ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

The Postcard was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize, and a bestseller in France. And that’s interesting, because everybody’s favourite tourist destination doesn’t come out of it very well in this story that is a mystery, a portrait of Parisian intellectual and artistic life in the 20th century, and a devastating portrayal of how antisemitism still lingers in the France which deported so many French Jews to their deaths in Germany.

But first, the cover image.  I was still reading the first of four parts in this book when it occurred to me to look for the source of the arresting portrait on the cover.  It’s not a cleverly chosen stock image, it’s an authentic photo of Noémie Rabinovitch in 1941. Born in 1923 in Latvia, she was the younger sister of Anne Berest’s grandmother, Myriam.  She wanted to be a writer.

And while we should never make the mistake of mourning the loss of attractive people in the Holocaust more than those who are less appealing to look at, the intelligence and vitality of that young woman is a reminder that the Holocaust was a loss to humanity.  The world lost scientists, artists, musicians, inventors and writers, as well as ‘ordinary’ people who deserved to live just as much as anyone else.  What might that young woman have done with her life had she lived?

She might have written a magnificent book like this one.

The prologue begins with the postcard in the narrator’s mother’s ‘archive’.  Anne tells the story of Lélia receiving it in 2003, when she was twenty-four:

What caught my mother’s attention right away was the handwriting, strange and awkward, like no handwriting she had ever seen before.  Then she read the four names, written in the form of a list.

Ephraim
Emma
Noémie
Jacques (p.12)

And that was all, nothing else, except the stamp and the address.

The family knows who these people are.  They were Léila’s maternal grandparents and her aunt and uncle.  They were all deported from France and had died in Auschwitz in 1942, more than sixty years ago.

My mother felt a jolt of fear, as if someone were threatening her, someone lurking in the darkness of the past. Her hands began to tremble. (p.12)

Now, years later after an antisemitic incident at her daughter’s school, the narrator, Anne — a secular Jew — embarks on a quest to find out who sent this enigmatic postcard.  It seems impossible, but the book tells an intriguing tale of leads and red herrings drawn from her mother’s recollections and rambling stories.  A private detective helps, and so does a graphologist, both of them somewhat overwhelmed by the task because they usually work with pettier quests.  People who knew these four people are dead now, but descendants of those who knew the sole surviving sibling Myriam, sometimes know a scrap of information, leading to stories of flight, of the French Resistance, and of venal complicity.

I wanted to stop reading at the end of Part 1 ‘Promised Lands’.  Through Léila’s memories, I had come to know Ephraim, Emma, Noémie and Jacques, and when their lives came to an end about half way through the book, I was devastated. Berest had brought these people back to life in an extraordinary way; I was invested in them even though I knew their fate. But the rest of the story is just as rivetting. And Berest does not flinch from revealing the French betrayal of its Jewish citizens under the Vichy government.

The rest of the book recounts the quest and why it matters.  Berest depicts the awkwardness that is encountered when people know something but won’t tell.  There is still shame, and guilt, and people still have in their possession items that belong to descendants of those betrayed.  A scene when Léila ‘steals’ some photos from a man who lived in her parents’ village, is ironic. Anne remonstrates, and Léila retorts by saying that he can’t complain, he’s still got the beautiful old piano that Emma used to play.

The  postwar chaos when Myriam waits anxiously in Paris for her family’s return is very poignant.  Since she’s had no news, her assumption is that they are alive somewhere.  At this stage of human history, not everything is known.  So — day after day — she goes to the hotel hastily converted into a reception centre for people returning from the camps. She vacillates between hope, denial and despair, and refuses to take the advice to stay home and listen to the radio announcing the names.  This cruel, impersonal way of telling people about the fate of their loved ones seems incomprehensible today, but all over Europe authorities were overwhelmed by what had happened.  There was no plan.  And in some places, it was a problem that authorities did not want to confront.  They wanted these problem survivors gone; they wanted to move on.  They certainly did not want to interrogate the past.

The book is also a meditation on what it means to be Jewish when not observant at all… It’s an identity that cannot be shaken off, and it shapes a life, even for secular Jews. Because she doesn’t announce her Jewish heritage, Anne is sometimes taken for a Jew and sometimes not, and these assumptions lead to droll scenes when Anne is out of place and ignorant of the rituals to follow at services — both Jewish and Christian.  Her mother reminds her about the rules for using cutlery, but Anne doesn’t know the words or the songs and pronounces Amen/Oy-men incorrectly and so on.  (Having been to Anglican, Catholic, Jewish and secular funerals and marriages, I can relate to this embarrassment and confusion!)

The Postcard explores the emotions of the past and present and the repercussions which filter down to the present day, including the tension between those who want healing from acknowledging the past, and those who are afraid, for all sorts of reasons, of digging it up.  The ending, which reveals that they did indeed find out who sent the postcard and why, shows that it came from a very human impulse, and wasn’t malevolent at all.

The book is a work of autofiction, with names changed to protect the guilty.  The author did not want to shame the descendants of those who betrayed her family, her community, the Resistance and her country.  And no, the postcard is not an authorial invention; it really was sent to the author’s mother.

Author: Anne Berest
Title: The Postcard (La carte postale)
Translated from the French by Tina Kover
Cover design by Ginevra Rapisardi
Publisher: Europa Editions, 2023, first published 2021
ISBN: 9781609458386, pbk, 464 pages
Source: Kingston Library