The Postcard

Starred review from March 20, 2023
In Berest’s phenomenal English-language debut novel (after the nonfiction work How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are), the author pieces together stories of her ancestors who were lost at Auschwitz. In 2003, when Anne is 24, her mother, Lélia, receives a cryptic postcard containing only the names of four relatives, all of whom died in the Holocaust. The postcard remains an enigma until 10 years later, when Anne, now pregnant and visiting her parents’ house, decides she’s ready to learn more about her roots. In flashbacks sparked by Lélia’s stories, Berest builds a touching account of her great-grandparents Emma and Ephraïm Rabinovitz, whose names were on the postcard along with two of their children, and who had fled from four countries before settling in a Paris suburb in 1929. After France is invaded, Ephraïm’s business is seized by the government along with his cookware patents, and the family is subjected to curfews and restrictions. Emma and Ephraïm are separated from two of their children, and the four are eventually taken to Auschwitz. With bracing prose, smoothly translated by Kover, Berest takes an unflinching look at antisemitism past and present (“And, I realized now, I was the same age as my mother and grandmother were when they were hit with the insults, the stones.... The pattern was undeniable”). The more Anne learns of her family, the more powerful her story of reclaiming her ancestry becomes. This is brilliant.

April 1, 2023
A piece of family lore looms large for L�lia and her daughter, Anne. Several years ago, L�lia received a mysterious postcard with only four words on the back--Ephra�m, Emma, No�mie, and Jacques--the names of her maternal grandparents, aunt, and uncle, who were all taken from their small French town and subjected to the horrors of the Holocaust. Fueled by their extensive research, tireless curiosity, and a driving sense of justice, L�lia and Anne are determined to uncover who sent the postcard and whether they did so in solidarity or intimidation. In this sweeping family saga, French novelist Berest illuminates opportunities for kindness and betrayal in wartime France and the long echo of the Holocaust's atrocities. L�lia's predecessors were subject, like so many others, to the creeping oversight of bureaucracy and harmful, illogical biases. Berest gives family members and close friends occasional opportunities to narrate, while keeping young Anne as the story's central protagonist. Translated from its original French, The Postcard will appeal to fans of All the Light We Cannot See and The Book Thief.

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Starred review from February 1, 2023

In this Prix Goncourt finalist, L�lia, a Frenchwoman living in Paris, receives a postcard with nothing on it but four names, which happen to be those of her grandparents and an aunt and uncle who perished during the Holocaust. She shows the postcard to her daughter, and neither of them has a clue as to who might have sent it or why. L�lia has kept a voluminous file over the years on her lost family, and she and her daughter set out to unravel the mystery behind the postcard. Through flashbacks, award-winning French author Berest (Sagan, Paris 1954) reimagines her own family history (that postcard really existed), while relating events surrounding the perished family, the grandparents originating in Moscow, then traveling with their children to Latvia and Palestine and finally settling in France some time before the German occupation. She also fills her daughter in on the life of Myriam, grandmother to L�lia and the sole survivor of her family. Effectively translated by Kover, the narrative has a somewhat complex structure, but despite all the flashbacks, the story is not hard to follow, and the well-drawn characters readily gain readers' sympathy. VERDICT Not only a significant contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust but a moving reflection on loss, memory, and the past, in equal measures heartwarming and heartrending. Highly recommended.--Edward B. Cone

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2023
A Jewish family's experience across multiple generations, researched by a mother and daughter, shines a spotlight on French antisemitism, both historic and contemporary. The arrival in 2003 of an unsigned postcard, delivered to her mother L�lia's postbox in Paris, bearing the names of four family ancestors murdered at Auschwitz, forces Anne Berest properly to consider her Jewish heritage. The result is this autofiction sharing the tragic saga of one branch of her forbears, the Rabinovitches, seeking peace and a safe home in the shifting European landscape of the 20th century. L�lia, who has methodically pieced together the story of her grandparents, now shares it with Anne, starting with Ephra�m and Emma's marriage in Moscow and the birth of their first child, Myriam, L�lia's mother, who will be the sole survivor. Two more children, No�mie and Jacques, are born, while the Rabinovitches move, for political reasons, to Latvia, then France. But Ephra�m fails to secure French citizenship for the family, and, as their lives become increasingly circumscribed after the German occupation, first No�mie and Jacques and then the parents are arrested, imprisoned, and slaughtered. Berest's descriptions of captivity are notably horrific. Years later, as Anne's child reports antisemitism at school, Anne remembers the postcard and begins a quest to find its author. Now the narrative switches from historical record to detection, involving a private eye and a graphologist, before turning more introspective as it traces Myriam's experience. Having escaped into the French free zone with her husband, she settles in a remote Provencal cottage, then comes back to Paris and joins the Resistance. As the war ends, she witnesses the return of skeletal survivors from Germany. The story overall is poignant, tense, restless, and ultimately pivotal, as Anne not only solves her mystery, but, more importantly, gains her identity. The anguish and horror of genocide arrive with fresh impact in an absorbing personal account.

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