𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐓𝐂𝐀𝐑𝐃 (PUB 05.16) is a beautifully harrowing, heart-breaking and intimate book-in-translation.

This gripping novel is based on the author's family. In January 2003 an anonymous postcard arrived with 4 names written on the back. Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacque. The names of Berest's maternal great-grandparents and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all of whom died at Auschwitz in 1942. No additional information. 20 years later Berest begins to truly research the history and source of the postcard in earnest.

"𝘉𝘶𝘵, 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘥𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘦𝘯𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘴𝘦, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘬𝘦𝘱𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘤𝘪𝘳𝘤𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘢 𝘥𝘢𝘳𝘬 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳, 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘣𝘪𝘻𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘴𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘺 𝘢 𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘰 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘺. 𝘑𝘦𝘸."

FORMAT: The novel is divided into four books. I started this in print and nearly set it aside. The first book focused on WWII and the history of the family. It was meticulously researched and detailed. I switched to audio for Book 2 and that's when the story really took off. I was hooked. The foundation provided in Book 1 was important and I'm glad I stuck with it.

A beautiful written novel a book of family a look at life during ww11.Anne Berest shares with us the desire to discover her true family history.This is the story of a family separated seeking safety from Hitlers army.From the first pages I knew this book was a very special emotionally moving story.#netgalley #europabooks

Imagine sorting through your mail and noticing that you’ve just received a cryptic postcard with a picture of the Paris Opera House on one side and only four names on the reverse. Imagine then how you’d react after remembering, a few minutes later, that the Paris Opera House was one of the headquarters of the Nazi occupation of Paris and that the names were actually those of your ancestors who perished in the Holocaust. Would you feel threatened? Curious?

This REALLY happened in 2003.

In 2019, the author decided to try and solve the mystery. This is her story.

Berest has incredible talent. The retelling of facts is not boring. It’s told in such a way that readers are reliving her ancestor’s experience through flashbacks. It’s truly a captivating style and story.

“In life you will find that you have to know how to anticipate things. Hold on to that. Being one step ahead of the game is more useful than being a genius.”

Berest’s book focuses on the role of Holocaust trauma, antisemitism, and the French Jews’ desperate search for safety that still continues today. I appreciated the effort Berest made to explain to those of us non-Jewish readers what it really means to be Jewish - both then and now - and what it’s like to live in the shadow of a painful past. Like Berest, readers will be left with questions….questions that may never be answered.

The writing style and compelling narrative instantly pulled me in and I was not aware of the length of this book. Berest’s quest to reclaim her ancestry is captivating.

I was gifted this copy by Europa Editions and NetGalley and was under no obligation to provide a review.

The Postcard comes in with such a great hook, I wanted to know more from the start!

It was a bit confusing at times to follow the mom telling the story, and the story of the family itself.

Otherwise, I enjoyed the evolution of this book, and found it engaging.

Do I review this superb marvel of a book as a child of Holocaust survivors? As a voracious reader who devours literary mysteries? As a Jewish woman navigating what often is still a virulently anti-Semitic world? It does not really matter because this book succeeds on every level. If you can stand the heartbreak, join French author Anne Berest on her autobiographical, auto-fiction journey while she searches for the author of and an explanation behind a postcard received by her mother with nothing else but the names of her mother's grandparents and aunt and uncle, all of whom were killed in the Holocaust. It is a compelling propulsive heart-rending exploration of the trauma we carry when our loved ones live through horrid times. It is a moving account of the Holocaust - but those parts we do not often think about - the hellacious day the "deportees" returned to Paris from the camps; the letters mailed to loved one who were no longer there to receive them. It is also a cri de couer of what it means to survive and honour the legacy of those we lost.

The postcard of the title is received in 2003 at Berest’s mother’s Paris home in 2003, and includes only the names of Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their two younger children, Noémie and Jacques. Anne mother, Lélia, who seems to save everything, puts the postcard away in a drawer. Many years later, an antisemitic incident spurs Berest’s memory of the postcard and a compulsion to solve the mystery of who sent it and why.

The book plays out in two storylines. One is the story of Berest’s quest, which includes long talks with her mother and research through the many archival boxes her mother has collected about the family history, consultation with a private detective and graphologist, and visits to the places where Berest’s maternal ancestors lived.

The other storyline is a fictionalized family history. Berest’s family members listed on the postcard existed, they were murdered in the Nazi death camps 60 years before the postcard was received, while Berest’s grandmother, Myriam, who was the eldest child of Ephraîm and Emma Rabinovitch, was able to escape the net of the Nazis’ collaborators in the occupied zone and survive the war in the so-called free zone in the south of France. Berest is able to fill in many other life events from family lore, the materials in her mother’s archives, and what she is told by people who knew or knew of her great-grandparents and their children. The book is classified as fiction because Berest then clothes the bones of this true Rabinovitch family history with thoughts, emotions, and actions of her ancestors.

I imagine that most people reading this book are familiar with the Holocaust and its six million murdered European Jews. They’ve seen the horrific black-and-white pictures and videos of starving prisoners found in the liberated death camps, and the stacks of skeletal corpses. As awful as those sights are, they can be distancing and dehumanizing. Berest brings vividly to life how 20th-century European antisemitism drove her ancestors to move constantly throughout Europe, seeking safety and a normal life. Moscow, Lodz, Riga, Palestine, Prague, and France are just some of the places of her family’s diaspora. But no place was safe. Even before the Holocaust, antisemitic hostility drove her ancestors away from their homes to try and start over again in another place. Her great-grandfather, Ephraïm, who was completely secularized, was convinced he’d found that place in France, where he moved his wife and three children when his older daughter, Myriam, was just 10 years old. French became Myrian’s sixth language, and she and her sister Noémie excelled at it and all their academic subjects. Yet they were always treated as being separate, never really French. And when France fell to the Germans, they saw how quick the French, especially the police and civil authorities, were to collaborate and do the Nazis’ dirty work.

Given the shocking rise in antisemitism around the world and in France and the US today, it’s easy to understand the anguish of the Rabinovitch family to discover that no matter how hard they worked, no matter their dedication to their adopted country, they would always be viewed with hostility by a significant segment of the population. And all these years after the horrors of the Holocaust, Anne and Lélia discuss their personal experiences of antisemitism and how Anne’s young daughter, Claire, has already experienced antisemitism at her school. With a new boyfriend, the divorced Anne attends her first seder, and all the talk is about the rise of right-wing antisemitism in France, and how concerned they should be about the increasingly overt antisemitism in their country and how much it may affect them.

This book is phenomenal, truly exceptional. I’ve read so many books, fiction and non-fiction, about the Holocaust and antisemitism, and few have had the emotional power and feeling of enlightenment that this one has. Berest deserves all the awards she has already won for the book, and more.

Powerful and engaging, realistically written as a novel and autobiographical. The writing and storytelling are so excellent that I wondered which parts were true and which were imagined. Highly recommended for readers who love historical or literary nonfiction and fiction. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

I kind of wish that everyone had a writer in the family who could do for their history what Anne Berest is able to do for her own in The Postcard, beautifully translated by Tina Kover. This book, which I can best describe as a blend of autofiction and historical fiction, is an attempt to fill in gaps and bring back to life relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust. Berest also seeks to understand how her grandmother, Myriam, survived; asks questions about what it means to be Jewish; and wrestles with continuing anti-Semitism. This book is extraordinary in its depth and sensitivity and vibrancy.

The catalyst for Berest’s exploration of her family’s history is the arrival of a mysterious postcard. The card contains the names of Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, great-aunt, and great-uncle. All four were murdered at Auschwitz. The card is addressed to M. Bouverais, which might refer to either her own grandmother or her step-grandfather. When it arrives, Berest begins to question her mother, Lélia, to learn what she knows about what happened to the Rabinovitch family before and during World War II—and how Myriam escaped their fate.

The amount of research that Léli was able to find is astonishing, considering the efforts made by the Nazis to cover up their crimes and of the French and Vichy governments to side-step their collaboration with the Nazis. In the second half of The Postcard, there are several heartbreaking moments when Myriam and Lélia run face-first into stonewalling by the French government. Myriam was constantly put off with white lies that her family would come back if she was just a little more patient. Years later, Lélia would have to deal with contradictory documentation on what happened to the four Rabinovitchs.

Berest takes her mother and grandmother’s research, blends it with wider research about the French Resistance, the history of French anti-Semitism, her memories, and her talents as a writer to create dialogue and scenes that help us imagine what it might be like to be hunted across France, to be persecuted, to be pushed towards industrialized death. Even though I know that there’s no way that Berest could know what her relatives actually said to each other or what, for example, Myriam’s thoughts were as she huddled in the trunk of a car as her mother- and sister-in-law helped her escape from Paris to Vichy-controlled Provence, it’s impossible to resist the veracity of what Berest writes.

I can’t praise The Postcard highly enough.

This ticked a lot of my favorite topics: Parisian intellectual life, family history and an author I'm starting to love.
It was a fascinating reading experience, a story that kept me in thrall and i loved.
The author is a master storyteller and the translation worked very well.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

3.5 stars. In 2003, the Berest household receives a strange, anonymous postcard that contains only the names of four members of their family that perished at Auschwitz six decades earlier. They set is aside and continue with their lives, until Anne decides in 2019 that she simply must know the origin of the postcard and why it was sent to them. We then embark on a journey into the past, as Anne's mother recounts the lives of her lost family members. After the stories end, Anne goes on a physical search for information and answers.

The Postcard is (in my opinion) a two-part story. The first part is the historical recounting of the lives of Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques. As expected, it is tragic and heartbreaking — merciless in its factual recounting, but still packed with emotion and the devastation that can only come from these kinds of losses. The second part of the book details Anne's search for answers, taking her to the office of a private investigator and then to the family's old village. I found this part interesting, the door-to-door interactions with neighbors all wildly different but all with a shadow of the sinister.

The ultimate resolution of this book was satisfying, if not what I expected. I enjoyed the stories of the lives of the lost Rabinovitch family members, but I was expecting this story to focus more on Anne's search for answers. Rating translated fiction that I don't LOVE always makes me hesitate (perhaps the original contains nuance that I'm missing by reading it in English), but I found the pace of this book to be pretty slow and the tone rather dry. Still, it's a worthwhile addition to WWII fiction, as I think the plot setup and structure are pretty unique.

Thank you to Anne Berest, Europa Editions, and NetGalley for my advance digital copy.

This novel was first published in France in 2021, winning several awards. Is it actually fiction? It seems to be a memoir or autobiography. It is clearly based on facts and research, but there are gaps in the details that Berest needed to fill in because so many of the individuals who would have known the specific details died in the Holocaust.

The theme of this novel can be found in a quote from an interview with Berest: “Why did my family not leave? Will I, who come from a family that failed to get out of harm’s way, be able to?” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2022)

A postcard with four names on it arrives at the home of Berest’s mother, Lélia Picabia, in 2003. The postcard has four names printed on it ... the mother’s grandparents and Lélia’s mother’s two siblings. All died in the Holocaust.

After many years, the author feels that she must learn the origin of the postcard. Who sent it? Why did they send it? Was it a memorial? Was it a threat? The author has significant research skills, as does the mother ... who also has a huge “archive” of material. Together, though sometimes with reluctance, they peel back the layers of history.

This is a fascinating read. And the quote above may well be relevant today for many people. Are we entering an era when the political atmosphere may cause people to ask, “Why did my family not leave?”

This book is genius! A profoundly moving story of a woman’s quest to discover her family’s origins at the worst time time in history. What happened to her family is not a new story but is so moving and engrossing that you can’t wait to turn the next page. A remarkable book.

"The Postcard" is a terrifically interesting book about a Jewish French woman's attempt to discover the history of her family during World War II. What makes it so special is the way that Berest creates a fiction-like narrative to tell the history of her family. While details are clearly embellished, the core of the story remains intact and her discoveries seem credible. I found this book fascinating--a story of one European Jewish family that stands in for a million others.

This book is the perfect example of ambivalence for me: I love it, but I am disturbed. The book is about the Holocaust and the multi-generational ripples of Antisemitism on a French Jewish family. The book is heart-breaking and moving and whatever you want to call it… but there’s the problem, right on the cover: it says “A Novel”. Now is it? What is real? What is fiction? I couldn’t wrap my head around it and I could not ignore it. France has a particular subgenre in literary fiction called auto-fiction. I’m usually okay with it, but not this time.

Anne Berest’ mother receives in the early 2000s an anonymous postcard with just 4 names written on it. It shocks and upsets her but she refuses to explain any of it to her daughter. Its only 20 years later than Anne takes an interest. Turns out that the names are those of the parents and siblings of Anne’s mother, all of them victims of the Nazi persecutions and killed in extermination camps. So the question becomes: what happened to those relatives? And also, who sent the postcard?

But it’s not the only questions by far. Anne Berest is quite ambivalent about her Jewish heritage, not practicing at all but even hiding it in some occasions, because antisemitism still exists in France and sometimes life is easier when you don’t say you’re Jewish. She gets challenged by more religious Jewish friends: is she really Jewish?

The book is torn between 3 pilars: the reconstitution of Anne Berest’ Jewish relatives destiny from Russia to their tragic deaths, and of her grandmother’s improbable survival, the suspenseful mystery around the postcard, and Anne’s contemporary private doubts and interrogations. I really loved this long genealogy of strong women. I was deeply moved, but the word “novel” kept nagging at me. Did she make up some of the most melodramatic parts of the story? Did she invent details of her ancestors’ journey she had no information about? I really think the book works have warranted a postface.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley. I received a free copy of this book for review consideration.

Where to begin?? I loved this book. I greatly enjoy reading works in translation, and The Postcard, with its powerful story and engaging style, was just brilliant.

The Postcard details the history of author Anne Berest's Jewish grandparents and great-grandparents as they navigate Europe to escape persecution. Berest's writing not only conveys the trauma and loss of her family members in a sensitive but deeply moving way, but she also discusses her own experience as a Jewish woman disconnected from her culture and her past.

This is the perfect read for fans of moving, historical fiction who are interested in exploring nonfiction or memoir. Thanks to Europa for the eARC!

Beautifully translated story of what it means to be a family. Who tells your story when everyone is gone? This is moving and heartbreaking and life affirming. I cannot think of enough adjectives to describe how thoughtful this story is.
Recommended for anyone looking for a family saga that straddles the line between history and present day.

"The Postcard" by Anne Berest is a captivating novel that not only explores the themes of love, loss, and self-discovery, but also delves into the author's personal struggle with her identity as a Jew in modern-day France. Berest's ancestors experienced pogroms in Eastern Europe, which forced the family to seek refuge elsewhere, eventually settling in Palestine and later France. The story of their creation of new lives and assimilation into French society is tinged with success and security, but ultimately ends in tragedy and unimaginable horror.

Berest's exquisite writing style brings to life the sights, sounds, and sensations of Paris, where the novel is set. The story follows the journey of Louise, who finds a postcard from her ex-boyfriend and embarks on a journey of self-discovery that uncovers her past and its impact on her present.

Parallel to Louise's journey, Berest shares her personal struggle to understand her Jewish identity. Although she knew she was Jewish, Berest had no clear understanding of what that meant. Her family's history, with its tragic events and displacement, serves as a reminder of the importance of understanding one's roots and heritage.

Overall, "The Postcard" is a beautifully written and thought-provoking novel that explores the complexities of love, loss, and self-discovery, while also shining a light on the challenges of understanding one's identity in a rapidly changing world. Berest's recounting of her family's experiences and her personal journey add a layer of depth and richness to the story, making it an unforgettable sad and emotional read.

This books was such a compelling read. I was just looking for what to read next and sampling various ARC's when I realised I had been reading for hours. The story of Anne's family draws you in immediately and you can't stop reading it is so immediate. I feel like this will still be into five by the end of the year, it's not often you find a book like this.

Intense and affecting, Berest’s novel - an auto-fiction - traces familiar history from a personal perspective. She is her own readership,as she pieces together her Jewish family’s history, both horrible and heroic. First comes her mother’s research, then her own, putting flesh in the bones of ancestors lost in time. The conclusion is powerful.

A deeply moving and gripping tale of persecution and family trauma. One day in January 2003 an intriguing postcard arrives at Anne Berest’s family home. On the front a photo of the Opera Garnier in Paris. On the back the names of her maternal great-grandparents and their children Noemie and Jacques, all of whom were murdered in Auschwitz. Not until 15 years later does Berest feel impelled to discover who sent the postcard and why. She sets out on a voyage of discovery which takes her to some dark places indeed. En route she uncovers her family history as well as musing on issues of identity, in particular Jewish identity, and what it means to be Jewish today, not least what it means to be Jewish in contemporary France. A dual-time narrative set in the present and during WWII, the two time frames are seamlessly woven together, with perfect pacing and construction. There are many stories about the Holocaust and its continuing impact, and this is certainly one of the most compelling. A marvellous read.