The Postcard

by Anne Berest

Just like in all the Russian novels,” my mother began, “it started with a pair of star-crossed lovers.

Ephraïm Rabinovitch was in love with Anna Gavronsky, whose mother, Liba Gavronsky, born Yankelevich, was a cousin of the family. But the Gavronskys didn’t approve of Ephraïm and Anna’s love.”

Ephraïm and our cousin Aniouta? If not, I can only tell you in complete confidence—even though it seems that some in the family are aware of it already. Simply put, An and our Fedya (he turned twenty-four two days ago) have fallen in love—they’ve gone utterly mad with it—and it’s upset us all terribly. Auntie doesn’t know about it, and it would be utterly catastrophic if she found out. They see her all the time, and they’re in agony. Our Ephraïm adores Aniouta, but I’ll admit, I’m not sure I believe her feelings are sincere.

“So if I understand what’s going on here, Ephraïm was forced to give up his first love.” “And another fiancée was quickly found for him: Emma Wolf.”

E wanted A but she loved F. E then arranged to marry emma

Tradition dictates that, on his wedding day, the groom must smash a glass with his right foot after the ceremony, a gesture representing the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. After this, he makes a vow. Ephraïm’s vow was to erase the memory of his cousin Aniouta from his mind forever. But, looking at the shards of glass littering the floor, he felt as if it were his heart lying there, broken into a thousand pieces.

Is this incest? Theyre cousins?

freedom that is unreliable, that is gained through pain.

Listen carefully, son—the instant you feel the touch of honey on your lips, ask yourself: of what, of whom, am I a slave?” Ephraïm knew that his revolutionary soul had been born at that very moment, listening to his father’s words.

“Have they invited the Gavronskys, too?” he asked his younger sister Bella, worriedly. “No,” she assured him, carefully concealing the fact that both families had agreed to avoid a face-to-face meeting between Emma and Cousin Aniouta.

“You must understand something. One day, they’ll want us all to disappear.”

The Rabinovitches had no way of knowing that these were the last hours they would all spend together as a family.

The police trooped into the apartment. Spotting Ephraïm’s hat lying on an armchair in the living room, Emma pretended to be overcome by faintness, dropping into the chair, feeling the hat crumple beneath her weight. Her heart thumped in her chest. “Your grandmother Myriam hadn’t even been born yet, but she had just experienced, physically, what it means to have terror fill the pit of one’s stomach. Emma’s organs clenched around the fetus.”

Fearing the worst, Ephraïm promised Emma that, if the baby survived, they would leave Moscow and go to Riga, in Latvia. “Why Latvia?” “Because it had just become an independent country—one where Jews could settle without being subject to laws restricting their commercial activity.”

“I knew that story about the hat that absolutely had to be hidden from the police,” I said. “Myriam wrote it down for me when I was little, in the form of a fairy tale. She called it ‘The Tale of the Hat.’ But I didn’t know it was a real family story. I thought she’d made it up.” “Those slightly sad little stories your grandmother always wrote for you on your birthday—they were all episodes from her life. They’ve been real treasures for me, as I’ve tried to piece together certain events in her childhood.”

It was the gossiping housewives at the synagogue who informed Emma that Cousin Aniouta had married a German Jew and was now living in Berlin. “Don’t mention it to your husband, though, whatever you do. You must never revive the memory of your former rival,” warned the rebbetzin, the rabbi’s wife, whose unofficial role was to counsel the wives of the congregation.

Pesach reminds us that the Jewish people are a free people but that this freedom has a price. Sweat and tears.”

Ephraïm felt a pang in his heart. Aniouta. His cousin’s face flashed through his mind; he imagined her, at that very moment,

His cousin??

‘Within the family, the husband belongs to the middle class, while the woman is a member of the working class.’ Don’t you agree with that?” asked Ephraïm, still a devoted reader of Karl Marx despite the fact that he was now the owner of a thriving business.

“Don’t ask,” Maurice Wolf sighed, embracing his daughter. “The Poles don’t want to work in the same rooms as the Jews anymore because they hate each other, but they hate me most of all. I don’t know if it’s because I’m their boss, or because I’m Jewish.”

On the evening of Shabbat the Wolfs put out a magnificent spread for dinner, their Polish maids working busily in the kitchen, as they alone were permitted to light the stove and do all the other tasks forbidden to Jews after sundown on that day.

And then Myriam told the nephew that on that day, right in the middle of the game, a thought had suddenly occurred to her: Whoever wins this game will be the one who lives the longest.”

The walk along the length of the train reminded Emma of the strolls she used to take with her parents and her sisters in Lodz in the spring, when people’s home lives could be glimpsed through windows left open. When will I see them again? she wondered.

samovar.

its two slender smokestacks reaching upward like the arms of a newly married young wife.

On the first evening, they had dinner in the grand dining room, an excellent meal that ended with a dessert of apples candied in honey.

What had happened to the three-piece suits? The pearl necklaces? The lace collars and polka-dotted ties? Esther wore a shapeless cardigan, Nachman overlong trousers and battered old shoes.

“Oh yes, I’m a Zionist now!” Nachman announced proudly to his son one evening.

“You mean Jews didn’t normally speak Hebrew before then?” “No. It was solely a written language.” “So it’s like if, instead of translating the Bible into French, Pascal had encouraged people to speak Latin?” “Exactly.

And so Hebrew was the third alphabet Myriam learned to read and write. At six years old, she could already speak Russian; German, thanks to her nanny in Riga; and Hebrew. She knew some basic Arabic, too, and she could understand Yiddish. But she didn’t speak a word of French.”

The whole family could tell that Ephraïm was unhappy, exhausted by the heat, by the long round-trips between Migdal and Haifa. He was not himself. Five years passed in this way. These were cycles: just over four years in Latvia, nearly five years in Palestine. Unlike in Riga, where their fall from grace was as rapid as it was sudden, their situation in Migdal deteriorated year by year, slowly but surely.

“The Hebrew word Pesach means ‘to pass over,’” Nachman explained. “Because God passed over Jewish homes to spare them. But it also means passage: the passage across the Red Sea, the passage of the Hebrew people to become the Jewish people, the passage from winter to spring. It’s a rebirth.”

That evening he couldn’t keep himself from remembering his cousin. Aniouta. It was a name he never spoke out loud.

“You should know that all the characters in this story have multiple first names and multiple ways of spelling them. It took a while before I realized, reading so many letters, that Ephraïm, Fedya, Fedenka, Fyodor, and Théodore were all the same person!

You see, over the centuries, Russian Jews picked up some characteristics of the Slavic soul, including a taste for changing their first names—and, of course, the refusal to give up on love. The Slavic soul.”

new stage name: Manuel Raaby. No more Emmanuel Rabinovitch.

To get to school, Myriam and Noémie took the metro each morning, traveling the ten stations from Porte d’Orléans to Place de l’Odéon and then walking through the narrow cour de Rohan, which opened onto the rue de l’Éperon. The journey took thirty minutes from start to finish

chosen a new name, one that he thought rolled off the tongue like that of a hero in some nineteenth-century novel: Eugène Rivoche.

A few weeks later, the Rabinovitch family’s application for naturalization was denied. Ephraïm was stunned, and quickly assailed by pains in his chest and esophagus. He tried desperately to understand the reasons for the refusal. He was advised to wait six months and resubmit a more complete application.

Nachman, she could tell, still didn’t dare mention the Gavronsky relatives. For twenty years—twenty years—her father-in-law had avoided that subject in her presence. Spurred on by a combination of pride, tipsiness, and defiance, she adopted her most detached expression and asked, “Do you ever hear anything about Anna Gavronsky?” Nachman cleared his throat, casting a furtive glance at his son. “Er . . . yes, yes,” he said after a moment, slightly flustered. “Aniouta lives in Berlin now, with her husband and their only son. She nearly died giving birth to him;

“Oh—you’re already here,” she remarked, as if they’d just seen one other the day before. “Wait for me in the tearoom. I’m just going to put these things in my room.” Ephraïm stood frozen, breathless, silent, gazing at this almost supernatural vision—it was as if Aniouta hadn’t changed a bit in twenty years. “Be an angel and order me a hot chocolate. Do forgive me, but I wasn’t expecting you to be here so soon,” she said, in an adorable French accent. Ephraïm wondered if her words contained a subtle reproach. It was true that he had responded to her summons with the haste of a dog called by its master.

“I don’t love Aniouta anymore,” he said aloud, like a crazy man, there in the back seat of the car. How ridiculous she was, repeating her husband’s words like a parrot; surely the husband was one of those fat, rich men who were horrible bosses and made people hate Jews. And really she wasn’t so beautiful anymore, after all. Her eyelids were sagging with age—her whole face was. And there’d been a few liver spots on her hand . . .

On June 23, 1940, Hitler paid a visit to the capital with his personal architect, Speer, so that the latter could draw inspiration from Paris for the project called Welthauptstadt Germania—“Germania, capital of the world.” Adolf Hitler wanted to turn Berlin into a model city, reproducing Europe’s greatest monuments but on a scale ten times greater than the originals, including the Champs-Élysées and the Arc de Triomphe. His favorite building was the Opéra Garnier, with its neo-Baroque architecture.

One morning they found that the tide had gone out very far, so far that the ocean was no longer in view. They had never seen anything like it in their lives, and for a moment they didn’t speak. “It’s like the sea is afraid, too,” Noémie said at last.

Pétain had been named head of the French government. He announced a policy of “national renewal” and signed the first of the Jewish Status Laws. This was where it all began, with the first German ordinance of September 27, 1940, and the law enacted October 3. Myriam, summing up the situation, wrote later, “One day, everything was turned upside down.”

The law of October 3, 1940, stated that “any person with three grandparents of the Jewish race, or with two grandparents of that race if his/her spouse is Jewish” would be considered a Jew themselves. It also prohibited Jews from holding any sort of public office. Teachers, military personnel, government employees, and those who worked for public authorities—all were obliged to resign from their positions. Jews were also forbidden to publish articles in newspapers or participate in any of the performing arts: theatre, film, radio.

On October 14, 1940, Ephraïm became the first person to register himself as a Jew at the prefecture in Évreux. He, Emma, and Jacques were assigned numbers 1, 2, and 3, respectively, in a register composed of large-format copy sheets on grid-lined paper. As Ephraïm had never been granted French citizenship, the family was listed as “foreign Jews.” They had lived in France for more than a decade. It was Ephraïm’s hope that, one day, the French government would remember his willingness to obey.

One day, an official order was given for foreign nationals “of the Jewish race” to be “interned in camps,” “in assigned residence.” The wording was brief, terse. And vague. Why should they be interned in camps? And for what purpose? There were rumors of departures for Germany “to work there,” but with no further clarification. In the orders, foreign and unemployed Jews were said to be “surplus to the national economy.” And so they would serve as labor in the land of the conquerors.

They were stripped of their jobs so immediately unemployed

“Maman . . . there comes a point when you can’t just keep saying ‘but people didn’t know’ . . .” “Indifference is universal. Who are you indifferent toward today, right now? Ask yourself that. Which victims living in tents, or under overpasses, or in camps way outside the cities are your ‘invisible ones’? The Vichy regime set out to remove the Jews from French society. And they succeeded.”

“Yes. They forced you to lie, and then they treated you like a liar. They prevented you from working, and then they told you that you were a drain on society.”

“On Ephraïm’s file, the word ‘farmer’ was replaced with ‘sp,’ for ‘sans profession.’ And there you have it—he’d been transformed into an unemployed, stateless parasite, reaping the fruits of a piece of French land he never should have been able to buy in the first place.

When he met Myriam in October 1940, Vicente was a young man without a high-school diploma or even a middle-school certificate. Before the war he had worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant. Now, he aspired to become a mountain guide and poet. The problem was his grammar. He had posted a notice at the Sorbonne seeking a student to tutor him. That was how he met Myriam. They’d been born three weeks apart; Myriam in Russia sometime in August, and Vicente in Paris on September 15.