The Postcard by Anne Berest

May their memories be a blessing. This is s story that swings between the time before the Nazi's, the time of the Nazi's and more modern times. The take home message, besides these were horrible people who committed horrible acts through out the war, even when no one was looking, is to demonstrate generational trauma, how it happens, what it consists of, and how to work on confronting it and getting over it. The book opens on a snowy Paris morning in 2003. The protagonist is Anna and her mother, Léila, steps outside for her first cigarette of the day, only to find a mysterious postcard in the mailbox. On it are four names: Ephraim, Emma, Noémie, Jacques. Her grandfather, grandmother, aunt and uncle – all killed at Auschwitz. No signature, no explanation. For Léila, the postcard is a threat, a provocation. For Anne, it poses a question: why does she know so little about those ancestors? Her quest to find the sender will open rifts between mother and daughter; it will also unearth the family’s origin story. Their early years of wandering; their fate under Vichy France and the Nazis; the risks her grandparents undertook in the Resistance. And then afterwards, the pain of survival; the long reach of the Holocaust through the generations. Two things I liked about this book--one is the nomadic existence of many European Jews before the war and the other is the perspective looking back from the 21st century. We are undergoing another round of "othering" in the United States, and it is more important now than ever to remember how frightful that was for all involved, bot the perpetrators and the victims. Nobody wins, it is just ugly.