot his Johanna, in his rage at her converting his wife to Christianity. (The other villain was an unrepentant old “Christian.”) There are a few other subplots besides, including a Russian Orthodox family, but this gives you the flavor of the book well enough.
If I haven’t made it clear by now, I really didn’t like this book. But to do historical justice to it, I have to remind you—and myself—that it was written in 1909, well over a century ago. It was actually a valuable exercise to remind myself of all the things Royová did not know and could not have known: positively, the ecumenical movement and the extraordinary reduction in hostilities between various Christian groups since her time; negatively, the Nazi exploitation of age-old Christian paranoia and blame surrounding the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust. I wanted to argue with Royová—and did—but responsible historical reading means taking figures of the past where and when they are. This is what the world looked like to her, and I will learn more by trying to understand why than just dismissing her out of hand for her lack of enlightenment. (And all historical judgments should immediately sober us up: what countless causes do we find self-evidently just and good that the future will judge us harshly for?)
Trying to sort out just where Royová was coming from and why nudged me in the right direction to find, if not exactly answers, then at least suggestive possibilities about her own commitments and how this one, along with her other books, came into English.
Here’s what tipped me off: protagonist Johanna had attended the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. What?! Yeah, that was my reaction, too. I’d heard of both MBI and its founder Dwight Moody but never quite followed the trail. Well, I did, at last. Turns out Moody was a fervent Evangelical (which probably accounts for the not-quite-accurate translation of evanjelické for “Evangelical” throughout the novel—“Protestant” would ring a bit more accurately to American ears) who wanted to train lay people in mission methods. Fair enough; I can see why a lay woman like Royová, who came out of a very clerical tradition, would be attracted to that.
But… on a trip to Britain, Moody made contact with the Plymouth Brethren, a rather extreme sect in the fertile soil of British sectarianism that was particularly committed to Dispensationalism, the notion that God works in different “dispensations” throughout history. Your goal is to get yourself on the right side of history by figuring out the key and following the dispensation’s rules. (This is the worldview that gave us the Left Behind series, speaking of religious soap operas.) The most influential of the Plymouth Brethren was John Nelson Darby, forerunner of the Scofield Reference Bible which set countless American Evangelicals off on oracular searches through Scripture to chart out the trajectory of the rapture, tribulation, and end times.
This proved to be a vital clue in two directions.
First, the Pietism to which Royová was connected already had a strong judeophilic streak: which is to say, instead blaming and persecuting the Jews, the Pietists were more interested in dialoguing with them, naturally with the end goal of conversion, but still—better than pogroms! However, add to this a Dispensationalist bent, and you get the fervent hope that if you can convert all the Jews, then the conditions of Romans 9–11 will be met and Jesus will return again in glory. So this probably accounts for Royová’s reworking of the “blood curse” motif into an opportunity for Jewish salvation in this novel instead of guaranteed damnation. Plus, it gives the Gentiles hope for a near-end to history.
The second thing this clue pointed me toward was the extent of Royová’s connection to multiple Brethren groups. As noted in earlier reviews, it was mostly Brethren publishers who translated and promoted Royová’s works in English and keep them in print up to this day. I revisited the biography of Royová on Zlaty Fond, which notes that Kristína and her sister Mária visited Písek and Prague (in today’s Czech Republic) where they became acquainted with Friedrich Wilhelm Baedeker, a German missionary to Russia who was part of the Plymouth Brethren and deeply influenced by Moody, and Alois Adlof, a Czech minister of the Jednota Bratrska or Unity of the Brethren, heir to the movement that coalesced around Jan Hus. Czech Brethren and Plymouth Brethren are not the same thing, but it’s evident they share values and the status of being small free churches not well loved by the larger state and folk churches around them. Royová herself is proof of the connections between them—along with one of her translators, Charles Lukesh.
And if that wasn’t enough, the publisher of this particular volume, Good News Publishers, has Brethren connections, too. I could find out very little about translator Martha Tenjack—I asked the publisher but they couldn’t find anything in their records—other than that she was born in the Czech Lands and evidently migrated to the U.S. at some point in time. Her Foreword thanks her sister Mirka Penland and a Rev. Jan Piroch for their help with “the hard spots, which seemed almost untranslatable.” It’s not clear whether this is because of the gap between Slovak and Czech, or maybe Royová’s old-fashioned or idiosyncratic Slovak, or the fact that the story is set in Poland and represents so many different nationalities, which may show up in the language itself.
A final hint at the Brethren connection can be found in the place names. I searched for all of them, wondering if I’d get a location as specific as the Croatian castle in the Kingdom of Hungary populated by Slovaks in another of Royová’s works. This time around, I think it’s safe to say that the setting is imaginary, but it’s clearly meant to be in Poland near the Slovak and Czech borders. There’s only one character identified as a Slovak, Jaroslav Lakrinsky, and at one point Bohus visits Žilina in Slovakia, not too far away. One of the primary settings is called Zahori, which I’m guessing to be inspired by the Záhoří near Písek where Royová first met her Brethren connections.
Another fictional location is Stranov, and it turns out there’s a Stránov Castle near Mlada Boleslav, a northern Czech town that is home to a Czech Brethren church and one-time publisher, Bratrské listy… which, in fact, seems to be the outfit first to publish this book at all, in 1909, and evidently in Czech! This is not as strange as it sounds, as this page documents translations from Slovak into Czech over time, and sure enough Royová appears in 1909 (and also in 1901, 1912, 1922, 1935, 1946, and 2005… most of them different editions of Martinko/Without God in the World). This alphabetical list of all of Royová’s works notes that Moc svetla came out as a české vydanie (“Czech edition”), but it looks to me like there have been at least two recent Slovak publications. One was in 1972 by the Kristova cirkev bratov, which is, you guessed it, a Brethren publisher, except (you didn’t guess this part) it’s based in Báčsky Petrovec, Serbia! Also not as strange as it sounds—this is the part of Serbia that was settled by Slovaks in the eighteenth century. The other Slovak publication was by Tranoscius, the Slovak Lutheran publisher, in 2000. For all the significant differences in outlook between Lutherans and Brethren, Royová did remain within the Slovak Lutheran church and exercised an important influence on the Pietist branch within the church, and is accordingly remembered fondly. (I wonder how much this would be affected by her Dispensationalist leanings…!)
The other place names in the book don’t seem to have secret Brethren connections, but they do account for my sense that the setting is meant to be in the Silesian portion of today’s Poland, which has historically housed more Protestants than the rest of Catholic Poland. There is a Potok just north of the Slovak border in Poland; a Skałka very near Wrocław (Breslau), the “capital” of old Silesia (and also a Skalka nad Váhom in Slovakia); and the principal family name in the novel, Hrichovsky, is surely drawn from Hričovský hrad in northern Slovakia, very close to the intersection of Slovakia, Moravia, and Silesian Poland.
Whew! That was a slog. And here at last is the most up-to-date bibliography I’ve been able to pull together of Royová’s writings in English. You can also look at this composite library record that shows her works in other languages as well.
Kristína Royová: Books in English
Aliases:
Kristina Roy
Kristiny Royovej [= genitive of her name in Slovak]
Cristina Roy
Martinko: A Slovack Story (Bez Boha na svete, 1893)
trans. Frederick & M. K. Butcher
1) London/Glasgow: Alfred Holness/R. L. Allan and Son, n.d.
2) Addison, IL: Bible Truth Publishers, 1900
3) Shanghai: Christian Book Room, 1918
4) Stirling, Scotland: n.p., n.d.
5) Hong Kong: Bible Light/Christian Book Room, 2000 [reprint of Shanghai edition?]
Only a Servant (Sluha, 1903)
trans. Charles Lukesh
1) Minneapolis: Osterhus, 192X, 1950
2) Crockett, KY: Rod and Staff, 1991
Sunshine Country: A Story of Czechoslovakia (V slnečnej krajine, 1909)
trans. W.M.S. (from the Spanish, which was a translation from the Slovak)
1) London: Pickering & Inglis, 1931, 1934, 1950 [by “Cristina Roy”]
2) Denver, CO: Wilson Foundation, 1950s
3) Crockett, KY: Rod and Staff, 1967, rev. ed. 1986, new ed. 2007 [by “Cristina Roy” or “Kristiny Royovej”]
4) Bromley, Kent/Midland Park, NJ: Send the Light Trust/Operation Mobilisation, 1980s [by “Cristina Roy”]
5) Fearn, Scotland: Christian Focus Publications, 2003
6) Addison, IL: Bible Truth Publishers, 2004
The Heiress (Moc svetla, 1909)
trans. Martha Tenjack
1) Westchester, IL: Good News Publishers, 1979
Kept by a Mighty Hand (V pevnej ruke, 1921)
trans. Charles Lukesh
1) Apollo, PA: Swauger Publishing Company, 1945
Three Comrades (Traja kamaráti, 1922)
trans. Charles Lukesh
1) New York: Loizeaux Bros., 1941
2) Addison, IL: Bible Truth Publishers, 1970