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Anne Berest's The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. Luminous and gripping to the very last page, it is an enthralling investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life.
January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.
Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling that shatters long-held certainties about Anne's family, her country, and herself.
Chapter One
My mother lit her first lung-charring cigarette of the morning, the one she enjoyed most, and stepped outside to admire the whiteness blanketing the entire neighborhood. At least ten centimeters of snow had fallen overnight.
She stayed outside smoking for a long time despite the cold, enjoying the otherworldly atmosphere of the garden. It was beautiful, she thought, all that blankness, that erasing of colors and blurring of edges.
Suddenly she heard a noise, muffled by the snow. The postman had just dumped the mail on the ground at the foot of the mailbox. My mother went to collect it, putting her slippered feet down carefully so as not to slip.
Cigarette still clamped between her lips, its smoke dissipating in the freezing air, she made her way quickly back to the house to thaw fingers numbed by the cold.
She flipped through the stack of envelopes. There were the usual holiday cards, most of them from her university students, a gas bill, a few pieces of junk mail. There were also letters for my father, from his colleagues at the National Centre for Scientific Research and the PhD candidates he supervised, all wishing him a happy new year.
All very typical for early January. Except for the postcard. Slipped in among the other envelopes, unassuming, as though it had hidden itself deliberately.
What caught my mother's attention right away was the handwriting, strange and awkward, like no handwriting she had ever seen before. Then she read the four names, written in the form of a list.
Ephraïm
Emma
Noémie
Jacques
They were the names of her maternal grandparents, her aunt, and her uncle. All four had been deported two years before she was born. They died in Auschwitz in 1942. And now, sixty-one years later, they had reappeared in our mailbox. It was Monday, January 6, 2003.
Who could have sent me this terrible thing? Lélia wondered.
My mother felt a jolt of fear, as if someone were threatening her, someone lurking in the darkness of the past. Her hands began to tremble.
"Look, Pierre! Look what I found in the mail!"
My father took the postcard and examined it closely, but there was no signature, no explanation.
Nothing. Just those four names.
At my parents' home in those days, one picked the mail up off the ground, like ripe fruit fallen from a tree; our mailbox had gotten so old that it was like a sieve—nothing stayed inside—but we liked it that way. It never occurred to any of us to get a new one; that wasn't how our family solved problems. You simply lived with things, as if they deserved the same respect as human beings.
When the weather was bad, the letters would get soaked, their ink running and the words becoming permanently indecipherable. Postcards were the worst, bare like those teenage girls who run around with exposed arms and no coat in wintertime.
If the author of the postcard had used a fountain pen to write to us, their message would have been obliterated. Had they known that? The names were written with a ballpoint pen.
The following Sunday, Lélia summoned the whole family: my father, my sisters, and me. Sitting around the dining room table, we passed the card from hand to hand. None of us spoke for a long time—which was unusual for us, especially during Sunday lunch. Normally, in our family, there's always someone with something to say, and they always want to say it right now. But on that day, no one knew what to think about this message that had shown up out of the blue.
The postcard itself was nothing special, just a touristy post- card with a photo of the Opéra Garnier on the front, the kind sold by the hundreds in tobacco shops and kiosks all over Paris.
"Why the Opéra Garnier?" my mother asked.
No one knew the answer.
"The postmark is from the Louvre post office."
"You think they could give us more information there?"
"It's the biggest post office in Paris. It's huge. What do you think they'll be able to tell you?"
"Was it mailed from ...
Excerpted from The Postcard by Anne Berest, originally published as La carte postale, copyright Anne Berest 2021. Translation by Tina Kover, copyright 2023 Europa Editions.
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Europa Editions. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
Anne Berest's The Postcard — with an elegant translation from the French by Tina Cover — is marketed as a novel about a Jewish family during the German occupation of France but in fact skirts quite close to the line dividing fiction from memoir. Berest applies the narrative liberties afforded by fiction to augment an otherwise accurate account based on well-researched history, family documents and archival sources.
In January 2003, twenty-four-year-old Anne and her sisters are summoned to their parents' Paris home. Lélia, Anne's mother, shows them a postcard that arrived earlier in the week. Written on the unsigned card, in an unfamiliar script, is a short list of names: "Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, Jacques." These are the names of Lélia's maternal, Rabinovitch grandparents, her aunt, and her uncle. All four died at Auschwitz in 1942. Anne's family is baffled and distressed by the strange postcard. Who could have sent it? And why?
In the chapters that follow, which transform the names listed on the postcard into fully imagined, vital characters, the novel does not adhere to strictly chronological rules. The central story of the Rabinovitch family in occupied France is approached from several directions: the years leading up to the Holocaust as the family flees Russia and makes its way to France via Latvia and British Palestine, and, equally, from the near-present reflecting back. The narrative voice is layered, often one family member recounting pieces of the story to another, reminding the reader that history is a living thing, reanimated through its telling.
Within this layering of time and place, the novel is at once a closely depicted, meticulous account of the lives of the Rabinovitch family and the ways in which their terrible fate has resonated in the lives of their descendants; a fascinating, true-life mystery involving detectives and handwriting analyst, as Anne and her mother investigate the identity of the postcard writer; and a powerful account of the occupation of France and the unfurling, systemic reinforcement of antisemitism through the Vichy government's administrative practices.
In tracing the strategic way that Jews were isolated from full membership in French society, paving the way for public acceptance of their arrests, Berest explains that "they existed in the gray area of indifference." She then follows this with an unsettling question to the reader: "Which victims living in tents, or under overpasses, or in camps way outside the cities are your 'invisible ones'?" The intentional processes by which antisemitism became increasingly normalized within European society are recognizable tactics for the alienation of marginalized groups in today's political arena.
The author also reflects on identity as she explores how inheritances of loss and trauma can realign generational values. For Berest's grandmother, Myriam, the only survivor in her family, "God had died in the death camps." Believing that "her children and grandchildren should be born into a new world, with no links to the old one," Myriam never again entered a synagogue. Berest acknowledges that this movement towards a fully secular life has also been a part of her inheritance. She recognizes that her history is a deep, living thing as she grapples to fully engage with the complex reverberations of her family's virtual erasure: "And that struggle is what constitutes me."
Reviewed by Danielle McClellan
Rated 5 out of 5
by Marie
A Mystery Within A Family History
This book is about real people living in a very dangerous and frightening time and place. It includes a mystery but the book does not dwell on a solution; rather a solution naturally evolves. The writing feels immediate and personal.
Rated 5 out of 5
by Roberta
A powerful Holocaust story
I have a profound respect for this author who took on researching her family’s Holocaust story. There are so many books written about the Holocaust, but when the story is about a family or just one or two people, it becomes so much more powerful and moving.
An anonymous postcard is delivered to the author’s mother’s home. On the front is photo of an opera house in France and on the backside of the card are the names of four of the author’s relatives who died at Auschwitz in 1942. There is nothing more on the card. The postage stamp is upside down. This card leads the author to start a search for her family’s history as well as to try to find out who sent the card. So there is a bit of mystery in the book.
What was remarkable for me was Anne Berest’s self-discovery about being a Jew and how her family’s trauma was part of her own DNA.
The book is poignant, sad and very moving. I recommend it highly.
Rated 5 out of 5
by Sophie Angela
The post card
It's a very nice and incredible story and it's educational
Rated 4 out of 5
by Jesse Shadrack
Postcard
Well, this book gets interesting the more you read, I've just loved it, and I hope everyone who get to the library reads it.
In The Postcard, Jeanine Picabia, the author's grand-aunt, is a leader in the French Resistance movement. When she is betrayed, she becomes "one of the most wanted female fugitives in France." In December 1942, she flees to England by way of Spain, which she enters by crossing over the Pyrenees mountains. She takes a particularly challenging route, via Mont Valier, because "German soldiers won't go that way…it's too dangerous."
The Pyrenees mountain range is Europe's second major range, after the Alps. It runs over 265 miles (430 km) between Spain and France, from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and separates the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) from the rest of Europe. The range is distinctive because there are no low mountain passes; all are notoriously high and difficult to traverse in winter, even with skis.
In choosing this route of escape, Jeanine Picabia was not alone. According to essayist Margarita Gokun Silver, writing for The Forward, "With Hitler's army sweeping through Europe, many fled across the Pyrenees into Spain — officially neutral during the war — either to join the Allied troops or to emigrate. Among these refugees were European Jews escaping certain death."
Silver explains that success for these refugees largely depended upon when they crossed the Pyrenees as Spain's policies shifted during World War II. In the early years of the war, refugees were able to acquire transit visas. In the mid-1940s, however, the Franco government bowed to German pressure and halted all visas, deporting those caught crossing illegally. Silver writes that "Although the exact number of Jewish refugees that crossed the Pyrenees between 1939 and 1944 isn't known, historians estimate it to be somewhere between 20,000 and 35,000."
Also never to be forgotten were those Spaniards who had in the late 1930s crossed the Pyrenees in the other direction to escape the vengeful fascists winning the Spanish Civil War. When France fell to Germany in 1940, their fate was doubly sealed. According to journalist Nick Mead, "Many Spaniards were captured or handed over to the Nazis by the Vichy government, and ended up in the notorious Mauthausen concentration camp. These Spaniards were some of the first prisoners to be sent there, before the Jews arrived for extermination."
Today many people who cross the Pyrenees on foot do so, as I did, as part of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. The French Route begins in France and crosses into Spain through the Pyrenees, on a hike through some of the most beautiful landscape imaginable. On my first night of hiking, I stopped at the Orisson Refuge at the French base of the Pyrenees and spoke to a young woman who was walking the Camino in tribute to her great-grandparents who had escaped Spain into France at the close of the Spanish Civil War. It was a powerful experience to walk up and over the Napoleon pass the next day carrying in my thoughts her story, and the stories of all those who had walked before me.
Mont Valier from the Refuge Les Estagnous, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities
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