Many people and institutions have contributed to the making of this book. The Bacon Fund of the Department of Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard made possible my frequent research trips to France over a seven-year period. The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington provided, through its invitation to occupy the Shapiro Senior Scholar position, an indispensable year of reading, writing, and reflection in 2009–10. My first presentations of this research were at the museum, in two informal seminars and in the public Shapiro lecture, delivered in February 2010. My conversations during those months with Sara Horowitz, Brett Kaplan, Jürgen Matthaus, and other Fellows and researchers at the Center proved invaluable for my thinking; the enthusiastic support of my friend and colleague Sonya Michel convinced me that there could be broad interest in this book. At the other end of the process, the semester I spent as a Faculty Fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study in spring 2016 allowed me to put the finishing touches to the manuscript and present parts of the book in public lectures and class visits. I thank the colleagues and students at “Aggieland” for their warm welcome.
As my many references to him make clear, my personal and professional debt to Olivier Philipponnat is immense. His work on Némirovsky is indispensable to anyone writing about her, and he has shared with me many hard-to-find documents and discoveries of his own, rare acts of generosity among researchers. I am truly grateful to him for his generous friendship.
I deeply regret that Denise Epstein-Dauplé did not live long enough for me to thank her in person for her warmth and helpfulness over several years and for her ongoing interest in this work. Her son Nicolas Dauplé has taken on the job of representing the family, and I am grateful to him for his support and friendship. Other family members and friends of Denise and of Elisabeth Gille have provided unique personal reminiscences in my interviews with them; I thank them all for their invaluable help. I am also very grateful to the people I met in Issy-l’Évêque who had a connection to this story and who kindly showed me around: Madeleine and Denise Jobert, Elisabeth Kulik, and Renée Michaud as well as the mayor M. Nivot and the secretary of the mairie, M. Granger. And I thank Nicolas Weill for putting me in touch with his mother, Denise Weill, who remembered seeing Némirovsky’s books on her family’s bookshelves in the 1930s and shared other memories dating to the war years.
In the course of my research, librarians and archivists at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine outside Caen, the Archives Départementales in Mâcon, and the Cercil-Musée des Enfants du Vél-d’Hiv in Orléans were unfailingly helpful. I want especially to thank Hélène Mouchard-Zay, a founder and president of the Cercil, for guiding me around the camp site of Pithiviers and for sharing her memories of her father, Jean Zay. Margot Adler, the great-granddaughter of Raïssa Adler, kindly helped me look for traces (alas, not there) of Michel Epstein and Irène Némirovsky in her family archives. The young historian Daniel Lee shared his enthusiasm over archival research and provided precious suggestions at an important moment, as this book was nearing completion.
I thank my faithful and efficient research assistant, Violeta Banica, for her important help in collecting materials and hard-to-find publications; she also drew up the family tree that figures in chapter 7. My research assistant in Texas, Jonathan Bibeau, did an outstanding job in preparing the index. Earlier, I had the excellent research help of Laura Connor, especially in tracking down essential newspaper and journal articles. John d’Amico sent me books from the library during the summer when I was away, writing.
A number of people have read parts of the manuscript in progress and provided valuable comments and suggestions or just plain encouragement: Murray Baumgarten helped me rethink the chapter on Némirovsky’s Jewish protagonists, and Annette Wieviorka shared her vast knowledge as a historian of the Holocaust for the chapter on Némirovsky’s choices during the war. Sharon Bryan, Nicolas Dauplé, Laura Davulis, Fabrice Gille, Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Joan Nathan, Olivier Philipponnat, Allen Reiner, Daniel Suleiman, and Michael Suleiman read individual chapters. Alan Riding read the whole manuscript in its next-to-last incarnation with his expert editorial eye. Joe Golsan and I have been discussing Némirovsky, very productively for me, for many years, in public and in private; the same holds true for Alice Kaplan, whose books on French literary figures of the 1930s and 1940s are an inspiration, and Sandra Smith, whose translations of Némirovsky’s works have contributed to their worldwide success. Other friends who have been prized interlocutors for me on this project include Constance Borde, Jeanette Demesteere, Marianne Hirsch, Andreas Huyssen, Maurice Samuels, Leo Spitzer, and Judith Vichniac. In the very early stages of this work I benefited from discussions with my late and much-regretted friend and colleague Svetlana Boym, Helen Epstein, Dan Jacobs, Anna and Paul Ornstein, Sue Quinn, and Steve Zipperstein. My agent, Charlotte Sheedy, has been exemplary in her patience and encouragement. My first editor at Yale, Steve Wasserman, read the manuscript in record time and made important suggestions about style. I am grateful to his successor, Sarah Miller, for her responsiveness and support. Eva Skewes has been a model of efficiency in shepherding the manuscript into production, as has Jeffrey Schier. Lawrence Kenney’s superb copyediting has made me rethink many a word and rework many a sentence. I thank Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, who is translating the book into French, for his careful going-over of the English text.
My family, as always, has been a source of emotional support and of much-needed diversion over the course of writing this book—as have my good friends Wini Breines, Marcia Folsom, Ruth Perry, and (last but not least) Allen Reiner. I have dedicated the book to my grandchildren, who are an unalloyed joy to me and a hope for the future.