new york post book reviews

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Spring Partner Bookseller: (1) City Lights in San Francisco!

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Briefly Noted

Revolusi , by David Van Reybrouck (Norton) . This powerful account of the colonization of Indonesia takes the form of a people’s history, using interviews with those who lived under—and sometimes defied—Dutch rule. Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian best known for his work about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, shows how the Dutch relied on genocide and slavery to piece together the Indonesian “jigsaw puzzle.” As one colonist put it, “Trade cannot be maintained without war, nor war without trade.” Van Reybrouck also captures the hope that independence brought, showing how, before a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship ushered in a “crazed explosion of violence,” Indonesians’ fight against oppression inspired other nations to break free.

Women and the Piano , by Susan Tomes (Yale) . In this engaging survey of fifty female pianists, from the eighteenth century to the present, Tomes aims to correct a male-centric understanding of piano history. Women pianists have long been scrutinized—for playing in a “masculine” style, for their appearances, for not orienting themselves around family. Through short biographies, Tomes documents the cost of pursuing art. Fanny Mendelssohn allowed her compositions to be published under her brother Felix’s name; Zhu Xiao-Mei continued studying Bach even after being sent to do manual labor during China’s Cultural Revolution. Yet the resounding note is one of passion. As Marguerite Long told her students, “My joy in life is work, because it will never betray you.”

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Lucky , by Jane Smiley (Knopf) . The main character of this warmhearted novel is Jodie Rattler, a girl who, at the age of six, accompanies her uncle to a racetrack and wins a roll of forty-three two-dollar bills. That talisman propels Rattler through life, from her upbringing in a gregarious family to a successful, if ultimately unfulfilling, career as a folk-rock singer-songwriter. As the novel wends its way from the nineteen-fifties to the near future, through multiple national crises—some historical, some speculative—Rattler contemplates the mixed blessings of her lifelong lucky streak and the contingencies inherent in “the great enigma . . . the sense you have, that comes and goes, of who you are, what a self is.”

Piglet , by Lottie Hazell (Henry Holt) . Newly installed in a house in Oxford, the protagonist of this novel savors visions of a future with her well-to-do fiancé. To her relief, they are a world away from her family in Derby, for whom she feels “a crawling embarrassment,” and from whom she received the nickname Piglet, for her prodigious appetite. Days before the wedding, however, her fiancé confesses a betrayal. Clinging to “the life she had so carefully built, so smugly shared,” Piglet insists on moving forward with the marriage. But amid sensuous descriptions of her cooking and of the vast amounts of food she begins to order at restaurants, battles between self-denial and indulgence, external expectations and inner feeling, start to consume her. Each burger and croquembouche is freighted with meaning.

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Mackenzie Dawson is the books editor at the New York Post, where she writes the weekly Required Reading column of best new releases, and oversees all books coverage. She received a BA from Colby College and an MA in Journalism from NYU. Prior to journalism, she was a publicist in the technology sector.

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An Autobiographical Novel Reclaims a Jewish History in Occupied France

“The Postcard,” by Anne Berest, tells the story of the author’s family members who died at Auschwitz in 1942.

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THE POSTCARD , by Anne Berest. Translated by Tina Kover

In a scene that lies near the direct center of “The Postcard,” an autobiographical new novel by the French author and screenwriter Anne Berest, the protagonist (also named Anne) attends a Passover Seder at the home of her boyfriend, Georges.

Anne, Jewish by birth, is largely unfamiliar with Jewish rituals, a detail she has kept hidden from Georges. But her reaction to the Seder is powerful: “Everything seemed familiar: passing the matzos around, dipping the bitter herbs in salted water, letting a drop of wine fall from my fingertip onto my plate, resting my elbow on the table. … My ears already seemed to know the Hebrew chants. It was as if time had stopped. … I could feel hands sliding into my own, inhabiting them.”

Shortly afterward, Georges’ cousin likens the antisemitic persecution depicted in the Haggadah to the current state of French-Jewish affairs: “When I read the papers, when I see everything that’s going on in France nowadays, it seems to me that people just want us to disappear.”

In the conversation that follows, Georges mentions that Anne’s daughter, Clara, has recently been the victim of antisemitic remarks at school. Anne, asked how she responded to the incident, reveals that she hasn’t addressed it at all, for reasons that are unclear even to herself. Another dinner guest responds with a pointed accusation: “The truth, as far as I can tell, is that you’re only Jewish when it suits you.”

Though Anne is stung, she recognizes that the accusation is not wholly off the mark. And she uses the resulting sense of shame — or, to be more exact, the writer Anne Berest uses it — as an incitement to action, i.e., to fuel the research and writing of this powerful, meticulously imagined book.

“The Postcard” (translated into a lucid and precise English by Tina Kover) takes its readers on a deep dive into one Jewish family’s history, and, inextricably, into the devastating history of the Holocaust in France. Most memorable of the many stories Berest tells in its pages is the one that lends the novel its title: In January 2003, a mysterious postcard arrives at Anne’s mother’s house. The card, bearing a touristy photograph of the Opéra Garnier, is inscribed with the names of Anne’s great-grandparents and her great-aunt and -uncle, Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie and Jacques, all of whom died in Auschwitz. The names are written in ballpoint pen in wobbly letters, on a card that contains no other words, no signature and no return address.

Could the sending of the card be an act of harassment, fueled by resurgent antisemitism in an increasingly xenophobic Europe? Or is it more personal, a message from the past to the present?

Anne’s parents put the postcard away in a drawer and never speak of it. But 10 years later, when Anne is pregnant with her first child, the card rises to her consciousness again: “Suspended in a state of anticipation, my thoughts turned to my mother, my grandmother and the whole line of women who had given birth before me. It was then that I felt a pressing need to hear the story of my ancestors.”

She asks her mother to tell her all she knows, and her mother, who has by now researched this history extensively, complies. She begins by telling Anne about Ephraïm and Emma’s flight from Russia in 1919, their subsequent sojourns in Latvia and Palestine, their ill-timed return to Europe in 1929 and, finally, their wartime experiences in France, a devastating sequence of violations and brutalities that ends with their deportation to Auschwitz in 1942.

Anne’s mother, a skilled storyteller, fills in the blanks with acts of empathetic imagining where the historical record fails — such as the moment when Noémie, 19, is forced to have her head shaved shortly before her death: “When Noémie’s turn came, her long hair, the hair of which she had always been so proud, the hair she had loved to wear twisted and pinned on top of her head like a coronet, fell to the floor, mingling with the hair of the other women, forming a vast, shining carpet.”

Anne gives birth to her first child just days after her mother finishes telling this story. But it’s not until after the antisemitic incident at her daughter’s school six years later that she chooses to revisit her family’s history — her own history, in effect — and to revive the questions incited by the postcard: Who sent it, and why?

At first Anne seeks outside help, employing a private detective and a graphologist; with their aid, she thinks, an answer might emerge quickly. But the few clues available lead only to further questions, and Anne and her mother take the search into their own hands.

Together they pore over marriage certificates and archival documents, and travel repeatedly to the tiny hamlet of Les Forges, where Anne’s great-grandparents lived before their deportation. They seek out the original family farm, speak to the current inhabitants and then knock on the doors of neighbors, some of whom still harbor her family’s possessions. Each new piece of information they unearth carries with it a freight of pain, a reminder of what was lost. But Anne, having chosen this search, persists: “I’m your daughter, Maman,” she tells her mother. “You’re the one who taught me how to do research, to gather information, to make even the smallest scrap of paper speak. Really, I’m just doing what you showed me how to do. I’m carrying on your work, that’s all.”

For Anne, perhaps the most important part of the work is a quest to understand herself — a quest she undertakes primarily through learning about her grandmother Myriam, sister of Noémie and Jacques, who married the son of the artist Francis Picabia and survived the war in a rural cottage 50 miles north of Marseille. In a series of chapters from Myriam’s perspective — chapters that convey her anxiety about her vanished siblings and parents, her love for her opium-addicted husband, her nascent desire to become involved in the French Resistance — a narrative that might otherwise have been classifiable as a memoir or a family history truly becomes, through acts of empathetic imagination, a novel.

One of the most devastating sections finds Myriam back in Paris after the war’s end, awaiting news of her parents and siblings; she goes each day to the Hotel Lutetia, where returning deportees are housed, to search for her loved ones or anyone who might have known them. One day there is a routing error, and 40 women who were supposed to be brought to the Lutetia are taken to the Gare d’Orsay instead. “Forty women — that’s a lot, thinks Myriam. And Noémie is among them. She can feel it. She takes the metro with the group from the hotel and enters the station with her heart pounding. She’s filled with a kind of light, an anticipatory joy. But none of the women at the Gare d’Orsay is Noémie.”

If Berest’s search for her identity and for her family history feels, at times, as long and difficult for the reader as it was for Berest herself, that effect is of the essence: In a sense, it’s the point. For Anne, embracing her Jewishness — both its pleasures and its difficulties — is a choice, one to which she has committed herself fully. And the quest leads to a profound identification with those who suffered and died.

To the Seder guest who accused her of being Jewish only when it suited her, Berest ultimately responds: “All I can tell you is that I’m the child of a survivor. That is, someone who may not be familiar with the Seder rituals, but whose family died in the gas chambers. Someone who has the same nightmares as her mother and is trying to find her place among the living.”

I suspect that the Seder guest in question now regrets launching the original barb. But considering the powerful literary work that emerged as a result — one that contains a single grand-scale act of self-discovery and many moments of historical illumination — we should all be glad she did.

Julie Orringer’s most recent novel, “The Flight Portfolio,” is the inspiration for the Netflix series “Transatlantic.”

THE POSTCARD | By Anne Berest | Translated by Tina Kover | 475 pp. | Europa Editions | $28

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Joseph Epstein, conservative provocateur, tells his life story in full

In two new books, the longtime essayist and culture warrior shows off his wry observations about himself and the world

Humorous, common-sensical, temperamentally conservative, Joseph Epstein may be the best familiar — that is casual, personal — essayist of the last half-century. Not, as he might point out, that there’s a lot of competition. Though occasionally a scourge of modern society’s errancies, Epstein sees himself as essentially a serious reader and “a hedonist of the intellect.” His writing is playful and bookish, the reflections of a wry observer alternately amused and appalled by the world’s never-ending carnival.

Now 87, Epstein has just published his autobiography, “ Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially if You’ve Had a Lucky Life ,” in tandem with “ Familiarity Breeds Content: New and Selected Essays .” This pair of books brings the Epstein oeuvre up to around 30 volumes of sophisticated literary entertainment. While there are some short-story collections (“The Goldin Boys,” “Fabulous Small Jews”), all the other books focus on writers, observations on American life, and topics as various as ambition, envy, snobbery, friendship, charm and gossip. For the record, let me add that I own 14 volumes of Epstein’s views and reviews and would like to own them all.

Little wonder, then, that Epstein’s idea of a good time is an afternoon spent hunched over Herodotus’s “Histories,” Marguerite Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian” or almost anything by Henry James, with an occasional break to enjoy the latest issue of one of the magazines he subscribes to. In his younger days, there were as many as 25, and most of them probably featured Epstein’s literary journalism at one time or another. In the case of Commentary, he has been contributing pieces for more than 60 years.

As Epstein tells it, no one would have predicted this sort of intellectual life for a kid from Chicago whose main interests while growing up were sports, hanging out, smoking Lucky Strikes and sex. A lackadaisical C student, Myron Joseph Epstein placed 169th in a high school graduating class of 213. Still, he did go on to college — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign — because that’s what was expected of a son from an upper-middle-class Jewish family. But Urbana-Champaign wasn’t a good fit for a jokester and slacker: As he points out, the president of his college fraternity “had all the playfulness of a member of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers.” No matter. Caught peddling stolen copies of an upcoming accounting exam for $5 a pop, Epstein was summarily expelled.

Fortunately, our lad had already applied for a transfer to the University of Chicago, to which he was admitted the next fall. Given his record, this shows a surprising laxity of standards by that distinguished institution, but for Epstein the move was life-changing. In short order, he underwent a spiritual conversion from good ol’ boy to European intellectual in the making. In the years to come, he would count the novelist Saul Bellow and the sociologist Edward Shils among his close friends, edit the American Scholar, and teach at Northwestern University. His students, he recalls, were “good at school, a skill without any necessary carry-over, like being good at pole-vaulting or playing the harmonica.”

Note the edge to that remark. While “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” is nostalgia-laden, there’s a hard nut at its center. Epstein feels utter contempt for our nation’s “radical change from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one.” As he explains: “Our parents’ culture and that which came long before them was about the formation of character; the therapeutic culture was about achieving happiness. The former was about courage and honor, the latter about self-esteem and freedom from stress.” This view of America’s current ethos may come across as curmudgeonly and reductionist, but many readers — whatever their political and cultural leanings — would agree with it. Still, such comments have sometimes made their author the focus of nearly histrionic vilification.

Throughout his autobiography, this lifelong Chicagoan seems able to remember the full names of everyone he’s ever met, which suggests Epstein started keeping a journal at an early age. He forthrightly despises several older writers rather similar to himself, calling Clifton Fadiman, author of “The Lifetime Reading Plan,” pretentious, then quite cruelly comparing Mortimer J. Adler, general editor of the “Great Books of the Western World” series, with Sir William Haley, one of those deft, widely read English journalists who make all Americans feel provincial. To Epstein, “no two men were more unalike; Sir William, modest, suave, intellectually sophisticated; Mortimer vain, coarse, intellectually crude.” In effect, Fadiman and Adler are both presented as cultural snake-oil salesmen. Of course, both authors were popularizers and adept at marketing their work, but helping to enrich the intellectual lives of ordinary people doesn’t strike me as an ignoble purpose.

In his own work, Epstein regularly employs humor, bits of slang or wordplay, and brief anecdotes to keep his readers smiling. For instance, in a chapter about an editorial stint at the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Epstein relates this story about a colleague named Martin Self:

“During those days, when anti-Vietnam War protests were rife, a young woman in the office wearing a protester’s black armband, asked Martin if he were going to that afternoon’s protest march. ‘No, Naomi,’ he said, ‘afternoons such as this I generally spend at the graveside of George Santayana.’”

Learned wit, no doubt, but everything — syntax, diction, the choice of the philosopher Santayana for reverence — is just perfect.

But Epstein can be earthier, too. Another colleague “was a skirt-chaser extraordinaire," a man "you would not feel safe leaving alone with your great-grandmother.” And of himself, he declares: “I don’t for a moment wish to give the impression that I live unrelievedly on the highbrow level of culture. I live there with a great deal of relief.”

In his many essays, including the sampling in “Familiarity Breeds Content,” Epstein is also markedly “quotacious,” often citing passages from his wide reading to add authority to an argument or simply to share his pleasure in a well-turned observation. Oddly enough, such borrowed finery is largely absent from “Never Say You’ve Had a Happy Life.” One partial exception might be the unpronounceable adjective “immitigable,” which appears all too often. It means unable to be mitigated or softened, and Epstein almost certainly stole it from his friend Shils, who was fond of the word.

Despite his autobiography’s jaunty title, Epstein has seen his share of trouble. As a young man working for an anti-poverty program in Little Rock, he married a waitress after she became pregnant with his child. When they separated a decade later, he found himself with four sons to care for — two from her previous marriage, two from theirs. Burt, the youngest, lost an eye in an accident while a toddler, couldn’t keep a job, fathered a child out of wedlock and eventually died of an opioid overdose at 28. Initially hesitant, Epstein came to adore Burt’s daughter, Annabelle, as did his second wife, Barbara, whom he married when they were both just past 40.

Some pages of “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life” will be familiar to inveterate readers of Epstein’s literary journalism, all of which carries a strong first-person vibe. Not surprisingly, however, the recycled anecdotage feels less sharp or witty the second time around. But overall, this look back over a long life is consistently entertaining, certainly more page-turner than page-stopper. To enjoy Epstein at his very best, though, you should seek out his earlier essay collections such as “The Middle of My Tether,” “Partial Payments” and “A Line Out for a Walk.” Whether he writes about napping or name-dropping or a neglected writer such as Somerset Maugham, his real subject is always, at heart, the wonder and strangeness of human nature.

Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life

Especially if You’ve Had a Lucky Life

By Joseph Epstein

Free Press. 304 pp. $29.99

Familiarity Breeds Content

New and Selected Essays

Simon & Schuster. 464 pp. $20.99

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