An Unsigned Postcard Named Four Family Members Who Died within the Holocaust. Why?

In 2003, an unsigned postcard reached the Berest household house. On one facet was an outdated image of the Opéra Garnier. On the opposite, there have been 4 names: Ephraïm. Emma. Noémie. Jacques. All have been relations of the French creator Anne Berest. All died in Auschwitz in 1942.

Berest and her mom, Lélia Picabia, descended from Myriam — daughter of Ephraïm and Emma, older sister to Noémie and Jacques, and the one surviving member of the nuclear household. Myriam had not favored to speak in regards to the battle, and Berest grew up realizing little of their historical past.

The mysterious postcard, at first, hardly modified her relationship with the previous. Without a clue in regards to the identification or the motives of the sender, Berest quickly forgot about it. Until someday, her 6-year-old daughter got here house and mentioned: “They don’t like Jews very much at school.”

The phrases have been “a shock,” Berest, 43, recalled. “I couldn’t even talk to her about it.” Her thoughts turned to the postcard, and to the misplaced members of the family. Soon, she launched into an investigation of the mysterious piece of correspondence.

The consequence, “The Postcard,” recreates in beautiful element the lives of Berest’s misplaced members of the family and weaves them right into a detective story, loosely centered on the postcard. Part Holocaust drama, half household thriller, the novel led Berest to relive a number of the grimmest hours of France’s current historical past and to look at her personal expertise of being Jewish. Europa Editions will launch an English translation by Tina Kover on Tuesday.

“Sometimes I spent entire days crying in front of my computer, from morning to night,” Berest mentioned just lately at her house in Paris. “On the way to the school pickup, I had visions of children being arrested, being put on trains to death camps.”

“The Postcard” reached a big viewers when it was launched in France, in 2021, and earned the creator vital acclaim, particularly from youthful audiences. “It’s a book that is totally researched, yet you don’t feel the research in it,” mentioned the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, identified for the documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” primarily based on an unfinished James Baldwin manuscript.

Struck by the “human quality” of Berest’s type, Peck requested her to co-write his subsequent script, impressed by the Jewish director and producer Bernard Natan. “We are both motivated by history and by injustice,” he mentioned.

By the time she began work on “The Postcard,” Berest had loads of expertise with biography. After a literature diploma and a stint as editor of a Paris theater’s in-house journal, in 2008 she appeared for a versatile supply of earnings as she labored on her first novel. Together with an affiliate, she based Porte-Plume, a distinct segment press that makes a speciality of ghostwritten household biographies and company books.

“I’d always been attracted to the past, and I loved this job,” Berest mentioned. Telling the tales of strangers “taught me to write, to craft characters and through-lines,” she added. “You realize that every life is extraordinary, once you dive into it.”

After her first novel, “Her Father’s Daughter,” was printed, in 2010, she wrote “Sagan, Paris 1954,” a brief fictional memoir of the French creator Françoise Sagan that was translated into English and printed by Gallic Books. Then Berest turned to her circle of relatives historical past: In 2017, she and her sister Claire, additionally a author, wrote a biography of the artist and critic Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, their great-grandmother, who was married to the Spanish painter Francis Picabia. Myriam, Berest’s grandmother, had married their son, Vincente, and survived the battle with assist from the Picabia clan.

Berest’s household historical past was so advanced and layered that in a bout of despair in her 20s she turned to remedy via genogram, a type of therapy primarily based on the evaluation of an individual’s household tree. “The idea that we inherit invisible bonds really helped me,” she mentioned. “It means that even people who were murdered pass things on to their children, to their grandchildren.”

It took longer for Berest to reckon along with her Jewish roots. Her household had distanced itself from faith; she had by no means attended service at a synagogue when she began the investigation that led to “The Postcard.”

She may a minimum of depend on the assistance of her mom, Picabia, a linguistics professor who had self-published a e book via Porte-Plume about their ancestors who died throughout the Holocaust. Picabia shared her in depth archives along with her daughter.

Berest’s perspective in “The Postcard,” Picabia mentioned, was “a revelation” for her. “Each generation has their vision, and she captured things that were much more difficult for me to see.”

Picabia is a distinguished character in “The Postcard,” and far of the story is informed via fictionalized conversations between her and Berest. “I wanted the book to progress through dialogue, because it’s a key form in Jewish thought,” Berest mentioned. “The figure of ‘the ignorant’ is very important in it. Asking questions is almost more important than having the answers.”

Berest herself feared for a very long time that she wouldn’t clear up the central thriller of the postcard. “For four years, I worked on a detective novel without an ending, which was very stressful,” she mentioned. Ultimately, a solution got here — and within the e book, it’s definitely worth the wait. “When I figured it out, I couldn’t even speak,” Berest mentioned, shaking her head.

Along the way in which, she discovered herself reconnecting along with her Jewish identification. “I feel like I’ve found my way back to the idea of a community, a culture I belong to.” Her two daughters have began attending a Talmud Torah after-school program: “They teach me now — the songs, their meaning,” she mentioned.

The launch of “The Postcard” additionally led Berest to expertise antisemitism in earnest, she mentioned. While Berest was a profitable creator and scriptwriter — she has labored on a number of TV collection, and was among the many 82 ladies who staged a red-carpet protest towards gender inequality on the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 — few knew of her Jewish heritage till the e book was printed. In addition to assaults on social media, there have been “explicit” remarks, she mentioned, from work acquaintances. “I saw things come to the surface in this very hushed literary world, and I understood what antisemitism might have been like in intellectual circles in the 1930s.”

It is the “paradox,” as Berest places it, of French attitudes towards Judaism, which have traditionally ranged from uncommon tolerance by European requirements — her great-grandparents had settled within the nation for that motive — to outright bigotry. For occasion, “The Postcard” explores the unsettling actuality of postwar France, the place Holocaust survivors have been silenced for many years in an try to permit the nation to start out with a clear slate after the Nazi occupation.

Taking her cue from those that later shone a rigorous gentle on the genocide, just like the documentary filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, Berest vowed “not to write a single sentence of description that I hadn’t read somewhere in testimonies,” she mentioned. Period scenes have been fleshed out by lifting particulars from survivors’ memoirs and analysis. “You have to be historically faultless, because if you start making things up, it’s an opening for Holocaust deniers.”

Berest calls “The Postcard” her “mitzvah.” “In Hebrew, it means something you do for your community. I didn’t care whether it would be a hit. I had done what I had to do.”

Her Holocaust-related “neuroses,” as she places it, haven’t gone away — “I’m still scared of gas leaks and losing my child in a crowd” — however the e book has made her really feel lighter.

“There is something liberating about bringing ghosts into your home,” she mentioned. These days, painted portraits of Noémie and Jacques, her ancestors, watch over her desk in Paris as she works on the subsequent installment of her household saga, which can heart on her mother and father. “You’re not scared of them anymore — on the contrary, these ghosts feel like family.”