Book Review: “The Postcard” by Anne Berest
The Horrors of the Holocaust
Writing books about the massacre of some six million Jewish people during the Holocaust can be a tricky business. You don’t want to come across as writing an entertaining yarn, for fear of disrespecting the dead. However, you also probably don’t want just to rhyme off a litany of horrors — I’m sure everyone by now knows that Adolf Hitler was an evil man and the crimes European society perpetuated on Jewish peoples were barbaric. It’s a fine line to walk, but Anne Berest walks it quite admirably in her new novel, The Postcard. It has an unusual but intriguing premise: The story is a fictionalized account of her family tree and what happened to some of her relatives during the Second World War. Thus, reality and fantasy merge in the telling of this tale, but this isn’t the work of a magic realist. The story is quite sober and straightforward, and — if it is as true as it claims to be, though it is a fictionalized account of that truth — it is also quite heartbreaking. The Postcard, then, is a personal book, and an important addition to the literature of the Holocaust. It has been translated now into English from French.
The story told is as such: In January 2003, an anonymous postcard arrives at the home of the author’s mother. On the front is a photograph of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back are the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques — all killed at Auschwitz in 1941. The first half of the novel, then, is Anne’s mother’s story to her daughter about what happened to these members of the family, all of whom were of Jewish descent. The latter half of the book takes place more than 15 years later, as Anne decides to investigate who sent the postcard in the first place. Her search takes her to a handwriting analyst, who can provide a few scant clues. Anne also goes to the village where her relatives resided for some time to see if she can find anything of note. As the story progresses, various strands of her family’s life — including what happened to her grandmother (the sole survivor on her mother’s side) come together and coalesce.
The Postcard is, in some respects, an experimental book. For one thing, I’m presuming that the barebones of the story are real — that Anne Berest’s mother did indeed get a postcard in real life as described here. Two, various narratives and threads are brought together from the present and the past. However, what makes this work striking and relevant is that it shows how widespread anti-Semitism is, and how ignorant of it most of us goys are about it. For instance, I wasn’t aware that Jewish people were persecuted in Russia around the time of the Revolution in 1917. In Berest’s family’s case, they had to flee the country — which Jewish people would have to do again before World War II in Germany if they wanted to escape the oncoming unspeakable horrors. Berest notes that the same forces of hate are still at work today, even if there is more tolerance towards Jewish people nowadays. As the author notes, prejudice still lurks in the shadows in insidious forms. The book is also interesting because it briefly examines the nature of what it means to be Jewish in the first place — especially if you’re non-observant of customs and traditions — and also details what it is like to be a survivor of the Holocaust some generations removed. The Postcard is a testament to the importance of telling stories that are uncomfortable to tell, and how important it is to do so to ensure that history doesn’t ever repeat itself.
That all said, The Postcard is beset with a few structural problems — and is, at best, a little on the uneven side (and I’m not sure how much of that is because things were lost in translation). For instance, the first part of the book lacks any sort of tension because Berest tells us upfront that the characters we are about to generally meet untimely and horrific demises. Thus, the reader is left waiting for bad things to start happening to Berest’s ancestors — and it does take a little while for all that to happen. (I also want to add here that in making that criticism, I’m tiptoeing into wanting to make this book more entertaining or readable — which one has to be careful of when dealing with the atrocities of the sorry part of human history being discussed here. It also may very well be that the author wants to show the lead-up to how the atrocities of the Holocaust took place, and that anti-Semitism exists throughout history, even in the present.) Thus, some readers may be a bit impatient with this part of the book, and this section of the book is tinged with a sense of sadness and grief that isn’t always easy to bear. However, the book tends to get more and more readable the deeper you get into it, so some of this may be the novel teaching you how to consume it. And part of that increased readability, too, may just be that the book gets a little more optimistic when the detective story kicks into gear — that there is a sense that reparations are going to get made. Still, despite any of this novel’s faults, it is a largely captivating read and signals the importance for people who were not directly impacted by the Holocaust — that is, they didn’t live through it — to tell their stories of “survival,” too. All in all, The Postcard is a fascinating work, and one that does justice to both members of the author’s family and the genre of Holocaust literature — proving that even as those who lived through the nightmare are largely now gone, there are still tales that need telling about this awful and brutal period that happened only less than 100 years ago.
Anne Berest’s The Postcard will be published by Europa Editions on May 16, 2023.
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