Her life on the surface is that of a free-thinking woman of the most educated, cultured and privileged section of French society. She explores her Jewish roots with an open-minded curiosity as her lover, Georges, takes her to a Pesach Seder at the house of a friend. Anne revels in the beauty of the food, the spiritual heritage, the sense of connection, until the conversation becomes tricky when a woman who would like to have Georges for herself challenges her, saying that she is only Jewish when it suits her.

This is the conundrum of those with Jewish ancestry who have for so long been drawn to and even held left-wing politics and humanist beliefs. Anne begins to remember incidents, connecting dots to find that embracing the Enlightenment and socialism has not provided Jewish people with shelter from pogroms in the past, or threats and graffiti (or worse) in the present. Ephraïm the progressive atheist was murdered on arrival in Auschwitz in 1942, along with his devoutly observant wife Emma.

Anne delves into their lives, sleuthing for such clues as were preserved, to imagine what life was like for them. Fleeing Stalin’s Moscow into Latvia, he and Emma end up in France, thinking for a time that there will be a haven there. At every point Anne portrays Ephraïm as a believer in the ultimate decency and fairness of fate or at least in French government systems, duped by optimism until the Vichy regime does its worst. Anyone who has seen The Sorrow and the Pity will recognise what happened to the Rabinovitches and so many like them.

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Only Myriam escaped. She married Vicente, the doomed, opium-addicted son of Francis Picabia, the Dadaist artist, colleague of Marcel Duchamp. Anne’s mother Lélia is the child of that pairing, an elegant, tough-minded Frenchwoman with a stellar academic career. Her daughters Anne and Claire Berest and their children carry on Myriam’s line, a line that stretches back millennia, now accounted for in this important and compelling book.

At times, I had to put the book down and take deep breaths. There was the urge to yell at Ephraïm “Go to America! Now! Get out as fast as you can!“. But it was like watching Romeo and Juliet, at that unbearable moment Shakespeare created, when he makes you feel, every time, that if only Romeo would wait one minute then Juliet would wake up and everything would be fine.

But tragedy must have its way and Ephraïm’s stubbornness leaves them with no escape from unimaginable evil – unimaginable precisely because he is, with obstinate optimism, decent. The vividness of Berest’s imagination is given all the more force for being firmly couched in the rigorous research that she documents as the book continues, in quasi-Proustian flashbacks seamed with precise analysis and candid self-disclosure. The reality she presents is one you can accept.

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