The Postcard by Anne Berest

 

In 2003, a postcard comes to Anne Berest's Paris home.  On it is nothing but four names, Ephraim, Emma, Noemie and Jacques.  They are her grandmother's father, mother, brother and sister, all taken during the German occupation of France and killed at Auschwitz.

Anne wanted to find out who sent the postcard.  Her mother had never been willing to talk about what she knew as her mother had refused to talk about those times and had in fact, sent Myriam to live with others for much of her childhood.  Could Anne break through her family's reluctance to talk and find out her relatives' stories and who sent the postcard?

This book was a best book of 2023, chosen by many publications such as Time, the New Yorker, NPR and the Globe And Mail.  Anne Berest is from an artistic family with several famous painters in her background.  The family whose story she looked for, the Rabinovitchs, had started in Russia, moved to Israel for a while then ended in Paris.  The first half of the book tells their story while the second is the hunt for the sender of the postcard.  Anne and her mother are able to find the French village where her family had fled during the Occupation and from which they were taken to be killed in Auschwitz.  I found both halves to be engrossing and the book brings home the tragedy of the Jewish extinctions during World War II in a hard-hitting way as one reads of the impact of the deaths down through the generations.  This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction and memoirs.