Review by beckfest - The Postcard

beckfest 's review for:

The Postcard by Anne Berest

5.0

challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Yes

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

This book is going to sit with me for a long time. As a fellow descendant of Holocaust survivors, I too wish to know the stories of the people who had come before me- to know what they had seen, where they had been, to know of them. Switching between the present tense and the past was done in a really seamless way, one that kept the storylines of the Rabinovitch family of WW2 as visceral and alive as Berests. This book will haunt me, with the prose:

"On this page, I gently close his wide-open eyes

will haunt me, as I think of my family, and most of the people they once knew, were taken to their deaths. And the conflict, of not being Jewish enough, or being too Jewish. Of carrying this harrowing pain, in fear that it will happen again, in fear that it will be forgotten.

"I feel like the only thing I truly belong to is my mother's pain. That's my community. A community made up of two living people and several million dead ones"

sits within my stomach like a rock. The weight of my families past on both sides, the pain they've experienced, all transferred to me by both my parents; carrying this burden of keeping them alive through their trauma, and yet having nowhere to place it. There were so many moments in this book where I felt myself living through conversations I had had with my parents, especially my father. I am clinging to whatever knowledge he was able to gleen, in hopes to be connected to a time, to a community that is buried, whether in the literal sense or emotional one.

Content Warnings