Language:
English
Year of publication:
2013
Titel der Quelle:
Journal of War & Culture Studies
Angaben zur Quelle:
6,2 (2013) 127-140
Keywords:
Rosnay, Tatiana de,
;
Paquet-Brenner, Gilles
;
Sarah's key (Motion picture)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in motion pictures
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Influence
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Abstract:
Examines Paquet-Brenner's film "Elle s'appelait Sarah" (2010), an adaptation of Tatiana de Rosnay's novel "Sarah's Key" (2007). At the center of the plot are efforts by American-French journalist Julia Jarmond to investigate the story of Sarah Starzynski, the only survivor of a Jewish family that perished following the great roundup in Paris in July 1942, and in whose apartment the family of Jarmond's husband settled after the deportation of the Starzynskis to Auschwitz. The investigation made by Jarmond is alternated in the novel and film with scenes of the roundup and the story of Sarah's survival. The plot's secondary line is Jarmond's quarrel with her husband over her pregnancy and their subsequent divorce: the husband demands an abortion, while Jarmond wants to preserve the baby's life. While praising the novel and the film for realism in their representation of the Holocaust to the 21st-century viewer, who has lost almost all connection with the World War II period, finds shortcomings in Rosnay's narrative strategies and storytelling choices. Besides the author's somewhat anti-French disposition (France stands for both forgetting of the past and abortion), she introduces a "vicarious witness" into the plot, thus erasing distinctions between historical fiction and testimony, memory and postmemory. Suggests that testimonial war narratives should be limited to those told by first-hand witnesses and their immediate descendants.
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