Review of The Postcard by Anne Berest

*The Postcard* by Anne Berest, translated by Tina Kover (2023). Published by Europa Editions.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog, and fell back more into literary criticism. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

The Postcard is one of those books I’ve been staring at for over a year, but never actually read the synopsis or knew what it was about. Before a freshman college student wrecked and totaled my car, I used to go to the movies a lot, and there was a bookstore near me local movie theater. I would pop in there not to buy anything, but to check out what the latest publishing trends were and what people were buying these days.

This is what you have to do when you’re a writer, but every time I went in there for a while a copy of The Postcard would be front and center in the new fiction section. And I remember being interested in it, but I never grabbed it and actually read the dust jacket to see what the book was actually about.

So time later, I was in my local library when I finally picked up the book and read it. I read a lot of Holocaust literature in general, and most of the time it’s not something I intentionally sought out and am like “I’m going to read about genocide!” It tends to just happen, as what happened with this book.

It’s a thick book, but one Saturday, after getting my groceries, I read all of it in one sitting. It was a glorious day, that’s for sure.

Let’s get into the review!

A mother and daughter dives deep into their family history, which was decimated by the Holocaust.

We begin this novel in the present day. In 2003, the Berest family home gets a strange postcard in the mail. It’s depicting the Opera Garnier in Paris, and the writer’s grandmother is named as the recipient. The only other writing on the postcard are the names of four family members who died during the Holocaust: Ephraim, Emma, Jacques, and Noemie.

Something to note before we go deeper into this story is that this is an autofiction novel. It is no coincidence that the family in the book has the same name as the writer; this is her actual family story, except there are some elements that are based in fiction rather than reality. So I think we should use care in describing some of the events of the novel (although that should be already in place—this is the Holocaust we’re talking about).

After receiving the postcard, Anne and her mother eventually decide to dig deeper into the family history and piece together the extent of what actually happened. The second phase of the novel is in the past, when the Rabinovitch family are all still alive. We meet each member of the family, grow to love them despite knowing what is going to happen next.

We see how they ended up in France to begin with. The family was from Palestine, living in a vibrant Jewish community, but members of the family all decided to move for other opportunities in Europe. That would be a fatal mistake, even though the elderly matriarch and patriarch remained in Palestine.

Noemie was a talented writer, and might have even been a famous novelist if she had survived. The children were the first to die; we learn how and why Myriam was the only member of the family to survive what had happened, as well as how communities either rallied around their Jewish neighbors or looked away when they were being escorted to their deaths.

We then see life after the loss of her family (although she is unaware of what happened to them until much later) for Myriam, as well as the impacts on the war beyond the Jewish community. It was a terrible time in Europe for everyone, but especially those who belonged to minority or targeted groups.

All of this is an interesting contrast to the present day, as Anne and her mother are not really observant Jews. The impact of the Holocaust can be measured in the trauma that it created—the distance they have from their religious and cultural heritage. Anne especially feels this friction, especially at a Passover dinner where she is specifically targeted for not really being Jewish.

Her own daughter is targeted, which makes this novel a question of how far we’ve really come. While the Nazis might be gone, as well as her distant family members, that doesn’t mean the forces that created such hate are gone either.

Overall Thoughts

This was such a well-written novel. I’ll start off with that; I think that longer books can be difficult for me not because of the length, but because of how authors aren’t able to sustain the pacing or plot for that long. Sometimes long books can be some of the best works I’ve ever read because of how well the author pulled it off.

The Postcard is one of those books. Split into four parts, Berest deftly weaves together the multiple storylines to tell a history that spans decades, and it’s one that needs to be read and told. I didn’t have high expectations coming into this book, thinking it might be another Holocaust book among the many I’ve read, but it’s quite memorable.

Not to be reductive of the other books, though. Sometimes the writing doesn’t make me find it impressionable, although the stories are critical. I think it helps that this is autofiction and actually done, so we get a direct connection and memory to what’s actually happening in real-time.

Go read this one if you haven’t already! It’s one of my favorite books I’ve read recently for sure.

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