Interview with Tatiana de Rosnay, Author of Sarah’s Key

Not long ago I reviewed Sarah’s Key, a novel set in France during two time periods—World War II and today. I had the opportunity to connect by email with the author of Sarah’s Key, Tatiana de Rosnay, and ask her a few questions about her background, about her book, and what she’s working on now. Here’s the book review, followed by the interview:

Sarah's Key cover imageSet in both 1942 and modern times, Sarah’s Key is a mystery as well as a heartbreaking look at the round up and deportation of Jewish families from Paris to Auschwitz in what became known as the Vel d’Hiv for the place the families gathered—the Vélodrome d’Hiver, or winter velodrome.

Ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski is sleeping when the Paris police bang on her apartment door.  Her family had heard of Jews being rounded up, but only the men. So Sarah’s father was hidden in the basement, thinking his family was safe. But the police came for everyone this night. Sarah’s four-year-old brother, Michel, stubbornly refused to go and insisted on hiding in a secret cupboard before the police saw him. Sarah locked Michel in and promised to come back when she returned.

Sixty years later, Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in Paris, investigates the story of the Vel d’Hiv and uncovers Sarah’s story when she finds out that her husband’s family moved into Sarah’s apartment after her family left. She is determined to find what happened to Sarah and Michel, in the process uncovering family secrets that some think would be best to leave buried.

Gripping and emotional, this fast-paced book brings to life Paris in the 1940s and in modern times. It takes a frank look at a nation and a people who for so long would not come to grips with its complicity in sending its own citizens to die in Nazi concentration camps. It also follows Julia as she delves deeper into the story while confronting conflicts of her own with her husband and his family. I recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with girls aged 14 and up.

Interview with Tatiana de Rosnay

Tatiana De Rosnay photo

Tatiana De Rosnay

 

How did you decide to become a writer?

TR: I was 11 years old and had just read Anne Frank’s diary, was terribly moved by it, and decided to start my own diary. Then I read The Young Visitors by Daisy Ashford, who had published her first book at nine years old. I found it most inspiring, so I wrote a 90-paged novel for my mother’s birthday on a school note book. It was called “A girl named Carrie,” the story of a poor little rich girl in 19th century London. My mother was thankfully very enthusiastic. And so I decided to pursue the experience, and every year, I wrote a novel for my family and kept writing my diary. But I didn’t seek publication until my late twenties.

Can you tell us a little about your background and where you live?

TR: My father is French, of Russian descent and my mother is British. I was born in France, and raised in the USA where my father taught at MIT in Boston as a scientist. I then went to high school in Paris, and then on to college in England. I now live in Paris with my husband and children.

There are many stories about the Holocaust. What makes Sarah’s Key different?

TR: Maybe the fact that there are two voices in the book, a voice from the past and a voice from the present is what makes it different.

When did you become familiar with the round up of Jews in Paris, referred to as the Vel d’Hiv?

TR: Like most French school children of my generation, I was not taught about this event at school, during the 70’s. I heard about it for the first time through President Chirac’s speech in 1995. He was the first French president to publicly acknowledge the role of the French police during the Vel d’Hiv round-up.

What made you want to write about it?

TR: I was appalled by what I discovered concerning the 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—I am not a historian—it had to have a more contemporary feel to it. And that’s how I imagined Julia’s story taking place today, linked to Sarah’s, back in the 40’s.

What other kind of research did you conduct before writing your story?

TR: Writing Sarah’s Key took me to Drancy and Beaune La Rolande, places around Paris which have a dreaded past that cannot be forgotten despite time going by. My visits there were poignant and memorable. I read everything I could concerning the round-up and I met Vel d’Hiv survivors, other unforgettable moments.

How long did it take you to write Sarah’s Key?

TR: It took me two years, including my research.

Why did you decide to tell this story in two eras-Paris during World War II and in modern times?

TR: The idea for the book came to me that way: linking two stories. Sarah’s story, seen through the eyes of a little Parisian girl forced to wear a yellow star and whose life dramatically changed in July 1942. And then Julia’s story, today, an American married to a French man. Because she is commissioned by her magazine to write about the Vel d’Hiv’s anniversary, she plunges into the horror of July ’42. That way, through Julia’s modern story, I could reveal the taboos and scars that the Vel d’Hiv has left in France, sixty years later.

I understand people affected by the Holocaust have been touched by your book. Would you please share a story or two about that?

TR: I met  several Vel d’Hiv survivors who had read my book. They are in their 70s and 80s, but when I look at them, I see the children they used to be. Suzy C. is my neighbor, she lives directly above me. She moved in a couple of years ago, just as I was finishing the book. She is in her 80’s, a wonderful, chirpy, small, round woman, with bright blue eyes. Her husband Maurice is also the most fantastic old gentleman. One day, just before Sarah’s Key was due to be published in France, I meet Suzy in a shop on our street and we have a little chat. She asks me what my new book is about, and I tell her. All of a sudden, her face goes very pale. She stops smiling. She puts a hand on my arm. We are in a noisy shop, but it seems to have become very silent. She says “Tatiana, on July 16th 1942 I was your daughter’s age. The French police came to our home at dawn. They took our mother but they wouldn’t take me or my sister. We begged to be taken with mother; we had no idea where they were going, what was going to happen. But they wouldn’t hear of it. They shoved us away and ordered us to take off our stars. We didn’t know it yet, but that day, they saved our lives. Our mother never came back and after the war, we found out she had been exterminated at Auschwitz.” Later on, Suzy read my book. I was nervous about how she was going to react. But when I knocked on her door, she opened and just took me into her arms. Tears were running down her face. “Tatiana, thank you for writing this book. France needs to remember. The youngest generations need to know.”

You have a teenaged daughter. How did you talk to her about Sarah’s Key?

TR: When I started to write Sarah’s Key, my daughter was 11 years old, so technically she wasn’t a teenager yet! I told her and my son, who is two years older than she, all about this book; they were very much involved in its writing process. I took them to Beaune la Rolande, explained all I knew about the round-up. I guess both of them grew up with this book. This book is part of their lives !

Can you share with us what you’re working on now?

TR: I have just finished Boomerang, which will be published in France in April 2009. Not quite sure yet about the US publication date! It’s a love story with a dark twist. My hero is a 40-year-old man, Antoine, who will have to deal with a heavy family secret coming back like a boomerang. But in the middle of confusion and pain, he will fall in love. I’ve never written about love before, it was quite a wonderful experience!

Right now, I am now researching my new book, which takes place in 19th century Paris…

What else would you like readers of Mother Daughter Book Club.com to know?

TR: Just how happy I am to have been picked by this book club as I had heard about it during my US tour !  What’s more, if you want to contact me about Sarah’s Key, and if you would like me to call in to your book club and answer a few questions, please contact me on my brand new website at the book-club page :

http://www.tatianaderosnay.com/

I’d be very happy to hear from you and your book club!

All best from France,
Tatiana de Rosnay

Book Review: The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein

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The Painter from Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein is a historical fiction novel based on the life of Pan Yuliang, a Chinese artist born in 1899.

Sold into a brothel by her opium-addicted uncle when she’s 14, Yuliang learns to cope with the help of her friend and top girl at the house, Jinling. Then Jinling’s violent death emphasizes that life in a brothel is always tenuous and under someone else’s control. When a local official, Pan Zanhua, becomes attracted to her for her mind and not her body, he buys her freedom from the house and makes her his second wife, or concubine. But the match is clearly one of love, and Zanhua wants Yuliang to develop her mind by learning to read.

Soon Yuliang discovers another passion: painting. Defying convention of the times, she is admitted to the local art school, which has created scandal by bringing in nude models to paint. Yuliang wins a scholarship that takes her first to France, then to Rome to study western painting, and she returns home with new ideas about art that don’t sit well with many in Chinese society at the time.

Epstein tells Yuliang’s tale in this epic of a book about a woman who learns to gain control over her own fate. The Painter of Shanghai is filled with rich details of China from the early days of the 20th century into the very beginnings of the rise of communism, revealing the country’s ambivalence between moving into a modern world or cleaving to the old ways. Yuliang is a strong woman who never compromises what she believes to be right, even at great cost to herself and her husband. I recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with girls aged 16 and up. Readers should be aware of detailed scenes of life in a brothel and other sexual encounters.

Book Review: The Pages In Between by Erin Einhorn

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In The Pages In Between, Erin Einhorn has written a memoir about what she finds when she searches for the Polish family that sheltered her Jewish mother during World War II.

When she was growing up in Detroit, Einhorn didn’t know much about her mother’s past until she wrote a paper on the topic when she was in high school. Her mother, Irena, offered only the basics: Born in the early 1940s, Irena’s mother died during the war, while her father, Beresh, survived. Before he was taken away to a concentration camp, Beresh offered a local woman money and his home to live in if she would keep Irena safe. After the war, Beresh returns and makes his way with his daughter and new wife first to Sweden then to the U.S., where he made a new life.

When Erin, Irena’s daughter, became a journalist, her reporter’s mind refused to let go of her mother’s story, and she wanted to learn more. Taking a sabbatical from her job, she moved to Poland to see if she could find her mother’s rescuers. In the story of her quest, Einhorn mixes historical fact with current cultural observations with details of her journey to create a fascinating account that is very personal, yet universal in many ways as well.

The story will touch a chord with anyone who has ever wondered about the people who came before them: where did they live, what motivated them, how were their lives different from ours? There’s genealogical research and observations about Jews in Poland. Einhorn takes a look at historical attitudes of Poles to Jews and how lingering feelings of distrust resulting from the Holocaust continue to this day. But she also looks at how this generation of young Poles is different from the one that came before, and she candidly assesses the differences.

I think The Pages in Between is not just the story of one woman’s search for her mother’s history. It taps into the yearning that many of us feel about understanding our mothers and ourselves by  looking at the events that helped shape us into who we are. I recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with daughters in 10th grade and older.

Book Review: Piper Reed, The Great Gypsy by Kimberly Willis Holt

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Every now and then I get to take a break from some of my heavier reading and get a reminder of how much fun it can be to read something geared to early readers. Piper Reed, The Great Gypsy by Kimberly Willis Holt is one of those books.

I’ve been of fan of Holt’s since reading My Louisiana Sky several years ago. Being from Louisiana originally, I was particularly taken with a book set there that didn’t involve negative clichés about the state or its people one often sees in works set in Louisiana. And I liked the story of a pre-teen girl who must choose between living a glamorous like with her sophisticated aunt or staying to live with her mentally challenged parents.

Piper Reed has appeal for younger readers in large part, because Holt has a very down-to-earth voice that imparts lessons to younger readers without being preachy. Readers get a glimpse of what life is like for the family of a military man when he is on assignment for long periods of time and they remain on the base. But they also get to know and love Piper, a middle sister who does her best to make friends wherever her family is stationed.

The book also makes use of its setting in Pensacola, Florida, to help readers learn something of the area. Piper and her family take short vacations to the beach and to New Orleans, with descriptions of each place that may help to spark interest in learning more about them. It all ties into a navy family’s exploration of a new area they move into and adapt to.

Younger readers in particular will be able to identify with Piper’s desire to win the prize at the pet show she puts on and the conflicts that arise with her sisters. Now, I’m inspired to go back and read the first book in this series, Piper Reed, Navy Brat.

Book Review: The Mother Daughter Cookbook by Lynette Rohrer Shirk

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My daughters are ecstatic because school got called for another snow day here in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. They’ve been off all week, and now they have two more weeks off to look forward to. I, on the other hand, am going a little stir crazy. I haven’t been out of my neighborhood since Sunday, since we have one four-wheel drive car that will take us around and my husband is using it to go to work.

Today I think I’ll have to get out and walk. There’s a Starbucks Coffee about a 1/2 hour walk away, and a nice hot cocoa sounds like a good reward at the end of it. Maybe all three of us can venture out together.

Then I’d like to come back home and bake something from The Mother Daughter Cookbook. I recently got this book to review, and this will be the first recipe I try from it. I’ve got my mind set on making Gingerbread Cream Cheese Cupcakes. There’s a substitution for chocolate frosting listed with the recipe, and I may just have to frost half the cupcakes with that. Yum!

The Mother Daughter Cookbook looks like a great addition to any mom’s cookbook shelf. The author, Lynette Rohrer Shirk, has put together an interesting collection of recipes and broken them down into tasks for the mom and tasks for the daughter. In my case, my daughters are older and they can do any of the tasks, but I think they’ll like taking on the daughter’s side of the recipe anyway.

The recipes are also punctuated with quotes and cooking tidbits that make for interesting reading as well. There are a lot of recipes I’m looking forward to trying in this cookbook. And I think it would make a good gift for any mother and daughter team. You could also use this at a mother-daughter book club meeting, and have the girls work their part of the recipe while the moms collaborate with theirs. What fun!

I’ll keep you posted when we get to taste the cupcakes.

Book review: Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss

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I’ve loved every Molly Gloss book I’ve read, and Hearts of Horses proved no exception.  Here’s my review:

It’s 1917 in rural Oregon, and many of the local men are away in France fighting. Into this scene rides Martha Lessen, a girl of 19 who says she can break horses to saddle. With fewer men around to perform the same job, Martha finds success first by hiring on at the Bliss ranch, then by expanding out to other ranches in the county. Eventually setting up a circuit training, where she rides horses from one corral to the next rotating where a horse spends the night, Martha works hard to gain the respect of the horses and the people in the area.

The tale unfolds slowly, giving the reader time to get to know the characters the way Martha gets to know them as well as her horses, one incident at a time. And the story is firmly rooted in it’s time period. There’s anti-German sentiment directed against ranchers of German descent, even though they were born in this country. There’s sacrifice for the war effort, and there’s loss from the war too. The cast of characters are a mix of good and bad, which you would expect to find in just about any place you settle for a while. As Martha’s confidence in her abilities grow, so do her connections to people in the county.

As in her other books, The Jump Off Creek and Wild Life, Gloss brings the American west in its first decades of settlement to life. Her storytelling is rich in details, and she knows what motivates and moves her characters. Her female characters are strong, often bucking expectations for women of their time while remaining true to themselves. I recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with girls in 8th grade and up.

Book Review: Much Ado About Anne by Heather Vogel Frederick

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Heather Vogel Frederick continues her delightful mother-daughter book club series with Much Ado About Anne. This time the book club is reading the Anne of Green Gables series, and the girls are totally committed to their book club and to each other when the new reading year starts for their group. There are new challenges—can the moms really have invited Calliope and Becca Chadwick into their book club without asking the girls?—and new events arise that test their friendship in ways they don’t expect. But Frederick does a great job of continuing the saga and bringing us even more into the lives of these book club members that readers grew to know and love in her first book in the series, The Mother-Daughter Book Club.

The historic town of Concord, Mass., where Frederick herself group up, is once again a prominent feature in the story. So is Lucy Maud Montgomery, who wrote the Anne of Green Gables books. Frederick weaves facts about the classical author into the story seamlessly and helps readers learn about another classic series in the process.

You’ll worry with Jess about losing her family’s historic farm, cheer for Emma as she grows more confident, worry for Cassie as she struggles to accept her mom’s new boyfriend, and stress right along with Megan as she crunches to design clothes for her fashion show. And they all experience a few blips in their friendship in ways that will ring true for girls in upper elementary and middle school.

Much Ado About Anne will most certainly satisfy readers of the series while leaving them happily anticipating the next book up.

Book Review: Love, Meg by C. Leigh Purtill

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Meg believes she knows everything about her life. Her parents are dead and her older sister, Lucy, has cared for her ever since she was a baby. They travel from town to town in California, following Lucy’s jobs and boyfriends. Meg has learned to be self-sufficient since she was very young, because Lucy is overwhelmed providing for the two of them on her own.

For years she has turned to Jennifer Aniston—the actress from friends—for emotional support, writing her letters detailing the difficulties she faces in school and at home. Jen has always written back with great advice and sometimes even gifts to help Meg through rough situations. When Meg starts another new school to go with a new apartment that follows Lucy’s new boyfriend, she thinks her life will continue to follow this pattern for years to come.

Then a man shows up at the apartment Meg shares with Lucy claiming to be her uncle from New York. He talks about a family back east that she knows nothing about, and tries to convince Lucy to go there. Suddenly, everything Meg thinks she knows about her life changes, and when Lucy refuses to reconnect with her family, Meg sets off without her. Moving to New York becomes a journey of self-discovery as well as a way to get to know the family she never had.

What she finds is not what she expects, but she discovers a lot about herself and the true meaning of family along the way.

Love, Meg by C. Leigh Purtill looks at what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a grandmother, and all the ways that family can support us as well as tear us down. I recommend it for mother-daughter book clubs with girls 12 and older.

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