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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does the narrator say about the awareness of the history Julia goes looking for?

2. Who calls Julia to say that Mr. DuFaure would like to meet with her?

3. How does the narrator characterize the trip to Paris?

4. What does Julia ask Franck Lévy about Sarah?

5. What work did Sarah take in her new home?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is the tone of the book, up to the point of Julia finding out about Sarah from Eduard?

2. What does Julia decide to do about her pregnancy and her marriage?

3. What point in the development of the plot does this moment signify?

4. What decision does Julia change her mind about?

5. Describe Julia interaction with Eduard.

6. Describe Sarah's return to her apartment.

7. How does the narrator characterize the interactions between Julia and Bamber during their trip to Vel d'Hiv'.

8. How does Julia's pregnancy affect her feelings about Sarah's history?

9. What are the contents of the letter Gaspard DuFaure gives Julia?

10. Describe Rachel's arrest at the DuFaures'.

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Debate the proposition that the parallel de Rosnay draws between the end of a woman's marriage and the death of a child's little brother in the Holocaust is offensive and demeaning to the experience of those who died in Europe in the 1940s. Or is it a way of honoring the depth of human emotion?

Essay Topic 2

What is the significance of Bertrand's mid-life crisis? Is it a convenient mechanism for removing him from Julia's live, to make room for William Rainsferd, or is it a metaphor for the inability to arrive at a mature acceptance of life's painful complexities?

Essay Topic 3

What does escaping cost characters in "Sarah's Key", and what do characters do when they cannot escape, from history, from relationships, from their own stories? What limits the ability to escape, in the novel?

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