Irène Némirovsky

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Irène Némirovsky

Born 11 February 1903 (1903-02-11)
 Kiev, Ukraine
Died 17 August 1942 (aged 39)
 Auschwitz-Birkenau, Nazi Germany
Occupation Novelist
Literary movement Modernism,
Notable work(s) Suite Francaise
Influences

Irène Némirovsky (born February 11, 1903, Kiev, died August 17, 1942) was a novelist who died at the age of 39 in Auschwitz, Poland. She was killed by the Nazis for being a Jew, despite her conversion to Roman Catholicism.[1]

Contents

[edit] Biography

Irène Némirovsky was the daughter of a Jewish banker from Moscow, Léon Némirovsky. Her volatile and unhappy relationship with her mother became the heart of many of her novels.[2]

The Némirovsky family fled Moscow at the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917, spending a year in Finland in 1918 and then settling in Paris, France, where Irène attended the Sorbonne and started writing when she was 18 years old.

In 1926, Irène Némirovsky married Michel Epstein, a banker, and had two daughters: Denise, born in 1929; and Élisabeth, in 1937.

In 1929 she published David Golder, the story of a Jewish banker unable to please his troubled daughter, which was an immediate success, and was adapted to the big screen by Julien Duvivier in 1930, with Harry Baur as David Golder. In 1930 her novel Le Bal, the story of a mistreated daughter and the revenge of a teenager, became a play and a movie.

The David Golder manuscript was sent by post to the Grasset publisher with a Poste restante address and signed Epstein. H. Muller, a reader for Grasset immediately tried to find the author but couldn't get hold of him/her. Grasset put an ad in the newspapers hoping to find the author, but the author was "busy": she was having her first child, Denise. When Irène finally showed up as the author of David Golder, the unverified story is that the publisher was surprised that such a young woman was able to write such a powerful book.

Although she was widely recognized as a major author, by Jewish authors like Joseph Kessel and anti-semitic authors like Robert Brasillach alike, French citizenship was denied to the Némirovskys in 1938.

Irène Némirovsky was Jewish, but converted to Catholicism in 1939 and wrote in Candide and Gringoire, two anti-Semitic magazines—perhaps partly to hide the family's Jewish origins and thereby protect their children from growing anti-Semitic persecution.

By 1940, Némirovsky's husband was unable to continue working at the bank—and Irène's books could no longer be published—because of their Jewish ancestry. Upon the Nazis' approach to Paris, they fled with their two daughters to the village of Issy-l'Evêque (the Némirovskys initially sent them to live with their nanny's family in Burgundy while staying on in Paris themselves; they had already lost their Russian home and refused to lose their home in France), where Némirovsky was required to wear the Yellow badge.

On July 13, 1942, Irène Némirovsky (then 39) was arrested as a "stateless person of Jewish descent" by French police under the regulations of the German occupation. As she was being taken away, she told her daughters, "I am going on a journey now." She was brought to a convoy assembly camp at Pithiviers and on July 17 together with 928 other Jewish deportees transported to Auschwitz. Upon her arrival there two days later, her forearm was marked with an identification number. According to official papers, she died a month later of typhus.

Her husband was sent to Auschwitz shortly thereafter, and was immediately put to death in a gas chamber.

[edit] The rediscovery

Némirovsky is now best known as the author of the unfinished Suite française (Denoël, France, 2004, ISBN 2207256456; translation by Sandra Smith, Knopf, 2006, ISBN 1400044731), two novellas portraying life in France between June 4, 1940 and July 1, 1941, the period during which the Nazis occupied Paris. These works are considered remarkable because they were written during the actual period itself, and yet are the product of considered reflection, rather than just a journal of events, as might be expected considering the personal turmoil experienced by the author at the time.

Némirovsky's oldest daughter, Denise, kept the notebook containing the manuscript for Suite Française for fifty years without reading it, thinking it was a journal or diary of her mother's, which would be too painful to read. In the late 1990s, however, she made arrangements to donate her mother's papers to a French archive and decided to examine the notebook first. Upon discovering what it contained, she instead had it published in France, where it became a bestseller in 2004.

The original manuscript has been given to the Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC), and the novel has won the Prix Renaudot—the first time the prize has been awarded posthumously.

Némirovsky's surviving notes sketch a general outline of a story arc that was intended to include the two existing novellas, as well as three more to take place later during the war and at its end. She wrote that the rest of the work was "in limbo, and what limbo! It's really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens."

In a January 2006 interview with the BBC, her daughter, Denise, said, "For me, the greatest joy is knowing that the book is being read. It is an extraordinary feeling to have brought my mother back to life. It shows that the Nazis did not truly succeed in killing her. It is not vengeance, but it is a victory."

[edit] Controversy

Several reviewers and commentators[3][4] have raised questions regarding Némirovsky's attitude toward Jews, her generally negative depiction of Jews in her writing and her use of anti-semitic publications in advancing her career. A review of her work published in The New Republic states:

Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew. Does that sound too strong? Well, here is a Jewish writer who owed her success in France entre deux guerres in no small measure to her ability to pander to the forces of reaction, to the fascist right. Némirovsky's stories of corrupt Jews-- some of them even have hooked noses, no less!--appeared in right-wing periodicals and won her the friendship of her editors, many of whom held positions of power in extreme-right political circles. When the racial laws in 1940 and 1941 cut off her ability to publish, she turned to those connections to seek special favors for herself, and even went so far as to write a personal plea to Marshal Pétain.[5]

[edit] Fire in the Blood

On September 21st, 2007 another novel by Némirovsky was published from surviving manuscripts. Irène gave some of the manuscript to her husband, Michel Epstein; the rest was in the suitcase entrusted to her daughter Denise. The two matched up to form her last work, Fire in the Blood, a tale of country folk in the Burgundy village of Issy L'Eveque, based upon a village where Némirovsky and her family found temporary refuge whilst hiding from the Nazis.

[edit] Works published during the author's life

  • L'Enfant génial (Éditions Fayard, 1927), was renamed by the publisher L'enfant prodige in 1992 with the approval of Némirovsky's daughters, because the French term génial had become a teenager word like awesome and sounded funny.
  • David Golder (Éditions Grasset, 1929)
  • Le Bal (Éditions Grasset, 1930)
  • Le malentendu (Éditions Fayard, 1930)
  • Les Mouches d'automne (Éditions Grasset, 1931)
  • L'Affaire Courilof (Éditions Grasset, 1933)
  • Le Pion sur l'échiquier (Éditions Albin Michel, 1934)
  • Films parlés (Éditions Nouvelle Revue Française, 1934)
  • Le Vin de solitude (Éditions Albin Michel, 1935)
  • Jézabel (Éditions Albin Michel, 1936) [published in the U.S. as A Modern Jezebel by Henry Holt & Co., 1937]
  • La Proie (Éditions Albin Michel, 1938)
  • Deux (Éditions Albin Michel, 1939)
  • Le maître des âmes (Revue Gringoire, 1939, published as weekly episodes)
  • Les Chiens et les loups (Éditions Albin Michel, 1940)

[edit] Works published posthumously

  • La Vie de Tchekhov (Éditions Albin Michel, 1946)
  • Les Biens de ce monde (Éditions Albin Michel, 1947)
  • Les Feux de l'automne (Éditions Albin Michel, 1957)
  • Dimanche (short stories) (Éditions Stock, 2000)
  • Destinées et autres nouvelles (Éditions Sables, 2004)
  • Suite française (Éditions Denoël, 2004) Winner of the Renaudot prize 2004. English translation by Sandra Smith published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 2004, and in the U.S. by Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
  • Le maître des âmes (Éditions Denoël, 2005)

[edit] References

  1. ^ Early glimpses of Némirovsky's talent - International Herald Tribune
  2. ^ Early glimpses of Némirovsky's talent - International Herald Tribune
  3. ^ Nextbook: Behind the Legend
  4. ^ Stuart Jeffries on Irène Némirovsky | World news | The Guardian
  5. ^ Scandale Française
  • Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works, Jonathan Weiss, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-8047-5481-1.
  • Le Mirador, Mémoires rêvées, Elisabeth Gille, Nemirovky's youngest daughter, A "dreamed biography" of her mother. Presses de la Renaissance (1992) ISBN 2856166296, Available in English from Knopf in Fall 2006.
  • As France Burned, Paul Gray, New York Times Book Review, April 9, 2006

"Le Memorial de la Deportation des Juifs de France", Serge Klarsfeld, Paris, 1978. No pagination.

[edit] External links

Critical reviews of Suite Française