“The Postcard” with Anne Berest and Leslie Camhi 

Winner of the American Choix Goncourt Prize, the Prix Renaudot des lycéens, and the ELLE Readers Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is among the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years. Luminous and gripping to the very last page, it is an enthralling investigation into family secrets, a poignant tale of mothers and daughters, and a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life.  

Anne, the heroine of the novel, embarks on a journey to discover the fate of the Rabinovitch family: their flight from Russia following the revolution, their journey to Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. What emerges is a moving saga of a family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling that shatters long-held certainties about Anne’s family, her country, and herself.  

Anne Berest will be joined in conversation by Leslie Camhi, an essayist, cultural journalist, and translator, who covered The Postcard for The New Yorker magazine. The Postcard will be available for purchase at shop.mjhnyc.org.  

Ellen Sowchek will join as the translator of the event.  

Anne Berest is the bestselling co-author of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Doubleday, 2014) and the author of a novel based on the life of French writer Françoise Sagan. With her sister Claire, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed biography of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse. She is the great-granddaughter of the painter Francis Picabia. For her work as a writer and prize-winning showrunner, she has been profiled in publications such as French Vogue and Haaretz newspaper. The recipient of numerous literary awards in France, The Postcard was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize, has been a long-selling bestseller in France, and is her first novel to appear in English translation. 

Leslie Camhi’s essays on art, design, literature, Jewish culture, and women’s lives, including her own life and travels, appear regularly in The New York Times, Vogue, Tablet, and many other publications. A frequent contributor to art museum catalogs, she also holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from Yale, and her scholarly work includes essays on kleptomania and 19^th-century French medical photography. Her first translation, from the French, of Violaine Huisman’s novel, The Book of Mother, was a New York Times Notable Book and long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize, among other honors.  

Photo Credit: Anne Berest © DR 

This program is made possible in part by support from the Battery Park City Authority.