The author discovers a mysterious postcard for her family and begins a journey to learn about her ancestors during World War II. She uncovers stories of love, loss, and strength, reflecting on the connections between generations and the search for identity.

This was an interesting read. Well researched and beautifully woven together to keep me on the edge throughout. Times have changed but relatable to where the world is now.

Thank You to NetGalley for this free ebook ARC.

I was drawn to this book because of the front cover. I love the black and white photo. I also wanted to read this book as it was about history, the holocaust, families, survival, and genealogy. Although a work of fiction, it felt and read like a work of nonfiction and was inspired by the author's own family. It was an emotional read and I'm not sure if I'm ready to move to on to another book just yet.

The author's, maternal grandmother receives a postcard amongst a bunch of holiday cards. It has a picture of a place in Paris and the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents and their children on the flip side. All members died at at Auschwitz except for the author's maternal grandmother. The postcard was placed in with some other mementos and no one knew who sent the card. About 15 years later, the author and her mother try to solve the mystery of who sent the postcard. They learn more about what it means to be Jewish, who might have sent the postcard, what happened to the family, neighbors, and community during this horrific time, the family struggles .

The Postcard by Anne Berest is a poignant and beautifully written story about uncovering family secrets and understanding the past. The novel begins with the mystery of an anonymous postcard sent to the author’s family, bearing only the names of her Jewish relatives who perished in Auschwitz during World War II. The story weaves between the past and present, illustrating the lasting impact of trauma, memory, and the search for belonging. It’s a book that reminds us of the importance of remembering and honoring those who came before us. I enjoyed this beautiful book.

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.

This true novel is incredible and powerful and necessary. I tend to steer clear of Holocaust novels for reasons I won’t discuss here, case in point I have had the advance reading copy of The Postcard for quite a long time and kept avoiding it. Once I began, I couldn’t stop reading. We are at a place in history and in time where antisemitism is rampant and overt and there are fewer and fewer first-person witnesses to the Holocaust alive. This is a personal story, of the author’s family, but universal in the suffering of so many others everywhere. The ongoing antisemitism in France is a thread winding through the book. That same antisemitism exists here too. This is Holocaust book, but different than most I think, reading in part like a detective story, the search for who wrote the postcard, that brings in all of that history to the present day. The bureaucratic details of the mechanics to rid France of all of its Jews is chilling, the historical details written with such immediacy. It was an antisemitism incident at a French public school that compelled the author to begun the search for the writer of the postcard that had been sent to her family years before. This is a very special book.

Thanks to Europa Éditions and Netgalley for the arc.

Totally forgot to post this review after reading this book over the summer. This was so well done—it has also sold extremely well in our store, and has seen a resurgence in sales recently due to the conflict in Israel and Gaza.

A gorgeous, beautifully written, heartbreaking WWII story. The characters felt like they were my own family. Very emotionally engaging. I thought about this one for a long time after I finished.

Highly recommend. 5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Europa Editions for an advanced readers copy of this book.

This book is exceptionally timely as antisemitism is on the rise around the world. An interesting read with a slightly different approach than other Holocaust books. Everyone should read this.

“It is the gaps left within us by the secret of others that keep on haunting us throughout our life” - Hungarian-born French psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham.

In “The Postcard” Anne Berest grapples with the gaps left by her family members lost to the Holocaust, while touching upon complex yet important issues of loss, transgenerational trauma, memory and identity.

“The Postcard” is narrated in a way that goes back and forth between the present and the past. In one storyline, Anne (based on the author herself) receives a mysterious postcard with the names of her Jewish family lost to the Holocaust. Anne doesn’t know any details about their past, but coalescence of various events which remind of her Jewish ancestry works as an impetus to discover who sent the postcard and why. Together with her mother, Anne sets off on a private investigation into her family’s past. In another storyline we follow Berest’s Jewish family of Rabinovitch during World War II. As the Rabinovitch family struggles to find a safe place in the world, constantly moving and starting over again in another country, we learn that antisemitism had been rooted into European society long before the Holocaust happened.

These two interwoven storylines work in order to convey a deeper understanding of the whole - Anne doesn’t only discover the details about her family, she also tries to understand the significance of her ancestry in the present world as well as its connection to her own identity.

While “The Postcard” turned out to be quite a positive reading experience for me, I felt Berest's writing, especially its evocative quality, was slightly uneven. I understand the author's intention to include as many details about her family members as possible, so the author had no choice but to fill in the gaps, yet sometimes the rendition felt slightly stilted and superficial. Despite these gripes, I appreciate the elegiac character of “The Postcard” and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in this part of the history.

3.5/5

Many thanks to Europa Editions who kindly provided me with an advanced reading copy via NetGalley.

A great read that I have mentioned and recommended to my subscribers in multiple videos on my booktube channel so far.

I have increased the number of non-fiction books I read in any given year, and books with a narrative style like this one are usually more appealing to me.
The author thinks back about her family life for several reasons, events that occurred in her life and she thinks back about an anonymous postcard that listed the names of her family members, most of whom were lost in the war. She sets out on a diligent pursuit of her family's history, and every investigative step is followed by a tale of facts that her mother has somehow already uncovered by that point. The mother gives out information when she feels like it, although she has much more she could say, but leaves it for another day. Since that is not a format I usually appreciate when people are generally telling me a story, I wish the author had avoided the constant back and forth (unless she wanted us to feel as frustrated as she does at the roadblocks).
The style will work better for those people who like to ride along with the narrator as they piece together the full picture. I am not one of those people, and that is one of the main reasons I struggled with the book.
The content is unique - it focuses on an average family and their myriad struggles to make something of their lives, only to be blindsided by a war that they do not have personal stakes in. The family in question do not have a strong affinity to their Jewish identity, which makes for an additional talking point.
I would recommend this book to readers who want to investigate a different angle of life during Hitler's reign and the kinds of people it affected.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

4.5 stars. Thank you to Net Galley and Europa Editions for the ARC in exchange for my honest review. This story immediately pulled me in. It starts with the Berest family receiving a postcard with no information except four names -- Ephraim, Emma and children Noemie and Jacques -- all family members killed at Auschwitz. 15 years after it's receipt, Anne and her mother set out to solve this family mystery. The book jumps back and forth between present day as the duo travel to France to find more information and what happened starting in the 1930s and what happens in a community where the people were whisked away never to return. The storytelling is wonderful and not only told the story of a mother and daughter and a family devasted by the Holocaust but also pre/post World War II in France and neighboring countries. I had previously read Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay and was aware of France's involvement with rounding up Jewish people and sending them to the camps. But I appreciated that the author spent some time on what happened to people who were rescued from the camps as I feel this aspect is not usually focused on. I highly recommend this book!

An unforgettable autofictional thriller that brings alive the experience of surviving the Holocaust.

In this eloquently written family story, Anne Berest has presented a carefully recreated portrait of a small Jewish family lost to the Holocaust. In 2003, her mother Leila received a postcard of the Opera Garnier in Paris with an unusual message: four names listed, Ephraim, Emma, Noemie, Jacques; these were Leila’s grandparents, aunt and uncle who died in the Holocaust. After Leila’s initial discussion of this postcard and what it’s possible meaning could be with her husband and daughters, it was filed away. Until some ten years later, when Anne was pregnant, consigned to rest and spending time with her parents. On the eve of becoming a mother Anne wanted to know more about those who had come before her. And the seeds of this story were born.

Actually, as becomes obvious, the seeds began earlier in searches Leila had made through various archives in France to track her family’s history. But Anne, already an investigator and writer, would go much further. This story combines biography, history, recreation of some events with fact based historical fiction, and a loving restoration of a full family story. Along the way, there is much to learn about the Parisian arts culture pre-war, the way that Jewish people tried to exist in various places in Europe before the war, the insidious methods that the Nazis used to remove those they wanted gone, etc.

Although I have read other literature of this time, I still found much that was new in addition to the deeply human story. The translation appears to be excellent and the tale flows.

I recommend this book to all history lovers, those interested in biographies and also those interested in a different view of a family searching the Holocaust.

A copy of this book was provided by Europa Editions through NetGalley. The review is my own.

“For almost forty years, I have tried to draw a shape that resembles me, but without success. Today, though, I can connect those disparate dots. I can see, in the constellation of fragments scattered over the page, a silhouette in which I recognize myself at last: I am the daughter, and the granddaughter, of survivors.”

In 2003 the author’s family received a mysterious postcard with no message on the back except for the names of four family members who died during the Holocaust, the author’s maternal great grandparents and two of their children. Fifteen years later the author is grappling with how to explain and pass on her Jewish heritage to her daughter and launches into a quest to better understand her family’s story prior to and during WWII with the hopes of uncovering who sent the anonymous postcard and why.

“The Postcard” chronicles this investigative journey, perfectly walking the line between historical fiction and narrative non-fiction as the story jumps between the author’s present day genealogical research alongside her mother and the constructed story of the lives of her family members from the early 1900s through the tragic events of the 1940s. As a family historian myself, I loved how “The Postcard” at its core was about how understanding the threads of connection that run from generation to generation is essential to having a rooted identity in the present. Fascinating, poignant, and haunting, this is a book that will stick with me for a long time.

I would highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in true accounts about WWII and the Holocaust, memoirs that examine the intergenerational impacts of trauma and the burdens inherited from the past, or books about family secrets and memory-keeping. Honestly, I think anyone who enjoys gripping non-fiction that reads like a well-written novel would enjoy this book. "The Postcard" is easily the best work of non-fiction that I have read so far in 2023 and it will definitely have a place on my year end non-fiction favourites list.

"There are, in the genealogical tree, traumatized, unprocessed places that are eternally seeking relief. From these places, arrows are launched toward future generations. Anything that has not been resolved must be repeated and will affect someone else."

*DISCLAIMER: I received an eARC of this book from Europa Editions through NetGalley for the purposes of providing an unbiased review.*

I really loved this story. It's long but it doesn't moves fairly quickly. It covers some hard topics, so be prepared, but it's a fascinating mystery as well as a beautiful family drama. Highly recommended.
I received a copy of this book for review from the publisher and Netgalley.

This is a difficult story that follows what happened to members of a Jewish family through WWII in France. Based on the story of her family, the author weaves a heartbreaking story that is discovered when a postcard arrives with the names of 4 family members lost during the Holocaust. Research, memories, and long-lost letters help fill in the missing details. One of the saddest sections for me that I’ve rarely read about previously was the sobering details when the too few survivors returned to France. The reactions of the French citizens who still didn’t really know what had happened was painful to read knowing what we know now.
I thought the translation was excellent since I would have never thought it wasn’t written originally in English.

“What does it mean to be Jewish? Maybe the answer was contained within another question: What does it mean to wonder what it means to be Jewish?”


The Postcard by Anne Berest is a wonderful story consisting of a list of names with no explanation whatsoever. This list will lead readers to a wonderful story about discovery and identity. The book follows different timelines as readers will be introduced to the family's history as immigrant Jews from Russia in Europe prior to and including the holocaust. Present day in 2019, after all the postcards are sent, Anne decides to delve into her family history with the help of her mother Leila. Anne hired a private investigator and a handwriting expert to find the hidden truths of their family and the family's lost history.

It is a book that made family, identity, and culture as the main theme of the whole story that can invoke feelings of nostalgia, hope, and love throughout reading. I am very impressed with this book as it checks many of the feel good things I seek when reading a book.

“What does it mean to be Jewish? Maybe the answer was contained within another question: What does it mean to wonder what it means to be Jewish?”

If any question can encapsulate a theme, this one can—to wonder what it means to be part of a culture, a thread of history from which you had been severed. The Postcard is about a list of names with no explanation. A list that will prompt a discovery and a change of heart and direction. It is a story of the choice to detach from one’s past only to find that DNA is stronger than one’s philosophy. It is a snapshot of France during World War II, a condemnation for its role in the Holocaust, its attempt to bury that role in euphemism. It describes familial bonds, heroism, hate, addiction, abandonment, but mostly it describes finding and belonging.

Thanks to Europa Editions and NetGalley for this eARC.