The Postcard

In the morning, Anne phones Lélia about the postcard. She takes the train from Paris to her mother’s house in the suburbs. Lélia and her daughter search the office for the postcard. Lélia refuses to have anything to do with the investigation of the sender. However, Lélia later says she will help if her daughter talks to Clara about what happened at school. Anne agrees.

On the train ride back to Paris, Anne realizes she is crossing the same area Myriam crossed by bike in 1942 after her siblings were arrested. She muses that the opera house on the postcard was the first place Hitler visited in Paris. The old, weathered postcard has four names: Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques. It was sent in 2003 but appears to have been written much earlier by a different hand than the one that addressed it.

Anne confides in Georges, her boyfriend, who advises her to hire a detective. She reveals that she has never been in a synagogue or celebrated Pesach, which Georges invites her to. Like her relatives, Georges’s family were Russian Jewish people who escaped in 1919 but landed in then-dangerous France. Anne and Georges are distantly related by marriage.

At home, she emails the Duluc Detective Agency about the postcard. She discusses the case with Franck Falque. Although he will not help with the case, he points out that the stamp is upside down—a resistance fighters’ code. He also points out that it is addressed to M. Bouveris and suggests the letter was meant for Myriam’s husband, not Myriam. Anne says that both Bouveris and Myriam’s first husband died by suicide.

Anne recalls something Georges said about ghosts, or dybbuks, “unhappy spirits that enter people’s bodies to have certain vital experiences through them” (217).

Anne doesn’t know what to wear or how to celebrate Pesach despite her Jewish heritage. Anne feels the Pesach ritual was somehow familiar, as if Nachman was leading the prayers. Conversation turns to antisemitism, and guests voice the opinion that they should go to Israel before the tide turns again. Debate ensues, with some accusing others of wanting the right-leaning party, The National Front, to win so they have a clear enemy to resist en masse. Many believe that Jewish people will not be targeted. Georges talks about an attack on October 3, 1941, which was repeated in 1980 while Georges was in the synagogue: a bombing that worsened after antisemitic remarks by Prime Minister Raymond Barre. Georges’s past love, Deborah, accuses Anne of being a bad Jew, saying, “You’re only Jewish when it suits you” (229).

Anne apologizes to Georges in a lengthy email that comprises the chapter: She deceived him about her lack of understanding of Jewish tradition and faith. She explains that Myriam joined the communist party after the war. Like Ephraïm, she believed that a new world was necessary: “For her, God had died in the death camps” (229). She explains that her parents read her the Communist Manifesto, and she was raised secular and socialist. May 1968 changed both of her parents, Anne claims, and she loved her childhood. And yet, Lélia would secretly speak of her Jewish heritage.

In 1985, when she was six, her family woke to a swastika painted on their home. The following week, there was more graffiti. A year later, she was afraid playing hide and seek: Being hunted terrified her. She talks of being both Jewish and Communist. In 1987, she asked Lélia what being Jewish means. She showed Anne photos of the Holocaust, the concentration camps, the bodies, and says: “If we’d been born back then, we’d have been turned into buttons” (229). The graphic novel Maus appears in their home, and her family tree at school is cut short on her mother’s side. Lélia is attacked by dark thoughts when they visit the US, which she explains as survivor’s guilt. She studies at the same school Myriam and Noémie attended 70 years before her.

Anne asks her daughter Clara what happened at school. A Moroccan child named Assan said his family and his country dislike Jewish people, but Clara said that she visited Morocco and that wasn’t true. They then play together over recess. Georges asks her to talk to the school. At the meeting, the principal seems unconcerned, and she leaves disappointed.

Anne dines with Gerard Rambert, a friend who splits his time between Moscow and Paris. His family name was Rosenberg, but his father insisted his children have a French name to avoid antisemitic bias in the medical field. He recalls how, after his name was changed, children were no longer cruel to him. Anne says, “I’m my great-grandfather Ephraïm’s dream come true. I’ve got a perfectly French face,” (229). She admits that she feels safer being able to blend into Paris as a native.

Anne asks Lélia to help with the postcard, and Lélia tells her about the Matteoli Commission of 2003, the year she got the postcard. The commission sought to understand how property and real estate owned by Jewish people was confiscated and what became of it. The French government would then pay reparations if ownership could be proven. Lélia filed a request for reparations, and the French government worked hard to hide archives and records that showed their antisemitism. She filed for Ephraïm’s business, Emma’s piano, the family car, and more. She was scheduled to give testimony in her case right as the postcard arrived.

Lélia explains that, after the war, Myriam tried to get death certificates in France, but the government refused to admit they were complicit in deporting Jewish people, or that they died as a result of their collaboration with the Nazis. In 1947, Myriam finally began the process of getting death certificates in Les Forges, Ephraïm’s town. Myriam went to the same mayor who refused to help Ephraïm. In 1948, her family was declared missing. In 1949, their death certificates were finally issued, though all four were declared as dying on French soil, not deported to Auschwitz. It was not until 1996 that “death by deportation was granted and the death certificates were corrected” (229).

With these corrected records, Lélia’s claim for reparations was granted, and she realized that the postcard could have come only from someone close to the family. No one else used Ephraïm’s ancestral spelling, as he had changed the spelling to replace the PH with an F when he relocated to France.

Anne reads Lélia her notes from the detective visit and concludes it is from a neighbor, a friend, or a family member. They fill each column with suspects. Under friends, they list Colette, Noémie and Myriam’s old friend. She and Myriam remained close. Lélia has a letter from her, which they will use to compare handwriting. Anna lists the many ways she investigated the postcard, from contacting the maker, the photographer, and the outbound post office to no avail. The weather the day it was mailed was a record blizzard. They suspect Colette, who wrote of her remorse at not hiding Noémie and Jacques. Anne writes to a criminology graphologist recommended by the detective. He claims the handwriting looks disguised. They correspond back and forth as Anne attempts to ascertain if Colette was the postcard’s author.

Anne goes on a long walk through Paris, walking where Noémie and Myriam had walked, visiting the school they’d all attended. She thinks about how history repeats itself.

Anne meets with Gerard, who tells her of his childhood realization that his mother’s family all had tattoos on their arms. His mother claimed they were telephone numbers. He was haunted by this his whole life.

Later, Lélia shares letters she found from Colette, concluding she is not the author of the postcard. Anne isn’t convinced.

Anne gets a letter from the handwriting expert who claims Colette is unlikely to be the same author as the postcard. She spends her days sadly watching her uncle Emmanuel’s films. In conversation with Georges, she believes the only suspects left are neighbors.

Anne entices Lélia to go to Les Forges with her to question the neighbors; though any adult from 1942 would be dead, maybe the children would remember Noémie and Jacques. Lélia tells Anne that Ephraïm and Emma left their house keys with the mayor. He wrote about the property in official correspondence, claiming the land was run by Mr. Jean Fauchere. Eventually, the mayor is told to sell the livestock, and a provincial administrator will operate the land. When Myriam regains control of it, she sells it without returning in 1955. Many years later, Lélia visits the town and knocks on the door. The old woman who answers knows her by name. She leads Lélia to a trunk that contains everything that was in the house when she bought it. Lélia cannot look in the trunk but is given a painting Myriam did as a child. Weeks later, she returned for the trunk and brought it to Myriam, who was displeased. Lélia took items for herself: photos, documents, a tablecloth. Myriam got rid of the rest.

In torrential rain, Lélia and Anne find the home again. The current residents refuse to let them in, and they look for the stolen furniture and paintings taken when the house was vacant. They meet several neighbors; an old lady remembers Emma and recalls that her own mother saw Noémie and Jacques being arrested.

One man tells them about the Roberte Affair, infamous in Les Forges, wherein an elderly woman named Roberte hid resistance fighters. She was informed upon; one fighter was caught and buried alive, and Roberte was hung from a tree and shot dead. He tells of a man who was married to a teacher who helped Jewish people escape. He did not collaborate but was killed. This was likely Ephraïm’s friend Debord, who had advised him to leave and offered to help. His wife, they are told, stayed in town after he was deported and died in a concentration camp in Germany for helping the resistance.

They find Madam Francois, whose mother was the Rabinovitch housekeeper. Shockingly, her first name is Myriam, her mother having named her in honor of the Rabinovitch family’s first child. After they leave, they get a mysterious phone call telling them to look for Emma’s piano at Mr. Fauchere’s house: He was tasked with keeping up the property. They lie their way into his home and find Emma’s piano in his living room. He brings out a box of photos, still unaware of their true intention in his home. Suspicious, he kicks them out, and they go to the town hall to see Myriam’s marriage license.

Lélia wants to see Myriam and Vincente’s marriage license. The mayor greets them and knows of the Rabinovitch family. They learn that a high school class has been searching for descendants of the Rabinovitches. Mr. Debord was the witness to the wedding. The mayor’s secretary says her mother was the mayor’s secretary during the war, and she received a letter in 1950 asking for the Rabinovitch family to be added to the war monument commemorating the dead. The new mayor offers to complete this request now.

Back at the car, they find an envelope containing five postcards, each addressed to Ephraïm in Paris and bearing images of landmarks around the world. They are written in Cyrillic, and Anna realizes the handwriting on her mysterious postcard is strange because the author didn’t know the English alphabet. Lélia says the cards were from Boris, Ephraïm’s brother from Prague. Lélia says Boris was arrested in 1942 and executed at a mass grave in Byelorussia.