The Postcard

Myriam’s daughter Lélia is a professor of linguistics, a writer, and an archivist. She pieces together what happened to her mother’s family during the Holocaust in painstaking detail because Myriam will not tell her directly. She understands she is Jewish without knowing what it means to be Jewish, and instead takes after her grandfather, Ephraïm, whom she never met, in living an atheist’s life.

Through letters, diaries, archives, police records, Holocaust memoirs, and other primary source materials, Lélia has created the story that comprises Book 1 of The Postcard. She stops the hunt when history gets too close to her life and has little interest in knowing what Myriam did after the war, or why. She does not want to know about her stepfather, or her father’s death.

Lélia is a chain-smoking, independent, and bold woman who lives alone in the family’s Parisian-suburban home. She changes little throughout the novel, though she does have moments where she changes her mind, always circling back to supporting her daughter Anne in ways Myriam never supported her.

Myriam is the eldest child of Ephraïm and Emma Rabinovitch. She is the sole Holocaust survivor in the family, a well-educated and respected member of French society prior to WWII. She won accolades in academics before the war and was known for her intelligence and adaptability. She is not as pretty or charming as her sister Noémie, and not as athletic as her brother Jacques.

She falls for Vicente Picabia before the war, and they marry young. He is a troubled boy, dark and possessed by pain, and eventually, he overdoses directly after the conclusion of the war. Although they lived alone in rural France for some time, Myriam never feels close to Vicente, and never understands him. After Vicente, she marries his friend Bouveris and has two children with him.

Myriam is distant and unloving. She abandons her child directly after her birth, leaving for years before returning. She does not confide in her daughter or speak with her about her past or her family. Myriam feels the shame of surviving, the guilt that comes with it, and the constant questioning of how close she came to death.

Ephraïm is the son of Nachman and Esther, a well-educated and open-minded modern Russian. He believes that education leads to nobility, and that if he shuns all things Jewish and antiquated, he will be accepted into the ranks of the elites. He is an inventor and socialite, working his way to the top of society in Riga, Latvia, before an unsuccessful stint in Palestine, and then working again as an investor and businessman in Paris. He is hard-working, clever, and driven, but he is unwilling to see himself as Jewish, and thus does not believe the antisemitism surging around him in Europe will impact his family. This leads, ultimately, to him rejecting pleas to flee Europe.

His name is spelled in various ways throughout the novel, as he sought to westernize the spelling using an “F” instead of a “Ph.” He also chooses for himself a French name, though his citizenship is denied and he never gets the chance to use it.

Emma Wolf is Ephraïm’s wife, the woman he takes upon the advice of his family after his true love, cousin Anna, is denied him. Emma is the daughter of Polish Jewish people who meet their end in Poland’s Lodz. She is a piano teacher who would have gone further had laws not been enacted in Russia prohibiting Jewish people from higher education. She is kind, loving, and generous, and after her children are taken away, she continues to set dinner plates out for them until she is taken away herself.

Noémie and Jacques are the siblings of Myriam, the sole Rabinovitch survivor of the Holocaust. Noémie is a writer, a creative genius, and the passionate and eloquent soul of the family. She sees the world as a writer does, full of wonder and beauty and mystery. She writes feverishly and passionately. She is arrested early in the war and dies of typhus in Auschwitz in 1942, weeks after her brother and months before her parents die in the gas chambers. In her limited time in the transit camp, Noémie acts as a medical assistant, helping the chief French doctor care for the prisoners. She is immortalized in the posthumous memoirs of the doctor, as well as in her own draft novels and diaries.

Jacques, the young athlete turned agricultural engineer, is pragmatic and down-to-earth, like his grandfather Nachman. He is 16 when he is arrested in France and deported to Germany, where he is gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz. Jacques was unlike his father and felt a strong connection to his Jewish roots, choosing to pray with the older men at the transit camp in France. He was young and naïve, believing the German guards when they offered to take him to the infirmary, but they led him into the gas chambers.

Nachman takes on an oracle-like role in the saga, foretelling the tragedy that will befall the Jewish community in Europe ahead of WWII. He sees clearly the antisemitism growing in Russia and knows that Europe will follow suit. In Palestine, he is poor, hard-working, and without status, but appears content. Nachman’s premonition is the impetus for the family’s escape from Russia and the inciting incident for the Rabinovitch family, putting all their lives on course for massive change.

Esther is a static character; little is known of her life save for her marriage and obedience to Nachman, and her willingness to live a harsh life in Palestine in exchange for safety and freedom.

Myriam Rabinovitch marries Vicente Picabia before the Holocaust. His older sister, Jeanine, and mother, Gabriele, hide Myriam in their car, aiding her escape from occupied France. Gabriele goes on to fight in the French resistance and earns accolades for her work. Anne Berest and her sister Claire wrote a biography of Gabriele in French, published before The Postcard. Jeanine’s work as a resistance fighter is legendary, and she is awarded a medal by Charles de Gaulle, her work commemorated in history books in France and beyond. The whole of the Rabinovitch line that survives owes their survival to the Picabia family, a source of both anguish and pride for Anne Berest, the author of books covering both sides of her family history.

Anne’s sister Claire, younger and bearing the middle name Noémie, was a troubled youth. Her arms are covered in tattoos, and she is a risk-taker and wildling. She only appears in Book 3, a single epistolary chapter of correspondence between her sister Anne, in which they discuss their family’s heavy burden, and the burdens they bear as sisters.

Claire Berest is also an author and former teacher. She claims that she used to think she was a writer because her middle name was Noémie, but she has reconciled this within herself and finally has found comfort in being her own person, one who does not owe her life to her namesake Noémie.