The Boy with the Star Tattoo
| Modern Age |
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 The Boy with the Star Tattoo
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American History > Modern Age > Jewish History
From acclaimed author of The Third Daughter comes an epic historical novel of ingenuity and courage, of love and loss, spanning postwar France when Israeli agents roamed the countryside to rescue hidden Jewish orphans—to the 1969 daring escape of the Israeli boats of Cherbourg.
1942: As the Vichy government hunts for Jews across France, Claudette Pelletier, a young and talented seamstress and lover of romance novels, falls in love with a Jewish man who seeks shelter at the château where she works. Their whirlwind and desperate romance before he must flee leaves her pregnant and terrified.
When the Nazis invade the Free Zone shortly after the birth of her child, the disabled Claudette is forced to make a heartbreaking choice and escapes to Spain, leaving her baby in the care of his nursemaid. By the time Claudette is able to return years later, her son has disappeared. Unbeknown to his anguished mother, the boy has been rescued by a Youth Aliyah agent searching for Jewish orphans.
1968: When Israeli naval officer Daniel Yarden recruits Sharon Bloomenthal for a secret naval operation in Cherbourg, France, he can’t imagine that he is the target of the agenda of the twenty-year-old grieving the recent loss of her fiancé in a drowned submarine. Sharon suspects that Danny's past in Youth Aliyah may reflect that of her mysterious late mother and she sets out to track her boss’s extraordinary journey as an orphan in a quaint French village all the way to Israel.
As Danny focuses on the future of his people and on executing a daring, crucial operation under France’s radar, he is unaware that the obsessed Sharon follows the breadcrumbs of clues across the country to find her answers. But she is wholly unprepared for the dilemma she must face upon solving the puzzle.
Emily's Review
I was very interested in this book because it covers a topic I've always wondered about - what happened to all the children left in hiding during the Holocaust after the war? So many were orphaned, or their surviving parent was just too broken to find them...so what happened to them? This is the story of one such child.
I enjoy stories told from multiple perspectives, and in this book, we have three character perspectives to follow: Claudette, a disabled French girl who falls in love with a Jew; Sharon, an Israeli Jewish woman who is mourning her fiance's death during the Six-Day War; and Uzi Yarden, a scout for Youth Aliyah who is looking for orphaned Jewish children to bring back to Israel.
I admit, my favorite perspective was Uzi. I imagine the task of locating traumatized children would have been difficult, and I found his story to be the most compelling. I think stories like this are important because the market is flooded with stories about the Holocaust, but rarely do we get to find out what happened after. I enjoyed how all of the characters in this story were tied together, but I thought the pacing was a little slow at times, especially since a lot of the mystery element in Sharon's perspective were things we already learned from Claudette's.
Overall, though, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in learning more about the Holocaust's aftermath and the Youth Aliyah program!
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