Though it is copiously footnoted, the Berests’ biography of Gabriële is written in a novelistic style, from inside the characters’ heads. “The legacy of Francis and Gabriële, for both of us, is their iconoclasm, their rule-breaking,” Claire said via Zoom from Paris. “So the freedom we took in writing about them was also our way of honoring them.”

“Gabriële” ends in 1919, well before what may have been the most dramatic chapter in its heroine’s long life—when she was in her sixties during the Second World War and became an active member of a Resistance network known as Gloria SMH, alongside Samuel Beckett and others. These activities, touched upon in “The Postcard,” will be the subject of a future volume by the two sisters, who remain close. (Part three of “The Postcard” consists entirely of an extended e-mail exchange between them, probing their shared legacies of loss and survival.) In March, a small volume Anne edited of Francis Picabia’s letters and poems to Gabriële was published by Éditions Seghers, with a preface by both sisters And, last year, in Paris’s Twentieth Arrondissement, the Jardin Gabriële-Buffet opened, harboring a few gentle shade trees, a trickling fountain, and children at play.

When we spoke via Zoom in April, Berest had just completed a script with the director Raoul Peck—whose documentary on James Baldwin’s fight for civil rights, “I Am Not Your Negro,” was nominated for an Oscar—for a bio-pic about Bernard Natan, a pioneering French Jewish film producer. During the nineteen-thirties, Natan was dragged to court, after which he had to give up his ownership of the Pathé film studios, and was later imprisoned, deported, and killed at Auschwitz. “Even people who know a lot about French cinema have never heard of him,” Berest said.

In 2019, she had the idea and wrote the script for the hit French television series “Mytho,” a dark comedy about suburban motherhood. Her advice on scripts is also sought after. The director Audrey Diwan, one of Berest’s co-authors on “How to Be a Parisian,” turned to Berest for help with “Happening,” a screen adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s memoir about her determined search, as a college student, in 1963, for a back-alley abortion. (The film won the Golden Lion at the 2021 Venice Film Festival.)

“Anne is a natural collaborator,” Diwan said, “intellectually rigorous but also a bit irreverent, which I love.”

The film director Rebecca Zlotowski, who has been friends with Berest since they were both eighteen, believes that Berest’s literary endeavors are a form of family engagement. “We tend to think of writing as a very solitary activity,” she explained via Zoom from her home in Paris, “but, in fact, with Anne there’s this desire to use a book project to open up a dialogue with members of her family.”

Zlotowski’s latest film, “Other People’s Children,” stars Virginie Efira as a dedicated high-school teacher coming to terms with the idea that the time for her to conceive a child may have passed. Berest, who occasionally acts in films by her friends, plays a mother afflicted with cancer, whom Efira’s character meets in passing. (Berest’s younger daughter, who is also Zlotowski’s goddaughter, plays her character’s daughter.)

“She’s very believable as this almost ghostly presence,” Zlotowski said. Berest’s role is small, but Zlotowski told me that it underlines the film’s broader subject, which is “what will remain of us when we are gone.” It’s a preoccupation that she said she shares with Berest. “As European Jewish women whose families were impacted by the Shoah, it's our almost genetic inheritance—this anxiety and sense of responsibility concerning what we will leave to future generations.”

“The Postcard” is particularly strong on the build-up of bureaucratic details in Vichy France that gradually denied Jews—both immigrants and those born on French soil—their personhood. So it’s striking that in the year it was published, the hard-right pundit and French Presidential candidate Éric Zemmour was campaigning to rehabilitate Vichy’s collaborationist leader, Marshal Philippe Pétain, as the protector of French-born Jews.

In the book, Berest imagines Ephraïm buying a copy of the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s long pamphlet, “Trifles for a Massacre”—a virulently antisemitic screed that was a best-seller in the France of 1937—because “he wanted to read what the French were reading.” (It is not a great reading experience for him.) Last year, Gallimard began publishing a series of newly discovered manuscripts by Céline, the late, disgraced literary giant who was convicted of collaboration with the Nazis by a postwar Paris court, but whose novels “Journey to the End of the Night” and “Death on the Installment Plan” remain highly influential. The publisher and many critics scrambled to separate Céline’s literary genius from his antisemitism as his works once again hit the best-seller list.

And it was, after all, an antisemitic incident in a French public school in 2018 that set Berest’s search for the postcard’s author in motion. In the past decade, France has seen a rise not just in hateful rhetoric but in deadly violence against Jews: three children and a teacher were shot outside a religious school in Toulouse, in 2012; four Jews were murdered at a kosher supermarket in Paris, in 2015, by an extremist associated with the Charlie Hebdo attackers; a sixty-five-year-old retired physician and schoolteacher, Sarah Halimi, was killed in 2017; and the following year, Mireille Knoll, an eighty-five-year-old who as a child had survived the notorious 1942 Vel d’Hiv roundup of Jews in Paris, was fatally stabbed.

Berest “went in search of this family history because she didn’t understand something about today,” Haïm Korsia, the chief rabbi of France, observed by phone from Paris. Nevertheless, “the community is flourishing,” he insisted. “We’re establishing new synagogues and community centers, there are more and more kosher restaurants, and every Jewish school that opens is full. At the same time, there is this fear that the antisemitism of some risks becoming contagious for the whole of society.” Berest’s book, he felt, “does a very good job of expressing that anxiety.”

It’s an anxiety that is shared in the U.S. Any sense that American Jews were sheltered from the violence afflicting Jews in Europe was shattered by the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which a man killed eleven congregants who had assembled there for Saturday-morning worship. The Anti-Defamation League reported a record-breaking number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. last year, and an almost doubling between 2019 and 2022 of support for antisemitic attitudes—canards about Jewish pushiness, Jewish clannishness, or an excess of Jewish power in the United States today. Twenty per cent of Americans were found to believe in six or more antisemitic tropes.

When Berest and I first met, it was just a few weeks after antisemitic comments made by Kanye West had reverberated across the country. Now “The Postcard” arrives in the U.S., carrying a message about the relevance of the past to today. “In ‘The Postcard,’ I draw a distinction between [my great-great-grandfather] Nachman, who experienced pogroms at the end of the nineteenth century in Russia, and his son Ephraïm, who didn’t live through them. Nachman tells his children ‘es’shtinkt shlekht drek’—‘it stinks of shit’—because he recognizes, in a series of scattered and seemingly minor events, the rise of hate.” The Second World War must appear as remote to twenty-year-olds today as the First World War did to her in her twenties, Berest said. It’s “a conflict belonging to the preceding century.”

Berest hopes her book will be “a link between generations.” She liked the fact that, after it was published in France, people wrote to her to say, “I’m not Jewish, but your family has become a little bit my family, the story of the Rabinovitch has become my story.” She added, “I’m very happy when readers say they’ve begun to investigate their own family history.” ♦