Sarah’s Key

by Tatiana de Rosnay (St. Martin’s Griffin 2007)

First I saw the movie based on this novel. I probably wouldn’t have gone to see it if I had known what it was about. I usually avoid holocaust books and movies; they are too upsetting. But I was glad I saw it, and so when the opportunity presented itself to read the book, I took it.  Knowing how it turned out certainly did not spoil the experience–I was immediately drawn into the twin stories of Sarah and Julia and finished the book in just a few days, hardly able to put it down.

For almost half of the novel, Sarah’s chapters alternate with Julia’s. Sarah is ten, living in Paris with her parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland, when the French police, in an overly enthusiastic response to Nazi orders to round up and deport Jewish adults, arrest thousands of toddlers and children as well, separate them from their parents, leave them without food and water for days in the Vélodrome d’Hiver in the middle of Paris, and eventually send them to their deaths in Auschwitz. Sarah and her parents are taken to the Vel’ d’Hiv’; her four-year-old brother Michel hides in a secret closet in their apartment to wait for Sarah to return, which of course she cannot do.  Sixty years later, Julia, an American woman married to a philandering Frenchman, is investigating the story of the roundup for the magazine she works for when she discover,s to her horror, that the apartment that she and her family are planning to move into had been occupied by one of the Jewish families arrested in the roundup–specifically, it turns out, by Sarah’s family. As Julia’s marriage falters, she becomes obsessed with finding Sarah, or at least, with finding out what happened to her, since she was apparently never deported with the thousands of other children who were with her in the Vel’ d’Hiv’.

At the halfway point, Sarah’s story ends with her return to Paris, where she learns with finality how her brother died; but Julia’s story continues on for another 140 pages, as she struggles to decide between her husband and her unborn child while continuing to search for Sarah.

A wonderful book.

The Laramie Project

by Moisés Kaufman

I don’t usually read plays; I prefer to see them performed on stage or even on TV. Maybe that is why I never read this when it was the University of Maryland First Year Book back in 2002-2003, and it has been sitting on my shelf ever since. I took it down after the public library snatched the book I was reading off my Nook when I couldn’t finish it in 14 days (Excuse me? The book had over 400 pages! I have a job! How could I possibly have finished it?).

The tragic story of the murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shephard is the centerpiece of this Teutonic Theater Project play, so I assumed I would be reading about the callousness and prejudice of the people of Laramie, whose interviews make up the play. I’ve been through Laramie, driving west to California on Route 80.  It is so alien for me–like a different country, maybe a different planet. But I was wrong. Most of the people who “speak” in the play were as appalled by the crime as I was. Several of them are also gay. Who thought there were so many gay students, professors, and citizens in Laramie WY? (I guess it’s like Jews: we are everywhere.) So I ended up feeling somewhat comforted by the idea that the two young men who beat Matt Shephard to the point of death and then left him to die, and who are paying for their crime in prison, were as much of an aberration in Laramie as they would be in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

I recommend it to English learners because it is quite short and the language is quite accessible.