I borrowed this book from the library without having heard any reviews of it, or really knowing what it was about. Something in the blurb caught my attention, and I paused my scrolling through available audiobooks for long enough to borrow it. I then promptly forgot about it for a few days until I was looking for something new to listen to, and decided to give it a try. And it became clear very quickly that this impulsive choice had been a fantastic one.
This book begins when Anne is on bed rest during a difficult pregnancy. While she’s stuck in bed, she begins talking to her mother about their family history, asking questions she’d either never thought to ask before or hadn’t felt she could. But knowing that she’s about to bring a baby into the world who will inherit the legacy of the family that came before her gives her a strange desire to understand where she came from and learn about the people to whom she owes her very existence. It turns out her mother, at some point, had a similar desire – and was adept at research to the point of collecting boxes and boxes of documents. Anne begins to learn about her family, starting with a mysterious postcard that arrived with no explanation or signature, simply bearing the names of four of her ancestors who had died at Auschwitz. She becomes determined to find out what the postcard means, and in the process finally learns about her family history.
The book is part present-day sections where Berest and her mother do some sleuthing, travel to areas her family lived in to ask around about them, and go through her mother’s research trying to piece together the bits of information they have to make a complete picture. The other part of it is skipping backwards into the time of her ancestors and tracing their stories through their own eyes as the events of their lives unfold. She does a fantastic job of seamlessly weaving these two elements together – sometimes we have more information about her ancestors than she has found in the present-day sections, sometimes she learns something that then dovetails into a chapter about what she’s found out, but it never feels jarring or confusing, and both perspectives are equally well written and engaging.
I was surprised by how much and how quickly I was completely invested in her stories and her search. I wanted to know more about her family, what had happened to them, where their belongings had ended up, who knew what, and what that darn postcard meant! I was as drawn along by the unfolding events in this book as with the most well-plotted thriller, but in addition to the brilliant plot momentum, there’s also a huge amount of emotional impact in the knowledge that the events that are being recounted are, by and large, factual.
I did a little bit of research about whether this book is fact or fiction, because it is quite confusing. The characters are Berest’s family and have her family’s names. A lot of the events she’s learning about are the historical events of her own family. I found a reference to her own description of the book as a “roman vrai” (I can’t find the original site I saw this on, but it’s also on the Wikipedia page here). This book was translated from French, so this is a French term that means, more or less, that it is a “true novel.” I’m still a little fuzzy on where the lines are drawn between real and fictional, but I think that the facts are mostly her real relatives’ stories, and the details she includes from historical events are based on historical accounts that are real. I think where the “roman” – or novel – part comes in is when she’s writing the first-person accounts of what happened to her deceased relatives – there’s no way to know for sure everything that happened to them with any certainty, but her writing includes great detail and storytelling. So I think that she used fiction to add flesh and blood to the bones of fact. At any rate, it’s a writing format I’ve never encountered before – there are plenty of historical accounts of the Holocaust, plenty of first-person memoirs, and tons of novels – but I’ve never seen a book that’s technically a novel, but that includes characters who are the author herself and her own family, and that blends the facts of their lives with fictional retelling. It was a fascinating reading experience just because of this blurred mixture of fact and fiction. But it was also incredibly effective; it meant that both the fact and fiction felt more real and had much greater impact.
I’m still thinking about this book weeks after having finished it, and I expect I will continue to do so for quite some time. I’m already planning a re-read. It blew all my concepts of genre and fiction vs. non- out of the window in the most extraordinary way, as well as just being a cracking book. Obviously I’d recommend this book, and give it full stars. Surprisingly fantastic read!
Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.
January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.
Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why. Aided by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist, and many others, she embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself. – Goodreads
Book Title: The Postcard
Author: Anne Berest (Tina Kover – Translator)
Series: No
Edition: Audiobook (Libby)
Published By: Europa Editions
Released: August 18, 2021
Genre: “Roman Vrai” – True Novel (Based on Berest’s Family History), Family History, Holocaust, Historical Mystery
Pages: 464
Date Read: January 7-8, 2025
Rating: 10/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.36/5 (29,967 ratings)