Anne Berest

Anne Berest is the protagonist and first-person narrator in The Postcard. At the outset of the narrative, she tells the reader, “I kept hold of the vague intention to ask my mother, one day, about out family’s history. But the years slipped by, and I never took the time to do it” (14). Ten years after Lélia received the postcard, Anne is on bedrest after her cervix dilates too early and “suspended in a state of anticipation, [her] thoughts turn to [her] mother, [her] grandmother, and the whole line of women who had given birth before [her]” (14). At her mother’s home, Anne asks to hear about her ancestors and Lélia gladly tells her daughter about her grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma Rabinovitch who lived in Russia, Latvia, and Palestine before moving to France in the 1930s. In the narrative present, when Anne attends Pesach...