“The Postcard,” a novel by the French author Anne Berest, opens on a snowy morning in a Parisian suburb: “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.”
The scene was drawn from life: in early January, 2003, Berest’s mother, Lélia, a college professor and chain-smoking structural linguist, went out to gather the mail and found, tucked among the junk mail and New Year’s greetings, an anonymous postcard. It had a picture of the Opéra Garnier in Paris on one side, and, on the other, the names Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques, written in an awkward, unfamiliar script. Lélia recognized the names: her grandfather Ephraïm Rabinovitch; his wife, Emma; and two of their three children, Noémie and Jacques. They were Jews who, in 1942, had been deported from France and then murdered at Auschwitz. Lélia’s late mother, Myriam—the eldest of Ephraïm and Emma’s children—had escaped her family’s fate by the slenderest of threads. In later years, Myriam almost never spoke of them, or of her own wartime experiences.
As it happened, Lélia was about to give oral testimony in a legal case, seeking compensation from the French state for property that had been confiscated from her family during the war. Had the postcard been sent as an act of remembrance, or was it a warning to her, to cease and desist?
“I was twenty-four when the postcard arrived,” Berest told me, over breakfast—blood-orange juice for her—in the dark-panelled lobby of the Bowery Hotel in Lower Manhattan last fall, in a conversation that would continue for six months over Zoom, e-mail, and WhatsApp. Growing up in the Parisian suburb of Sceaux, the middle of three daughters, she didn’t know much about her Rabinovitch relatives. “Once, in elementary school, my teacher gave us an assignment over the holidays to draw our family trees.” There were big gaps in hers. “When my mother realized that she couldn’t tell her daughters the names of her own grandparents, she felt ashamed,” Berest said. “So she began researching.”
Based in part on two decades of her mother’s research, “The Postcard,” originally published in France by Grasset in 2021, arrives in the U.S. in May in a fluid English translation by Tina Kover. Both mother and daughter play central roles in the nearly five-hundred-page novel, whose first section finds a pregnant Anne questioning her mother about Rabinovitch family history. The vivid scenes unfold in flashbacks as we follow the fluctuating fortunes and narrow escapes of the Rabinovitch clan: from Moscow in 1918, to Latvia, across Eastern Europe and the Black Sea to Palestine, on to their final adopted homeland in France, only to end in Auschwitz.
The story then jumps to Paris in 2018, where Anne’s daughter, now six years old, tells her grandmother Lélia one day over lunch, “They don’t like Jews very much at school.” (One of her classmates, it turns out, had parroted an antisemitic remark from home.) In real life, Berest was shocked. “Instead of asking my daughter what happened, or going to the school, I became totally obsessed by the postcard. For fifteen years, I hadn’t thought about it, and on that day it came back to me, like a flash. I had to find out who had sent it.”
Though not quite as rarefied as the netsuke collection in Edmund de Waal’s memoir, “The Hare with Amber Eyes,” which leads him to reconstruct the lost worlds of his ancestors, the Ephrussi family, in prewar Jewish Paris and Vienna, Lélia’s postcard sets Anne on a quest through history (even if her references are more French New Wave than fin-de-siècle). In the novel, she and her mother hunt through a French village for traces of its wartime past. Anne consults with the Duluc Detective Agency and a handwriting expert named Jésus, and confronts family tensions, all while questioning the meaning of Jewishness in her secular, assimilated life.
Dressed in a loose, dark trouser suit, Berest, who is also a screenwriter and a playwright, has a modern, understated French chic. In fact, with three friends, she co-wrote “How to Be a Parisian Wherever You Are” (2014), a tongue-in-cheek international best-seller. (Its recommendations include raising the topic of adultery to enliven dinner party conversation, and understanding the importance of the three Simones—Simone Veil, Simone de Beauvoir, and Simone Signoret—in the lives of Parisiennes.) “We laughed a lot while writing it,” Berest admitted. “We didn’t expect it to be such a success.”
Very different in tone, “The Postcard” is “un roman vrai” (“a true novel”), Berest told me, anchored in scrupulous historical research and in her own real-life experiences. She used novelistic techniques (invented dialogues, narrative compressions) to give it both a detective story’s page-turning urgency and the immediacy of life as it unfolds. The latter brings to mind “Suite Française,” Irène Némirovsky’s long-lost pair of novels that portray early-nineteen-forties France. (In “The Postcard,” Noémie Rabinovitch, a nineteen-year-old aspiring writer, very nearly crosses paths with Némirovsky in a transit camp set up by the Vichy government for Jews en route to deportation.)
“As I was writing, I had the feeling that I was living in all these different periods at once,” Berest said. “It was as if I had entered into a different relationship with time.”
Berest also changed the name of the village in Normandy where her family members were arrested. And she used pseudonyms for characters who collaborated with the Vichy regime, out of concern for their descendants. One such character is the village mayor, who is taxed with sending a report each week to the region’s prefecture, entitled “Jews Currently Living in the Municipality.” At the end of the week in which Ephraïm and Emma are taken, Berest tells us that “the mayor was able to write, in his elegantly rounded script, with the satisfaction of a job well done: ‘None.’ ”
The French love literary scandals, and the 2021 Goncourt Prize (the country’s oldest and most distinguished literary award) was no exception. “The Postcard” was among the nominees for the prize, as was “Les Enfants de Cadillac,” a début novel by the philosopher François Noudelmann. Like “The Postcard,” it’s a story of the Holocaust and Jewish exiles in France, based on the author’s family history.
Noudelman’s romantic partner, the writer Camille Laurens, was among the Goncourt Prize jurors who voted to nominate his book; the jury had decided not to consider this a conflict of interest because the couple are not married or in a civil union. But eyes widened when, a short time after the longlist of nominees was announced, Laurens published a scathing review of “The Postcard” in Le Monde, in which she accused Anne, the character in the novel, of asking her mother “inane questions.” “You feel like you’re reading Shoah for Dummies,” she wrote.
Tastes differ, of course, but in reading Laurens’s review, I couldn’t help thinking that she was mistaking Berest’s humility—before her mother’s pain, and before a history that, eighty years on, continues to shock us—for ignorance. In any case, Noudelmann’s book was withdrawn from further consideration for the prize, which was awarded to the Senegalese author Mohamed Mbougar Sarr for his novel “La Plus Secrète Mémoire des Hommes,” and “The Postcard” continued to garner critical acclaim and robust sales. (From an initial print run of fourteen thousand copies, sales in France have now topped three hundred and thirty thousand.) The book appears to have connected especially well with young readers. Last April, at the Villa Albertine in New York, it was awarded the first-ever Goncourt Prize U.S., in which a jury composed of students of French at five American universities chose their own winner from among a list of Goncourt nominees.
Support among the young seems particularly valuable at a moment when the last survivors of the Nazi death camps are dying off, and the question of how to make the crucial lessons of that era come alive for a new generation becomes ever more acute. The calcification of the Holocaust into official history, the building of numerous museums and monuments devoted to its memory, has not countered an astonishing lack of knowledge about its basic facts among a broader public. In a 2020 survey in the U.S., for example, sixty-three per cent of respondents between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine did not know that approximately six million Jews perished at the hands of the Nazis.
Fiction, with its imaginative power to evoke the reader’s identification, has a particular role to play in promoting empathy and countering historical forgetfulness. “Literature is living memory,” Berest has said. Yet “The Postcard” does not sit easily among the many “feel-good” Holocaust novels that have proliferated in the past two decades, some of them mega-best-sellers such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” and “The Book Thief.” They represent a trend that Dara Horn, in a recent book of essays, “People Love Dead Jews,” decries both because of the authors’ frequent focus on heroic Gentile saviors and their insistence on “uplift,” on finding redeeming qualities amid the cataclysmic destruction of European Jewry.
In “The Postcard,” no one arrives to save the Rabinovitchs, whose deaths remain an irredeemable tragedy, the costs of which are still being measured today, even as their descendants fall in love, make art, and give birth to a new generation. And “The Postcard” ’s stunning surprise ending, when it finally arrives—after a detour about a nineteen-forties menage à trois in the South of France—resolves the mystery of the postcard’s author. Yet it also leaves us wondering whether the opposite of memory is not forgetting, but rather indifference.
In a late-night e-mail, Berest cited Art Spiegelman’s two-volume graphic novel “Maus” as an inspiration. (In “The Postcard,” she writes about reading it as a child.) Her current reading, she noted, includes Esther Safran Foer’s “I Want You to Know We’re Still Here.” Safran Foer—the daughter of Holocaust survivors and the mother of the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer and the journalists Franklin and Joshua Foer—reminds her of Lélia, Berest told me.
With “The Postcard,” Berest joins a third generation of writers with family ties to the Holocaust who are reckoning with it as a subject, including nonfiction authors such as Daniel Mendelsohn and novelists like Jonathan Safran Foer, Julie Orringer, and Nicole Krauss. In a recent Op-Ed in the New York Times, Daphne Kalotay wrote about the awareness, common to many storytellers, of losing first-person witnesses, and the “attempt to combat this vanishing, in ways apt and new.” Third-generation writers are often “literary sleuths,” Victoria Aarons, a professor at Trinity University in Texas specializing in literary representations of the Holocaust, told me via e-mail. She explained that “one of the questions that the third generation implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) asks is ‘where am I in this history?’ In other words, ‘How has this traumatic past informed my identity?’ ”
There were other ghosts knocking around Berest’s childhood home in Sceaux. She was almost an adult, for example, when she learned that her maternal great-grandfather was the avant-garde painter, poet, and publisher Francis Picabia. He is present in “The Postcard,” largely by reflection in the eyes of his neglected son Vicente, who, during the war, marries Myriam.
Though unaware of this artistic legacy, Berest was drawn to creative pursuits. She studied French literature in high school and after receiving her baccalaureat began preparing for the entrance exams to the École Normale Supérieure—one of the traditional routes to life as a French intellectual. When the exams didn’t go her way, she instead went to work at the Théâtre du Rond-Point, which showcased work by living authors. After five years there, she left to co-found a small publishing house, Porte-plume, “to write biographies of old people for their families,” she said. “We did the interviews, wrote them up, and published them in micro-editions.”
The endeavor felt personal. Her grandmother Myriam had died when Berest was fifteen. Only once, Berest recalled, had she tried to tell Berest about her war years. It was during a summer that the family spent camping out in Céreste, Provence—“living in the wild,” as Berest put it—near a rudimentary hilltop cabin where Myriam and Vicente had hidden during the war. Her grandmother invited her for a walk. “She told me about the war, but I was too young to understand her,” Berest said. “Afterwards, it was horrible, because my mother grilled me, and I couldn’t tell her anything.”
By her early thirties Berest had published a handful of novels, including “La fille de son père” (2010), set in contemporary Reims, and “Les Patriarches” (2012), a dive into mid-nineteen-eighties Paris. Both books explore family mysteries and conflicted filial legacies. But a commission from Denis Westhoff, the only son of the late novelist Françoise Sagan, prompted her to begin weaving the past and present together in her work. Westoff was looking for a young female novelist to write about his mother in Paris during the months preceding the 1954 publication of her first novel, “Bonjour Tristesse,” which made her, at eighteen years old, a celebrity, and also to consider Sagan’s influence on her own life. While working on “Sagan, Paris 1954,” Berest said, “I had the feeling that Françoise Sagan was right there with me, that we were speaking to each other. And I realized that I had found my terrain as a writer, in my relationship with the dead.”
In 2017, she turned to history again with “Gabriële,” a joint biography written with her sister Claire Berest (who is also an accomplished novelist) of their maternal great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia. Gabriële was an art critic and intellectual engine of the early-twentieth-century Parisian avant-garde. A close friend of Guillaume Apollinaire and a lover of Marcel Duchamp, she had studied musical composition in Paris and Berlin before marrying Francis Picabia, then a successful post-Impressionist painter, at twenty-seven. In their book, the Berest sisters posit that Gabriële helped push Francis, with ideas drawn from her musical studies, toward greater abstraction in his art.
The couple had four children together and remained close even after they divorced, in 1930, and through Francis’s subsequent relationships and remarriage. Yet when Gabriële died, in 1985, at the age of a hundred and four, having outlived almost all her contemporaries, she remained unknown by the general public, and her contributions lay largely unrecognized.
Though it is copiously footnoted, the Berests’ biography of Gabriële is written in a novelistic style, from inside the characters’ heads. “The legacy of Francis and Gabriële, for both of us, is their iconoclasm, their rule-breaking,” Claire said via Zoom from Paris. “So the freedom we took in writing about them was also our way of honoring them.”
“Gabriële” ends in 1919, well before what may have been the most dramatic chapter in its heroine’s long life—when she was in her sixties during the Second World War and became an active member of a Resistance network known as Gloria SMH, alongside Samuel Beckett and others. These activities, touched upon in “The Postcard,” will be the subject of a future volume by the two sisters, who remain close. (Part three of “The Postcard” consists entirely of an extended e-mail exchange between them, probing their shared legacies of loss and survival.) In March, a small volume Anne edited of Francis Picabia’s letters and poems to Gabriële was published by Éditions Seghers, with a preface by both sisters And, last year, in Paris’s Twentieth Arrondissement, the Jardin Gabriële-Buffet opened, harboring a few gentle shade trees, a trickling fountain, and children at play.
When we spoke via Zoom in April, Berest had just completed a script with the director Raoul Peck—whose documentary on James Baldwin’s fight for civil rights, “I Am Not Your Negro,” was nominated for an Oscar—for a bio-pic about Bernard Natan, a pioneering French Jewish film producer. During the nineteen-thirties, Natan was dragged to court, after which he had to give up his ownership of the Pathé film studios, and was later imprisoned, deported, and killed at Auschwitz. “Even people who know a lot about French cinema have never heard of him,” Berest said.
In 2019, she had the idea and wrote the script for the hit French television series “Mytho,” a dark comedy about suburban motherhood. Her advice on scripts is also sought after. The director Audrey Diwan, one of Berest’s co-authors on “How to Be a Parisian,” turned to Berest for help with “Happening,” a screen adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir about her determined search, as a college student, in 1963, for a back-alley abortion. (The film won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Film Festival.)
“Anne is a natural collaborator,” Diwan said, “intellectually rigorous but also a bit irreverent, which I love.”
The film director Rebecca Zlotowski, who has been friends with Berest since they were both eighteen, believes that Berest’s literary endeavors are a form of family engagement. “We tend to think of writing as a very solitary activity,” she explained via Zoom from her home in Paris, “but, in fact, with Anne there’s this desire to use a book project to open up a dialogue with members of her family.”
Zlotowski’s latest film, “Other People’s Children,” stars Virginie Efira as a dedicated high-school teacher coming to terms with the idea that the time for her to conceive a child may have passed. Berest, who occasionally acts in films by her friends, plays a mother afflicted with cancer, whom Efira’s character meets in passing. (Berest’s younger daughter, who is also Zlotowski’s goddaughter, plays her character’s daughter.)
“She’s very believable as this almost ghostly presence,” Zlotowski said. Berest’s role is small, but Zlotowski told me that it underlines the film’s broader subject, which is “what will remain of us when we are gone.” It’s a preoccupation that she said she shares with Berest. “As European Jewish women whose families were impacted by the Shoah, it's our almost genetic inheritance—this anxiety and sense of responsibility concerning what we will leave to future generations.”
“The Postcard” is particularly strong on the build-up of bureaucratic details in Vichy France that gradually denied Jews—both immigrants and those born on French soil—their personhood. So it’s striking that in the year it was published, the hard-right pundit and French Presidential candidate Éric Zemmour was campaigning to rehabilitate Vichy’s collaborationist leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, as the protector of French-born Jews.
In the book, Berest imagines Ephraïm buying a copy of the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s long pamphlet, “Trifles for a Massacre”—a virulently antisemitic screed that was a best-seller in the France of 1937—because “he wanted to read what the French were reading.” (It is not a great reading experience for him.) Last year, Gallimard began publishing a series of newly discovered manuscripts by Céline, the late, disgraced literary giant who was convicted of collaboration with the Nazis by a postwar Paris court, but whose novels “Journey to the End of the Night” and “Death on the Installment Plan” remain highly influential. The publisher and many critics scrambled to separate Céline’s literary genius from his antisemitism as his works once again hit the best-seller list.
And it was, after all, an antisemitic incident in a French public school in 2018 that set Berest’s search for the postcard’s author in motion. In the past decade, France has seen a rise not just in hateful rhetoric but in deadly violence against Jews: three children and a teacher were shot outside a religious school in Toulouse, in 2012; four Jews were murdered at a kosher supermarket in Paris, in 2015, by an extremist associated with the Charlie Hebdo attackers; a sixty-five-year-old retired physician and schoolteacher, Sarah Halimi, was killed in 2017; and the following year, Mireille Knoll, an eighty-five-year-old who as a child had survived the notorious 1942 Vel d’Hiv roundup of Jews in Paris, was fatally stabbed.
Berest “went in search of this family history because she didn’t understand something about today,” Haïm Korsia, the chief rabbi of France, observed by phone from Paris. Nevertheless, the community is flourishing,” he insisted. “We’re establishing new synagogues and community centers, there are more and more kosher restaurants, and every Jewish school that opens is full. At the same time, there is this fear that the antisemitism of some risks becoming contagious for the whole of society.” Berest’s book, he felt, “does a very good job of expressing that anxiety.”
It’s an anxiety that is shared in the U.S. Any sense that American Jews were sheltered from the violence afflicting Jews in Europe was shattered by the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which a man killed eleven congregants who had assembled there for Saturday-morning worship. The Anti-Defamation League reported a record-breaking number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. last year, and an almost doubling between 2019 and 2022 of support for antisemitic attitudes—canards about Jewish pushiness, Jewish clannishness, or an excess of Jewish power in the United States today. Twenty per cent of Americans were found to believe in six or more antisemitic tropes.
When Berest and I first met, it was just a few weeks after antisemitic comments made by Kanye West had reverberated across the country. Now “The Postcard” arrives in the U.S., carrying a message about the relevance of the past to today. “In ‘The Postcard,’ I draw a distinction between [my great-great-grandfather] Nachman, who experienced pogroms at the end of the nineteenth century in Russia, and his son Ephraïm, who didn’t live through them. Nachman tells his children ‘es’shtinkt shlekht drek’—‘it stinks of shit’—because he recognizes, in a series of scattered and seemingly minor events, the rise of hate.” The Second World War must appear as remote to twenty-year-olds today as the First World War did to her in her twenties, Berest said. It’s “a conflict belonging to the preceding century.”
Berest hopes her book will be “a link between generations.” She liked the fact that, after it was published in France, people wrote to her to say, “I’m not Jewish, but your family has become a little bit my family, the story of the Rabinovitch has become my story.” She added, “I’m very happy when readers say they’ve begun to investigate their own family history.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
