THE HOLOCAUST IN TATIANA DE ROSNAY’S SARAH’S KEY (2007)

Abstract

The article offers an analysis of the Holocaust theme in the novel by a contemporary French writer Tatiana de Rosnay, whose writings incorporate patterns of mass literature as related to relevant concepts of modern culture. The novel Sarah’s Key (2007), the first literary text in English later translated in French, reveals a dark episode in the life of French society within the Nazi occupation in 1940-s, namely one of the biggest crimes committed by Nazis against Jewish people — the raid of Vel’ d’Iv (July 1942) that was witnessed and partially supported by a number of population in Paris. The paper provides an analysis of the events described in the novel as a significant sample of writings on Holocaust in the corpus of the modern French literature in the lights of trauma studies and the concept of transgenerational memory and based on historical approach, as well as comparative and narrative methodology. In particular, the circumstances and consequences of the raid are viewed from historical and cultural aspects, the comparative aspect is incorporated through the analysis of the concept of memory in the novel by de Rosnay and in Patrick Modiano’s writings, whereas fondamental metaphors and symbols in the novel are classified and interpreted in their relation to the theory of ‘lieux de mémoire’ by Pierre Nora. Such a complex approach in the research is to reveal several distinct interpretative levels of the Holocaust theme in the novel; it also helps to reinforce the writer’s dialogue with her predecessors and contemporaries in modern European literature against the background of the current war in Ukraine.