Blessing: my writing stems from two languages, at least. In my tongue it is the “foreign” languages that are my sources, my agitations.
—hélène cixous, “Coming to Writing”
It seemed to her sometimes that, by a mysterious power in her soul, she could feel or guess the thoughts of others.
—némirovsky, The Wine of Solitude
“THE SUBJECT IS NOT the confession of a solitary drunkard, although that could actually be quite amusing to take on, don’t you think? No, by this title I want to express the kind of moral intoxication produced by solitude (moral as well) in adolescence and youth. To you, and you alone, I will confide that this book is the almost autobiographical novel that one always writes, inevitably, sooner or later. I hope the critics won’t be too harsh, but it’s one of those books we write for ourselves, not really caring if others don’t like it.”1 So wrote Némirovsky to her sometime mentor Gaston Chérau in February 1935, a few months before the publication of The Wine of Solitude. By then she was hardly in need of his help, having published several successful books after David Golder and being solidly established as a writer of note. If she had misgivings about the critics’ response, warding them off, as it were, by proclaiming indifference, she had reason to rejoice when the book appeared in October, for it garnered plentiful praise from the establishment figures whose opinion mattered most to her. The Academician Henri de Régnier, who was following her career closely, reviewed the book in Le Figaro and praised her “harsh and powerful” talent. Ramon Fernandez, a well-known writer and public intellectual who had not yet abandoned his left-wing allegiances (a socialist since the 1920s, Fernandez converted to the extreme Right in 1937 and became an avowed collaborationist during the war but had the good fortune to die of a heart attack in August 1944 before he could be prosecuted), wrote in his review in the weekly Marianne that Némirovsky was “one of the most appealing novelists [un des romanciers les plus attachants—note the masculine noun]” in French letters.2
The Wine of Solitude is indeed autobiographical, recounting the childhood and adolescence of a young woman, Hélène Karol, who resembles Némirovsky like a twin. Hélène, born in a city on the Dnieper River, “between the Ural Mountains and the Caspian Sea,” is the only child of a mismatched, upwardly mobile Jewish couple. The family travels frequently to France and employs a French governess for Hélène, a sign of their social aspirations. Left largely on her own, between a vain, self-absorbed mother who cares more about her lovers than about her daughter and a father whose main preoccupation is to accumulate the wealth that seals his distance from his ghetto childhood, Hélène learns precociously to penetrate the secrets of the adults around her. She is especially watchful of her beautiful, emotionally cold mother, Bella, whom she observes with a mixture of longing and loathing. At the outbreak of the First World War the family moves to St. Petersburg, where financial speculation and war profiteering are at their peak. Boris Karol and his associates, both Jews and non-Jews, are caught up in the fever of moneymaking. This too Hélène observes with ironic precision: “ ‘Ships . . .’ ‘Oil . . .’ ‘Pipelines . . .’ ‘Boots . . .’ ‘Sleeping bags . . .’ ‘Shares . . .’ ‘Millions . . . Millions . . . Millions. . . .’ Money was the only thing that excited the men around Hélène. They were all getting rich. Gold flowed.”3 When Hélène sees her mother with her new lover, her young cousin Max, from the wealthy branch of the mother’s family, which had always shunned the Karols until then, her first thought is, “Max, here? Oh, how rich they must be” (1233). Soon after the October Revolution, in 1917, the Karols, accompanied by Max, leave Russia for Finland and Sweden, arriving in Paris in 1919. During this time Hélène has grown into an attractive young woman. Fulfilling her childhood dreams of vengeance against her mother, she seduces Max, who falls in love with her and wants to marry her. But in the end she sends him away, her hatred of her mother now mingling with a kind of pity for the unhappy older woman. After her father has a stroke and dies, Hélène leaves the house for good, declaring herself finally “free, free from my childhood, my mother, free from everything I hated” (1362). Just before closing the door she looks at herself in the mirror and thinks she resembles “a child of immigrants who’d been forgotten in some port” (1361). But once out on the street, clutching her beloved cat to her bosom, she feels elated. Her life until now, she reflects, has been “simply the years of apprenticeship. They have been exceptionally hard, but they have forged my courage and my pride. That is mine, my inalienable treasure. I am alone, but my solitude is sharp and intoxicating.”4
Critical commentaries on The Wine of Solitude, both nowadays and at the time, generally emphasize the mother–daughter conflict, a familiar and recurrent theme in Némirovsky’s work. But Hélène’s mention of her “years of apprenticeship” points us to a reading of this novel as a bildungsroman, a genre with a long history in European literature. Although the name was invented by a German philologist around 1820, the genre itself goes back at least to the Middle Ages, to tales of young knights setting out to find their way in the world. In its modern version, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is usually credited as the inaugurator, with his novel of 1785 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Traditionally, the bildungsroman, literally, “novel of formation,” featured a young male protagonist who, after a number of false starts, discovers his authentic self and his vocation in the world. In the best of circumstances the hero succeeds in melding individual autonomy with social integration and reaches manhood by assuming an active role in society. Negative versions, more numerous and varied than the positive ideal, emphasized the hero’s failure or disillusionment. In Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, the great example of a negative bildungsroman, the protagonist Frédéric Moreau is never able to move beyond the dreams of his youth and remains immature to the end. A specifically artistic version of the genre, the so-called Künstlerroman, recounts the “years of apprenticeship” of a young man who becomes an artist, more often than not a writer. In that case, exile and a refusal of social integration are the prelude to artistic achievement, as in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, probably the best-known example. Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu can also be considered as a Künstlerroman, in addition to being much else. According to one authoritative critic, the whole of that immense novel can be condensed into a single sentence: “Marcel becomes a writer.”5
Traditionally, women protagonists did not easily fit into any version of the bildungsroman, no doubt because the genre presumes a degree of autonomy and choice as well as self-centeredness that were denied to most women. Women who sought to affirm their independence—usually defined in sexual terms, whether in adultery, prostitution, or merely a refusal to marry—generally incurred punishment, both in life and in fiction.6 It was only toward the end of the nineteenth century, notably in England and the United States, where feminist movements were stronger than on the Continent, that novelists began to imagine destinies for women that included the possibility of self-realization through work, as opposed to marriage or motherhood. But even there, portraits of the artist as a young woman were virtually nonexistent, this despite the fact that quite a few women in both countries earned their living through writing fiction, without using male pseudonyms. In France too women participated increasingly in the literary marketplace, but their presence did not increase the number of fictional heroines who sought independence through work, let alone who affirmed themselves as artists.7 Colette’s heroine in her novel La Vagabonde (1910) is a major exception, and Némirovsky knew it well, as we shall see. Beauvoir, growing up in the Paris of the 1910s and 1920s, dreamed of becoming a writer and became one, but in her novels all of the main characters who are writers are male.
Némirovsky, for her part, never presented herself as a feminist or a radical in any way, but in The Wine of Solitude she tells a story that ends on a note of female defiance. “I am not afraid to work,” Hélène Karol assures herself at the end of the novel, as she affirms her “courage and pride.” Although we are not told what form her work will take, everything that precedes this declaration of independence implies that Hélène will become an observer of other people’s secrets, one who describes the life around her without illusions—in other words, a writer. “What always interests me,” Némirovsky stated in an interview in 1933, “is to try and discover the human soul beneath the social exterior . . . , to unmask, in a word, the profound truth that is almost always in opposition with appearance.”8 Hélène thinks in exactly the same terms when she looks around at the crowd at a fancy reception given by her parents in Paris: “There wasn’t a single face whose anxious, tense features Hélène could not perceive beneath its mask of carefreeness and lust.”9 If Hélène becomes a writer, she will be one who seeks to uncover the truth about people, even if it is painful or unpleasant—in short, a writer like Némirovsky. As we know, critics admired Némirovsky for the harsh quality of her prose, her cruel but just insights into her characters. That’s why they called her a romancier and not a romancière. Yet it was as a woman writer that she made her mark, sharing with Colette the enviable status of a female literary star whose talent stood out all the more for being “masculine.” In Hélène Karol she created a portrait of the artist as a young woman with similar qualities.
Even though Hélène’s future career is not spelled out, Némirovsky placed a highly elaborate scene toward the middle of the novel that shows the heroine’s “coming to writing” and the production of her first literary text. A similar moment occurs in Proust’s Recherche when the narrator-hero writes his first text as a child, inspired by church steeples appearing and disappearing as he observes them from a moving carriage. In Hélène’s case the inspiration comes from her view of two scenes of family life, one fictional and the other real, that unfold before her eyes. Both scenes are built on lies, she decides, and it is the desire to unmask the lies that makes her take her pencil from her pocket and start to write.
The scene, set in St. Petersburg, occurs in a chapter that begins with an astonishingly concise summary of collective history: “The February Revolution came and went, then the October one. The city was haggard, hunkered down in snow” (1252). So much for the Russian Revolution! In her later novels, culminating in Suite Française, Némirovsky would pay more explicit, sustained attention to war, but her focus was always on how individual lives are affected by History. In her writing journal for Suite Française she notes that she has learned this from Tolstoy. In this scene the tension and anxiety felt by the characters are indicated by means of short, clipped sentences or else longer ones broken up by commas: “It was a Sunday in autumn. Lunch was over. Max was there. . . . Everyone was silent, listening absentmindedly to the muffled, distant gunfire that echoed in the suburbs, day and night, but that no one paid attention to any more.”10 Hélène is studying her German lesson while her parents and Max talk worriedly about how to leave the country and where they might go: Shanghai, Teheran, Constantinople?
Hélène’s German textbook, by contrast, presents an idyllic scene, “the description of a close-knit family” accompanied by a color illustration. Hélène is supposed to memorize the sentences in the book, which she translates to herself (not always correctly) as she reads: “ ‘Eine glückliche Familie (a happy family). Der Vater (the father) ist ein frommer Mann (the father is a humble man).’ ” The illustration shows the Hausfrau dusting the furniture while the father reads the paper; four children, playing quietly or doing their homework, plus a dog and a cat complete the picture. Hélène’s reaction to this happy scene is immediate: “What a lie!” she thinks to herself. Looking at her own family, father, mother, mother’s lover, she feels they are unreal, “half-hidden in a mist,” and very far away: “She lived far from them, separated, in an imaginary world where she was mistress and queen.” At that moment, she fishes out a pencil from her pocket and starts to write, on the page of the book itself: “The father is thinking about a woman he met in the street, and the mother has only just said goodbye to her lover. They do not understand their children, and their children do not love them; the young girl is thinking about the boy she’s in love with, and the boy about the bad words he learned at «[[?a id=”page_181”?]]»school. The little ones will grow up and be just like them. Books lie. There is no virtue, no love in the world. Every home is the same. In every family there is nothing but greed, lies and mutual misunderstanding.”11 Hélène literally overwrites the German text, as if she wanted to replace the lie she sees in it with her own view of the truth. Némirovsky emphasizes this by putting Hélène’s text into italics. If “books lie,” then Hélène seems to be saying that her own writing will not lie. Her jaundiced view of family life is subjective, presenting her individual experience as a universal one, but the main thing is that this act of writing produces an immense feeling of pleasure in her. Here again one thinks of Proust’s episode about the church steeples, where after composing his text the boy is so pleased with himself that he begins to sing at the top of his lungs (“chanter à tue-tête”).12 In a similar way Hélène experiences a totally new pleasure as she writes “with a strange rapidity and dexterity she had never experienced before, an agility of all her thought”—and here the narrator introduces a striking simile: “as if she were watching tears flow down her face and hands on a winter evening, when the frost transforms them into icy flowers” (1254). Transforming tears into flowers could be a definition for the kind of writing Hélène—and, behind her, Némirovsky—considers valuable, for it makes something beautiful and pleasurable out of pain and alienation. She continues to write, and her own text (in italics) alternates with the narrative voice:
It’s the same everywhere. In our house as well, it’s the same. The husband, the wife and . . .
She hesitated, then wrote:
The lover . . .
She erased the last word, then wrote it in again, enthralled as it appeared before her eyes, then erased it again, crossed out each letter, spiking it with little arrows and curlicues until the word had lost its original appearance and looked like a creature with a mass of antennae, or a plant with many thorns. It had a malevolent air about it, strange, secretive and crude, that pleased her.13
Suddenly her mother notices and demands to see what she has written. When Hélène, in a panic, tries to tear up the page, Bella grabs the book from her. Her enraged reaction is characteristic: “ ‘She’s gone mad!’ she exclaimed. . . . When someone thinks, dares to think such things, so reckless, so stupid, they don’t write them down at least, they keep them to themselves. How dare you judge your parents!” Hélène is an ungrateful, spoiled daughter, and the blame, according to Bella, must be placed on the governess, Mademoiselle Rose: “She’s turning you against your parents. She’s teaching you to look down on them! Well, she can just pack her bags, do you hear?”14 In reality, the governess has been the only person to show real affection toward Hélène, who has always felt like an unwanted child. After being fired, Mademoiselle Rose has a breakdown and dies. Hélène, in despair, thinks about throwing herself into a canal but then steps back. From now on she will rely only on herself, she resolves, in terms that foreshadow her declaration of independence at the end of the novel: “ ‘No, they won’t get me,’ she said out loud. ‘I’m brave’ ” (1265).
Aside from offering a vivid dramatization of a young girl’s artistic awakening, the scene of writing in The Wine of Solitude points to questions that preoccupied Némirovsky throughout her career, and nowhere more so than in this novel about a budding writer. The psychological knot that exists between mother and daughter is unmistakably a chief preoccupation in this scene. Hélène’s text can be thought of as determined by and written against her mother, a fact Bella immediately understands, whence her rage upon reading it. But equally important is the focus on languages, in particular the role they play in delineating and complicating social, psychological, and generational differences. The scene puts into play French as the “language of truth” (Hélène’s text is written in French) against the German textbook’s lie and against the mother’s lie as well. But since Bella’s preferred language is French as a sign of distinction, this renders any simple opposition, whether between languages or between mother and daughter, impossible. To the extent that both mother and daughter speak French as their “chosen tongue,” as opposed to a mother tongue, they are part of a dynamic in which contradiction and ambivalence predominate. If the mother is a source of rage and hatred, she is also a source of creation, as is emphasized by the language she shares with her daughter.
But the presence of Russian is also implied in the scene, for we know that the father, Boris Karol, does not speak French. When Bella speaks to him or to others in his presence it must be in Russian. The novel as a whole is, in a sense, written in translation, and Némirovsky occasionally calls the reader’s attention to this fact. In an earlier scene, for instance, where the Jewish businessman Slivker is at the Karols’ for dinner with the aristocratic Chestov, the latter says something to Bella “amiably, in French,” the narrator states, thus pointing up the fact that until then the conversation was in Russian (1241)—and also marking Chestov’s desire to differentiate himself from the more vulgar Slivker, with whom he nevertheless does business. When Hélène’s grandmother calls her “my darling, my treasure made of sugar” (Ma chérie, mon trésor tout en sucre, 1204), we can be sure she is saying that in Russian. The published translation effaces this foreignness by rendering “trésor tout en sucre” as “sweet, sweet treasure.” Above all, Russian emerges in moments of strong emotion, at least in the parents’ generation. Thus toward the end, when Bella’s love affair with Max is unraveling and she pleads with him on the telephone, the narrator specifies that she is speaking in Russian (1335). Like the mother of the ultracivilized Harry in The Dogs and the Wolves, who has lived in France for years and spoken French since the age of three but still reverts to Russian when she feels distressed, Bella lapses into her native tongue to express feelings of anxiety or rage. She must certainly not be speaking French when she berates Hélène for being an ungrateful daughter.
One language that does not appear in the writing scene but hovers in the background is Yiddish. As the language of the ghetto that upwardly mobile Jews have escaped or wish to have escaped, Yiddish is a primary marker of social differences. In her writing journal for The Wine of Solitude, which contains drafts she later discarded, Némirovsky develops the social difference that Bella and her family perceive between their own middle-class, albeit impoverished, status and Bella’s husband, Boris, as a difference in their command of languages. The fact that Boris does not speak French is proof, in their eyes, that he is inferior to them socially. This lack marks him even in his own eyes, for although he is proud to be the family’s financial mainstay, his pride, the narrator states, is mixed with humility: “He clearly did not belong to a ‘good family’ ” (Il n’appartenait visiblement pas à une “bonne famille”). The fact that Némirovsky puts “bonne famille” in quotation marks suggests that she views such distinctions with a certain irony. In another discarded passage in her journal, she emphasizes that Bella’s family, the Safronovs, including Bella herself, are not as far from their ghetto origins as they would like to think, for while they no longer speak Yiddish, they understand it. “Then, suddenly,” Némirovsky writes, “Hélène no longer understood: her father was speaking in Yiddish. Her mother and grandparents replied in Russian, but they were laughing.”15 Since Némirovsky omitted these sentences as well as any explicit mention of Yiddish from the final version of the novel, the reader has to read between the lines to discern how intricately the theme of Jewish identity and its anxieties is linked to language. Bella, in the published version, refers to her family’s view, which is also her own though she does not say so openly, that her husband, despite his millions, is “a little Jew who came out of nowhere.” Her anxiety about her own social status is one reason she is so happy when Max becomes her lover, for he belongs to the wealthy branch of the Safronov family, more distant from Yiddish than she. In Max’s family even French is not considered elevated enough—their preferred language is English. When Bella introduces Hélène to Max in St. Petersburg, his first words are to admonish the young girl to stand up straight, like his own sisters. And when Bella seconds him in criticizing Hélène, he remarks to her, in English, that his sisters have benefited from an “English education, you know. . . . Cold baths and scraped knees and not encouraged to be sorry for themselves” (1234). As if to tease the French reader, Némirovsky leaves these sentences untranslated.
She returns to the theme of social differentiation among Jews through language later in the novel, when the Karols and Max, along with others who have fled the Revolution, take refuge in Finland. The refugees, the narrator notes, get along well with each other, “like passengers caught in a storm,” despite their belonging to diverse social groups: “Russians, Jews from ‘good families’ (those who spoke English together and followed the rites of their religion with proud humility), and the nouveaux riches, sceptics, free thinkers, with masses of money.”16 The remark about differences in religious practice is not necessarily accurate, given that many upper-class Jews in Russia and Europe were not at all strict in their observance of religious laws. But the contrast between those who felt sufficiently confident to maintain their ties to Judaism—like the Israélites who were members of the Consistoire in France—and those who, in their eagerness to distance themselves from their Jewish roots, abandoned all allegiance to Jewish groups or practice, is insightful. Significantly, Némirovsky does not delineate differences among Jews, either here or in her other works, in terms of ideology or politics. Many Jews who left Russia after the Revolution were not only anti-Bolshevik and “sceptics and free thinkers” but socialists, Zionists, working-class Bundists. In Némirovsky’s mental and literary universe what separated Jews from each other was not so much their politics as their social standing, which in turn was defined by their relation to their Jewish roots; and the latter was expressed most often in familial, that is to say, psychological, terms. Némirovsky inflects the Jewish theme toward class and family rivalry, for instance, when she has Max recall the jealous attempts by his own mother to turn him away from Bella in the early days of their liaison: “ ‘She doesn’t love you. She wanted to take revenge on me, take you from me . . . You poor child . . . She who was nothing, a mere nobody,’ she would say bitterly, finding some consolation in her misery by being able to express it in English, naturally, not like Bella, who had undoubtedly learned it from some lover or other.”17 One cannot be sure which of the two women, Max’s snobbish mother—who may be right about Bella’s English—or Bella herself, elicits the greater irony from the narrator in this observation.
Hélène too has her place in the linguistic and familial labyrinth. Speaking more than one language with ease, or “naturally,” as Max’s mother would say, Hélène is separated by one more generation from her Yiddish-speaking grandparents, her father’s parents. In addition to French, the language in which she writes, she is learning German, a language that neither of her parents speaks. But given the relation of German to Yiddish, this could be a displaced form of bonding with her father or with her Jewish past. The narrator notes at one point that Hélène and her father have the same “dark humor,” another link to Jewishness. Since she and her mother are united, willy-nilly, in their love of French, learning German also affords Hélène a way of separating herself from her mother or of finding a better substitute for her. When the family moves briefly to Helsingfors (Helsinki) before heading to Paris, Hélène is sent to board with a Finnish widow who teaches her German. But German is not a first language for Hélène, while French and Russian are. To have two first languages is, in one sense, a luxury, a sign of excess, as is suggested by Hélène Cixous in the epigraph to this chapter. In another sense it is an impoverishment, for it means that one has no true, that is, unique, home. The ambiguity of the in-between state, which is also a kind of nowhere state, suits Némirovsky’s Hélène well, just as it had suited Némirovsky herself when she teased her “very French” friend Madeleine about the rowdiness of her Russian friends.
Hélène’s in-betweenness is emphasized in a chapter devoted to the annual trips she takes as a child with her parents to Paris in the years before the war and Revolution. Here Némirovsky endows her heroine with a self-awareness well beyond her years. Hélène loves Paris, a “haven of light,” but is no more than an observer of the life there, an outsider. At the same time, her native Russia, seen from Paris, appears like a “barbaric country where she didn’t feel at home either” (1221). She dreams of being a French girl, with a name like “Jeanne Fournier or Loulou Massard or Henriette Durand, easy to understand, easy to remember”—but the next sentence brings a different thought: “No, she was not like the others . . . not completely . . . [ . . . ] It seemed to her at times that two souls inhabited her body without mingling, side by side, each one separate.” This sense of doubleness, which could be experienced as an affliction, is turned by Hélène into a source of invention. Looking at the people on the street, she starts to imagine stories about them, endowing each with a name and a history. Not feeling at home either in France or in Russia, she is able to see her difference from others as a reason for pride: “In Russia, they [the Parisians she observes] would not understand the language of the country. They would not know the thoughts of a shopkeeper, a coachman, a farmer . . . But I know. . . . I’m a little girl, but I’ve seen more things than they have in their whole long, boring life.”18
Critics who think of Némirovsky as totally enamored of France and the French establishment, at least until the disillusionment of her last years, have overlooked this other side of her, which embraces and even celebrates foreignness. One can, it’s true, see this in entirely negative terms, as a search for identity that ends in an impasse, with dissatisfaction in both East and West.19 But that does not take account of the empowering possibilities of the in-between position. Hélène Karol, Némirovsky’s alter ego, owes her creativity precisely to her doubleness, her bilingual, or even multilingual, if we count German and English, and bicultural status, which places her at once inside and outside any scene she observes. This is the position she occupies in the “scene of writing,” making possible her critical view both of the German text and of the actual family tableau she is part of. Another bicultural Hélène, Hélène Cixous, writing a generation after Némirovsky, has called such a figure, with which she identifies, a juifemme, a “jewoman.” Born in Algeria in 1937 of a German Jewish mother and a French Jewish father, Cixous grew up with two mother tongues and has written eloquently about the obstacles she faced in becoming a writer: “Everything about me conspired to forbid access to writing: History, my story, my origin, my gender. Everything that constituted my social and cultural self; starting with the most essential, the material out of which writing is tailored, which I lacked: language. . . . I learned to speak French in a garden from which I was about to be expelled, because I was a Jew. I belonged to the race of paradise-losers. Write in French? What right did I have to it?”20 Although Némirovsky’s career was by all indications unusually smooth and successful, she had in fact to overcome a triple exclusion from the “paradise” of French letters: as a woman, as a Jew, and as a foreigner.
“There is not a book she hasn’t read,” gushed Némirovsky’s admirer Janine Auscher in the interview she published with her a few months before The Wine of Solitude appeared.21 But one finds relatively few literary allusions in Némirovsky’s novels, including this one. Hélène, schooled by her French governess, has read classic authors like Jean Racine and Pierre Corneille, about whom she learns the usual clichés: “Racine paints men as they are, Corneille as they ought to be” (1267). More bizarrely, we are told that as an eight-year-old her favorite book was Napoleon’s Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, which she knew almost by heart. It’s a curious book for a little girl to latch on to, but the Mémorial may be there to serve as an allusion to Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, a bildungsroman of the negative type, ending in failure, whose hero, Julien Sorel, is also a fervent admirer of Napoleon’s book and of its author. When we first meet him in Stendhal’s novel, the adolescent Julien is reading the Mémorial and daydreaming about Napoleon’s exploits. Hélène’s version of this imaginative play is her construction of a fortress with the books in her library, where she reenacts Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Wagram, playing the roles both of Napoleon and of the brave young lieutenant who dies while kissing the French flag!
Hélène’s identification with male heroes tallies with the male model of the bildungsroman and generally of literature as a whole in those years. In numerous interviews in which Némirovsky was asked to name her favorite writers, she never cited a woman. This is hardly surprising, given the context—even Beauvoir, who was only five years younger than Némirovsky though she started publishing much later (her first novel appeared in 1943), imagined herself as Maurice Barrès or André Gide, two male literary giants at the time, when she dreamed of becoming a writer as an adolescent. Beauvoir adored George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, the tragic heroine of The Mill on the Floss, but when it came to writers rather than their creations her thoughts focused on men.
Yet there was a woman on the French literary scene whom Némirovsky might well have mentioned among the writers she admired: Colette. Although Colette was thirty years Némirovsky’s senior, the two shared space in the literary field. Both were considered to be noteworthy writers, rare among women. They shared a publisher, Albin Michel, and they contributed to some of the same journals, including Gringoire. They were both members of the Société des Gens de Lettres and had some friends in common, the playwright Tristan Bernard and the novelist Joseph Kessel among them. There is no indication they ever met in person, but they certainly knew of each other, as Colette was unavoidable and for a while Némirovsky was too. In 1931, when Duvivier’s film adaptation of David Golder was released, Colette, along with fifteen other well-known writers, was asked to comment on it in Le Figaro. Duvivier had already made close to twenty highly successful silent films, and David Golder was his first talkie. Although in her comment Colette did not mention the novel on which the film was based and may well not have read it, she could not have been unaware of the young Russian immigrant woman whose début novel had made such a splash. Besides, Colette had been in charge of the literary page in the newspaper where Némirovsky published her first short story under her own name, and she may have remembered her.22
As for Némirovsky’s awareness of Colette, it was real and it endured throughout her life. She started reading her as a teenager (a note in her journal dated 1919 includes one of the Claudine books in a list of works she wants to read or has read), and she mentioned Colette in her journal as late as 1941, saying she didn’t think much of her last book!23 In a way Colette was for her both an older role model and a rival, which may explain, among other reasons, why Némirovsky didn’t mention her in public. In The Wine of Solitude, however, she refers to Colette by allusion when she describes an expensive but vulgar resort in Normandy where “gigolos sprawled on the grass, cut-rate ‘chéris’ [‘chéris’ au rabais] with the hairy chests and damp red wrists of butcher boys” (1316). The published English version translates “chéris” as “darlings,” thus eliminating the allusion to Colette. Némirovsky does not capitalize the noun whereas in Colette’s novel it’s the name of the young hero, but Chéri, published in 1920, was one of her best-known works, and readers would be sure to make the association. Némirovsky’s allusion to it can be read as both an homage and a depreciation, for these “cut-rate ‘chéris’ ” are a far cry from the seductive young man in Colette’s novel, who is also a gigolo but a very refined one.
Colette is present, albeit unacknowledged, in another place in The Wine of Solitude, and, not by chance, it is in the scene where Hélène writes her first French text, the scene of writing I discussed earlier. Here again is the description of the word Hélène writes, erases, and finally transforms into a fantastic creature with her pen: “She erased the last word, then wrote it in again, enthralled as it appeared before her eyes, then erased it again, crossed out each letter, spiking it with little arrows and curlicues until the word had lost its original appearance and looked like a creature with a mass of antennae, or a plant with many thorns” (italics added).24 Now here is a passage from Colette’s novel La Vagabonde, from 1910, in which the heroine, a writer turned music hall performer, reflects on what writing means to her: “To write! To be able to write! It meant a long reverie in front of the blank page, dreamy doodling, the pen circling around an inkblot, biting the word that doesn’t belong, scratching it, spiking it with little arrows, decorating it with antennae and legs until it lost its readable shape as a word, transformed into a fantastic insect.”25 I have italicized the words and phrases in the two passages that are nearly identical. The resemblance cannot be purely coincidental, for both passages contain rare combinations of words such as hérisser de fléchettes, spiking with little arrows, that build up to a strange metaphor: the written word becomes unreadable, a fantastic creature with antennae. Némirovsky was not plagiarizing Colette or imitating her in a systematic way. Instead, the passage suggests an unconscious echo, the way we sometimes find ourselves repeating almost word for word, without knowing it, a sentence we have heard or read and that has struck a chord in us. It confirms that Némirovsky knew Colette’s work well enough to have assimilated it into her own creative process.
La Vagabonde was particularly suited to this kind of assimilation, as it too is an autobiographical novel and a female bildungsroman about a writer and artist. The heroine, Renée Néré, is no longer in the first bloom of youth, having been married and divorced, earning her living as a music hall performer when we first meet her. Colette herself, married at twenty, had divorced her first husband and spent several years as a music hall performer before she wrote La Vagabonde. She had allowed her husband, a journalist who wrote under the pen name Willy, to sign her first books, the enormously successful Claudine series. La Vagabonde was her coming out novel as an independent writer, and its theme is that of a woman’s independence as well. When a rich, handsome man who becomes her lover asks Renée to marry him, she accepts, but in the end rejects him, preferring her vagabond life as an artist to the sedentary joys of bourgeois marriage. (Today’s reader may be disappointed to learn that Colette’s next novel, L’Entrave [The Shackle], from 1912, has the same Renée Néré willingly accepting the shackle imposed on her by a man she is madly in love with! By then, Colette had married her next husband, Henry de Jouvenel.)
Némirovsky’s Hélène too rejects a rich, handsome man who begs her to marry him. Are we totally surprised to learn that in both novels the rejected lover’s name is Max? Yet another unconscious echo may be the title of Némirovsky’s novel itself, for shortly before the above-quoted passage in La Vagabonde we find the following sentence: “There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that makes you drunk with freedom.” Curiously, but understandably, since all this was below the level of consciousness, Némirovsky makes no mention of Colette’s novel when she is trying out titles in her writing journal for The Wine of Solitude. Instead, she evokes two male poets, Charles Baudelaire and Alfred de Musset, who had both used “wine of” in some of their titles: “The beautiful Baudelairian phrases . . . The Wine of youth (A. de Musset), The Wine of memory, the Wine of Solitude.”26
Colette, then, figures as an important but repressed predecessor and model in The Wine of Solitude. One can think of several interesting reasons for that repression, starting with Némirovsky’s fraught relation to mothers and mother figures. If to her Colette was a literary mother of sorts, she would surely elicit some of the ambivalence, the combination of fascination and hatred or, in literary terms, of admiration and depreciation, that mothers always elicit in Némirovsky’s works, especially in this one. Furthermore, Colette herself was known as a writer who idealized her mother, devoting several adoring books to her. While some recent critics have intimated that even Colette harbored ambivalent feelings toward her beloved Sido, her professed adoration for her mother would surely have struck Némirovsky as hard to tolerate.
Another reason for repressing Colette could be, as I mentioned earlier, that the literary models for a woman seeking to make a name for herself as a writer were, as if by definition, male. And not only in the years before the Second World War, but later as well. Beauvoir’s acclaimed novel of 1954, The Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt that year, features two protagonists, a man who is a writer and a woman who is a psychoanalyst. In her memoirs Beauvoir explains why she made her writer figure male: “Depicting a writer, I wanted the reader to see in him a fellow human and not an odd beast [une bête curieuse]; but much more than a man, a woman whose vocation and profession are writing is an exception.”27 Némirovsky was already a sufficiently “odd beast” in France, being Jewish and Russian, with a foreign-sounding name, so we can understand why she chose to project herself into male rather than female literary role models. Unlike Beauvoir, however, she imagined her fictional writer-protagonist as a young woman, even if Hélène identifies herself at the end in the masculine terms of force, courage, autonomy. These “virile” traits in Némirovsky’s heroine (and in Némirovsky herself, for, as we’ve seen, she was usually represented as a masculine writer) tend to confirm Virginia Woolf’s observation that androgyny is a characteristic of creative minds—and, even more broadly, Freud’s theory that bisexuality is a trait common to all humans. A male identification does not necessarily imply bisexuality in behavior, however: Némirovsky’s sexual preference, like her heroine’s, appears to have been exclusively heterosexual, while Woolf, Beauvoir, and Colette were all bisexual. Colette, when asked late in life about her happy marriage with Maurice Goudeket, who was decades younger than she, replied that what he loved about her was her virility.28
Finally, and perhaps most important, Némirovsky may have repressed Colette (but the repressed always manages to return, one way or another) because Colette was so unambiguously French. Just as she was known for her adoration of her mother, Colette was known for her celebration of her native province, Burgundy, where her mother lived, a place whose landscape and gardens and ways of speaking she dwelled on in many of her works. And when she wasn’t writing about Burgundy or Provence, another of her preferred sites, she was lovingly depicting Paris and the ways of life of its inhabitants, from modest music hall performers and demi-mondaines to the artistic and social elite. One cannot imagine Colette ever saying to herself, as Némirovsky did in her journal, that she was writing a novel “about the French,” since all of her works are unproblematically, that is, without any thought of alternate possibilities, set in France and feature French characters. Nary a foreigner nor a foreign word is to be found in their pages.
Némirovsky sought to be accepted by the same literary world as Colette, but on her own terms. Her preferred position, by now familiar to us, was the in-between, the position of emotional ambivalence and of an existential sense of otherness in relation to French or any other national or ethnic identity. This is one reason why her most interesting works feature Jews: Jews were the others par excellence in the world she lived in, as in the one she depicted. And surely it is also one reason Némirovsky, unlike some foreign-born writers in France, chose to keep her Russian-sounding name. The well-known novelist Romain Gary, who was born in Riga, Latvia, during the czarist regime and whose birth name was Roman Kacew, recounts with wonderful humor in his autobiography that as early as the age of thirteen, when he decided to become a writer in order to fulfill his mother’s ambition for him, he started searching for an appropriate pseudonym, because, his mother told him, “a great French writer cannot have a Russian name.”29 Elsa Triolet and Nathalie Sarraute, both of them born in Russia and married to French husbands, used their married names to sign their books. Triolet did so even though she started publishing after she had divorced her first husband, André Triolet. But Némirovsky kept her name. She wrote under a French-sounding pseudonym only at two moments in her career. In the 1920s, as a totally unknown writer, she published two novellas, L’Ennemie (1928) and Le Bal (1929), that focused on a young girl’s rage against her mother—evidently, she didn’t want her own mother to see her name on them; in 1930, after the success of David Golder, she allowed Bernard Grasset to reissue Le Bal under her own name. The second moment, as we have seen, was just before her death, when she was forced into using a pseudonym by the Vichy laws that forbade Jews to publish in newspapers.
While the heroine of The Wine of Solitude is on the threshold of becoming a writer, the heroine of The Dogs and the Wolves, published five years later, is shown evolving into a full-fledged artist. Ada Sinner is a painter, not a writer, but, like Hélène, she defines herself as an étrangère in France, both foreigner and stranger. Born in an unnamed city in Ukraine (again, the model is Kiev) in the early years of the century, Ada arrives in Paris as a young girl before the First World War. She continues to speak Russian with her immediate family, including the cousin she marries, Ben, the go-getting wolf of the title. As a result, she and Ben are perceived by their French neighbors “with a profound distrust” (une profonde méfiance), notes the narrator. This status as a kind of pariah is one that Ada accepts, even chooses, as she considers the “French way of life” with irony. On the same page where we are told that the neighbors are wary of her, we get her view of them: “As for comfort, the home-cooked dishes lovingly prepared, the hat you put together with a yard of ribbon bought on sale, the evenings by lamplight, with a husband in slippers who reads the newspaper while a child sleeps on his lap, that lovely and harmonious French way of life, so enviable, it was . . . it had to be, pleasant; but it was as difficult, and as foreign to Ben and Ada, as the sedentary existence of rich plains dwellers is to nomads.30 In this tone of detached amusement (note the move from “it was” to “it had to be,” from the declarative to the doubtful), we recognize the voice of the outsider who may yearn to belong to the majority but only in part. Némirovsky’s use of the word “foreign” here reverses the usual hierarchy, signaling that from Ada’s perspective it is France and the French that appear foreign. Later, she will refer to a French woman as a foreigner. Like Hélène Karol, Ada loves France but also derives satisfaction from not fully belonging to it. In fact, her art is nourished by her sense of distance and difference. Némirovsky emphasizes this in a scene in which a group of French people who admire her paintings makes an unexpected visit to Ada’s studio. They gush over her works, but the narrator compares their cries of admiration to those of visitors “in a zoo, in front of a rare wild beast [une bête sauvage et rare] in its cage” (621).
Ada resembles Hélène in yet another way: she too is a precocious child deprived of a mother’s love. Her mother dies young and is replaced as caretaker when Ada is five years old by a widowed aunt, who cares more for her own children than for her niece. Ada’s first years are spent in her native city with her maternal grandfather and her father, gentle souls who harbor great ambitions. The grandfather, a small-time jeweler, traveled and acquired some education in his youth and now spends all his spare time writing his magnum opus, “The Character and Rehabilitation of Shylock.” Ada’s father, who ekes out a living by trading in “a little of this and a little of that,” like the poor immigrant Rabinowitz in “Fraternité,” dreams of a bright future for his daughter: perhaps she will become a great musician or actress? But Ada is not a performer. She is an observer, and she starts young: “She had just turned five, and she began to see what was around her” (517). When she turns ten, she receives her first box of paints and discovers her passion for reproducing what she sees, the snow-covered street beneath her windows, the gray and white sky of springtime, the faces of people she knows. As her father’s fortunes improve, he agrees to send her, with her aunt and two cousins, to Paris to study—this is in May 1914, the narrator emphasizes. Soon the war and the Revolution will sweep away the Russia of Ada’s childhood as well as the money for her studies. After her father’s death, the family in France is forced to scramble for a living. A few years later, while still a teenager, Ada marries Ben. She does not love him, even expresses contempt for him, since in her view he cares only about making money, but by marrying him she gains the freedom to continue painting.
It will come as no surprise, to a reader of Némirovsky, that Ada’s paintings do not feature “gracious young girls in beautiful gardens,” as Ada puts it. Rather, her inspiration comes from people like her neighbor on the rue des Rosiers, the street of poor ethnic Jews that David Golder and his friend Soifer visit on occasion to reconnect with their impoverished childhoods. Examining her portrait-in-progress of the neighbor, Ada is satisfied with the way she has rendered her “full, voluptuous face, the hooked nose, the fake pearls and the satin dress, worn out at the elbows” as well as the woman’s “lips painted a geranium red, with that humid glance sliding out from beneath her heavy lids.” This portrait, which the artist herself finds both attractive and repelling at the same time, may remind us of Némirovsky’s own fictional portraits of Jewish figures: the Jewish woman is observed without tenderness but with enormous precision and attention to detail. If one is so inclined, one can read the portrait as antisemitic: the hooked nose, the fake jewelry and tawdry dress, the voluptuous face and humid glance, hinting at the lubricity of Jewish women according to antisemitic myths. But it is more accurate, I believe, to see the portrait, as well as the artist’s own feelings of attraction and repulsion when she examines it, as a self-reflexive commentary that refers both to Ada’s work and to Némirovsky’s. Ada asks herself why she doesn’t paint instead “gracious young girls in beautiful gardens, light-colored hats, fountains, flowers in June” and immediately realizes she is incapable of that kind of work: “It wasn’t her fault. She was driven to seek out, cruelly, tirelessly, the secrets hidden beneath sad faces and dark skies” (612).
This is as good a definition as any of Némirovsky’s own vocation as a writer, and she seems to have been quite aware of it. In the spring and summer of 1938, as she was working on the novel she first titled “Le Charlatan” (now known as Le maître des âmes), she made numerous notations in her journal about the kind of writer she thought herself to be. In one of these she tries to define the character of her protagonist, Dario Asfar. He is a man “who sees people as they are and scorns them, hates them, desires with all his heart to be better than they, . . . and who in the end becomes just like the others and worse than the others.” Then she adds, letting loose some expletives and even committing a spelling error in her indignation: “What will the assholes say? ‘Madame Némirovsky stays true to the genre of the painful novel,’ or other bulshit [coneries, misspelled]. . . . I should be hardened to it by now, but still . . . It’s strange that in 1938 there should still be a desire to see life through rose-colored glasses.”31 She herself had no such desire and apparently had never had one. Whereas Tolstoy could claim that happy families are all alike, Némirovsky’s novels show the resemblances among unhappy families, lacking in mutual love, displaced from home, if they ever had one, battered by historical upheavals, and, if they are east European Jews, like the families in David Golder, The Wine of Solitude, and The Dogs and the Wolves, battered as well by persecution and prejudice or merely by the daily anxieties of fitting in.
Némirovsky’s Ada is cut from the same artistic cloth as her creator, and Ada’s work has another aspect that is also present in Némirovsky’s work. She depicts scenes remembered from her childhood in Russia, devoid of sentimentality but capable of arousing strong emotion in a viewer, at least if the viewer is a Jew or, better still, a displaced Russian Jew. Such a one is Harry, Ada’s distant cousin, who plays the role of dog in the wolf–dog dichotomy that structures the novel. Although he resembles the wolfish Ben physically, shares the same last name as he, and hails from the same city in Russia, Harry is socially and temperamentally Ben’s opposite. The pampered only son of a wealthy Jewish banking family, Harry has grown up in a world of privilege, observed from afar by Ada, who became fixated on him even as a child. He is cultivated and a lover of fine books and art, and he apparently feels at home in the world of the Parisian bourgeoisie. Yet, after he marries a Catholic banker’s daughter he is in love with, who had to overcome her father’s prejudices against “foreigners from the East” in order to marry him, Harry falls in love with Ada through her art. One day while walking by the window of a bookshop he frequents, his attention is caught by two small paintings Ada has persuaded the bookseller to display, precisely in the hope that Harry would see them. The paintings, of a snowy street at dusk and a “half-wild garden in spring,” represent Russian landscapes from her childhood. When Harry sees the works he is literally transported back to a “distant reality, long abolished,” the snowstorms of his childhood, in March, when the first hyacinths were blooming inside. He remembers his birthday celebrations when, as a young boy, he would stare out melancholically at the falling snow while the chocolate cake, with its almost sickeningly rich odor, was brought in. Seeing the gray sky in Ada’s painting, he suddenly rediscovers a whole world of objects and people he thought he had forgotten. One of these is his grandmother, who “spoke to him in a foreign language. She alone still spoke Yiddish, and everyone was scandalized by it” (615–16). Here, as in The Wine of Solitude, Yiddish serves as an indicator of social status, marking the relatively recent rise of the wealthy branch of the family, only a generation or two removed from their humble origins. And it marks as well their anxiety about it: that’s why they are “scandalized” by the grandmother’s speaking it.
Harry buys the paintings, thus setting in motion the somewhat implausible love story between him and Ada. This allows for dramatic scenes of jealousy and passion on both sides and several plot twists. But above all it allows for an extended questioning of Jewish identity and its relation to art, on the part of both the artist and the viewer. Ada’s work and eventually Ada herself captivate Harry because he sees in them a key to who he is, to his “true self” rather than the social self he has constructed by marrying into the French bourgeois milieu. In a crucial scene he and his wife, Laurence, visit Ada’s apartment studio along with other French friends, the episode in which the narrator remarks that Ada, compared to them, seems like a “rare beast in a zoo.” In a brief exchange while they are alone Ada reminds Harry of the few times they had seen each other when they were children in Russia and asks him whether he remembers the climate and the air back there, the evenings by the river, the linden trees on the street where he lived. This precipitates a whole cluster of shared memories between them: of the “chouroum-bouroum” carpet merchant hawking his wares, of child acrobats who performed beneath people’s windows, of the crazy old man who had been a singer at the Opera and now walked the streets in the snow, mouthing his songs silently. It was all so long ago, Harry remarks. Yes, she responds, but “what happened there may be more important than you think, more important than everything else, than your life here, your marriage. We were born there, our roots are there . . .” When Harry asks whether she means in Russia, she replies, “No. Further back . . . deeper . . .” [Non. Plus loin. . . . plus profond . . .] (621–23).
Ada is hinting here at their Jewish heritage, which binds them together beyond family and beyond nation. This idea is confirmed in the scene that immediately follows, when Harry is alone with his wife and they discuss their visit to the studio. Laurence is dismissive. Does he like those strange paintings? she asks, for instance, the one they saw on her easel, of men with curls on their face, trudging in the snow behind a sled bearing a coffin? Harry murmurs the work’s title: Burial of a Jew. It’s depressing and sordid, says Laurence—and besides, there is nothing original about Ada’s use of color. But one mustn’t look at her paintings with the eye of an art connoisseur, Harry responds: what matters is the effect they produce on him. “Her technique is weak, but her way of painting moves me so that I forget the painting and find myself instead. And that, probably, is the aim of her art. By all kinds of strange detours, I find myself” [Par des chemins détournés, étranges, je me retrouve] (625–27).
He then launches into a detailed commentary on the painting, which in his opinion captures an “imperishable essence.” Of what, exactly? Of a way of life he sees suggested in every detail: the gray sky, the snow and the mud, the crude coffin thrown onto the sled, and the faces of the mourners, which show “no hope in an eternal life” but are full of “avid attention” and passion. The wide-eyed child in the corner, he says, resembles all the other Jewish children he saw back there—in fact, he himself was such a Jewish child, just cleaner and better dressed. As we might expect, Laurence pooh-poohs this idea. She has seen photos of him as a child, she says, and he looked nothing like the “personages of Madame Ada Sinner.” When Harry asks her to invite Ada to their home with other friends, Laurence refuses. She invites only friends to her home, and Ada is too much of an “odd beast” to be considered a friend. “I don’t like her. I dislike everything about her,” Laurence continues. “You yourself have said it many times: that specifically Jewish combination of insolence and servility [ce mélange d’insolence et de servilité spécifiquement juif] is . . .” (629–30). Then, seeing his face, she shifts abruptly. “I’m only joking,” she assures him. But the harm has been done. Harry, pale with “fury and hurt pride,” pushes the conversation to an out-and-out fight and to a break in his marriage.
This is all the more remarkable, given that earlier, when he had first bought Ada’s paintings, he had refused the bookseller’s offer to introduce him to the artist, who he said very much wanted Harry to see her works. Harry’s refusal on that occasion showed his own suspicion of the “pushiness” of Jews. This young woman, doubtless alone in Paris, was probably trying to take advantage of her distant relation to the “rich Sinners.” The narrator had commented that “like all Jews, he was more sharply, more painfully shocked than a Christian by specifically Jewish flaws. And that stubborn energy, that quasi savage need to obtain what one desired, . . . all were summed up in his mind by a single label: ‘Jewish insolence’ ” (618). Harry evidently worries that the “insolence” of some poor Jews may make Jews like him look bad. But when his non-Jewish wife speaks of “Jewish insolence,” he becomes enraged, and we understand why: it’s for the same reason that Jews may enjoy telling deprecating jokes about “Cohen and Schwartz” but feel uncomfortable when non-Jews take that liberty.
Ada’s paintings, depicting a Jewish life that Harry himself never experienced and that has become even for her no more than a distant memory, reveal to him an identity he finds both comforting and inescapable. He becomes Ada’s lover, bound to her not so much by erotic passion as by “the obscure call of blood,” as his wife puts it to herself—against this call, she feels totally powerless. Harry’s mother, as we might expect, is horrified at their liaison, seeing in Ada only the poor Jew, not the artist: “A simple girl from the slums! It’s the worst thing that could have happened!,” she wails to her daughter-in-law. Is Harry’s infatuation with Ada a form of racial determinism? They are of the “same blood” not only as Jews but also as members of the same family. But his response to her paintings suggests that what unites them, rather, is a shared cultural heritage and a common history. As in Némirovsky’s other works, not to mention debates still ongoing today about what it means to be a Jew, we see here a vacillation between two views of Jewishness: as biology, “race,” or as ethnicity and culture. Clearly missing, however, is the third possibility, Jewishness as religious practice. The Jewish artist, although she feels neither group solidarity nor religious affiliation with Jews, nevertheless finds her inspiration in their world, both past, her childhood in Russia, and present, her neighbor on the rue des Rosiers. Her depictions are sufficiently true and sufficiently sympathetic to their subjects to reconnect her viewer emotionally to the Jewish past—if not exactly to his own past, then at least to a cultural memory (or is it a fantasy?) of Jewishness.
And there’s the rub. In 1938–1939, when Némirovsky was working on this novel, was it possible seriously to envisage, if one was a realist writer (and Némirovsky was nothing if not a realist), a love story between two isolated Jews, with a happy ending based on their common, largely imagined cultural memories? Ada’s and Harry’s union is a mirage, a bubble, and Némirovsky bursts it with one of those sudden catastrophes she is so good at. One thinks of the way she dispatches the young, well-meaning priest Philippe Péricand in Suite Française, who is literally torn to pieces and drowned by the young delinquents he is shepherding; or of the way she kills off the despicable porcelain collector Charlie Langelet in that same novel, who is run over by a speeding automobile on his way to dinner. In The Dogs and the Wolves catastrophe arrives in the form of financial scandal, brought upon Harry’s family’s bank by the speculator Ben, who flees to South America. Ada, in a desperate move to save Harry, solicits the help of his wife, whose influential banker father can shield Harry from the scandal. In exchange Ada renounces Harry forever, letting him think that she has left the country with Ben.
In her first draft of the novel Némirovsky included a fairly long section on what happens after the scandal becomes public, including scenes in which Harry and Ada discuss what they should do.32 When she proposes that they leave France together, he refuses: he is not a nomad, he tells her (Ada, we recall, was characterized as a nomad some chapters back). Némirovsky omitted these pages from the final version, in which Harry and Ada never see each other again after the scandal breaks. In fact, Harry never appears again, so we do not know how he responds to the news of Ben’s misdeeds, to Ada’s absence and his wife’s help, or to anything else. In a sense Némirovsky loses interest in him, returning him to his former position as a haughty, assimilated Jew who looks down on “Jewish insolence.” Instead, she follows the nomadic artist. Ada, technically still married to Ben, is expelled from France as an “undesirable alien” even though she is now living alone. She obtains a visa to an unnamed “small city in Eastern Europe,” where she finds a place in a community of refugees who are not explicitly designated as Jews, but the context implies they are refugees from Nazi Germany. There she gives birth to a son. Her first thought, after he is born, carries an echo of Hélène’s determination at the end of The Wine of Solitude: “She counted on her fingers, like a child surveying her possessions: ‘Painting, the baby, courage: with that one can live. One can live very well’ ” [La peinture, le petit, le courage: avec cela on peut vivre. On peut très bien vivre] (699).
A few years earlier, in a note in her writing journal for the short story “Fraternité,” Némirovsky had copied down a sentence she put in quotation marks, without indicating the source: “La forme de désespoir particulière au Judaisme comporte, en soi, une espérance formelle” (The form of despair that is particular to Judaism includes, inherently, a formal hope).33 The implausibly upbeat ending she imagines for her artist heroine, stranded with a baby in a foreign city in eastern Europe on the eve of the Second World War, seems to bear out that claim.
While I have emphasized the central role that Ada’s activity as an artist plays in this novel, it would be wrong not to consider the larger setting, both the setting within the novel and the place of this work in Némirovsky’s fiction. The Dogs and the Wolves was the last of her works to feature Jewish characters, and its writing coincided almost exactly with the process of her conversion to Catholicism. This work is in a sense her summing up of and farewell to Jewishness as she understood it, with all its shortcomings and impossibilities as well as its virtues. Intelligence, courage, resourcefulness, qualities bred by a long history of persecution, defined in her mind what it meant to be Jewish, along with anxiety, snobbishness, and an ambition to succeed that was so powerful it could on occasion turn into crime. This view was based on her perception of those she knew best, middle-class Ashkenazi Jews from Russia who were only a generation or two removed from the shtetl or its poor urban equivalent, the ghetto. In her interview of 1930 in L’Univers Israélite, when the journalist Nina Gourfinkel asked her why none of the Jewish characters in David Golder could produce a single “tender memory” of family or community, she answered, “They are Russian Jews,” as if no further explanation was needed.34
In The Dogs and the Wolves she tries to provide an explanation, adopting a quasi-sociological analytic tone in some instances. Whereas in The Wine of Solitude the specifically Jewish story lies beneath the surface and must be read between the lines, here it is laid out explicitly. The novel begins with a description of the social and geographical strata among Jews in the “Ukrainian city that was home to the Sinner family.” The very poorest Jews, the “riffraff” (la racaille) live in the teeming lower city near the river, while the members of the privileged elite reside in their villas in the hills, where Jews are not even allowed to live according to the law but where bribes pave their way. The rest live in the middle, among Russians and Poles, in an area that is itself divided into sectors: doctors and lawyers above tailors, shopkeepers, pharmacists. Traversing all three regions are the “intermediaries,” who earn their living by making deals, finding buyers and sellers for whatever comes to hand. Ada’s father is one of those middlemen, but there is also an elite branch of the family in the hills, doting on their only son and heir, Harry. One day, when she is seven years old, Ada goes with her older cousin, Ben’s sister, for a walk in the upper city and catches a glimpse of a boy coming out of a sumptuous-looking house with his mother. He bears a striking physical resemblance to her other cousin, her playmate Ben, but everything else about him is different: dressed in a cream-colored suit with a fine lace collar, this boy is a vision of beauty such as she has never seen. From the start Harry is associated in Ada’s mind with refinement and aesthetic pleasure as well as with a certain passivity. Later on, when they are lovers, she is the more active figure. She thinks of him as her “creation,” and in her dreams he has “curls like a woman.” This could also be an association to the sidelocks, or “curls,” on the faces of religious Jews in Ada’s paintings; the figure of the Jewish male is often feminized in popular antisemitic mythology.35
The narrator lingers over the class divisions among Jews in the city, emphasizing that they were not hereditary and fixed because the hope and ambition of all the poor Jews was to rise:
So and so was born in the Ghetto. By the time he was twenty, he had saved a bit of money; he climbed a rung on the social ladder: he moved away and went to live far from the river [. . .]; by the time he married, he was already living on the even-numbered (forbidden) side of the street; later, he would rise even more: he would settle in the neighborhood where, according to the law, no Jew had the right to be born, to live, to die. People respected him; his own people thought of him as an object of envy and an image of hope: it was possible to climb to such heights.36
A few lines before this the narrator underlined the arrogance of Jews in the upper city, who take pleasure in “letting other Jews know that they [are] worth more than they.”
Another Russian Jewish author with a love of France and conflicted feelings about Jewishness, Isaac Babel, just nine years Némirovsky’s senior, wrote some wonderful stories about the distance between rich and poor Russian Jews around the time of the First World War. One of these is a comic tale titled “Guy de Maupassant,” featuring an impoverished writer and a buxom lady, Raïsa, originally from Kiev, who lives in opulence on Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg and whose “only passion in life,” she proclaims, is the nineteenth-century French author. The culture-loving Raïsa’s husband, a “yellow-faced Jew” who made millions in war profiteering, interests her far less than the poor writer, whose knowledge of French and whose way with words she finds irresistible. Sholem Aleichem too emphasizes class differences among Jews in many of his stories, which are not only the stuff of comedy. One of Tevye’s daughters drowns herself after the snobbish mother of her wealthy suitor, whom she loves dearly, forbids them to marry and spirits her son out of the reach of the dairyman’s family. Not surprisingly, this daughter was left out of Fiddler on the Roof, the American musical version of Tevye the Dairyman, which had no place for such bitterness.37
The analysis of class differences spills over into questions of religious practice. The poor Jews of the ghetto, according to the narrator of The Dogs and the Wolves, are strictly observant by habit, unable to even imagine an alternative. Rich Jews are observant too but for a different reason: they consider strict adherence to tradition as a matter of “dignity, of moral distinction, as much as—perhaps even more than—genuine conviction.” This recalls the narrator’s remark in The Wine of Solitude that rich Jews “followed the rites of their religion with proud humility,” which was not totally accurate historically. Yet evidently Némirovsky was convinced of it, having in mind perhaps families like the Rothschilds, who maintained formal ties to Judaism even if they no longer practiced it. As for the Jews in the middle, they are more lax in their observance, the narrator explains. Ada’s father goes to synagogue occasionally, “the way one would visit a capitalist who could, if he wanted to, help you in your business, . . . but who is really too rich, too grand, too powerful to think about you, poor earthly creature.” For this lesser branch of the Sinner family, the narrator concludes, “Judaism no longer brought any joys, but did still bring a lot of troubles” [le judaisme ne donnait plus de joies, mais procurait encore beaucoup d’ennuis] (541, 542).
Pogroms, for instance. Némirovsky devotes more than twenty pages to describing a pogrom that takes place in the city when Ada is eight years old. Historically, major pogroms occurred in or near Kiev in 1903 and 1905. In 1913, when Némirovsky herself was eight, Kiev was the site of the famous blood libel trial of Mendel Beilis, which caused some rioting in the city. In the novel she describes Cossacks riding through the poor neighborhoods, breaking and destroying—among other things, they burn Ada’s grandfather’s opus on Shylock, a loss he never recovers from. Ada and Ben find themselves in the street, separated from the servant who was taking them to stay with a Christian neighbor. The two children flee instinctively to the heights, beyond the reach of the Cossacks, and there Ada recognizes the grand house of the other Sinners. She and Ben are taken in, and she sees Harry again, but his mother and aunts try to relegate the two waifs to the kitchen until Harry’s grandfather, the family patriarch, intervenes and treats them more kindly. This experience provides Ada with a major insight. Observing the arrogance of the women, she thinks to herself, “They are mean.” But she immediately qualifies this simple thought:
But, as sometimes happened to her, she found herself harboring two different thoughts at the same time: one naïve and childish, the other more mature, more understanding and insightful; she felt two Adas inside her, and one of them understood why they were casting her aside, why they spoke to her with anger: these famished children suddenly appeared before the rich Jews like an eternal reminder, a horrible and shameful memory of what they had been or what they could have been. Nobody dared to think: “what they could become again someday.”38
This kind of understanding, which John Keats called “negative capability,” allows one, in particular an artist, to take a step back from one’s own concerns and identify with another person’s feelings. The analysis given here is way beyond the capacity of an eight-year-old child, but it tallies perfectly with Némirovsky’s own writerly interest in Jewish class differences and her engagement with the anxieties of assimilation. She was acutely aware of the discomfort that contact with poor, unassimilated Jews provoked among some upper-class Jews, whose fear of falling back into the ghetto was real. Of course, there were rich Jews who felt a moral responsibility to help their less fortunate brethren, but Némirovsky would probably have said they still felt uncomfortable around them, even if they were kinder than the women she imagines in this scene.
Her preoccupation with the social dichotomy is reflected in the metaphor that structures the novel: dogs versus wolves. Ben, ever hungry and restless, full of schemes to succeed in business, is the wolf to Harry’s dog, the cultivated man of privilege. One is vulgar, unassimilated—when he is angry Ben curses in Russian and Yiddish—and fits the stereotype of the “pushy Jew.” The other is sleek and refined and exclusively French-speaking, the quintessential assimilated Jew, even though he is perceived by his Gentile father-in-law as a “foreigner from the East.” But this apparently stark dichotomy is complicated by the fact that Ben and Harry resemble each other physically and by the plot twist involving Ben’s financial misdeeds. While Harry himself is unaware of Ben’s shady dealings, Harry’s uncles, who run the family bank, give Ben a free hand because they too have some of the wolf in them. Ada’s character complicates the opposition even further: she loves Harry and despises Ben, but she shares Ben’s energy and wildness. Harry himself, once he is in love with her, compares her admiringly to a “wild animal, not yet domesticated” because of her indifference to “feminine” niceties (660). And if she has some of the wolf in her, Ben has something of the artist in him. He “constructed gigantic schemes, imagined financial combinations the way an artist creates a world, out of nothing,” notes the narrator (639). The Yiddish word for this kind of shrewd operator, macher—a figure who, as we know, fascinated Némirovsky—literally means “maker,” which resonates quite nicely with “artist.”
Possibly Némirovsky was evoking here the literary tradition’s figure of the wolf, which is ambiguous. In fairy tales and fables this animal appears most often as a dangerous predator, but it can also embody a wild nobility, often in opposition to the domesticated dog. Jean de La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Dog” presents the classic example of this opposition: the wolf in the fable appears as the starving but independent loner, while the dog is well fed but servile. Jack London’s The Call of the Wild offers a variation on the same motif, transforming a domesticated dog into a quasi-wolf. The most romantic version of the noble wolf is probably Alfred de Vigny’s narrative poem 0f 1843 “La Mort du Loup” (The death of the wolf), once known to all French schoolchildren. The wolf, killed by hunters, dies in stoical silence, but not before killing one of the hunters’ dogs, and becomes an allegory of the suffering poet. Némirovsky too saw a kind of allegory in the wolf figure, not just of the striving Jewish macher / artist but of a certain human type. In the spring and summer of 1938, as she was starting on the novel she was calling Le Charlatan and thinking ahead to The Dogs and the Wolves, she speculated that her talent lay in the direction of Balzac, the great creator of types in social settings. “Faire mon petit Honoré” (doing my little Honoré [de Balzac]), as she put it in her journal, meant creating contemporary figures in contemporary situations but exaggerating their features to bring out the type. The protagonist of Le Charlatan, who desires to be better than other people but becomes worse, would have to be larger than life, she concluded, a quasi-tragic figure. At this point she imagined the character as a Frenchman, not a foreigner, but even in this early incarnation he appeared to her as a wolf. Immediately after her thought that he must be larger than life, she wrote, “Painting wolves, that’s my business! I couldn’t care less about animals in groups, nor about domestic animals. Wolves are my business, what I’m good at.”39 If we think back to the protagonist of David Golder, we see he was but the first of a series of such wolf characters, with all their ambiguous danger and charm.
But the dog–wolf metaphor in The Dogs and the Wolves raises more questions than it answers. Dogs and wolves are cousins in the animal realm, their difference being historical rather than biological. Is Némirovsky suggesting that beneath their varying exteriors Jews are a single, inalterable race? If so, then does history matter? Naomi Price, the British critic who found this novel horribly antisemitic, wrote, “The view of the novel is that Jews are all the same, whether poor and unpleasant or rich and unpleasant is simply an accident of birth. . . . Had a Nazi publishing house commissioned a novel stipulating the perpetuation of racial stereotypes, they would not have been disappointed with this as a result.”40 But if we accord history its due, then we might say Némirovsky was struggling to portray, as sympathetically as she could, the dilemmas of assimilation that European Jews faced in the first decades of the twentieth century and to anticipate as well the dead-ends that awaited them. When Ben, in a dramatic confrontation with Harry, whom he hates as a rival, hurls at him the taunt, “You who look at us from on high, who scorn us, who want nothing to do with the Jewish riffraff, just wait a bit! Wait! You’ll be mixed up with them once more! And you’ll be part of them, you who thought you had left them behind!,”41 one cannot help thinking of cattle cars rolling to the East, with no distinctions among their occupants. Némirovsky could not foresee the cattle cars—no one could. But during the time she was working on this novel, roughly from the fall of 1938 to fall 1939 (it started appearing serially in Candide in October, after war had been declared), one did not have to be clairvoyant to feel foreboding about the fate of Jews in Europe. Hitler had annexed Austria in March 1938, creating a new wave of Jewish refugees, and a year later his troops occupied all of Czechoslovakia, breaking the agreement he had made at Munich the previous September. In France, xenophobia and antisemitism ran rampant.
The last two chapters of The Dogs and the Wolves, after Ada receives her notice of expulsion from France, carry traces of this history. In fact, the chronology of the novel is perturbed by it, for suddenly we are in the atmosphere of the late 1930s, whereas the chapters devoted to Ada’s years in Paris, the bulk of the novel, take place in the decade after the Russian Revolution. The sudden leap forward by a decade can be considered a flaw in terms of narrative construction since it goes unacknowledged, but it corresponds to Némirovsky’s preoccupations at the time of writing. The Russian refugee women Ada sees at her aunt’s house worry about visas, asking themselves which countries still have places on their emigration lists. Later, in her place of exile, Ada lives in a hotel full of “refugees from Eastern Europe,” including her neighbor, a Jewish woman whose husband is in a concentration camp. This clearly points to a time after 1933, when the Hitler regime set up the first camps for political prisoners and other “undesirables” in Germany. Ada’s neighbor, Rose Liebig, whose Germanic name evokes love, Liebe, helps deliver Ada’s baby and facilitates contact between her and the other refugees. In a sense Ada in exile finds a community, but it is a community of outcasts.
That is as far as Némirovsky got in depicting the life of European Jews on the eve of the Second World War. Before she had finished the novel the war broke out, and soon afterward, in her story “The Spectator,” she imagined yet another outsider, Hugo Grayer, who is comforted by a fellow sufferer as he awaits his death on the high seas. I would like to think that in the wagon transporting her to Auschwitz in July 1942 she as well found good neighbors, and that she was one, too.