IRB: Sarah's Key Post #3

"There was no other name my daughter could have had. She was Sarah. My Sarah. An echo to the other one, to the other Sarah, to the little girl with the yellow star who had changed my life" (de Rosnay 293).

Throughout much of the book, the story follows the life of Julia Jarmond as she researches a round-up of Jewish children in France during the Holocaust. After investigating and digging through old documents, she discovers that the apartment her grandmother-in-law lived in was formerly owned by a Jewish family who was deported during the round-up and later sent to die in concentration camps. She sees a photograph of the family and is especially moved to see a little girl in the photo, whom she is told is Sarah Starzinsky. After confronting her in-laws, she discovers that Sarah had connections to the family and that a horrible accident occurred at the apartment involving Sarah's key and her little brother, who never left. She feels compelled to find Sarah and traces her descendants to America and Italy. During this discovery, she realizes the failures of her marriage as her French husband, Bertrand, seems to ignore the past, and this supposedly alters her life. Thus, as the quote illustrates, when Jarmond gives birth to her daughter, she decides to name her Sarah after the little Jewish girl.

IRB: Sarah's Key Post #2

I just finished reading Sarah's Key yesterday, and I was pretty disappointed with how the story unfolded. I originally chose this book because I thought it would focus on a ten-year-old Jewish girl and her family's experience in Vichy France, as described on the back-cover summary and reviews. The cover of the book -- which features two young children running towards a beautiful house -- seems to indicate that this would be the central plot of the story line. However, disappointingly, the novel was predominantly told from the point of view of Julia Jarmond, an annoying American journalist in present-day as she becomes obsessed with finding a particular Jewish family who lived in her husband's grandmother's former apartment in Paris. The first chapter was interesting, told from the point of view of Sarah, the Jewish girl. However, towards the end of the book, it completely shifts to Julia's narration. A lot of the times, especially from Julia's rambling, I felt like the writing was stilted and ineffective. The cover was beautiful, the title was intriguing, and the idea was captivating, but writing was at best mediocre and the author's fictional characters were unpleasant and un-likable. The majority of the book was spent on Julia complaining about her French husband and almost every person she meets in the book is divorced. I expected the book to be more about the Holocaust in France, and not the wayward life of a woman who complains incessantly about her marriage.

Overall lesson: really don't judge a book by its cover.

Page: 293/293

IRB: Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay

Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay is told from two different viewpoints -- a third-person perspective from 1942 France during World War II, and a first-person narrative in present-day. The first-person account is told by an American journalist living in Paris, trying to research a round-up that took place during the Vichy regime in July 1942. The chapters alternate between the two perspectives, which I found most interesting so far, as they slowly tie together. Another interesting thing I read about so far is that much of the French seemed to be ignorant of how it was the French police who rounded up French children and sent them to concentration camps, not just the Gestapo or Nazis.

Page #: 108