Awarded the first-ever Goncourt Prize in the USA, The Postcard, a “true-novel,” is based, in part, on the factual life of the Rabinovitch family and on the seismic literary talent of French author Anne Berest, a member of that family. The book is crucial reading for young generation of Jews to whom the Shoa is becoming more and more remote yet the past continues to impact their Jewish identity, shape the future and inform the present.
In January 2003, chain- smoking Leila (born in 1944 Paris) discovered among her snail- mail a postcard, written in ball point pen with a photograph of the Opera Garnier on one side, and four names-- Ephraim, Emma, Noemie, Jacques--- on the other side. The stamp on the card was upside down. The people named on the card were Leila’s maternal grandparents and her aunt and uncle.
Leila shared with her twenty-four year old daughter, Anne Berest, an acclaimed author and filmmaker in France, the wrenched history of the lives that uprooted her ancestors who left 1919 Russia for Latvia then to Palestine and finally in 1929 settled in France. All four perished in Auschwitz in 1942. Leila’s own mother, Myriam, the last Rabinowitz daughter and only survivor died of Alzheimer’s in 1995. She never spoke of her Shoah experience. Who sent the card in 2003 and why? Mystified Leila put the card away.
In 2018, six-year-old Clara daughter of author Anne Berest asked her grandmother, Leila, whether she is Jewish. Clara added, “They don’t like Jews very much at school.” Leila did not panic. Neither did Anne. Both women were aware of the antisemitic climate in France –- the 2015 shooting of Charlie Hebdo, the 2017 incident of Sara Halimi. Totally assimilated Leila diminished Clara’s questions as she did the spray -painted swastika on her house dismissively adding “it’s nothing, it doesn’t matter.” Though Anne would speak to the principal and reportthe incident to him, Anne did not want to make her daughter, Clara, feel singled out.
Secular and unaffiliated, Leila never taught her daughter Anne any religious Jewish rituals nor had Anne Berest ever set foot in a synagogue, observed Shabbat, read any biblical texts. She celebrated “all holidays, Christmas, Halloween, Chanukah blended together”. Yet having had no religious background Anne’s Jewishness was “never insignificant.” It mattered. When a woman at a friend’s Seder said, “You are Jewish when it suits you” followed by, “If you were truly Jewish you wouldn’t take it so lightly”, referencing Clara’s questions and comment, Berest resolved to find her mother’s postcard, sent in 2003 to discover who sent it and why.
Compelling and truly a riveting search for family, The Postcard addresses the rusty conundrum: what it means to be Jewish, then and now.
