The Postcard (Paperback)
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
A BEST BOOK OF 2023
TIME Magazine・NPR・Library Journal
"A testament to the power of imagination and an investigation of empathy."--Vogue
"Stunning."--Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker
"A can't-miss novel."--Chicago Review of Books
"Compelling."--The Washington Examiner
Anne Berest's The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. It is at once a gripping investigation into family trauma, 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 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.
Years after the postcard is delivered, the heroine of this novel is moved to discover who sent it and why. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the travails of the twentieth century and partly restored through the power of storytelling.
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