On Reading The Postcard and Reclaiming Jewish Stories
Lélia Picabia received this haunting, anonymous postcard in January, 2003:
In 2000, I flew to Austria on a student ambassadors’ trip. I was 11 and something of a mascot to the other students who were in or about to enter high school. One morning, our teachers arranged for us to meet and learn from a Holocaust survivor, a thin man with white hair. I was confused when he began speaking German, reaching us through a translator. My world, a child’s, was so small. This was the first time I left West Springfield, Massachusetts — except for trips to my grandparents’ house in Florida and the beach in New Hampshire. My family is Catholic on both sides, a mix of French-Canadian, Italian, and Irish. LeFebvre, D’Orazio, Robinson. A simple pie-chart, or so I thought. From my travel diary:
“07-03-00. Met survivor of a concentration camp. He is now a professor. He had 15,000 kids in the camp. Out of that 96 girls survived and 4 boys. This included him.”
This tone is typical of my early diaries, full of numbers and details, and no introspection. That same day, we visited Mauthausen, the last concentration camp liberated by the Allies. Our teacher must have prepared us, speaking into a microphone as we drove up the long, gray road. But I don’t remember any framing or context. Everywhere was dusty stone. I remember descending a steep, stone staircase into a quarry, where we learned that Nazis forced enslaved men to carry granite slabs, heavier than their own starved bodies, up the stairs. Men would trip and fall like dominoes to their death. Back on the bus, unable to process what I’d seen, I opened my diary and wrote: “I’m sorry, but I can’t wright about it.”
Reading Anne Berest’s The Postcard, translated from the French by Tina Kover, I found myself returning to that tour bus, to that silent state of confusion, fear, and shame. I never talked about visiting Mauthausen with my family. It was easier, more comfortable to talk about my joyful homestay with an Austrian family, or our trip down into a salt mine. Only while reading The Postcard did I tell my husband, whose mother is Jewish, what I’d felt at eleven. Bereft. My husband’s ancestors, like mine, emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-19th century, safely an ocean away. Still, a question lingers — a question that recurs throughout Berest’s novel, too — what if?
On the opening page of The Postcard, it’s cold and snowing. A postcard arrives at the home of Lélia Picabia, the author’s mother, “unassuming, as though it had hidden itself deliberately.” It bears four names, in shaky ballpoint pen: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, Jacques. They are Lélia’s grandparents, aunt, and uncle, who died in Auschwitz in 1942. Lélia’s mother, Myriam, was the sole survivor of the Rabinowitz family and never spoke about it or acknowledged her Judaism. Traumatized and grieving, Myriam assimilated into France.
“These people were my ancestors,” writes Anne, both author and narrator, “and I knew nothing about them. I didn’t know which countries they’d traveled to, what they’d done for a living, how old they’d been when they were murdered. I couldn’t have picked them out of a photo lineup.” Throughout the book, Anne asks herself: “What does it mean to be Jewish if you’ve never stepped inside a synagogue?”
As I read on, seeing the name Rabinowitz on the page, I recalled a hazy memory about my mother’s maiden name. “Robinson is Irish?” I asked her once. She waved me off and said, “No, no, Robinson used to be Rabinowitz.” I was skeptical, but I was a teenager; I lost interest and moved on.
Anne admits to a similar trajectory. It’s not until age 34, when she’s pregnant and on bed rest, that she asks about Myriam’s story. “Suspended in a state of anticipation, my thoughts turned to my mother, my grandmother, and the whole line of women who had given birth before me,” she writes. “It was then that I felt a pressing need to hear the story of my ancestors.” Lélia, a retired professor, has spent her life searching for her family’s history — research as reaction to her mother’s silence. Archive boxes of government documents and personal letters line her home office. The way Lélia speaks to Anne about her story is a straightforward, effective way to tell readers about the making of the novel they are holding:
“I should warn you,” she began now, “that what I’m about to tell you is a blended story. Some of it is obviously fact, but I’ll leave it up to you to decide how much of the rest comes from my own personal theories. And of course, any new documentation could flesh out those conclusions, or change them completely.”
This novel is a beautiful, affecting portrait of mother and daughter searching for their family history, all that was too painful for Myriam to speak aloud. Berest quotes Louise Bourgeois, a statement comprising an argument for the novel itself: “If your need is to refuse to abandon the past, you must recreate it.”
Inspired by The Postcard, I logged into Ancestry.com and found, in government documents, an untold story. My second great-grandfather, Louis Rabinowitz, was born to Iosel and Sarah in Butrimonys, Lithuania. He emigrated to the United States in 1886, among 2,000,000 Jewish people fleeing an increasingly anti-Semitic Russia. By 1896, he signed his name Robinson. He married a Catholic woman and bore Catholic sons. This past week, I spent hours reading immigration papers and marriage certificates, but I longed for the sort of sensory-rich details that Berest uncovered in her research — letters, diaries, an ancestor’s novel pages. It’s a marvel to witness how many primary resources she was able to access, find, and preserve, up against systematic erasure and the silence that comes with time.
Un roman vrai, or true novel, The Postcard is paced like life. It proceeds swiftly in the present timeline, the frame narrative, in which Anne Berest and Lélia Picabia solve the book’s core mystery: who sent this postcard and why? These pages read like a memoir-cum-mystery: enthralling. Elsewhere, the book settles into a walking rhythm as Berest reclaims the stories of Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques Rabinowitz — using imaginative leaps to show all they may have seen, dreamed of, and accomplished. I regard these chapters as some of the best historical fiction I’ve ever read.
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Of related interest On The Seawall:
Tina Kover’s essay on translating Anne Berest’s The Postcard, with an excerpt from the novel — click here.