Sarah's Key: A Novel

I thought I knew pretty much about WW2 being that my husband and I both have a passion for learning about this time in history. I was shocked learning about the roundup in France. Shocking not only that it was the French police carrying out orders from the Nazi regime but that they took it even further and rounded up many more children than what was ordered from above. I cannot even write about this story from an unemotional standpoint because of the true events it explores and because it is all so horrific.To point out a few literary standouts, the first I noticed was the parallel between Sarah's and Julia's personality. They both were being discriminated against. Sarah because she was a Jew and Julia because she was an American. Sarah was alway's asking what is wrong with being a Jew? Why were Jews treated so differently? Could you spot a Jew by their looks? Where they really that different? Julia was constantly the butt of her husband's "American" jokes. People made quick judgements of her because she was an American. Her French friends spoke to her in English even though she had lived in France for most of her life. People made comments to her saying "You must be an American" in a derogitory tone. However Sarah was much braver than Julia. Sarah hated that her mother was so afraid the first night the French police came. She wanted her mother to stand up and be strong. Sarah carried that strong personality with her throughout the book, which helped in many ways. But in the end, it was too hard for Sarah to be brave. Julia on the other hand doesn't stand tall and defend herself when she is the butt of the American jokes. She holds it all inside until she comes to a breaking point and has to decide who she really is.The author also spends quite a bit of time describing her French characters using stereotypical information about the French. Hold everything in, keep it together, the coldness of the culture, etc... These stereotypes I think are used to help with the story that the French didn't want to unbury the past. They didn't want to remember. These characterizations added to the absolute horror that these people could forget that day in history or even worse that they just didn't want to talk about it or admit it was their police force.I pretty much read this book straight through. I was so caught up in Julia's search that I just couldn't put the book down. This is probably one of the best books I have read all year. It taught me things I never even knew about, it gave me a several different perspectives of one period in time, and the writing was beautiful. I know I will Remember and Never Forget Sarah's Key.

In her novel, "Sarah's Key," Tatiana de Rosnay works to keep the atrocity of the Holocaust alive, known and unforgotten by ensuring that the modern reader fully understands the long-term effect of the Velodrome D'Hiver roundup of Jewish citizens that occurred in Paris in the summer of 1942. With knowledge comes regret and perhaps the ability to ascertain that such an event never happens again in the history of humanity. While the novel successfully reminds its readers that the past does not always marry well with the present--the sadness of old ghosts permeates and weakens pillars of hope and the right to happiness--main character Julia's personal quagmire--her unexpected pregnancy, her husband's failure to age gracefully and her anger with regard to what she perceives as the ambivalence of the French people as a whole--trivializes the impact of Sarah's ultimate decision to let the past win with an improbable ending that seems more an afterthought than an actual foregone conclusion.In order to underline the effect of the past on the present, the story is told from alternating perspectives that are relayed along with their 2002 impact as they are discovered. De Rosnay presents the events as they happen to ten-year-old Sarah Starvinsky who with her mother and father are forced by the French police to deport to an internment camp with thousands of other Jewish/French citizens. While researching a story commemorating the infamous events associated with the Vel D'Hiv sixty years later, journalist Julia Jarmond suspects that the family apartment which she, her husband and daughter are about to renovate and inhabit was acquired by her in-laws during that fateful summer of 1942. Bells of alarm trigger Julia's subsequent investigation of the property and its former denizens and what she uncovers disturbs not only her family's fragile equilibrium but shakes her faith in society's negligence in allowing such an event to occur and still call itself humane.Clever and precocious ten-year-old Sarah locks her younger brother in a hidden closet in their Marais apartment in order to hide him from the gendarmes when they arrive to take her family away. Although she physically survives a horrendous ordeal that will forever etch pictures of unspeakable sadness upon her mind, she must then live with the consequences of not only her actions, but those of a frightened world spinning out of control--a world where, in her eyes, safety no longer exists. De Rosnay drives home the point that the impact of this event on Sarah's ensuing short life symbolizes the death of the integrity of rational egalitarian society, where nothing can be counted on to go right--that personal gain and collaboration with humanity's enemy will come first if such atrocities are allowed to be forgotten without accountability. As a Holocaust story worthy of remembrance, De Rosnay's story hits its mark with a bleak reality that filters into the present day with all its uncomfortable implications as the story of the young girl and the journalist converges into one.However, even though Sarah's tale draws to its fizzling conclusion through Julia's intrepid efforts, De Rosnay muddies her primary message with too much sentimentality and coincidence with regard to Julia and her self-identity issues. Presented as an American in Paris--she has lived in Paris as a journalist, wife and mother for over ten years and yet she is still an outsider--Julia struggles with Bertrand, a husband she does not trust, her un-French viewpoint that clearly labels her as an American and her own feelings of failure with regard to not being able to conceive another child. When she discovers she is pregnant, her initial confusion gives way to joy until she realizes that her husband is happy with his life as it is--without an additional child. As she experiences a sense of disillusionment for all she has come to rely upon, Julia makes some hard decisions with regard to her future and must "come of age" in terms of who she really is. After discovering so many disturbing events that relate in a rather secondhand way to her extended family, it seems reasonable that Julia will indeed feel the effects of post traumatic stress in some degree. However, De Rosnay almost belittles the sadness of having her characters "move on" by throwing in the unsuspecting William as a romantic interest at the end of the novel. The two are drawn together by their knowledge and their participation in the denouement of Sarah's story. However, their entanglement seems contrived, unnecessary and uncomfortable in light of the more important "don't forget" Holocaust message.Technically, the book works well from the perspective of its alternating voices. Sarah's story is told in a third person narrative that strongly suggests the pain of a young child who separated from her beloved parents can only think of the devastating wrong she imposed upon her small brother. Julia's more contemporary first person account underlines the "sins of the father" theme of history penetrating modern life with its lessons in passivity and apathy. I listened to the unabridged audio presentation; the reader adequately captures the emotion and abject melancholy of the piece while still maintaining the listeners attention.Bottom line? "Sarah's Key" by Tatiana De Rosnay is a worthwhile Holocaust remembrance piece set in the France of 1942 and 2002. A young girl who may have escaped the death camps cannot move past the sorrow of an event for which she takes full responsibility. In 2002, a forty-year-old journalist researching the 1942 Vel D'Hiv roundup of Jews by the French authorities discovers a family connection that spirals her married life to an unhappy conclusion. As the mystery of Sarah's key is solved within the first two thirds of the novel, the technical addition of Sarah's voice is abandoned, replaced only by romantic contrivances by De Rosnay that attempt to pull the threads of the story together to create a happy ending. Recommended with reserve because of the rather hurried and flat conculsion.Diana Faillace Von Behren"reneofc"