La Carte Postale- Anne Berest

On 6^th January 2003 a postcard arrives at the home of Lélia and Pierre. It’s an old postcard of the Paris Opera Garnier, with four names written on the back: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques.  These are the names of Lélia’s maternal grandparents, her great aunt and great uncle, all murdered at Ausschwitz in 1942. At the time, the narrator, a young woman of 24, didn’t have the time to ponder too much on this postcard turning up out of the blue at her parents’ house. It’s only 10 years later, when she’s heavily pregnant, that she starts thinking again about the people on the postcard— as if the awareness of new life somehow makes her feel more connected to those people in the past.

When she asks her mother to talk about the family history, Lélia warns her it’s a récit hybride, a story based on a mixture of documents and hypotheses, not yet complete. And hybride is the mot juste here, because Anne Berest’s book is a mixture of family history and the broader history of the Jews in 1930s and occupied France. It’s an investigation of the narrator’s own Jewish identity, and touches on anti-semitism in France today. But it’s called a roman, a novel, rather than a memoir, because there are sections of fictionalised, imaginary experience which take us beyond the dates and numbers: the child’s intoxication at the exotic sights and smells of pre-war Lotz, the pain and desperation of the women prisoners at Pithiviers as they’re separated from their children. And it’s also a kind of detective story, as the narrator does keep coming back to that postcard, determined to find out where it’s come from, who sent it.

The first section, Terres Promises, Promised Lands, is the longest and most detailed, dealing with the diaspora of the family Rabinovich from Moscow, where Ephraïm was born. After spending time in Riga and Palestine, the family arrive in Paris in 1929, where they settle down, work hard, and are keen to integrate into French society. Ephraïm finds work as an engineer, Emma teaches piano, and the two girls, Myriam and Noémie, enter the prestigious Lycée Fenelon in 1931, aged 12 and 8 respectively. They arrived in France two years previously, speaking not a word of French, and by 1933 are winning the top academic prizes in their year. They have a younger brother, Jacques, born in 1925, who is not allowed to have a bar-mitzvah—Ephraïm is a secular Jew in any case, but has also applied for French nationality, and does not want their application muddied by what he calls des rites folkloriques.

Alongside the family’s successes during the 30s runs the worrying thread of increasing anti-semitism in Europe, particularly in Germany. Ephraïm and Emma are told of the rise of the Nazis there, and large numbers of German refugees appear in Paris, including Ephraïm’s ex-fiancée, en route to New York, who advises him to get out like her. Ephraïm cannot believe that Jews would be persecuted in France and stays put. In 1939 Hitler marches into Poland and by June 1940 France is under German occupation. By October Jews are banned from public office, work in theatres, cinema and the press, and are also required to register at their local town hall.

To some extent life for the two sisters goes on during this first period of the occupation. Noémie continues writing her novel, and Myriam has fallen in love with a handsome young man called Vicente Picabia, whom she’s met in the circles around the Sorbonne, where she’s studying philosophy. But by June 1941 their world is closing down: a numerus clausus is introduced, limiting the numbers of Jewish students at the Sorbonne. The Rabinovitch family leave Paris to go to their country house at Forges, near Evry, and it’s there that Noémie and Jacques are arrested in July 1942. By this time, the Germans are arresting and deporting foreign Jews. Myriam has married Vicente and is registered in Paris. She’s at Forges when her siblings are arrested, but hides in the garden, and they don’t look for her as she’s not on their books. She cycles back to Paris.

Noémie and Jacques are taken to the transit camp at Pithiviers and there’s a harrowing account of the conditions in that camp. Lélia refers to doctor Adélaide Hautval who worked at Pithiviers, survived the war, and wrote a book subsequently called Médecine et Crimes contre l’Humanité. She and the narrator take some small crumb of comfort from the fact that Noémie appears in the book, chosen by the doctor to be her assistant, a role she performed tirelessly and with great compassion: elle marquait les gens partout oú elle passait/ she touched people wherever she went.  But this didn’t save her. Noémie and Jacques are deported to Auschwitz where they die. Jacques is murdered in the gas chambers, Noémie dies of typhus. Their parents, after repeated attempts to locate their two children, are arrested in October and die in Auschwitz in November 1942.

This is the kind of book where you need to build in reading pauses and the end of this section is certainly a place to lay the book on one side while you take a walk in the fresh air. The next section, entitled Souvenirs d’un enfant juif sans synagogue/ Souvenirs of a Jewish child without a synagogue is less harrowing. It takes place in 2019, 16 years after that postcard landed on the mat, when the narrator’s child says to grandmother Lélia On n’aime pas trop les Juifs à l’école/ They don’t much like Jews at my school. Anne ( the narrator) begins to question what it means to be Jewish. She was brought up without religion but with the values of the soixante-huitards, the generation of ’68, equality and human rights for example, and is completely at sea when she’s invited to a Pessah dinner at her new partner, Georges’, where the rituals of Pessah are observed. She talks with friends about their experience of anti-semitism growing up and learns from Lélia that though the camps were recognised immediately after the war, a blanket of silence then descended until the 1980s. Her friend Gerard tells the extraordinary story of a family gathering he attended as a child, where he noticed a row of numbers tattooed on the arms of several older people. When he asked his mother about them, she told him they were the seniors’ telephone numbers, tattooed on their arms lest they forget.

Her child’s comments set Anne off again on the trail of the postcard. She engages the help of handwriting experts which leads her back to the village of Forges and the house belonging to the Rabinovich family, sold on by Myriam in 1955. During her visit there with Lélia there are some tense scenes as they ask neighbours about the family, and what happened to their furniture and possessions after the war—they get the feeling people know more than they’re letting on. And there’s a deeply moving moment when they discover the piano that surely must have been Emma’s in a neighbour’s sitting room. Anne imagines Emma sitting on that piano stool, turning to them, saying, ‘You’ve come at last. What took you so long?’

The final section is titled Myriam and is the most novelistic. It’s set initially in rural Provence, in the free Zone, which only remained free of course until November 1942, when the Germans took over the south and then occupied the whole of France. There’s a lot of interesting historical detail about the growth of Resistance networks, particularly after the introduction of the STO (Service de Travail Obligatoire) but the narrative focus is on Myriam’s life hiding out in a small cabin in the mountains. She’s joined by her husband Vicente and Yves, a distant cousin of his, also in hiding, and the narrative focuses on this unconventional ménage à trois, where the two men spend their days buddying up, rather to the exclusion of Myriam—scenarios imagined, I guess, by the writer, trying to make sense of what later happens to these three characters.

We return to a more historical focus towards the end of this section, with Myriam going north to look for her family. She finds her letters unopened on the door mat of the house in Forges, and goes to the Hotel Lutetia in Paris, which from April 1945 served as a reception centre for detainees returning from the camps. The walls of the hotel foyer are covered with photos of loved ones deported, and the place besieged with those desperately hoping to find their family. Yet the detainees arriving were barely recognisable, emaciated, skeletal, heads shaved, as if beings from another planet. Paris was utterly shocked and unprepared for the condition of those returning and Myriam, of course, never finds her family.  

One of the threads that stands out for me in this novel is the attitude of the French to the deportations and the undercurrents of anti-semitism. There’s the shocking collaboration of officialdom: the French authorities who suggested deporting the children before the Germans did, because they couldn’t be doing with children hanging round in the camps after their parents were taken. Then there’s the mayor of Forges, keen to get the Rabinovich family off his hands. There’s the discomfort of Myriam’s friends when she’s handcuffed and arrested in Paris for breaking curfew, replaced by indifference or resignation as they turn back to their drinks.

There’s a sense throughout of the long after effects of the deportations and murder of the Jews seen here through the character of Myriam, the sole survivor of her family, and her subsequent relationships. Lélia tells Anne that she never once heard her mother utter the names of the four family members that she lost. This silence was damaging to their relationship, as was the fact that Myriam left Lélia with a village foster mother for two years after the war, when she went to work for the French authorities in German Lindau, still hoping to find her family, or at least to find out what happened to them.

But there is a sense that we’re moving on from silence now. When Anne and Lélia return to Forges in 2019, the young mayor tells them that a class of lycéens are researching a school project on the Jewish children deported from their school. He’s aware that the names of the four Rabinoviches don’t appear on the village war memorial and promises to rectify this. And of course there’s this novel itself, telling the story of Ephraïm, Emma, Myriam, Noémie and Jacques, as well as recounting the process of uncovering her family history and what that means for the narrator, Anne Berest. And for those of you who are still wondering who sent that postcard, we do find out in the end. I’m giving nothing away though-you’ll have to read the novel and find out for yourselves. It’s available now in English translation by Tina Kover, the paperback due out in May. The book is achingly sad, though, so I advise a box of tissues and regular walks in between.