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Monday, 10 March 2008 |
Sarah’s Key
By Tatiana de Rosnay
John Murray, 2008: 294 p. paperback
Village Voice €11, Your French News Price €10
Even before President Sarkozy’s
controversial proposal to have each CM2-
level school child ‘adopt’ the memory of a
Jewish boy or girl deported during World War
II, the fate of France’s 11,400 Jewish children
who were deported, never to return, has
loomed larger in the national consciousness
these last couple of years than ever before.
But chilling as this figure is, it only
distances us from the facts as they were
actually lived. It takes displays of photographs
and personal documents, like the one held at
the Paris Mairie last year, and books, like
Hélène Berr’s recently published best-selling
wartime journal (to be issued in English in
September), to bring the reality home. Now,
thanks to the Franco-British writer and
journalist Tatiana de Rosnay, Englishspeaking
readers can relive – the word is not
too strong – the full horror behind the figures.
Issued in English in June 2007, only
weeks after first appearing in French – the
author is bilingual and evidently wrote both
versions – her ninth novel, ‘Sarah’s Key,’ tells
the story of two intersecting destinies. In
short, knife-sharp chapters, the reader follows
in the footsteps of Sarah Starzynski, a tenyear-
old Jewish girl who is arrested with her
parents in the infamous “Vel’ d’Hiv’” roundup
of July 1942. Alternating with these are
sections that unfold the life of Julia Jarmon, a
present-day American journalist in Paris on an
assignment to write about the 60th anniversary
of the rafle in 2002. The link between their
two lives is an apartment in Paris belonging to
the journalist’s in-laws and formerly occupied
by Sarah and her family.
The novel revolves around a secret so
horrific that when Julia’s research brings it to
light six decades after the events she is
investigating, they destroy both her marriage
and that of Sarah’s American son: before
being taken away by Petainist policemen
Sarah locked her four-year old brother Michel
in a hidden closet in their apartment. After
being separated from her parents at a holding
camp near Orleans, she managed to escape
and, after agonizing delays, made her way
back to Paris – only to arrive too late to save
him.
Her fear, anguish and shock are utterly
persuasive and compelling. One would have to
be stonehearted not to quail under them. In the
second half of the novel they are relayed and
brought up to the present by Julia’s obsessive,
intensely emotional delving into the past. It is
almost too much. In the last chapters of the
book the reader may well pause and wonder
why Julia’s life, and that of the baby she is
carrying, have insensibly been made to loom
as large as little Sarah’s fate. Though morally
questionable –how can the crisis of conscience
of a fictional character investigating the past
possibly be weighed in the same scales as the
horror of the Holocaust? – this is an effective
literary device and it makes what happened in
1942 so immediate and vivid that it becomes
impossible to sweep it into a dark pocket of
history that most of us would prefer not to
look at too closely.
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