Anne Berest interviewed Catriona Seth

French actor and author Anne Berest talks about her award-winning book, The Postcard, an epic story about her maternal great-grandparents and their family and the horrors of the Holocaust in France.

Berest describes how she sets off in search of the story of Ephraïm and Emma Rabinoivitch and their children, Noémie and Jacques, all killed at Auschwitz. Helped by her chain-smoking mother, family members, friends, associates, a private detective, a graphologist and others she traces their journey from Russia to Latvia, Palestine and Paris. It is a story of a family devastated by the Holocaust but partly restored through the power of storytelling.

‘The Postcard is a vivid indictment of France’s betrayal of the Jews. And the truth about the postcard is an absolute heartbreaker’ Hadley Freeman, The Sunday Times

Berest is the great-granddaughter of Spanish-born artist Francis Picabia and French Resistance fighter Gabriële Buffet-Picabia. She is co-author of the bestselling How to be Parisian Wherever You Are, which has been translated into 35 languages. The Postcard won many awards including the American Choix Goncourt Prize. Here she talks to Professor Catriona Seth, Marshall Foch Professor of French Literature at Oxford and fellow of All Souls College.

Part of the festival’s Voices of Europe programme and part of the programme of Jewish and Hebrew literature and culture.