Book Review: The Postcard, by Anne Berest

The Postcard by Anne Berest
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A postcard shows up at the home of a Frenchwoman in 2003. Mailed from the biggest postal outlet in France, the Louvre post office, it lists four names: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques, and nothing else. The person it was addressed to has been dead for years. So have the four people listed on the card: they were a mother, father, brother and sister all killed by the Nazis. The handwriting is unfamiliar, although it seems to have been addressed by someone different from the one who wrote the four names. Thus begins this true-life mystery story, as Anne Berest digs into her family’s past, determined to find out who sent the postcard and why.

I’ve included this book in my “historical fiction” lists, even though it isn’t fiction. It reads as though it were, and there are parts where conversations are imagined, but most of it is based on documented evidence. Berest’s research (and that of her mother) unveils family stories long buried, layers of guilty secrets, multi-generational trauma, deeply entrenched but papered-over antisemitism, France’s long-standing reluctance to admit that there were plenty of collaborators with the Nazis as well as many resistance fighters, and the challenge we non-religious Jews have faced over the generations and face again today about what it means to be a Jew.

My husband, who was raised Catholic but gets annoyed if I call him a Catholic because he rejected the religion when he was in his early teens, doesn’t understand why I consider myself a Jew. I don’t attend religious services, I am not a believer, I was raised without knowing any other Jews or following any of the traditions. My answer to him has always been: because if Hitler were here, I’d be killed as a Jew.

Today we had a horrifying reminder of that as a pogrom took place in Amsterdam. Gangs were stopping people on the streets near where an Israeli soccer team was playing, shouting “Jew” at them, and beating them up. Dozens were seriously injured; two are still missing. Fortunately, the Dutch government has already arrested 60 of the attackers, but it is horrifying to realize that, yet again, people are being attacked in what we think of as a modern, civilized, democratic country simply for being Jewish.

So many times in history Jews have assimilated and assumed they had been accepted into the society around them, only to have those societies turn on them when political leaders decided to harness what seems to be an ever-present latent antisemitism. Anne Berest, one of those fully assimilated Jews, explores the danger faced by even assimilated Jews as she digs into her family’s past and the fatal decisions her ancestors made in the belief that they could become fully accepted by the French. That false confidence led to the deaths of millions of Jews who waited too long to flee (and others who tried to flee but were turned away by other countries, including, I’m ashamed to say, my own).

Sometimes we need reminders like Berest’s book to bring home the sad reality that Jews are always living on the edge of danger. (I’d far rather get the reminders from books than to have actual pogroms happening in my lifetime!)

Whether you are Jewish or not, you’ll be gripped by this complex multi-generational family story, and by the puzzle of discovering who sent the postcard and why.

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