A review by romie_chat
La carte postale by Anne Berest

emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

this is objectively one of the books I had the hardest time reading. I never find it easy to read about the Holocaust and its aftermath, and knowing that this is a sort of novelised memoir did not help. knowing the people in this book are real makes everything ten times more painful. I saw a lot of my own family history in these pages, in the way my own grandparents simply did not talk about what happened because it was too much, in the way this war impacted their relationship with Judaism.

I think it's a book that will start conversations among Jewish families like mine, families who lost too much and decided that speaking about these events was too much. not speaking about it created a void in me and that made me relate all the more to the author's need to know more and to research what happened to her family.

this is a beautiful memoir that discusses what happened to Jewish people during the Holocaust, specifically French Jewish people, the aftermath of the war in France, and what it means to be Jewish but not religious today (4.57)

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