The Postcard

by Anne Berest

She doesn’t have any photos of her family—all the albums are in Les Forges—so she writes their first names in large capital letters, so they’ll be able to spot them easily amid the dozens, hundreds, thousands of forms papering the lobby. EPHRAÏM EMMA NOÉMIE JACQUES. Then she signs her name and writes her and Vicente’s address on the rue de Vaugirard so that her parents will know where to find her.

“Madame, we did send people to arrange repatriations from Ravensbrück. But there was no one left to repatriate.” The words are clear, but Myriam doesn’t understand them. Her brain simply refuses to register the meaning of the phrase. There was no one left to repatriate.

“I’ll go back tomorrow,” is all Myriam says. And every day, she returns to the Lutetia to wait for her family. She has no capacity for shame left, either. She fires questions unrestrainedly at the deportees as they emerge from the hotel, trying to catch their attention for even a few seconds.

THE LUTETIA NO LONGER A HOTEL FOR THE LIVING DEAD In just a few days, the requisitioned Hotel Lutetia on the boulevard Raspail will be returned to its owners. It will take three months to return the hotel to its former condition. ( . . . ) For now, the Lutetia stands empty, having closed its doors on the most abject human suffering, secure in the promise of welcoming happy guests once again.

the repatriation of deportees is now considered to be finished. “It isn’t finished, though. My family isn’t on any of the lists, but they haven’t come home, either.” Caught between waning hope and the absence of proof, Myriam is in agony. She remembers the rumors she heard in the hotel lobby: “There are still ten thousand people out there somewhere. Don’t worry. They’ll be back.” “They say there’s a camp in Germany where they’re putting people who have lost their memory.”

I don’t think it was possible. But we could have come to a better understanding, at least, if she’d just told me why she abandoned me for so many years.

If she’d just come right out and said that there was no other way. I think she kept silent out of guilt for being alive. And guilt over all those long absences when I was bounced around from friend to relative. If she’d explained to me why, I would have understood. But I had to figure it out for myself, and by then it was too late. She was already gone.

But Maman, this is my story, too. And sometimes, almost like Myriam, you treat me like I’m a foreigner in the land of your past. You were born into a world of silences. It’s only natural that your children would be thirsty for words.

Vicente had discovered an amphetamine newer than Benzedrine, and more suited to recreational use, called Maxiton. It was the perfect treat. An excellent stimulant for the nervous system, but without the dizziness or shaking, or that heavy, fatigued feeling behind the eyes. Maxiton made life feel simple and easy for Vicente. It brought him peace.

In this domain Vicente was a true scholar, with significant knowledge of chemistry, botany, anatomy, and psychology; he would have been among the highest scorers if there had been a competitive exam in toxicology.

I need to tell you that, if things during that first trimester of my pregnancy in 1944 hadn’t gone well for the Allies, neither Vicente nor I would ever have brought a child into the world. With the constant shooting in the streets, police raids on the metro, and the strong probability that those of us in networks would be arrested by the Gestapo, it would have been too dangerous. Really, you owe your life to the June ’44 landings at Normandy and the liberation of Paris. It was because things went our way that Vicente was able to go to the 6th-arrondissement registry office on Thursday, December 21, 1944, with his true identity papers and declare the birth of his daughter.

‘Prove that your parents were French,’ was the answer. Because my mother was born in a different country and my father had a Spanish name and the information on my birth certificate was incorrect, I was seen as a highly suspicious character,

That was how my mother learned that she was Jewish. That incident in the schoolyard in 1950. Thunk. Suddenly, and without explanation. The stone that hit her was much like the stone that had hit Myriam at the same age, that one thrown by Polish children in Lodz when she went to meet her cousins for the first time. 1925 and 1950 weren’t so very far apart. For the children of Céreste, like the children of Lodz—and the children of Paris in 2019, for that matter—it was nothing more than a joke, a schoolyard taunt like any other. But for Myriam, and Lélia, and Clara, it was an interrogation.

My sisters and I were confronted with the same viciousness on the day the wall of our house was tagged with a swastika. 1950 and 1985 weren’t so very far apart.

And, I realized now, I was the same age as my mother and grandmother were when they were hit with the insults, the stones. The same age as my daughter when she was told by a classmate, in a schoolyard, that his family didn’t like Jews. The pattern was undeniable.

Déborah, I don’t know what it means to be “truly Jewish” or “not truly Jewish.” All I can tell you is that I’m the child of a survivor. That is, someone who may not be familiar with the Seder rituals, but whose family died in the gas chambers. Someone who has the same nightmares as her mother, and is trying to find her place among the living. Someone whose body is the grave of those who never had a proper burial.

It would suit me for things to be different. It would suit me not to be afraid of the government, afraid of gas, afraid of losing my identity papers, afraid of enclosed spaces, afraid of dog bites, afraid of crossing borders, afraid of traveling by airplane, afraid of crowds and the glorification of virility, afraid of men in groups, afraid of my children being taken from me, afraid of people who obey orders, afraid of uniforms, afraid of being late, afraid of being stopped by the police, afraid whenever I have to renew my passport.

I’m afraid of all those things, all the time. Not “when it suits me.” I carry within me, inscribed in the very cells of my body, the memory of an experience of danger so violent that sometimes I think I really lived it myself, or that I’ll be forced to relive it one day.

To me, death always feels near. I have a sense of being hunted. I often feel subjected to a kind of self-obliteration. I search in the history books for the things I was never t...

Something I’m beginning to realize is that, as long as the battle isn’t over, we don’t have the right to think about the consequences of the war on our own lives and those of others (Myriam and pessimism). September 6

I leafed through the notebook. There were notes, chapter outlines, whole passages, all mixed together. In that chaos, I immediately recognized the creative process of a novelist groping, seeking, needing to get ideas out on paper and to write out certain passages that spring to mind fully formed.

I stared out the window, scrutinizing each house, each shopfront, the way you gaze at an old man’s face, trying to see the features of the young man he used to be. It was all so strange.

I thought we were learning our family’s old Provençal recipes. It was the same when she taught us to leave the shutters half-closed to keep the coolness inside, or to take a sieste in the afternoon—I just assumed they were local traditions handed down by our ancestors.

Myriam was like a seed, blown by the wind across entire continents, that had finally come to rest here, in this little, sparsely populated patch of land. And here she had stayed for the rest of her life, as if time had stopped moving.

for once she hadn’t been hunted. All the time I spent with my grandmother Myriam happened here, in the south of France. It was always here that I saw her, between Apt and Avignon, in the hills of the Luberon, this woman whose hidden name I bore.

Myriam was one of those people who needed to keep a certain distance between herself and others. She didn’t want anyone to get too close.

haunted look in her eyes. I’m certain, now, that it was because of our faces. Some sudden resemblance to the ones who were gone, a way of laughing, a...

She was happy to share a moment of warmth or a meal in our company, but deep down, all she really wanted was to be back with her real family.

For me, it was difficult to bridge the gap between Mirotchka, the daughter of Ephraïm and Emma Rabinovitch, and Myriam Bouveris, the grandmother I spent summers with between the peaks of the Vaucluse and the mountains of the Luberon.

Myriam had recreated a life which, I had no doubt, was much like the one she’d known at her father’s dacha in Latvia, and on her grandparents’ farm.

They’d each had something tragic happen to them when they were teenagers, Jacques at age seventeen, Nicole at nineteen. No one had connected the dots. Because of the silence. And because, in this family, we didn’t believe in psychoanalysis.

simply gone from her memory. She only spoke Russian now. As her mental capacity waned, she fell back into the language of her childhood, and I vividly remember writing letters to her in Cyrillic so we could still have contact with her. Lélia asked some Russian friends for an alphabetical key, and we copied it. The whole family did it; we would sit around the dining room table writing out sentences in Cyrillic, and it ended up being a happy, special thing, to write in the language of our ancestors.

“Mireille?” “Yes! Yes! Little Mireille Sidoine—Marcelle’s daughter! She was raised by René Char. She must be ninety years old by now. I know because I read her memoirs not long ago. And . . . and she mentioned that she still lived in Céreste! She knew Myriam, and she knew my mother. No doubt about it. She was a cousin of Yves’s.”

“Myriam got very confused at the end of her life. She thought Lélia had known Ephraïm, Emma, Jacques, and Noémie. She even said to my mother once: ‘You know what your grandparents were like,’ as if Lélia had grown up with them.”

Georges suddenly had the idea of showing the postcard to Juliette. I had a photo of it on my phone. “Oh yes, of course I recognize it,” Juliette said. “What?” “I’m the one who sent it.”

There was French, Russian, Hebrew—all the languages she’d learned in her life, all mixed up in her head, you know? And then one day she chose a postcard from her collection—you remember, her collection of postcards with historic monuments on them.” “Just like Uncle Boris.” “Yes—that name sounds familiar; she must have told me about him. Anyway, she asked me to help her write those four names. I remember that she absolutely insisted on using a ballpoint pen. She wanted to be sure the ink wouldn’t fade or run. And then she said to me, ‘When I go to live with my daughter, I want you to send me this postcard. Promise?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I promise.’ I took the postcard home with me and put it away with my personal papers.”

have an envelope handy . . .” “But why did Myriam want to send this postcard to herself?” “Because she knew her memory was failing, and she said to me, ‘I can’t forget them. If I do, there will be no one left to remember that they ever existed.’”