Anne Berest’s work of autofiction, a bestseller in France and a finalist for the Prix Goncourt, opens on a snowy Paris morning in 2003. The protagonist’s mother, Léila, steps outside for her first cigarette of the day, only to find a mysterious postcard in the mailbox. On it are four names: Ephraim, Emma, Noémie, Jacques. Her grandfather, grandmother, aunt and uncle – all killed at Auschwitz. No signature, no explanation. “Who could have sent me this terrible thing?”
For Léila, the postcard is a threat, a provocation. For Anne, it poses a question: why does she know so little about those ancestors? Her quest to find the sender will open rifts between mother and daughter; it will also unearth the family’s origin story. Their early years of wandering; their fate under Vichy France and the Nazis; the risks her grandparents undertook in the Resistance. And then afterwards, the pain of survival; the long reach of the Holocaust through the generations. Every page is gripping, revelatory.
