The Postcard

The postcard arrived, unexplained and unsigned, in 2003, listing just four names: those of Berest's great-grandparents and their two children, who were all murdered in Auschwitz over sixty years before. (A third child, Berest's grandmother, evaded deportation and survived.) Berest uses this real postcard to tell her family's true story as fiction: bohemians and entrepreneurs, eager to assimilate before the war, and, for the survivors after the war, eager—or at least encouraged—to forget. Berest's style in imagining her family's lives reads like a postcard itself, painted in bright, simple strokes, though she doesn't flinch in presenting the brutal facts (familiar but necessary to retell) of their destruction. The more unfamiliar side of the story comes in the second half, when she sifts through the murk of willful postwar forgetfulness to discover the truth of her family and of that mysterious message.