Awarded the first-ever Goncourt Prize in the USA, The Postcard, a “true-novel,” is based on the factual life of the Rabinovitch family and in part on the seismic creative talent of French author Anne Berest, a member of that family. The book is crucial reading for a young generation of Jews to whom the Shoah 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 as well as her aunt and uncle.

The card made no sense to her. Nonetheless, Leila shared its arrival with her twenty-four year old daughter, Anne Berest, an acclaimed author and filmmaker in France. Leila also recalled and spoke about the wrenched history of the lives that uprooted her ancestors who left 1919 Russia for Latvia, then to Ottoman Palestine and finally in 1929 settled in France. All four of the relatives on the postcard perished in Auschwitz in 1942. Leila’s own mother, Myriam, the last Rabinowitz and only survivor died of Alzheimer’s in 1995. She never spoke of her harrowing Shoah experience. So who sent the card in 2003 and why? Mystified, Leila tucked the card away.

In 2018, six-year-old Clara, Leila’s granddaughter and author Anne Berest’s daughter asked her grandmother, whether she is Jewish. Clara added, “They don’t like Jews very much at school.” Grandmere, Leila, did not panic. Neither did mom, 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 in importance Clara’s question. She also payed no attention to the spray-painted swastika on her house dismissively adding “it’s nothing, it doesn’t matter.” Though Anne would speak to the principal and report to him the conversation, Anne did not want to make her daughter, Clara, feel “singled out”.

Secular and unaffiliated, Leila never taught her daughter any religious Jewish rituals nor had Anne 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 women 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, Anne resolved to find her mother’s postcard, sent in 2003 curious who sent it and why.

Compelling and truly a riveting search for family, The Postcard addresses the rusty conundrum: what does it mean to be Jewish, and why it matters.