Bal Harbour

ver since I was a kid, I have been attracted to the past," says French author and actress Anne Berest. As the great-grand- daughter of famed avant-garde painter Francis Picabia and his first wife, the esteemed art critic and W WII resistance organizer Gabriélle Buffet-Picabia, it 's no wonder why. Berest's family lineage—not to mention her style and tal- ent—imbues her with an aura of ine€able cool. The kind of cool that found her the recipient of a 10-page fan letter from Karl Lagerfeld, who was so enamored with her 2014 biography of legendary French play- wright and novelist Françoise Sagan, that he was compelled to o€er his praise. Following the exchange, she became a Chanel ambassador, and remains a friend of the house. Growing up in Sceaux, a small suburb of Paris, in a house full of books, Berest listened to the strains of Leonard Cohen and The Doors wafting in the background from her parents' stereo. Her mother, Lélia, was a university professor of linguistics, while her father, Pierre, was a scientist studying the relationship between the moon and Earth's tide. Both were students during the May 1968 revolution, passing on their counterculture ideals to their children. But one thing that wa sn't so ea sily shared in her home were the stories of her famous linea ge. When Berest was in her early t wenties, while reading a biography of Duchamp, she was shocked to find refer- ences to her great-grandmother on nearly ever y pa ge. While it 's been wel l documented t hat Ducha mp a nd t he Picabia s were ver y close (and not always platonically), so much else was of t overlooked. "She was the first young girl to be admit ted to a ver y famous music school in Paris, La Schola Cantor um, as a composer when she was only 17," says Berest . "She wa s a w it ness at t he weddin g of Pablo Pica sso. I thought , ' What a woman!'" Inspired, she and her sister Claire set out E '' to w rite "Gabriële," the untold stor y of their g reat-g randmother. "I am convinced that all family linea ges are fascinating if you take the time to obser ve them." From an early age Berest was drawn to writing, which to her repre- sented "the image of freedom." After glimpsing a photo of famed author and filmmaker Marguerite Duras in a magazine when she was young, she never considered any other career path. Her love of histor y was early formed as well. "When I was a kid I always asked old people to tell me about their memories," recalling what may have led to her founding, in 2008, a small publishing house, Port-Plume, where she documented the stories of basically anyone who cared to share them. Most recently, Berest returned to mining her own family's history in what might be her most revealing book yet, "The Postcard," winner of the 2022 Goncourt Prize, one of the most high-profile literary prizes in France. The book took form back in 2003, when Berest 's mother re- ceived an anonymous postcard with the names of four Jewish relatives who perished in the Holocaust. The mysterious mail compelled the au- thor to take a circuitous journey to find the sender of the postcard, using autofiction to recreate the lives of her ancestors. In the process, she also found herself grappling with her own experiences as a Jewish woman in modern day France. "By working on my family tree, I found coinci- dences between the life of my relatives and my life today, which I call invisible transmissions," she says. "Even when we don't know anything about them, our ancestors exist inside us." She continues, "I might have one Spanish g randfather and one Breton one; a great-grandfather who was a painter and another who'd captained an ice-breaking ship, but nothing—absolutely nothing— mat ters a s much to me a s being descended from a line of Jew ish women." Perhaps the self is the most fascinating subject of all. FRENCH AUTHOR ANNE BEREST UNCOVERS A LINEAGE SHE NEVER KNEW EXISTED IN HER NEW BOOK, "THE POSTCARD." BY ISABEL B. SLONE PORTRAIT BY LAURA FRIEDLI Bohemian ROYALTY 108 BAL HARBOUR

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