The Postcard

by Anne Berest

Something had to be learned from all these lives. But what? Reflection. Examination. A deeper questioning of that word whose definition remained ever elusive. What does it mean to be Jewish? Maybe the answer was contained within another question: What does it mean to wonder what it means to be Jewish? The book Georges gave me, Nathalie Zajde’s Children of Survivors, told me everything I should have said to Déborah during that Pesach dinner, just a few weeks too late. 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.