The Postcard (Hardcover)
Staff Reviews
Beautifully written, tragic, and enthralling. The Postcard takes inspiration from a page of the author’s family history - a postcard appears in the mail, with the names of family members killed in the Holocaust as its sole message. From this spark, she gives us a fictional family receiving a similar postcard and spins the story of a Jewish family making repeated cross-continental journeys, moving between Russia, Central Europe, Palestine, and France - only to be caught up in the Holocaust. The complicity of occupied France and French neighbors using appeasement as an excuse to absorb Jewish/foreign businesses and personal wealth - and the denial of their descendants - was stunning. While the subject is dark and the story tragic from the start, the vivid characters kept me reading and the mystery of who sent the postcard kept me wondering.
— GingerMay 2023 Indie Next List
“This family saga, about a mysterious postcard received decades after WWII, plunges a daughter and her mother into the search for the truth and their roots. I have never read a book so well-written, so engaging, so poignant, so real.”
— Marianne Reiner, La Playa Books, San Diego, CA
Description
Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest's The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.
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 Op ra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephra m and Emma, and their children, No mie 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 that shatters long-held certainties about Anne's family, her country, and herself.
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