Now You Are Sara

Norman Ravvin’s novel, Café des Westens, won the Alberta Culture New
Fiction Award.

Now You Are Sara has a nice symmetry to it; short and sparely written,
it recounts two important summers in the author’s life, one in Paris
in 1964 and the other in Germany in 1989. The latter summer proves to be
the book’s focus, for it was in August of that year that Alexander
joined 163 other Jews who had once lived in the little German town of
Mцnchengladbach in a return visit organized by the local townspeople.
Alexander depicts the difficulties of Jews and Germans alike in trying
to maintain an air of normality during such an extraordinary reunion,
and her narrative takes on a tone of bemused detachment as she recounts
the experience of returning to the town she “had left secretly at the
age of three” in the wake of Nazi violence.

Juxtaposed with events from this visit are recollections from the
author’s youth in Paris, when the war, the loss of her mother and
brother, and her own sense of a Jewish identity had yet to be fully
assimilated into her otherwise happy postwar life. Alexander shifts
smoothly between these two very different landscapes and offers an
evocative portrait of both French and German daily life by focusing on a
few figures who bristle with national character without becoming
stereotypic in their behavior.

Now You Are Sara draws on a variety of genres—memoir, bildungsroman,
children’s story—and it may be that its varied tone will make it
difficult for readers to tell what audience Alexander means to reach.
Anyone with an interest in the life stories of women and men displaced
by the war will find her story intriguing. And her attention to the
child’s experience of displacement and loss gives sections of her
memoir the sweet, resonant atmosphere that children often enjoy, but the
level of language and complexity of the narrative will certainly keep
younger readers at a distance. The book’s title and cover design,
however, suggest that young readers—if only the most precocious among
them—are welcome. All readers will have to maintain patience with the
title, which remains obscure until late in the narrative, when its
explanation helps evoke a fascinating turn in the writer’s life.