Description:
De Rosnay's U.S. debut fictionalizes the 1942 Paris roundups and deportations, in which thousands of Jewish families were arrested, held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver outside the city, then transported to Auschwitz. Forty-five-year-old Julia Jarmond, American by birth, moved to Paris when she was 20 and is married to the arrogant, unfaithful Bertrand Tézac, with whom she has an 11-year-old daughter. Julia writes for an American magazine and her editor assigns her to cover the 60th anniversary of the Vél' d'Hiv' roundups. Julia soon learns that the apartment she and Bertrand plan to move into was acquired by Bertrand's family when its Jewish occupants were dispossessed and deported 60 years before. She resolves to find out what happened to the former occupants: Wladyslaw and Rywka Starzynski, parents of 10-year-old Sarah and four-year-old Michel. The more Julia discovers—especially about Sarah, the only member of the Starzynski family to survive—the more she uncovers about Bertrand's family, about France and, finally, herself. Already translated into 15 languages, the novel is De Rosnay's 10th (but her first written in English, her first language). It beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's trials so riveting, her innocence so absorbing, that the book is hard to put down.
This book is really two stories in one. The first story is about a young Jewish girl (Sarah) in Paris whose family was killed during the WWII. It gives a fictional but very disturbing account of how Sarah and her family are rounded up, left for days to wonder and worry and then separated and shipped off individually to be killed in the gas chambers. This part of the book is horrifying and disturbing. I hated every page of it, because it upset me so much; but that was the author's intension, no doubt; and very well done. (So well done that I had to set the book aside for a few days to take a break, and read something completely different.)
The second storyline in the book is about a journalist who discovers Sarah's story 60 years later, and how she's affected. This part of the book doesn't hit home nearly as much. I could probably have taken or left it; but I suspect that the author used the journalist, her research and her reactions to deliver Sarah's story so that she could break it up and make it easier to take. Otherwise, I think the book would have been too upsetting for most to read.
I'm torn on this one. It was a well written book on a subject about which we should all be more aware. However, I can honestly say that I didn't like it. Not because of the writing style, or character representation: I didn't like it because I don't like to read about others' suffering. I don't know how anybody could not be horribly disturbed while reading this book. Job well done on that front by the author... I just think of books like this as more of an obligation than entertainment.
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