The Postcard

"An unsigned postcard with the names of relatives killed in the Holocaust arrives at her mother’s home; finding out who sent it and why leads the author to learn about her family history and her own identity. Anne Berest describes this as a “true novel” because all of the events in it are true – a result of her meticulous investigation into her family history – but she wrote it like fiction, changing the names of people who harmed her family so their descendants don’t suffer today and imagining characters’ thoughts. Berest’s story is specific, but there are themes in this book anyone can identify with – that history and bias are ever-present when we dig just a little, that how people see us may be so different from how we see ourselves, and that even relatives we never met influence the way we are."