June 19, 2008
‘Two families, linked by death, and a secret’
The Vel d’Hiv had been an indoor cycling track located near the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Built in the early part of the last century, it was used over the years for everything from six-day bicycle races to ice hockey, wrestling, boxing, roller-skating, circuses and concerts.
But it was for one event in particular that it will always be remembered: the July 16, 1942 raid in which French police — acting on instructions from the occupying Germans — began rounding up approximately 13,000 Jews from their homes in Paris and the nearby region. The police sent many of the adults to the concentration camp located in Drancy, north of Paris. The others, many of them parents with children, were sent to the Vel d’Hiv where they stayed for six dreadful days. According to some accounts, as many as 7,500 people were held there with no lavatories, no place to sleep, unbearable heat, very little water and only a smattering of food. The conditions drove some to suicide. Most of those who lived through the nightmare were sent to French concentration camps before making their final destination to Auschwitz.
It is against the backdrop of this terrible event in French history that Tatiana de Rosnay set her terrific new novel, Sarah’s Key.
The book is a carefully woven tale tracking the lives of two families that share a tragic piece of history involving the Vel d’Hiv roundup. The first, the Starzynski family, was Jewish and lived in Paris before they were taken away in the roundup. The second family, the Tézac’s, was not Jewish and had been relatively unaffected by the events of the war. de Rosnay goes back in time to tell the story of the Jewish family. She returns to the present to tell the story of the Tézac’s. Much of the action follows the Boston-born wife of one of Tézac’s, Julia Jarmond. Like de Rosnay, Jarmond works as a journalist in Paris and she becomes absorbed in the history of the roundup. She seems especially concerned by French complicity in the event.
What I’ve written above is really just the set-up for the novel. If you’re expecting a book about the Vel d’Hiv roundup, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that de Rosnay cleverly uses the history of the event as a vehicle to tell a larger tale. I’m actually having trouble describing the plot without giving away any of the book’s secrets. I want you to enjoy them as much as I did.
The only thing about the novel I’d go back and change would be de Rosnay’s attempts to describe the younger characters’ thoughts. It’s extremely difficult to get inside the mind of a 10-year-old child and portray that in a book without having the young person come across as naive in a cliché sort of way. That’s the only area where I’d say de Rosnay stumbled.
On the other hand, Julia Jarmond is one of the most strongly written characters I’ve come across in a while. Her curiosity, her motivations and her fascination with the Vel d’Hiv pulled me along for the duration of the book.
In an interview published in the back of my review copy, de Rosnay said that while she shares the same age and occupation as Jarmond, the character is not autobiographical. de Rosnay based Jarmond on some of her American friends living in Paris.
She also said she learned about the Vel d’Hiv roundup while “browsing on the Internet about places in Paris where dark deeds had happened.” Here’s more from the interview:
Questioner: How much did you know about what happened before you started writing?
de Rosnay: I realized I didn’t know much about what exactly happened that day. I was not taught about this event at school, during the ’70s. And it still seemed to be shrouded by some kind of taboo. So I started reading and researching.
Questioner: And what did you learn? How did it make you feel?
de Rosnay: As I progressed through my research, I was moved, appalled by what I discovered concerning the Vel d’Hiv roundup, especially about what happened to those 4,000 Jewish children, and I knew I had to write about it. I needed to write about it. But I also knew it could not be a historical novel, it had to have a more contemporary feel to it. And that’s how I imagined Julia’s story taking place today, linking to Sarah’s, back in the ’40s.
If by that last comment she meant to say that she wanted to make the history of the Vel d’Hiv roundup more relevant to today’s audiences by connecting it to a modern-day story, I think she succeeded. Indeed, judging from the fact that the book has already been translated into 15 languages, it’s probably been more successful than de Rosnay ever imagined.
Sarah’s Key is published by St. Martin’s Press (304 pages).
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I purchased this book two days ago, and it is sitting on my stack of “to reads”. This review might make me push the book up the stack, a bit.
Your review is well done, and it motivates one to read the novel.
Why not stop by and read my interview with Tatiana de Rosnay!
http://jewwishes.wordpress.com/2008/09/19/jew-wishes-on/