In 2003, an anonymous postcard was delivered to Lélia Picabia at her Paris home. Written on it in biro, in strange, awkward writing, were the names Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques. Nothing else. They were the first names of Leila’s maternal grandparents, aunt and uncle. All four of them had been murdered in the Holocaust.
Lélia’s mother Myriam, who married Lélia’s non-Jewish father in 1941 and escaped to the south of France where she worked for the Resistance, was the only member of her family who survived the war. She never talked about her parents and siblings, or even mentioned their names, to her daughter or granddaughters. She had died several years earlier and Lélia had no idea who had sent the card. Was it an anti-semitic threat? Was it from someone who knew the family?
Nearly 20 years later, Lélia’s daughter, the acclaimed French author Anne Berest, decided to find out who had sent the postcard, and why. The Postcard is both the gripping story of her quest and the story of the Rabinovitch family. It’s also a powerful exploration of intergenerational trauma and of Berest’s own complex relationship with her Jewish heritage.
Although the story is all true, and based on Lélia’s extensive, thorough research into her family over many years, The Postcard is presented as a work of fiction. Berest tells her ancestors’ story in a novelistic way, imagining their thoughts and feelings about documented events in their lives, describing scenes as they might have been. Having first read the book in French last year, I was relieved to discover that Tina Kover’s English translation has captured the elegant clarity of Berest’s prose; both the horror and the love that Berest describes throughout the book are all the more moving for the unsparing simplicity with which she does so.
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Anne finds out who sent the postcard, and why; the extraordinarily moving truth is revealed at the very end of the book. But while the mystery is compelling, it’s not what lingers in the mind afterwards. What lingers is Anne’s emotional journey, and Emma, Ephraïm, Noémie, Jacques and Myriam themselves, whose descendant has brought them to vivid, unforgettable life in the pages of a book that deserves many readers.
