Content Warning: The source material and this guide discuss graphic violence, torture and death, and violent sexual assault. The source material also uses slurs and antisemitic language, lethal drug use, and suicide.

Anne Berest, the protagonist, remains unnamed throughout the novel as she attempts to unravel her family’s secrets. She is the daughter of Lélia and mother of Clara, granddaughter to Myriam, the sole Rabinovitch survivor of the Holocaust. Unlike her ancestors, she appears French, able to blend into any setting in her native France. She is quiet, distant, and discreet, like Myriam, though she is also brave, like her grandmother.

Berest is the author of the novel, which is also part memoir, part biography, and part history book. She has French citizenship through ancestry and has penned a book on how to be Parisian. She is connected to the Picabia family, a well-established artistic clan known in Paris as former resistance fighters.

Berest represents the generation of healing. Her mother, Lélia, was too close to the aftermath of the war. Born in 1944, she was born into a damaged world trying to forget. She was not injured by the war’s aftermath, as Lélia had been, and thus her role in the story is one of confronting the past without being destroyed by it.