BookBrowse Reviews The Postcard by Anne Berest

Anne Berest's The Postcard — with an elegant translation from the French by Tina Cover — is marketed as a novel about a Jewish family during the German occupation of France but in fact skirts quite close to the line dividing fiction from memoir. Berest applies the narrative liberties afforded by fiction to augment an otherwise accurate account based on well-researched history, family documents and archival sources.

In January 2003, twenty-four-year-old Anne and her sisters are summoned to their parents' Paris home. Lélia, Anne's mother, shows them a postcard that arrived earlier in the week. Written on the unsigned card, in an unfamiliar script, is a short list of names: "Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, Jacques." These are the names of Lélia's maternal, Rabinovitch grandparents, her aunt, and her uncle. All four died at Auschwitz ...