The Postcard by Anne Berest on May 16, 2023
Genres: Fiction / Historical / 20th Century / World War II, Fiction / Jewish, Fiction / World Literature / France / 20th Century
Pages: 464
Format: Hardcover
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The Postcard was a great historical fiction, mixed with an autobiographical type story. This one left me shaking my head! THAT ENDING!! I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry!
The main character received a mysterious postcard with only four names on one side of the postcard. They are: Ephraim, Emma, Noemie, and Jacques. They were her ancestors and all whom were killed at Auschwitz. On the other side of the card is an unremarkable photo of Paris’s Opera Garnier. We learned that this building was the first building Hitler visited after the Nazis captured the city in 1940. The story starts about 20 years after the postcard arrives. The novelist’s daughter came across it and her daughter is currently struggling with some anti-Semitist treatment at school so the postcard is a mystery that she must solve. She needs to know who sent it.
While giving all the background on her ancestors, there is another story that is also being told. Anne struggles to figure out what it means to be a Jew in the modern day. She knew she was Jewish, of course, but she had no firm sense what that meant. She recounts a memory from when she was very young of being told by protective adults that the numbers she occasionally saw on the arms of old people were their phone numbers, just in case they got lost. Later, as an 8 year old girl, she asked her mother what “Jewish” meant. After a moment of thought, her mother took a book down from the shelf and opened it on the floor, revealing “black and white photographs, images of ravaged bodies in striped pajamas, of barbed wire in the snow, of corpses stacked atop one another, of mountains of clothes and shoes and eyeglasses.”
So a lot of this story is about how being Jewish affected her growing up and how it continues to affect her life. As we hear of the horrors that occurred, we find out the background info on the 4 names from the postcard. I could get into more on this, but I don’t want to give anything away.
This is a very emotional and touching story. I learned a lot about the French side of the holocaust and how Hitler’s reign terrorized people for so long there. I think this book could have been a little shorter but it was still an amazing story. I didn’t see that end coming! If you like WWII stories or historical fiction, this is a must read.