The Postcard by Anne Berest; Possibly One of The Best Book I Have Ever Read!

One of the greatest things about summer is the chance to read without interruption.  During the year, there's always something busyness to do that when I finally fall into bed, I can barely keep my eyes open long enough to read but a few lines.  Summer offers opportunity to dive deep, to do nothing else but read.  Preferably on the deck in my chaise lounge    

The latest is The Postcard by Anne Berest.  A semi-autobiographical tale, sensitively translated from French into English, tells how the protagonist, Anne, is compelled to dive into her past to solve a decades old mystery.  Her mother, Leilia, shows Anne a postcard she received years ago.  It simply lists the names of the four relatives lost to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.  The postcard is unsigned; the stamp upside down and the handwriting strange enough to warrant further investigation.  Anne, the author, sets off on a journey to discover the author's identity and why it was sent.  What she learns is horrifying.  

The German goals for the Vichy government, were to round up all foreign and stateless Jews.  On July 17, 1942, thousands of Jewish men, women and children were forced into the Velodrome d'Hiver, and held in the most inhumane conditions - no food, water, no room to lie down, and unspeakable sanitary conditions. Then, shuttled off to the transit camps.  What lay ahead for these people was unimaginably worse - the concentration camps and killing stations.  At each stage of the journey, they are stripped of their possessions, their identities and their humanity.  They are transformed into skeletal shells only identifiable by a tattooed number.

Anne learns how her own grandmother, Myriam, is saved from these horrors by the quick thinking of  Ephriam, her father.  Myriam spends the war fleeing from the Nazis, trusting nobody and hoping to be reunited with her family at the war's end.  It is not to be and finally, understanding all that she has lost, Myriam speaks nothing about it after the war.  As a result, her story and that of the family, is lost to future generations.  The Postcard becomes the key to unlocking the past.

Sometimes translations become heavy and imprecise, sometimes the translator's own bias creeps in.  Not this one.  The translator, Tina Kover, is truly up to the job. "I make it my mission to share its author’s creative mentality as fully as possible. I try to climb into the source text, to sense it and breathe it and feel it as completely as I can," she says in her comments posted on The Seawall Blog  She gets that she is responsible for conveying a family history and the lives lost through the Holocaust.  She sensitively handles the narrative to show, not just the terrors of war, but also the sparks of joy that existed in the family's talent, honesty, and creativity.   And because of this, she breathes life back into Ephraim, Emma, Noemie and Jacque so that their stories are told and retold, so that they are not lost to a dark page in history but will be remembered always. The story of the Ephraim, Emma, Noemie and Jacque is so painful (which is too pale a word), but their lives give hope and joy to the reader.  

You grieve for these people; feel rage at those responsible for their extermination; feel keenly the hopelessness of their situation as they slide closer and closer to their dome.  But in the end, you are left with the memories of their dignity and grace.  Their bravery and  "aliveness" as Kover calls it.  Their very existence, snuffed out, is reawakened so that the world can bear witness to the Light that does exist, even in the darkest moments. 

The cover is graced by a beautiful smiling face. Eyes twinkling with light, soft hair tied up in braided ropes and coiled around her head like a halo.  A pretty face alive with intelligence and anticipation.   This is the face of Noemie, who died of typhus in Auschwitz 

May her story never be forgot.