Family Secret, National Embarrassment

Title: Sarah's Key

Author:Tatiana de Rosnay

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1st edition (September 30, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312370849

 

I'm a sucker for historical fiction, and I'll blame/commend my dad for that. He was always interested in history and taught me to love it too. Like many other adolescents, I had my phase of reading through all the Holocaust books available for young adults - the ubiquitous Anne Frank, plus some fiction titles. I moved on to non-fiction adult titles, all in a quest to understand, like many others have asked, "How could it happen?"

 

Not long ago, I read and posted on "The Book Thief" which was clearly a fictional creation as the narrator was Death himself. In Sarah's Key, the narrator is a modern woman, Julia, trying to investigate a family secret and a French national embarrassment. Wrapped around the mystery is her disintegrating marriage to a French man and her re-emergence as an independent woman.  Spoiler alert - do not read if you don't want to know the plot.  There are some interesting surprises!

 

Julia, an American-born woman, inherits from her French husband's grandmother, an apartment in Paris. At the same time, as a journalist, Julia is assigned to report on a commemoration of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup.  As the Nazis occupied France, they coerced the local population and police into rounding up and deporting the Jewish adult population to the concentration camps.  However, the children were left behind in horrible conditions.  It is a part of French history that many wish to forget, as Julia is reminded by several people.

 

Flashing back in time, Sarah locks her brother into a hiding place in their apartment to keep him from the round up.  Not knowing the true intention, Sarah assumes that she will be back for him.  However, she and her parents are confined to an arena, and then separated. Her parents are shipped off and she is confined with the other children.  She convinces another child to escape and they are taken in by a sympathetic older farming couple.   However, her friend, being ill is both seen by and betrayed by a doctor, leaving Sarah with the older couple, desperate to return to Paris and free her brother.  Disguising her as a relative, the couple takes Sarah to the apartment, to find the decomposed body of her brother in the locked cupboard.  A new family occupies the apartment - Julia's husband's family.

 

Through Julia's investigation, she follows the trail of Sarah from Paris, to the US, and then to Italy.  Her husband's family both dread and are relieved to have the family secret in the open.  As Julia gets deeper into the story of Sarah, her marriage begins to dissolve.  But, Julia re-discovers her own personality and passions.

 

The constant shift of time and narrator at times was distracting.  Just as I began to visualize the story, it shifted to a new place and time.  At first I found Julia a bit whiny, but over time I began to understand how she had become who she was.  However,  my greatest sympathies, of course, were with Sarah, who had survived the Holocaust, but could never get past the guilt of that survival. 

I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious . . .

Title: The Book Thief

Author: Markus Zusak

Date: 2007

Pages: 576

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

ISBN: 978-0375842207

A book narrated by death – not a typical narrator. And death has a sense of humor and compassion for the book thief, Liesel who stole her first book at the grave-site of her brother. A handbook for grave diggers. When her mother sends her to a foster family, she meets a compatriot in her foster father, a painter and violinist. Her foster mother is rough and sharp tongued, but strong and smart. Liesel becomes frenemies with Rudy and is teased at school for being uneducated. With various traumas surfacing each night in her dreams, her foster father begins midnight reading lessons. Liesel learns the power of words and wielding word in WWII Germany as Hilter begins his campaign against Jewish people. Because of an old promise to her foster father, the family hides a Jewish man, Max, who also befriends Liesel and builds new stories with her. As Germany rises and falls, Liesel's childhood is filled with unique characters, the illicit pleasure of stealing forbidden books, and treading a fine line of secrecy and discovery. Being a book narrated by death, the body count is not unexpected but it is still difficult to comprehend. The author uses a very interesting tone and style throughout the book that at first was distracting but became comfortable over the first few chapters. It was originally intended as a young adult book, yet because of the movie released in 2013, the book has been taken up by adult reading groups.

Here is some background and discussion questions from One Book, One Chicago 2012

Other discussion questions from LitLovers

Hiding Secrets of the Heart

Title: Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret

Author: Steve Luxenberg
Date: 2010

Pages: 432

Publisher: Hyperion

ISBN: 978-1401310196

Family secrets have a way of surfacing, whether the secret keeper wishes it or not. For Steve Luxenberg, finding out that his ailing mother was not an only child began a quest to find out who the unmentioned Annie really was in life, and why her presence was hidden from family history by his mother, Beth. This true story follows Luxenberg's quest to uncover the secrets of Annie after the death of his mother. In the process, Luxenberg becomes the keeper of other family secrets and uncovering unexplored family tensions and stories.

As with many quests, Luxenberg's journey happens in bursts of activity with long months of inactivity. Researching the life history of someone unmentioned and deliberately hidden requires perseverance and patience, which is portrayed in detail throughout the book. However, when Luxenberg finally pieces together the story, he (and the reader) is still unclear who Annie really was and what Beth's motivation was to deny her existence.

Beth, born Bertha, was born into a work-class family in New York. Her sister, Annie, was born a few years later with an unformed foot and cognitive delays. When caring for Annie became nearly impossible, she was sent to a mental asylum in her teenage years in the 1940s. She spent her entire life in various facilities, at first being visited by her mother and aunt. However, Beth reinvented herself and her family story to deny the existence of Annie in order to present a marriageable facade. The only contact that Beth had with Annie was to bury her middle-aged sister in the 1970s. With only one slip to a hospital psychiatrist, Beth took her secret to the grave.

While investigating this family secret, Luxenburg interviews extended family members and people from Beth's old neighborhood. Each person provides a small snippets of the secret – some knowing nothing about Annie, and others sharing images and impressions of the family. However, Anna Oliwek, a Holocaust survivor and cousin to the family, had direct experience with Annie and Beth's inability to except her blight, which caused a family rifted that lasted until Beth's death. While interviewing Anna, Luxenberg learns Anna's secrets and how she survived Hilter's onslaught.

At the beginning of the book, all the plot points are revealed. Beth dies, Annie is a secret, and Luxenberg investigates. But, his journey leads through a century of major social and political change and an evolving understand of mental illness. Although he never finds a picture of Annie, nor does he get a real sense of who she was, Luxenburg's family provides a gravestone for Annie's final resting place, where in death she will not be unnamed.  It was a book that I regretted putting down and couldn't wait to get back to at the end of the day.