I had been warned that I would need a box of kleenex and a prescription for Prozac to accompany this book; happily (I suppose), that was not the case.
Don't get me wrong, Tatiana De Rosnay's Sarah's Key held my interest and I certainly learned something about the Vel' d' Hiv roundup that happened in France in 1942. During this roundup, also called "Operation Spring Breeze" the French Police (via Nazi persuasion) rounded up men, women, and many French born children and locked them in an events center in Paris under deplorable conditions before shipping them to interment camps in France and, eventually, to Auschwitz. I appreciated this book for the history and the compelling premise of the story (young girl locks her brother in a cupboard thinking he will be safe from the Nazis and then must make her way back to him), but that's about it.
De Rosnay will never be blamed for an overuse of adjectives or too much introspection. I'm afraid her Freshman Composition Professor forget to install the "show, don't tell" maxim in her. Her writing is very simple. I finished all 293 pages in about five hours and even though the story was tragic, I honestly didn't feel like I knew the characters enough (or liked some of them enough) to cry into my pillow all night long.
Julia Jarmond, the journalist who becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Sarah, was hard to connect with. She seemed cold and distant to me. Her husband was a complete imbecile and the reader is supposed to believe that Julia has put up with fifteen years of his caustic cruelty and an open affair with another women because he is good in bed (presumably, because he is French and French men are supposedly so sexy that even if they cheat on their wives and treat them with no respect they are still considered a great catch). Right.
Like most Holocaust Fiction, the echo of "we must never forget" is felt throughout. However, the social/philosophical implications were too black and white for me. Everyone who wants to forget is bad and everyone who wants to remember is the bearer of light and goodness. However, because of what happens to some of the characters, De Rosnay seems to undermine her whole remembering = good/forgetting = bad binary and it left me with this question: if remembering means you are going to wallow in misery and forgetting means you can move on with your life and be happy, than isn't it better to try and forget?
No, no - I'm not saying we shouldn't read, teach, and learn about the Holocaust, but I think De Rosnay handled the issue in a very elementary way.
I wonder what she would say about the Israeli Orchestra's recent decision to play Wagner (a notorious anti-Semite and Hitler's favorite composer) despite a ban on it. Many people have said its an abomination to the memory of those who suffered, but the Orchestra Chief Executive argues that "the performance shows the world the Nazis failed in their attempt to exterminate the Jews" and he sees it as a "victory concert." Personally, I think there is something hauntingly (perhaps, ironically?) victorious about it. I doubt if De Rosnay would agree.
I really think Sarah's Key will make a better movie than a book, and if this trailer is any indication, it's much more likely to make me cry.
