Every book of my mother’s that is published brings her back into the world of the living.
—DENISE EPSTEIN
Suddenly, we had a family heritage.
—LÉA DAUPLÉ, Némirovsky’s great-granddaughter
ACCORDING TO LEGEND, THE manuscript of Némirovsky’s Suite Française, written in a notebook in tiny lettering to save paper, lay for decades in a suitcase, unread. The suitcase, containing papers and photographs as well as the precious notebook, had been handed to Denise by her father on the day he was arrested, with the admonition to never let go of it. After the war she and her sister had continued to treasure it, but they thought the notebook contained their mother’s personal journal and were not able to bring themselves to read it. Then one day decades later, Denise opened the notebook, saw that it was a novel, transcribed it—and the rest is history.
The story is “beautiful and tragic,” wrote a journalist who repeated the oft-told tale in October 2014.1 Like all legends, however, this one has only an approximate link to reality. The reality, in this case, is just as compelling and has the advantage of being true. But as usual, the truth is complicated and messy and requires patience in the telling. Here are a few facts to start with: Denise and Elisabeth knew about their mother’s novel from early on and did not try to hide that fact. Denise showed the manuscript to at least one journalist in the 1950s, who thought it unpublishable because it was “unfinished.” Denise’s son Emmanuel Dauplé recalls that his mother transcribed the manuscript more than once, while her daughter Irène remembers knowing about it since she was a child. Denise herself mentioned it, “a fat manuscript in my possession,” on a radio program in 1992, when Némirovsky’s name started to crop up again after the publication of Elisabeth’s Le Mirador, which also mentions it several times. When I first met her, in 2008, Denise told me she and her sister had been aware of the work for many years but were uncertain about publishing it. Elisabeth especially, ever the professional editor, worried about the fact that it was unfinished and that their mother had not had the chance to polish it. As we know, Némirovsky herself had offered to send part 1 of the novel to the editor of Gringoire, Horace de Carbuccia, as soon as she had finished it, in June 1941. The Némirovsky archives contain a very old typescript of the whole work on onionskin, probably done by Michel Epstein, who typed Irène’s manuscripts during the war. The typescript differs from the handwritten version, sometimes considerably. It is not clear who did the editing and revisions or exactly when, but after a quick perusal my impression was that they did not improve on the original. The revisions show signs of overwriting and striving for effects—for example, where the manuscript speaks simply of “birds singing,” the typescript chooses the more precious “sparrows chirping.” Denise was right to use only the original manuscript for the publication of 2004.2
This chapter will tell a complicated story with a happy ending, at least as far as the fortunes of Irène Némirovsky and her descendants are concerned. But even the happiest tale may have a bitter undertone, especially if it involves Jewish identity in modern times.
At the time she was deported, in July 1942, Némirovsky had been urging Albin Michel to publish two books of hers that were ready and waiting, the novel Les Biens de ce monde (All Our Worldly Goods), which had been serialized in Gringoire under a pseudonym in 1941, and La Vie de Tchekhov, which she had completed around the same time. She had also finished another novel, Les Feux de l’automne (The Fires of Autumn), written hastily in 1941–1942, which had never been published. In addition, there were some unpublished stories, a novel serialized in 1939 but never published as a book, and a novella, Chaleur du sang (Fire in the Blood), that was found by her biographers in the Albin Michel archives only after Suite Française had appeared. And there was Suite Française itself. Some of these works took decades to be published, but three were issued relatively soon after the war.
Albin Michel had contracted, while Némirovsky was still alive, to publish the Chekhov biography and All Our Worldly Goods, and they fulfilled their obligation by issuing them as soon as it became possible to do so after the war. La Vie de Tchekhov appeared in October 1946 with a substantial preface by Jean-Jacques Bernard, who succeeded in expressing his admiration and affection for Némirovsky and his outrage at the murder of “six million victims” of the Nazis without ever pronouncing the word Jew. “Born in the East, Irène went on to perish in the East,” he wrote. But she was deeply integrated into her adopted country, he added. Her writing shows no trace of her “foreign origin,” and she must be mourned as a “French writer.”3 Less than a year later, in March 1947, Albin Michel brought out All Our Worldly Goods, with no preface. These posthumous works received very few reviews, generally positive but quite short. Ineluctably, Némirovsky’s name was slipping into oblivion. The war had brought into prominence a whole new set of writers, including a few women, who were identified, rightly or wrongly, with the Resistance and with the Left. Sartre, Camus, Gary, Beauvoir, Elsa Triolet were among the newly famous. At the same time, the “chers Maîtres” of the Académie Française who had constituted the prewar establishment and on whose support Némirovsky had always counted were discredited by their less-than-stellar record of resistance to the occupant, to put it understatedly, for some were outright collaborators during the war. Besides, most of these Académiciens were now elders displaced by the new generation, whether Left or Right politically. Némirovsky had never been part of the aesthetic avant-garde, which also gained new prominence in the years after the war. The worldwide recognition of Samuel Beckett and Nathalie Sarraute, both of whom had published before the war but became known only with their postwar works, was accompanied in the 1950s and early 1960s by the rise of the nouveau roman, the so-called new novel, whose practitioners rejected the kind of social and psychological realism in fiction that Némirovsky had excelled at.
In the immediate postwar years Denise and Elisabeth were too young to have any role in promoting their mother’s work. Whatever negotiations occurred would have to be between the publisher and the girls’ guardian, Julie Dumot, who was not qualified for the task. By the time The Fires of Autumn appeared, in the spring of 1957, Némirovsky’s daughters, especially Denise, who was not employed at the time, could be more actively involved. In April 1957, soon after its publication, the French-language Swiss newspaper Tribune de Lausanne ran a long article on Némirovsky in its Sunday edition, featuring it as the main piece on its literary page. Signed by one J. Daven, it was actually written by the journalist and artist Catherine Descargues, who had interviewed Denise and corresponded with her in preparing it. Illustrated with two photos of Némirovsky furnished by Denise, the article was headlined, “At the moment when her last book appears: Remember Irène Némirovsky.” It began as follows: “There was no news of her since 1939, but with this publication we see the reappearance of Irène Némirovsky, one of the most famous women novelists before the war.” The journalist goes on to evoke Némirovsky’s death in Auschwitz, then gives a detailed, very positive review of the new book. Most important, from our point of view, she refers to the writer’s older daughter, who had told her about the family’s refuge in a village during the war. “The Fires of Autumn was written then, under those conditions, along with another book, unfortunately unfinished, which would no doubt have counted among the writer’s major works: ‘Suite Française.’ ” For a very long time, the existence of these works was unknown, the article states, but when the guardian of Irène Némirovsky’s two daughters died, among her belongings was found a suitcase containing “the novelist’s last writings.”4
When I discovered this obscure article in the online archives of a Swiss newspaper that no longer exists under that name (the Tribune de Lausanne became the tabloid Le Matin, which is still in existence), I experienced one of those moments that researchers long for: an important piece in a puzzle had fallen into place. Julie Dumot, who died in 1956, must have stowed the suitcase away for safekeeping during the war, which made perfectly good sense, for how could she or, more improbably still, the twelve-year-old Denise have carried the thing around with them during their years in hiding? But it was troubling to think that Julie had hung on to the suitcase after the war, when by all rights she should have turned it over to Némirovsky’s publisher or to the notaire who was handling the girls’ assets. If the article is right about dates, she did not part with the suitcase even when she returned from the United States in 1954, by which time Denise, one of its rightful owners, was a grown woman. Denise often hinted that Julie had done something dishonest, without further explanation. If this article is correct, it explains both Denise’s anger at Julie and the ten-year gap between the publication of the two earlier posthumous books and The Fires of Autumn. We know that Albin Michel paid an advance on royalties for The Fires of Autumn to Denise and Elisabeth in November 1956, just a few months after Julie Dumot’s death.5
So the story about the suitcase revealing its contents after many years is not completely wrong—it merely simplifies things for greater dramatic effect. One can only wonder what would have happened if Suite Française had been published when it first came to light, circa 1957. Denise had apparently sent the manuscript to Descargues with the idea of publishing it, and the journalist wrote to her a few days before the Tribune de Lausanne article appeared, returning the photos Denise had sent and promising to return the manuscript very soon. She had found it “altogether remarkable,” she wrote, then added, “It’s really a pity that, being unfinished, it can’t be published.”6 In fact, Suite Française as it currently exists has a perfectly acceptable ending with the departure of German troops from the occupied village in June 1941, almost exactly one year after the story begins. Némirovsky made copious notes for a sequel, but the novel as it is, spanning the first year of German occupation, stands on its own. She had been willing even to publish just the first part, “Storm in June,” separately. Her failure to find a publisher for it in 1941, which made her feel so bitter, turned out to be providential, and quite possibly the categorical response Denise received from the journalist in 1957, that “being unfinished, it can’t be published,” was fortunate as well. It is not at all certain, given the literary context at the time, that Suite Française would have been met with the same admiration it received in 2004. The nouveau roman was just gaining momentum, and Suite Française was definitely not that. Nor was there much interest in fiction about the Second World War or the Holocaust. The first French novel to evoke the Holocaust, André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, did not appear until 1959. Even nonfiction works now considered classics, like Elie Wiesel’s Night, Charlotte Delbo’s None of Us Will Return, and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (known in America as Survival in Auschwitz), were either unknown or not yet published. Night appeared in French in 1958 and was translated into English two years later; Delbo’s book, written quite early, was not published until 1970; and Levi’s book, published in Italy in 1946, had sold only a few hundred copies and was not translated into French until 1961. Besides, Suite Française was not a book about the Holocaust but a historical novel about French civilian life during the first year of German occupation. Realist historical fiction about the Second World War that did not deal with heroic feats, preferably by men, was not much of a sell in the France of the 1950s. In fact, after the flurry of novels and memoirs published right after the war had died down, there was little interest even in heroic stories. Beauvoir’s The Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954, could be considered an exception, but its subject was the postwar, with only glancing references to the period of the Occupation. The historian Henry Rousso has called the 1950s the period of repression about the Vichy years in France. By the time Suite Française finally appeared, fifty years later, France had acquired a huge appetite for works about the Second World War and the Holocaust, so huge that Rousso has qualified it as an obsession.7
In fact, the obsession had started quite a bit earlier, in the 1980s, and one may wonder why Suite Française was not published then. It could probably have found a publisher, especially given Elisabeth Gille’s connections. The people I spoke with offered various explanations for the delay, none of them documented. According to some, Gille was against publication because she too considered the novel unfinished, and not as good as it would have been had her mother lived to complete and revise it. Others claim that Elisabeth wanted to write her own book about Némirovsky before publishing the novel and that her sister went along with that. No doubt a host of factors created the delay, some based on conscious choice, some on the demands of everyday life, and some on pure chance.
Meanwhile, after the publication of The Fires of Autumn, which received almost no reviews even though it was advertised by Albin Michel as the posthumous work of a “great woman novelist who died in deportation,” Némirovsky’s fortunes in public memory continued to decline. David Golder remained in print at Grasset throughout all those years. But in 1965 Albin Michel still had several thousand unsold copies of the Chekhov biography and The Fires of Autumn; only a hundred or so of All Our Worldly Goods remained, but that was because they had pulped five thousand copies two years earlier. The books they had published during Némirovsky’s lifetime were all out of print, except for two titles of which a few hundred copies remained. These were the numbers Albin Michel provided to Elisabeth’s husband, Claude Gille, in response to a letter in which he requested an accounting (he signed the letter C. Gille-Némirovsky).8
After that, it was close to total silence for many years. But in July 1983 Albin Michel received a letter from someone who said he was doing research on Némirovsky and who wondered which of her books were still available. He had recently acquired her letters to André Sabatier, he said (Sabatier had died ten years earlier). Could they send him the addresses of her daughters? The publisher supplied the addresses but then cautioned, “Please be aware that our last correspondence with the heirs dates back to June 1972.”9 During the intervening years Denise’s children had grown up and left home, and she and her husband had gotten divorced. A few years later she moved to Toulouse, where her older son and daughter lived. Elisabeth too was divorced by then and had already published her article in Le Monde about being a child survivor of the Holocaust. And she had met, through her friend Odile Pidoux-Payot, the Yiddishist and specialist in American Jewish literature Rachel Ertel, who introduced her to the Cercle Gaston Crémieux, a group of secular Jewish intellectuals she would be involved with until her death.10 The Cercle, named after a nineteenth-century liberal Jewish writer, had been founded in 1967 by Richard Marienstras, a professor of Elizabethan literature at the Sorbonne whose family had emigrated to France from Poland before the war. Ertel, herself an immigrant from Poland who had survived the war as a child with her mother in the Soviet Union, was among the Cercle’s earliest members, along with Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Berthe Burko-Falcman, both of whom had lost parents to deportation. Jacques Burko, the latter’s husband, edited the group’s journal, Diasporiques, for many years (it ceased publication in 2007). The Cercle defined itself, and still does, on its website, as “a Jewish, secular, diasporist discussion group committed to the Left.”11 A few years before Elisabeth Gille joined them, Marienstras had published a book whose title sounds like a manifesto: Être un peuple en diaspora (Being a people in diaspora). According to Marienstras, Jews were a people, perhaps even a nation, but not a nation-state. He supported the existence of Israel but opposed the idea that all Jews should emigrate to Israel. His view of Jewish existence was, as he put it, that of a dreamer, for he thought it possible to affirm one’s Jewishness and to belong to a Jewish community even while rejecting all three of the major solutions, Zionism, assimilationism, religious orthodoxy.12 “Diasporism” as he defined it was a fine line to walk. Basically, he called for the embrace of multiple identities and allegiances, for “dispersion” as a way of life, but one in which Jewishness as a cultural and historical belonging would play a vital role. How this balancing act was to be achieved remained unclear and has not become clearer since then.
One of Elisabeth’s close friends at the time told me that Elisabeth had several circles of friends, which she kept quite separate.13 The Cercle Gaston Crémieux was only one of them, but it doubtless played a role in her growing affirmation of a certain Jewishness. It would lead her to request, when she was dying of cancer in 1996, that she be buried according to Jewish funeral rites, presided over by a rabbi. It would also lead her, in the last decade of her life, to delve more and more deeply into her own and her mother’s past—and to write about them.
In the late 1980s Némirovsky’s publishers started, somewhat cautiously, to reissue her works. Grasset, in addition to David Golder, which it had always kept in print, brought out Le Bal in their quality paperback series Les Cahiers Rouges in 1985 and followed it a few years later with the two other works they owned by her, Les Mouches d’automne (Snow in Autumn) and L’Affaire Courilof (The Courilof Affair). Albin Michel, not to be left behind, reissued The Wine of Solitude and The Dogs and the Wolves in 1988, and The Life of Tchekhov a year later. No one noticed these books, but at least they were available. And in the meantime Elisabeth and Denise were talking seriously about writing a biography of their mother. As Elisabeth Gille explained in interviews, someone had contacted Némirovsky’s publisher, presumably Albin Michel, with a proposal for a biography. But she did not like that idea, and she and Denise decided to write one together. It was to be a “classic biography, coauthored, based on documents.”14 Denise, putting to use her experience as a researcher and her excellent typing skills, went to work gathering her mother’s papers and transcribing some of her journals and other manuscripts. Albin Michel had all the professional correspondence in its archives, and Madeleine Cabour had handed over the letters Irène and Michel had sent her during the Sorbonne years and during the war. Denise also combed through the periodicals at the National Library, digging up dozens of stories and articles Némirovsky had published in newspapers and magazines. Perhaps most precious of all, she could refer to personal memories of her mother, from a time when Elisabeth was not even born. She later recalled that working on the book brought her and her sister together in a new and very positive way. It also brought them closer to their shared childhood: they visited Issy-l’Évêque together in the summer of 1990, for what appears to have been the first time since the war.15
Many children of famous parents have written books about them. But even if they avoid the “Mommy Dearest” genre of recrimination, their emotional involvement makes the usual stance of a biographer, sympathetic but distant, engaged but dispassionate, impossible to maintain. The most successful such books take the form of “My Father [or, more rarely, My Mother] the Writer, Artist, etc.,” with the child clearly implicating him- or herself as a privileged, if sometimes pained, observer. Alexandra Styron’s and Susan Cheever’s books about their self-centered, brilliant fathers come to mind, as does, closer to home, Dominique Fernandez’s book about his father, who became a collaborator during the war.16 The solution Elisabeth and Denise finally settled on was different and highly original. Elisabeth decided to write the book herself, with Denise contributing documents and memories—but it would not be a “classic biography.” Instead, she would write it in the voice of her mother, producing something between a biography and a first-person novel. Le Mirador is subtitled “mémoires rêvées,” dreamed memories. Irène was the presumed memoirist, but Elisabeth was the dreamer / author and historian as well, for she did a tremendous amount of background reading, as she explains in her acknowledgments, and incorporated many documents from Némirovsky’s archives into the book. This is where Denise’s help was precious. Adding yet another layer, Elisabeth inserted occasional brief fragments about “the child,” herself, bearing dates from March 1937, just after her birth, to October 1991. The book opens and closes with these fragments, which are written in the third person, as if to emphasize the difficulty of drawing clear boundaries between history, objective or at least verifiable, and dream, or invention. It is the autobiographical fragments that appear as history, told by an objective voice, while the subjective account of Irène Némirovsky’s life and thoughts is a literary invention, even if one based on historical research. Elisabeth Gille was a great admirer of Perec’s W, or the Memory of Childhood (she even quotes from it on the first page of Le Mirador), which consists of two parallel narratives, one totally fictional and one autobiographical. Perec is famous for this formal innovation, which allowed him to compensate for his lack of childhood memories—his father died in the war, and his mother was deported when he was six years old—by inventing a fictional story that mirrored both his and his mother’s stories indirectly. Elisabeth created her own version of a split narrative by interspersing Irène’s reconstructed story with her own and Denise’s scattered but actual memories.
She had to confront another problem, however: How to tell her mother’s story, most of which took place “before Auschwitz,” without imposing on it her own post-Holocaust perspective? In concrete terms, without judging it? As we have seen throughout this book, some of Irène Némirovsky’s choices during the 1930s and even in the first years of the war appear unfortunate, if not downright reprehensible, in retrospect. Elisabeth allowed herself to criticize her mother in interviews, including the one that appeared as a postface to the new edition of Le Mirador in 2000, and she had no trouble speaking about her mother with a certain distance, which was why she never referred to Némirovsky in public as Maman, always by her name. But in the book itself she did not want to adopt the position of a judge, which is the usual consequence of “backshadowing,” that is, expecting a person in the past to have known what we know later. As Elisabeth told Myriam Anissimov in 1992, “I had to confront the problem of their [her parents’] blindness. That is one reason I wrote [Irène’s story] in the first person. I didn’t want to set myself up in an attitude of reproach toward them.”17
Still, the problem obviously bothered her: How to tell the story without papering over those choices made by her parents that she, and no doubt others of her generation, found questionable or even deplorable but without condemning them or standing in judgment over them? This is a problem that confronts anyone writing about Némirovsky, as about many other assimilated Jews in Europe during the interwar period, but it is especially vexed if the writer is the subject’s own daughter. Elisabeth Gille solved the problem, as she herself explained, by dividing the book into two parts. In part 1 she imagines Irène writing about her life in November 1929, shortly after the birth of her daughter Denise. She recounts her childhood in Kiev, including the pogrom of 1905, the trips to France before the First World War, the upheavals of the Revolution and exile, before ending on a highly optimistic note: Her family had made the right choice by settling in France, “the country of moderation and freedom, and generosity too,” which had “definitively adopted” her as she had adopted it.
After this bit of tragic irony, we skip to July 1942: Irène is sitting in her favorite spot for writing, the woods outside Issy-l’Évêque, wearing the yellow star—and she is no longer optimistic. By constructing the book this way, Elisabeth told Anissimov, “I could have my mother say things in 1929 that she no longer recognized in 1942.”18 More to the point, she could have her mother say things in 1942 that showed remorse over her earlier choices. In the opening chapter of part 2 (chapter 9), Elisabeth imagines Némirovsky just days before she was deported, “crying with rage” when she rereads the pages written by her younger self. How could she have been so blind to what was happening around her? Even if a certain obliviousness was excusable in a “frivolous young girl” who had already seen too much death and destruction, was it not downright “criminal on the part of the happy and fulfilled woman I was in 1929, and that I remained until I arrived here?”19 The “crime” she reproaches herself for was her indifference to the rise of right-wing, antisemitic movements in France as early as the 1920s and her later hostility to “foreigners” fleeing Hitler’s Germany.
Elisabeth Gille’s solution as author, then, consisted in having Némirovsky herself express a judgment that her daughter refused to pronounce. She even imagines her mother foreseeing her daughters’ dilemma, for on the same page where Némirovsky calls her earlier self practically a criminal, she also asks, “If things go badly, very badly, what will my daughters think of me? What will they reproach me for, with good reason, in ten or twenty years, when they will be grown women?” One has the impression at moments like this that Elisabeth Gille wanted to “tell all” about her mother, holding nothing back, but also wanted to protect her and in a sense to excuse her or at least to explain her choices to a later generation. The temporal distance between subject and author, or reader, is hinted at in the book’s title. A mirador, from the Spanish mirar, “to look,” is an observation tower, most often associated these days with prisons and concentration camps. The word emphasizes the importance of seeing and being seen but also of perspective and point of view, which shift with time. In the book’s original edition the title appeared on the cover above a photo of Némirovsky in her youth, looking radiant. Elisabeth Gille explained to a journalist that she had sought that contrast: “I wanted the tragedy to be present, next to my mother’s smiling face.”20
A persecuted woman who bitterly regrets her earlier errors and even imagines her daughters reproaching her for them after her death necessarily elicits sympathy. In real life none of Némirovsky’s wartime writings suggest that she underwent that kind of transformation. She expressed rage and despair at what was happening to her, and she judged the French elites harshly, both in her journals and in the narrator’s ironic observations in Suite Française. But she showed no remorse over her own earlier views and never sought to justify or explain them. Elisabeth Gille, by contrast, provides fairly detailed explanations and comparisons, based on her historical research, that serve as a kind of apology for her mother. For example, she imagines a dinner party at Némirovsky’s home in 1933, shortly after Hitler had come to power, when the first influx of Jewish refugees was arriving from Germany. Among the guests are two visitors from New York, the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler and his wife, Raïssa, who was a relative of Michel Epstein. The others are Emmanuel Berl and Daniel Halévy, two French intellectuals with Israélite pedigrees (though Halévy’s family had converted to Protestantism before he was born), who both express hostility toward the newly arriving foreigners. The presence of these immigrants will harm the “integrated Jews who have been in France for centuries,” says Berl. The historical Berl railed against “undesirable” immigrants in his political articles of the late 1930s, calling them a threat to French culture, but he didn’t explicitly frame his arguments in terms of Jews.21 Alfred and Raïssa, who have left-wing sympathies, are appalled at Berl’s statement. But Gille’s Némirovsky writes, “I confess I shared Berl’s ideas: I took the measure of his blindness, and of my own, only in 1940, when I learned that he had followed Pétain to Vichy and even wrote two of his speeches.”
Berl did indeed write Pétain’s first speeches, including the famous one of June 25, 1940, in which Pétain condemned the “left-wing” ideas he associated with the 1930s—and with Jews and Freemasons. A sentence from that speech, “I hate the lies that did you [France] so much harm,” is among Pétain’s most-often-quoted statements, partly because of its poetic cadence. Elisabeth too quotes it in her book (on page 354). But it is not certain that Némirovsky herself would have blamed Berl for writing that speech (his authorship was not public knowledge at the time), and even less so that she realized his and her own “blindness.” As we know, she herself wrote to Pétain in September 1940 to request that he consider her an honorable foreigner, not an undesirable one. Elisabeth Gille reproduces her letter in full, but she has Irène say it was her husband who had insisted she write it (387). This is a perfect example of the “tell all but protect” impulse that dominates the book. The same impulse accounts for the historical explanations and analyses she puts into Némirovsky’s mouth, such as this one: “My arrival in France after the Great War had persuaded me that antisemitism no longer existed here. We foreigners had a very elevated idea of this country: the land of the Revolution, of freedom, of the rights of man. . . . We would never have imagined that it could betray us” (355). Or, a few pages later, “In Israélite milieux like mine, discretion was the rule. . . . In our crowd, everyone insisted on the distinction that Maurras himself [Charles Maurras, the founder of the right-wing Action Française] drew, between ‘well-born Jews,’ those who had been in France for generations and had given their blood for the fatherland, and those people that we ourselves considered to be ‘immigrants of the dregs’ [immigration de déchet]” (358–59).
There was one issue on which Elisabeth Gille was not in a position to tell all. It concerns Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the brilliant writer whose pathological antisemitism has presented a problem for several generations of critics. In 1932 Céline had become justly famous with his first novel, Journey to the End of Night (Voyage au bout de la nuit), which revolutionized French fiction by introducing the rhythms and vocabulary of slang into a highly stylized, poetic language. Journey is an angry book, lashing out at the whole world, but there can be no doubt that it is a masterpiece, and one would have to look very carefully to detect any sign of antisemitism in its pages. Five years later, however, after another novel, Mort à crédit (Death on the Installment Plan), in which he pushed his ranting style even further, Céline published Bagatelles pour un massacre, the first of his so-called antisemitic “pamphlets.” Bagatelles is not a slim pamphlet but another long rant of a novel, featuring as narrator Céline’s alter ego Ferdinand, whose favorite mode of expression is the incomplete sentence ending in three dots or an exclamation point. But this time the target of Ferdinand’s anger and hatred is specified: it’s the Jews, who are to blame for both his own and the whole world’s miseries. Bagatelles became a runaway best seller and was followed by two other similarly hateful works, L’École des cadavres in 1938 and Les Beaux draps in 1941. All three “pamphlets” were banned from Céline’s complete works by his and his heirs’ decision, but they are available as PDFs online and have also recently been published together in a scholarly edition in Canada.22 Despite the general acknowledgment of his extraordinary linguistic gifts, which were again manifested in several novels published after the war, Céline remains to many readers even today a writer to be shunned, or if not shunned then read with an extremely critical eye. He fled France in 1944, fearing reprisals for his collaborationist writings, and did not return until 1951. He had been tried and condemned in absentia after the war but was eventually amnestied and enjoyed a decade of literary acclaim for the novels he published in the 1950s. He died in 1961.
Elisabeth Gille has Némirovsky refer to Céline as a madman with abhorrent views (351). But she had not read her mother’s writing journals from the 1930s, which were still lying in the storage rooms of Albin Michel, undiscovered until 2005. (They were no doubt among the manuscripts Némirovsky had given to André Sabatier for safekeeping in March 1942.) Céline is not a steady reference in Némirovsky’s journals, but the one or two times she mentions him are significant. At the end of May 1938, after arriving at the summer house in Hendaye, she expresses relief that her mood has changed: “Blue sky. Sun. Ecstasy.” She had left Paris feeling terrible, lower than low: “36 degrees below zero. As Céline says, ‘You’ve got an ugly character, Ferdinand’ [T’es une sale nature, Ferdinand].”23 The quote, referring self-ironically to Céline’s hero, is from Death on the Installment Plan, which Némirovsky had evidently relished. By identifying herself with Céline’s angry alter ego, she gives her own depression a literary sheen. She notes, however, that it was the memoirs of Rudyard Kipling, “blessed be he,” that had brought her out of her “crisis of blackness.”
Among Némirovsky’s ideas that summer was the novel she planned to call “Le Charlatan,” which would feature an illegitimate child, Gabriel Dario, who grows up to be a crook. Eventually, she transformed him into Dario Asfar, a poor, ambitious immigrant doctor from the Levant, one of those shady but compelling “foreigners” that had always fascinated her. Dario Asfar is another version of David Golder and would soon be followed by Ben Sinner of The Dogs and the Wolves, both of whom are presented and indeed analyzed as Jewish characters. But even though he fits the model perfectly, Némirovsky decided not to specify Dario Asfar’s ethnicity, possibly because of the difficulties she had had in publishing her short story “Fraternité” two years earlier. (The editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, we recall, had rejected the story as antisemitic.) In the midst of her notes for “Le Charlatan,” in June 1938, on a page where she also talks about her desire to find peace of mind, perhaps by converting to Catholicism, there is suddenly the following: “Ah, God, if I were to describe the Jew . . . Yes, obviously, there was Golder, but . . . But I don’t dare, I’m afraid, Céline is right. I quite like Bagatelles [J’aime bien Bagatelles].”24
It came as a shock when I read those lines a few years ago, sitting in the high-ceilinged reading room, once the church of an abbey, of the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine in Normandy, where Némirovsky’s papers are deposited. True, it was a brief outburst written in a private journal, evidently at a time of great psychological stress and depression. But still, how could she say she liked Bagatelles? Was this her equivalent of Kafka’s outburst, in a letter to his lover Milena, that sometimes he would like to “stuff all Jews in a drawer,” including himself, and suffocate them?25 André Gide, in his review article in the Nouvelle Revue Française, treated Bagatelles as a kind of joke on Céline’s part since it displayed his usual stylistic verve and listed Cézanne, Picasso, and other modern artists among the Jews—and also because Gide could not believe this talented writer would say such hateful things in earnest.26 But Némirovsky does not appear to have been in a joking mood, nor was she referring only to Céline’s style, when she said she liked the book. This seems to have been one of those truly low moments when all her anxieties were let loose, at least momentarily. If Céline was “right,” then Jewishness was the cause of all her problems.
Elisabeth Gille’s version of Némirovsky voices nothing but indignation at Bagatelles pour un massacre. She hasn’t read the book, writes the “dreamed” Irène in 1942, but she has heard it is “a horrible pamphlet” and a “veritable call to murder” (351). Elisabeth’s ignorance of the facts can be called fortunate since it allowed her to reinforce her two-part schema for the narrative, with the older Irène wiser than her younger self. Curiously, however, Elisabeth invents another literary reference on the same page, this time somewhat to her mother’s detriment: her Irène mentions Robert Brasillach and Drieu La Rochelle, two notorious antisemites, in a list of “genuine writers,” among them Jacques Chardonne and Paul Morand, whom she had once loved and who had loved her, or at least pretended to, but who have now abandoned her. In reality, Némirovsky’s biographer Olivier Philipponnat has confirmed to me that Némirovsky had no personal relations whatsoever with Drieu and never mentions him in her journals; she may have met Brasillach, but there was hardly any “love” between them. She mentions him in her journal once, in 1934, after reading his negative review of Le Pion sur l’échiquier, which distressed her.27 Generally respected as a literary critic, Brasillach had written positive reviews of her works until then. His political views took a virulently antisemitic turn after 1934, when he first visited Nazi Germany. Chardonne and Morand, whom the real Némirovsky did know and correspond with, were bad enough, we could say. Chardonne was tried after the war for collaboration but was eventually acquitted, while Morand’s name figured for a while on a black list of collaborationist writers, although he was never tried.28
Le Mirador was published in February 1992 by a small press, the Presses de la Renaissance, where Elisabeth’s good friend Arlette Stroumza was her editor. Stroumza recalled, in 2010, that she and Elisabeth had talked about the book for many years, “whether to do it or not.” Elisabeth, she said, “was afraid it would bring back too many memories.”29 The book received admiring reviews in major newspapers and magazines, from Le Monde and Libération to L’Express, Elle, and the Jewish weekly Actualité Juive Hebdo. Their focus was on Elisabeth Gille as author and daughter, but above all on Irène Némirovsky, whose name suddenly reappeared in the press after a decades-long absence. The reviewers all emphasized her tragic death at the age of thirty-nine, but many also praised her work. Lionel Rocheman, himself a writer, declared in Actualité Juive Hebdo that he considered Némirovsky “one of the great French authors of the 20th century” and singled out David Golder, Le Bal, and The Dogs and the Wolves as among her best works.30 Elisabeth Gille was widely interviewed, both in the press—the International Herald Tribune headlined its article “A Daughter’s Painful Quest”—and on radio and television. She and Denise were featured in a ninety-minute-long program on the radio devoted to Némirovsky. The other participants on the program, all of them great admirers of Némirovsky’s work, were Françoise Ducout, a journalist from Elle; Maurice Schumann, an elder statesman and former minister and a member of the Académie Française who had been the “voice of Free France” on the radio in London during the war; and Lionel Rocheman, who recalled seeing a copy of David Golder on his parents’ bookshelf when he was a young boy—in his family’s milieu of Polish Jewish immigrants, he said, the novel was considered a masterpiece.31
Despite this flurry of interest, Irène Némirovsky’s work remained largely unknown for another decade. But her daughter’s book had breathed new life into her, and she returned the favor: with Le Mirador Elisabeth Gille became a writer. In the too few years that remained to her, she published two more books, including a novel that has entered the canon of autobiographical fiction by child survivors of the Holocaust.
Elisabeth had always had a particular respect for writers, “a kind of veneration,” her friend René de Ceccatty recalls. A novelist and essayist as well as a translator, Ceccatty was one of the authors she took under her editor’s wing. “She was like that with everyone,” he said, “extraordinarily kind and considerate. One could feel that writers fascinated her.” She always protested, even after the positive reception of Le Mirador, that she was “not a writer but an editor” and that the writer was her mother, he said.32 But when she was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1992, after treatment for a less malignant cancer a few years earlier, her primary way of dealing with it was to write a book. Le Crabe sur la banquette arrière (The crab on the backseat), published in 1994, is that rarest of entities, a hilariously funny memoir / novel about a cancer patient who is fired from her prestigious job at a Parisian publishing firm because her boss thinks it would harm the morale of the editorial team to see her “looking thin, wearing a wig.” Elisabeth Gille was in fact asked to leave the new position she had accepted around that time, as director of literary fiction at the Rivages publishing firm. Characteristically, she treated this blow with withering humor. Her book is written in the form of brief dialogues between the unnamed patient (“la malade”) and her well-meaning friends, colleagues, doctors, nurses, and family members, all of whom fail to recognize what is happening to her and how she feels about it. They assure her she will “do just fine,” that she will “come out of this because [she is] strong.” Besides, cancer is becoming very curable, and then they proceed to tell her about friends of friends who have died of the disease or committed suicide! The nurses are incompetent and underpaid, as they keep reminding her, the doctors are in competition with each other, and her twenty-year-old daughter borrows her good jacket and her cosmetics since she is “not going out these days.” Meanwhile, she is trying to write.
Le Crabe is the kind of book that has the reader laughing out loud, all the while aware of its devastating underside. At one point the patient calls the cemetery where her grandparents are buried in the Jewish section and explains that she wants to be buried rather than cremated, even though she knows cremation is cleaner and takes up less space. “But I think my family has already contributed,” she declares, no doubt to the bewilderment of the employee at the other end. The reader knows what she is referring to, however, just as we can guess why she tells some friends who are talking about ways to lose weight that “there were no overweight people at Auschwitz.” If ever there was gallows humor, this is it. Freud, in his essay “Humor,” defined this kind of humor as a way of asserting control over a desperate situation, like the man being taken to be hanged who observes the sunshine and declares, “It’s a nice day.”
At the end of the book the patient feels better after months of treatment, and her friends surprise her one evening bearing food and presents to celebrate her cure. But she knows that it is not a cure, at best a temporary reprieve. And she also realizes, raging at the thought, that her friends cannot understand this, for they live in a different “spatio-temporal universe” from hers. One thinks here of Susan Sontag’s famous observation about the two kingdoms, the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick. All humans are potentially citizens of both, but the distance between them is unbridgeable. The patient throws her friends out and is left alone, as “the curtain falls.”33 A television film adaptation broadcast shortly after Elisabeth Gilles’s death considerably sweetened this ending. The patient and her daughter, with whom she has had a quite stormy relation until now, come together, finally reconciled, and the last image we see is of them hugging.34
Le Crabe sur la banquette arrière was published in September 1994, timed for the fall literary season. It received respectful attention in the press and on radio and television. Elisabeth Gille was featured on an hour-long radio program devoted to writers’ childhoods, during which she spoke a great deal about her mother, the war years, and Le Mirador. When the conversation turned to Le Crabe, the interviewer remarked that it was rare to see a comical book on illness. Elisabeth responded that what is terrible about death is the death of others, not one’s own—she thought her mother herself may have faced death with a certain “gaiety.” Many of Elisabeth’s friends told me they saw in her a toughness belied by her petite frame. She did not suffer fools gladly and let them know it, but she was hard on herself as well: self-pity was not in her repertory. “Not to feel sorry for yourself, I learned that during the war,” she told her interviewer on this radio program. “But writing is a therapy. Books have always given me strength.”35 The previous evening she had participated in one of the most popular programs on television, a weekly talk show featuring writers and artists, moderated by the iconic journalist Bernard Pivot. To be invited “chez Pivot” was a coveted prize. On the program with Elisabeth that September evening were the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, who had just completed his celebrated trilogy of films in French, and two famous actors, Jean-Louis Trintignant, the star of Kieslowski’s Three Colors: Red, and Michel Bouquet, who was starring in a production of Eugène Ionesco’s Exit the King. Ionesco himself had died recently, and Pivot showed an excerpt from an interview Elisabeth Gille had conducted with him a few years earlier.
This was not the first time she found herself the only woman in a gathering of high-powered men, nor, for that matter, her first time chez Pivot. He had invited her in 1978, when she was a young editor at Denoël, to talk about new science fiction with seven other editors and authors, all of them men. Seeing the archived version of this program gives one a lot of insight into Elisabeth Gille’s success in the Paris publishing world. Petite, with short, dark curly hair and deep-set eyes, she sits at first silently smoking while the men talk animatedly among themselves without ever addressing her. But when Pivot finally turns to her and asks her to tell about the series she is in charge of, she becomes unstoppable. Science fiction is a kind of ghetto in the literary world, she explains, with its own rigid rules and conventions. It is written almost exclusively by men, and the characters are mere stereotypes, not really human. Girls don’t read it, generally, and she herself never read it as a child in her “personal ghetto,” the Catholic boarding school where she was educated, she says with a smile. But now that women writers are entering the field, she hopes they will bring more psychological depth to the genre. She speaks in a low voice, with great composure and authority, without a trace of shrillness: an intelligent, attractive professional woman.
Sixteen years later, once again surrounded by high-powered men, she gives the same impression. One would hardly know, were it not for her pallor, that she had undergone a year of intensive treatments for cancer. She had lost her job, but her good friend and neighbor Claude Cherki, who had recently become head of a major publishing firm, the Éditions du Seuil, offered her an editorial position evaluating manuscripts. It was not a full-time job, more like piecework, but it allowed her to keep her hand in.36 Above all, it allowed her to work on her next book, a novel, which Seuil would publish. She herself chose an editor to work with, Patrick Salvain, who was trained in philosophy and psychoanalysis and had been a practicing analyst when he started working at Seuil. When I interviewed him in 2010 he recalled that they had discussed her book very often while she was working on it. Her public persona was that of a highly self-assured woman, he said, but in private, at least with him, she revealed her more “tormented and vulnerable” side. Also, she was now racing against time, for her cancer had returned with a vengeance.37
Un paysage de cendres (A landscape of ashes, translated as Shadows of a Childhood) tells the story of a young child, Léa Lévy, whose parents are deported from Bordeaux in 1942 and who survives the war in a convent school under a false name. In Le Mirador Elisabeth had written the autobiographical fragments about the child in the third person, and in Le Crabe sur la banquette arrière she had sought the objective tone of theatrical dialogue, as if the closer she came to autobiography, the more she found it necessary to create distance. The novel too is written in the objective mode, from a classically omniscient perspective, and it too appears in large measure to be autobiographical. Léa comes from a wealthy, cultivated family of Russian immigrants in Paris and is five years old when her parents disappear. She is lively and highly intelligent, with a strong mind of her own even as a little girl. Baptized and attending only Catholic schools, Léa for a long time does not consider herself Jewish, citing Sartre’s Antisemite and Jew as her guide. But when she is at university, in Paris, she discovers the writings of a Jewish philosophy professor at the Sorbonne, Vladimir Jankélévitch, and she begins to think about a possible new way to be Jewish: neither as a religious practice nor as Zionism but as an “identity freely consented to.” Jankélévitch, born in the same year as Irène Némirovsky (1903), had been fired from his university position in 1940 as a Jew; he had been a supporter of the Popular Front in the 1930s and a member of the Resistance during the war. Aside from his many books on music and on moral philosophy, he wrote widely after the war on issues of Jewish identity and on the Holocaust, and participated in the “Colloquia of French-Speaking Jewish Intellectuals” that met annually in Paris starting in 1957. Elisabeth Gille mentioned her admiration of Jankélévitch in an interview in 1992 and paid him homage in this novel.38 Having her young heroine come under his influence may also have been a way of affirming her own intellectual and political distance from her mother.
Elisabeth put much of herself into Léa Lévy, but the differences between them are important too. Léa is a nightmare version of herself, as if she wanted to explore through this character the most extreme consequences of childhood trauma in orphans of the Holocaust. Brutally separated from her parents at an early age, Léa has no older sibling who remembers them, no nanny who knew them, no personal memories, no documents or other traces of their lives, absolutely nothing to hold onto. Even her beloved doll is thrown into the fire, along with her Parisian clothes, when she arrives at the convent. Her one connection to life is her best friend, Bénédicte, two years older, whose kindly parents bring up Léa with their own daughter after the war. But despite their well-meaning attempt to shield the child from knowledge about Nazi atrocities, Léa becomes obsessed with them. Secretly, before she even turns ten, she collects magazine articles with photographs of mass graves and other horrifying images of Nazi camps and listens to radio broadcasts of the postwar trials, dreaming of vengeance. Later, as an adolescent, she succeeds, by a stratagem that strains the reader’s suspension of disbelief, in gaining entry, over a period of several years, into the courtroom of the military tribunals in Bordeaux where collaborationists are being tried. One day she goes berserk when she realizes that those tribunals are starting to grant very light sentences to defendants whom she thinks of as the murderers of her parents. In fact, by the early 1950s almost all those who had been tried for collaboration were amnestied. Her outburst in the courtroom is like the lancing of an abscess, promising recovery. But at the end of the novel, just as Léa seems to be emerging from the deep, studying in Paris and living with her friend Bénédicte, Gille suddenly kills off Bénédicte in an automobile accident. Deprived of the one person who mattered to her, Léa is literally cut off from the outside world. She shuts herself in her room, scratches her face with her nails and “tears her hair out by the handful,” then curls up into a ball on the floor. She wakes to the sound of knocking on the door but doesn’t answer, covered by a “rain of ashes, which enveloped her in a thick grey shroud that shut out all sound.” Earlier, Bénédicte’s mother had used a similar metaphor: Léa, she feared, was “nothing but scorched earth, a landscape of ashes.”39
Burning and drowning, along with ashes, are recurrent images in literary works by survivors of the Holocaust. “To sink is the easiest of matters,” writes Levi in Survival in Auschwitz; “Burned child seeks the fire” is the title of Cordelia Edvardson’s poetic memoir about persecution and survival; Saul Friedländer, in his memoir about his orphaned childhood, writes, “Those who have descended never completely rise again.”40 Elisabeth Gille obviously knew many of these works and drew on her own experiences as well in creating the portrait of Léa. She herself had succeeded, brilliantly, where her heroine failed (if we take the ending of the novel as an indication of Léa’s future). But in the end she too fell victim, albeit to a different enemy: she was “vanquished by the crab,” as one obituary put it in October 1996.41 She lived long enough to hold a copy of her novel in her hand as she lay in her hospital bed. By the time the first glowing reviews appeared, however, she was not able to read them. Nor was she present to see her book nominated for all the major literary prizes that fall. All three of her books are available now in paperback editions, and Shadows of a Childhood is becoming a classic of autobiographical Holocaust fiction.
Elisabeth Gille died on September 30, 1996. Her death was reported on the eight o’clock news that evening on national television.42 She was buried according to her wishes, in the Jewish section of the Belleville cemetery, next to her grandparents Léon and Fanny Némirovsky.
Next it was Denise’s turn. After moving to Toulouse in the late 1970s she had started to frequent Reform Jewish groups, which in France are called “les libéraux,” and visit schools to talk about the persecution of Jews in France during the war, including her parents and herself. Before Elisabeth died, the two sisters donated what they possessed of their mother’s papers to the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine, thus making them available to researchers. Although the general public was still unaware of Némirovsky’s name, her work had started to be discussed by scholars of modern French literature at home and abroad. Jonathan Weiss, a professor of French literature at Bowdoin College who would publish the first biography of Némirovsky in 2004, contacted Elisabeth shortly before her death and met with her. After she died he met frequently with Denise, who gave him access to her personal archives.43
It was a good time to think about publishing some of the stories Denise had unearthed during her earlier research trips to the library. She had often traveled to Paris during Elisabeth’s final illness and had met many of her sister’s colleagues in the publishing world. In 2000 Jean-Marc Roberts, the head of the Stock publishing firm, who had been one of Elisabeth’s closest friends and had published a heartfelt eulogy in a Sunday paper after her death, brought out twin volumes bound in Stock’s signature dark blue covers: Elisabeth Gille’s Le Mirador, with a new preface by René de Ceccatty and an interview with the author that Ceccatty had published in an Italian newspaper after the book first appeared; and Dimanche, a selection of short stories by Némirovsky, originally published between 1934 and 1941 and never previously collected. The two books were often reviewed together. In fact, it was upon reading Edgar Reichmann’s review of them in Le Monde, in June 2000, that I started to be intrigued by the figure of Irène Némirovsky.
Not long after that, Denise found a small publisher near Toulouse to bring out another selection of her mother’s stories, in a limited edition for which she wrote the preface. Pasted onto the first page was a photograph of Irène and Michel with their daughters, smiling, in the garden of the summer house in Hendaye in August 1939. Denise’s preface is a commentary on this image, in which she sees “the last happy days” of her childhood. Her tone is mournful, her style eloquent: “Memory, which often causes so much pain, is warmed by the remembrance of a childhood filled with the love of a mother and a father who, for me, remain eternally young.” Denise Epstein had a very strong sense of her role as a witness to her parents’ tragic history. Twice in this brief text she expresses her desire to bring her mother back to life, with “her talent and her personality at once tender but often cruel [à la fois tendre, mais souvent cruelle], with her clear-eyed gaze on the world around her.” The importance of memory and testimony, which has dominated public discourse about the Holocaust worldwide in the past half century, had acquired a particular resonance in France during the 1980s and 1990s, when a number of highly publicized trials brought the Vichy period and, most notably, Vichy’s responsibility in the deportation of Jews, back into the limelight. The “duty to remember” (devoir de mémoire) became a slogan that Denise, like many others, adopted with fervor. In her case, the duty to remember was reinforced by the status of her mother, a writer once celebrated but now forgotten. She ended her preface with the hopeful declaration I have excerpted as an epigraph to this chapter: “I am the only one left now who still speaks of them [her parents], but every book of my mother’s that is published brings her back into the world of the living.”44
This book of stories, aptly titled Destinées (Destinies—it’s the title of one of the stories), appeared in April 2004. A few months later Irène Némirovsky returned to the “world of the living” with a bang. Denise had made a new transcription of the manuscript of Suite Française and had spoken about it with Myriam Anissimov, who was visiting Toulouse on a book tour. Anissimov, who had published an interview with Denise and Elisabeth a decade earlier, after Le Mirador appeared, read the typescript and showed it to her publisher at Denoël, Olivier Rubinstein, who took it immediately. Denise had also typed up excerpts from Némirovsky’s wartime writing journal and correspondence, which were added as an appendix. A preface by Anissimov outlining Némirovsky’s brilliant career and tragic end completed the volume, which appeared in bookstores at the end of September 2004. Right from the start the novel garnered excellent reviews in France and a great deal of interest from foreign publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair. But major success came when it was awarded the Renaudot Prize on November 8 that year. A few writers and journalists, pointing out that the literary prizes were awarded in order to “encourage living writers,” criticized the posthumous award, for which there was no precedent. But the general opinion, about the prize as well as the book, was enthusiastic. By the beginning of December Suite Française had sold more than two hundred thousand copies in France, earning a place among the top twenty best sellers of 2004.45 And it had made Denise Epstein, at the age of seventy-five, into a minor literary celebrity. In fact, the main television station, TF 1, had filmed, some time earlier, a long segment devoted to the book for its prime-time Sunday evening news program, which they ran on the night before the prize was announced. The segment focused on Némirovsky and Suite Française, but the starring role was played by her daughter. Denise, dressed in slacks and a turtleneck sweater, is shown in the back seat of a car heading to Issy-l’Évêque. Later, the camera records her joyful reunions in the village with a few people she had known as a child and her tearful visit to the house her family had lived in, now inhabited by a Dutch lady. Later still, we see Denise in her book-lined living room in Toulouse, with pictures of her mother on the wall. Finally, she reads from Suite Française to a packed audience at the local bookstore and fields questions with great poise.46
Thus began a whole new life for Denise Epstein. For the first time she found herself free of financial constraints. After years of living in cramped quarters, she bought a large, airy apartment on the top floor of a modern building. And she “worried over the high taxes she had to pay, after years of not paying any!” her son Nicolas Dauplé told me with a laugh. But characteristically, he added, she did not move into the fancy downtown section of Toulouse, preferring to stay in her old neighborhood near the outskirts, where all the shopkeepers knew her. Over the next eight years she traveled the world as her mother’s representative and occasionally, after the publication of her book of conversations about her life, Survivre et vivre, as an author herself. Already a local celebrity in Toulouse, she was invited as the guest of honor to the ceremony that took place in Issy-l’Évêque in September 2005, when a memorial tablet was placed on the wall of the house where the Epstein family had lived in 1941–1942 and the square in front was renamed Place Irène Némirovsky.47 As Némirovsky’s heir and copyright holder, Denise had the final say over adaptations and other uses of her mother’s work. She attended museum exhibits, literary festivals, and theatrical performances in New York, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Hamburg, Milan, Reykjavik, and other world cities. In 2010 she even made a trip to her mother’s birthplace, Kiev, at the invitation of the Alliance Française and then traveled to another Ukrainian city, Lviv, where The Wine of Solitude had just appeared in a Ukrainian translation. On these trips she was accompanied by various younger friends and representatives of her publisher and occasionally by her daughter Irène. She relied particularly on Olivier Philipponnat, who had become a good friend during the time he was working on his and Patrick Lienhardt’s massive biography of Némirovsky (2007), to which Denise had contributed documents and reminiscences. A few years later he acted as the editor of the two-volume edition of Némirovsky’s complete works.
Philipponnat, like many others I have spoken with, including Denise’s children and grandchildren, remembers her as a woman of extraordinary energy and vitality, with a real talent for friendship. Her granddaughter Léa, who was eleven years old when Suite Française was published, thinks of her as different from the “cookies and hugs kind of grandmother.” Denise was more like a copine, Léa told me, a girlfriend with whom she could talk about books and the world, who told cool stories about her travels and knew “so many things.” If some people who had known Denise years earlier remembered her as a sad woman, that certainly could not be said of her in the last decade of her life. In June 2008, after I first met her, I wrote in my notes, “Denise is a small woman with a youthful air, despite her wrinkled face and her almost 79 years. She dresses casually, smokes a lot, laughs easily, and affirms often that she ‘lives as she likes, not according to conventions or rules,’ and has brought up her children that way too.” Elisabeth’s old friend René de Ceccatty, when I spoke with him in 2010, used the word radiant to describe the impression Denise made on him when they met again after many years. Her son Nicolas described her as transfigured after the success of Suite Française. “It was as if she had been on radio and television all her life,” he said.48
The last time I interviewed Denise, in June 2011, we spent a while talking about Elisabeth’s funeral, but despite the rather solemn subject our conversation was full of laughter. Denise took delight in recounting her efforts to organize a Jewish ceremony, her ignorance of traditional rituals notwithstanding. The requirement of a minyan, a quorum of ten Jews to say the prayers, was news to her, she said. Luckily, the “liberal” rabbi who had been recommended to her was very understanding, even when she told him that Elisabeth had been a convinced atheist. As for herself, Denise said, she hadn’t decided yet how she would be buried, in a casket or an urn, but she had reserved a place for herself next to her sister. She knew that Jewish law forbade cremation, but the liberals had assured her that a Kaddish could be said for her even in an urn.
The following year she was diagnosed with lung cancer, the same illness that had killed her sister. Despite the debilitating chemotherapies, she continued her e-mail correspondence as long as she could, always interested in work about her mother; her last e-mail to me dates from October 2012. Up to the very end, according to Nicolas, she maintained her courage and good humor and her love of life. A favorite photo that Nicolas’s sister Irène sent to friends after Denise’s death shows her sitting on a fall day on a beach in Hendaye, her childhood vacation spot, where her children had taken her as a surprise gift for her eightieth birthday. She is bundled up in a sweater and scarf, with a bottle of champagne at her feet. Her arms are raised in a gesture of victory, and she is smiling.
Denise Epstein died on April 1, 2013, at her home in Toulouse, surrounded by her family. Her ashes are buried in the Belleville cemetery beside Elisabeth and next to an inscription that records the deaths of their parents at Auschwitz.
The publication of Suite Française and everything that followed it affected the lives of all of Némirovsky’s descendants. Aside from the monetary rewards and the occasional notoriety when a new book or film or television or radio program featuring Némirovsky appears, they have suddenly experienced what Némirovsky’s great-granddaughter Léa calls a family heritage. Léa considers Suite Française to have been a “unifying factor” for the family. But she also found it daunting, for “we would have to rise to the occasion [il faudrait être à la hauteur].” This is no small task in a country that values its literary tradition as highly as France does. The heirs of great writers, and even of less-than-great ones, are often kept very busy managing their ancestor’s legacy—not so much in terms of finances as in terms of the specifically French juridical notion of “droit moral,” the moral right of authors to protect their name and their works. Copyrights and the royalties that go with them are limited in time—seventy years after the author’s death is the international standard—but moral right is timeless, according to French law, as long as there is someone to represent the author in that regard. Such a person or persons, most often a direct descendant of the writer, is called an ayant-droit, literally, the “possessor of rights.” The literary executor in U.S. copyright law plays a similar role but not as sweeping. The rights of an ayant-droit are of two kinds: first, as long as copyright is in effect, he or she, or they if more than one direct descendant exists, is entitled to receive royalties on behalf of the author. Royalties for Némirovsky’s works would normally have expired in 2012, but as she is considered to have “died for France” (the irony of that label, in her case, is quite sharp), her works were accorded a thirty-year extension, maintaining royalties until 2042. Second, an ayant-droit possesses the moral right to authorize or refuse to authorize adaptations and other uses of the author’s work, according to her or his judgment of their appropriateness. Not long ago the descendants of the eighteenth-century playwright Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, the author of The Marriage of Figaro among other works, succeeded in preventing the publication of an adaptation they considered harmful to his name.
To complicate things further, the two kinds of rights can be separated: the moral right can be bestowed, by the author or her representative, on someone other than the author’s heirs. While they were alive, Denise Epstein and her sister were Némirovsky’s ayant-droit in both senses, but after Elisabeth’s death her share of royalties went to her children, while Denise continued in her double role. At her death, however, the roles were separated, for Denise assigned the moral right to Némirovsky’s works to her trusted friend Olivier Philipponnat. It is an unpaid responsibility and a heavy one, but one he could not refuse when Denise asked him, Philipponnat told me. Technically speaking, if there were ever a disagreement involving the moral right to one of Némirovsky’s works, he would have the final say. It helps that he is on very good terms with Denise’s children, he added.49 He and Nicolas Dauplé, who has taken on the role of family representative since his mother’s death, discuss all of the decisions and have agreed on everything so far. On his side, Nicolas, who consults on everything with his brother and sister and his two cousins, expresses nothing but admiration for Philipponnat: “They don’t make guys like that anymore,” he said. In 2015 alone they authorized a graphic novel adaptation of the first part of Suite Française, “Storm in June,” which appeared in January, and a television film adaptation of Némirovsky’s novel Deux (1939), a rather resigned portrait of bourgeois marriage, which aired at the end of March. They also followed from afar the making of an English-language feature film based on part 2 of Suite Française, a Franco-British coproduction whose script had been approved by Denise Epstein.50
Némirovsky/Epstein family tree.
Directed by the British director Saul Dibb and featuring Michelle Williams as the young Frenchwoman Lucile, Kristin Scott Thomas as her stern mother-in-law, and Mathias Schoenarts as the soulful German officer who is Lucile’s impossible love, the film opened in Paris and other European cities in April 2015. Némirovsky’s descendants were among those invited to the preopening screening and party a few weeks earlier. (As of April 2016 it had not been released in the United States.) The film is a well-done reconstruction of the period, costumes and all, with gorgeous photography of the French countryside and plenty of dramatic incidents. But it lacks the presence of the novel’s narrator, whose “pitiless gaze” and occasionally sardonic tone contribute to the reader’s sense, which I have called uncanny, that this work is both of its time and of ours. The one place we get that sense, and it is the film’s most moving moment, is in the final credits, which roll over an image of the manuscript in Némirovsky’s tiny handwriting, followed by the dedication of the film to Denise Epstein.51
The critical reception was mixed, in France and elsewhere, but the film did quite well at the box office. More to the point, Nicolas Dauplé was asked to attend several public screenings and to answer questions afterward. He talked about Némirovsky and about the importance of remembering what happened during the war. He admits freely that he became interested in all this relatively recently, especially since his mother’s death. Now that Denise is no longer here, he feels it is up to him to represent the family and help preserve the memory of his grandmother.
Nicolas, who is a gym teacher at a lycée near Grenoble and has become a local celebrity of late, is a friendly, athletic-looking man nearing retirement age. He was an ace volleyball player in his youth, he told me, and still plays on a team every week. He takes pride in his good relations with his young students and has written some short stories for adolescents, having started by inventing fairy-tales for his daughter Léa when she was a baby. Léa herself wants to be a journalist and has already published many articles in the regional newspaper, Le Dauphiné Libéré, he said, showing me the clippings, carefully preserved in a special folder. Léa is the only child of Nicolas and his wife, Julie, and they obviously dote on her. A few days later I met her in Paris, where she was completing an internship for the weekly news magazine L’Express. She had just finished her next to last year at “Sciences Po,” the prestigious School of Social Sciences in Grenoble, where she studied modern European history with an emphasis on the Second World War, among other subjects. She was getting ready to spend the summer in New York, having obtained an internship with a French-language online newspaper that would allow her to come up with ideas for stories and write them. I had a chance later to read some of her articles: this young woman knows how to turn a phrase.52 Léa had applied for her internships without referring to her illustrious great-grandmother, for despite her pride in the family heritage she wants to succeed on her own merits. In June 2015 she was admitted to the highly competitive school of journalism the Ecole Supérieure du Journalisme, in Lille.
Denise Epstein had told me that she had raised her children to be independent spirits. By all indications she succeeded, helped no doubt by the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. During the years when her children were coming of age, experimentation and freedom from social conventions became a way of life for many young people. Nicolas Dauplé jokes that he is Denise’s most conventional child, having been interested mainly in volleyball and girls as a teenager, then attending university and becoming a teacher. Denise’s older son, Emmanuel, devoted himself to far-left politics throughout his teenage years. He remembers with great pride the time he and his group broke up a meeting of the extreme-right-wing Ordre Nouveau, a precursor to the Front National, in 1973. He worked for years as a computer programmer and a consultant to industrial firms, until he became “too old for the tech industry” (he was around forty). He never learned any of his skills in school but taught himself, he told me. After the tech jobs, he moved to Toulouse and started a construction business, once again learning on the job. When I met him, in June 2013, he had just come from work and was dressed in dust-covered jeans and a T-shirt, sporting a gray ponytail. Soon he would be retiring, he said. He has read Némirovsky’s novels, but she is not his kind of writer. His favorite author is Emile Zola, whose series of novels about late nineteenth-century French society and politics, the Rougon-Macquart, he has read several times. During our conversation he laughed often, although not in a particularly lighthearted way, and we talked for a while about the meaning of such laughter. His mother laughed a lot too, he said: “It’s a way of hiding your despair.”53 Emmanuel is the father of two grown children, Benjamin and Sara, who live in Paris.
Denise Epstein’s youngest child, Irène, has led a similarly varied life. She left home right after obtaining her baccalauréat at the age of eighteen and lived for several years in an agricultural region in the southwest, near Perpignan, where she could do seasonal work and relax or travel during the off months. Her daughter Juliette, who is a member of a modern dance troupe in Montreal, was born around that time (in 1982). Juliette visits her family in Toulouse regularly, and I interviewed her with her mother in June 2011. Juliette knows her mother’s story well—she referred to those years near Perpignan as her “hippy period, Baba cool, and all that.” Eventually, Irène moved to Toulouse and enrolled in university, earning a degree in Russian, which she had studied in high school. But after several years of study she still couldn’t speak the language with sufficient ease, so she packed up Juliette and the two of them went off to Orenburg, in the Urals, to spend a few weeks with a Russian couple she had become friends with in Toulouse. It was the time of perestroika, and everything was opening up in the former Soviet Union, Irène recalled. Her immersion in the language having proved successful, she returned to Toulouse and worked for several years in the aerospace industry as a translator and interpreter from Russian—the MIR space station project had an outpost in Toulouse. But when the United States joined the project and interpreters had to be proficient in English as well, she gave it up and started to work seasonally again, as a stage manager for a summer theater troupe. Recently, she and some friends opened a summer dance hall and music venue (she calls it a guinguette, evoking the nineteenth-century vie de bohème) on the outskirts of Toulouse, where she is in charge of programming. Money has never been very important to her, she told me. She has simple tastes, loves to move around, and has always preferred to work at something she enjoyed.
Irène Dauplé and her daughters—her younger daughter Nina was born in Toulouse in 1992—are all avid readers and have read many of Némirovsky’s works, sometimes more than once. Irène recalls reading them for the first time as a teenager, in the original editions her mother had at their house. When I interviewed them, she and Juliette both spoke admiringly about Némirovsky’s keen understanding of human nature. “I find it astonishing how, despite her very protected and strict upbringing, she still had such a profound sense of life, of what human beings are, with all their good and bad qualities,” Irène said. “A sense of human misery,” Juliette added.54 As for Nina, she was still in elementary school when Suite Française was published, but she read it and became very interested in her great-grandmother’s story, so Irène gave her a copy of Le Mirador (this was before any biography had appeared). Nina, whom I interviewed in 2016, told me that her good friends know the story as well, and she is proud to be a part of it.55
All of Denise’s children and grandchildren with whom I have spoken express affection for the family, although they don’t see each other very often. “We don’t have that strong ‘family feeling,’ said Juliette, and her sister Nina said it more recently as well. Their cousin Benjamin, Emmanuel’s son, whom I interviewed in June 2015, agreed. “We lead our individual lives,” he said. Their younger cousin Léa, who considers Suite Française a unifying factor in the family, noted that it was mostly Denise who brought them together. But she and Nina are quite close, born only a year apart, and by a happy coincidence they were both at university in Lille for a few months in 2015 and 2016, Léa studying journalism and Nina earning a degree in teaching French as a second language. Like her mother and her sister, Nina likes to travel, and when I met her she was about to leave for Berlin as part of her degree work. It’s wondrous to see how a heritage of “foreignness,” which was a weight to bear for Némirovsky and her generation, can be transformed into a light-footed wanderlust. Being a native-born young French woman with a valid passport helps.
Denise’s children grew up quite separately from Elisabeth’s, and they don’t see each other often. Elisabeth’s daughter Marianne, born in 1973, is considerably younger than her first cousins. Marianne’s brother Fabrice, closer to the cousins in age, is in regular contact with them, but he has lived in the United States for many years. Still, all of Némirovsky’s descendants have read Suite Française and at least one or two of her earlier works, David Golder and Le Bal being the most popular. Even those who don’t consider themselves avid readers feel an obligation to have at least some familiarity with their great-grandmother’s writings and with her story. Elisabeth Gille’s children have the added heritage of their own mother’s books, which some of their cousins have also read. And whether consciously or not, at least a few of Némirovsky’s descendants seem to be following in the footsteps of their ancestor. Nicolas Dauplé writes fiction, and his daughter Léa is on her way to becoming a successful journalist; on Elisabeth’s side, Marianne has translated, under her married name, Marianne Féraud, more than a dozen books by British and American writers. She considers her mother to have been the more serious translator, while she does pop genres like romance and fantasy, but there is clearly a lineage there. Marianne’s son Alexandre, who was around ten years old when I met him with his mother in 2010, is interested in history, he told me. He knew that his grandmother and his great-aunt had lost their parents during the war and were left alone, but he didn’t know the name of Irène Némirovsky or anything about her, at least not yet. Marianne said she would tell him and his little sister Manon about “all that” when they were older.56
Is Jewish identification part of the heritage? After speaking with so many members of the family, my sense is that the answer, as is so often true with regard to Jews in France, is yes and no. Largely no, if by identification one means a sense of personal belonging to a group or community, and definitely no, if one has in mind some form of religious practice or knowledge about Jewish rites and traditions. Every one of Némirovsky’s descendants, as far as I can tell, including those who went to church as children, is today resolutely secular (laïque, in the lingo), if not downright hostile to organized religion. In this they resemble many other French people, indeed, people all over Western Europe. As survey after survey shows, church attendance and religious practice are way down and decreasing every year. A survey published by Le Monde des religions in January 2007 concerning France showed that only 51 percent of respondents identified themselves as Catholic, down from 80 percent in the early 1990s—this in a country that was historically known as the “oldest daughter of the Church.” Only half of that half said they believed in God, and the number of practicing Catholics is much smaller, estimated at 3 percent of the population in 2014.57 Among minority religions in France, which include Protestants, Jews number around five hundred thousand, representing less than 1 percent of the population, and practicing Jews are a small minority among them. Muslims, whether practicing or not, hover around 10 percent.
Némirovsky’s grandchildren did not baptize their children, but neither did they marry Jews, if they married at all. If some of their children—Léa, Benjamin, Sara—have Jewish-sounding names, it is by coincidence, they say. But there is at least one way that many of them reply yes when asked whether they feel Jewish: it concerns antisemitism. Part of the heritage they discovered after the publication of Suite Française, if they were not fully aware of it before, was what it means to be “of Jewish origin,” as the euphemism goes. It may not seem like much, but it makes a difference. “If I hear an antisemitic remark around the table, I say I’m Jewish,” Irène Dauplé says. Her daughter Juliette feels the same way: “I never introduce myself to people by saying ‘I’m Jewish,’ because I practice no religion, I’m completely agnostic. But if I hear people talking about Jews or making antisemitic remarks, my hair stands on end. And I go on the attack!” It’s a matter of history, they both say—if nothing else, Jewishness is a heritage. It is not necessarily a happy one. When I asked Nicolas Dauplé what it meant to him, he replied, “I feel sufficiently Jewish to know that one day somebody could beat me up or call me a ‘dirty Jew.’ ” And what would he do in that case, I asked him. “I would say to myself, ‘So, it has finally happened,’ ” he replied. His nephew Benjamin, who is an elementary school teacher in a northern suburb of Paris where 80 percent of his pupils are Muslims from poor immigrant families, has a somewhat different view. He is against all racism and discrimination, he says, and tries to communicate that to his students, without necessarily singling out racism against Jews. His school is not far from the former camp of Drancy, where Jews were imprisoned during the war before being deported. There is a memorial and museum there now, and he takes his ten- and eleven-year-old students on class visits. The Shoah, in his view, was a horror not because it murdered Jews but because it tried to destroy a whole people.
Benjamin Dauplé is a highly articulate, thoughtful man who studied sociology at university and decided to become a teacher because he wanted to contribute to society. He is firmly against all forms of religion and would no more consider himself Jewish than any other denomination. Above all, he says, he is an advocate of individual freedom. At the same time, he recognizes that this position is possible because he lives in France, in a generally peaceful time. What would happen, he wonders, if one day he had to “choose sides,” if there were an armed conflict between Muslims and Jews in his suburb, for example? That would be a real problem, but, luckily, it is not one he has to confront now or in the near future, he said.58 This was in June 2015, six months after the terrorist attacks of January 2015 in Paris that had targeted journalists at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and, a day later, Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket.
That Jewishness in modern times may be nothing more—but nothing less—than a heritage, for better or worse, is not a new idea or a new feeling. It has been the starting point of countless works of existential questioning by Jewish writers and philosophers, both before and after the Holocaust. In 1930 the novelist Albert Cohen, the son of Jewish immigrants to France from Corfu, created his larger-than-life hero Solal, a Cephalonian Jew who achieves brilliant success in French society. Dashing, handsome, and fablelike in his intelligence and talent, Solal becomes a newspaper editor in Paris and a government minister by the time he is twenty-five years old (this is not a realist novel!), marries a beautiful young Catholic noblewoman who adores him, and seemingly leaves all Jewishness behind. In a paroxysmal moment he repudiates his own father, a rabbi, at a public reception. But in the end we discover he has made amends, harboring a whole village of Jews from all over the world, most of them his relatives, also named Solal, in the basement of his chateau, where he visits them in secret every night. He is so tormented by the incongruities in his life that he ends up committing suicide; but true to the fable mode, he is resuscitated in the final chapter. Solal was a character, or at least a name, that haunted Cohen, returning in different incarnations in two more of his novels, including the international best seller Belle du seigneur, which appeared in 1964, when the author was in his seventies.
One cannot get rid of Jewishness, even if one tries. A similar conclusion, as we have seen, was reached by Némirovsky in her novels featuring Jewish protagonists. Némirovsky and Cohen were very different writers, and different too in their identification with Jewishness; Cohen even edited a short-lived Jewish literary journal in Paris, La Revue Juive, during the 1920s.59 But in their novels about Jews both of them emphasized the contradictions and dilemmas, the sorrows as well as the satisfactions of Jewish existence in the modern world.
For many individuals, in life as in fiction, Jewishness is a bitter heritage and even a mere “Jewish origin” is a burden, especially in hard times. “In times of persecution, there is probably not a single Jew . . . who has not blamed the heavens for his Jewishness,” wrote the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut in 1980, in his reflections on what it meant to him to be a Jew in France after the Holocaust.60 But that is only one side of the existential puzzle. On the other side, simultaneously, is a possibility that Finkielkraut also recognized: Jewishness as a positive link to something larger than one’s individual self, a mode of transcendence. This may not be much, which is why Finkielkraut called himself and others of his generation “imaginary Jews,” who have neither a personal experience of suffering, as their parents do, nor any genuine knowledge of Jewish history or Jewish practice. The son of Polish Holocaust survivors, Finkielkraut emphasizes that he himself was born “after.” But being an “imaginary Jew” is not nothing, and it may be enough to awaken a feeling of solidarity in times of crisis. Finkielkraut is proud of his name, which marks him as an East European Jew. Even without being thus marked, Irène Dauplé and her daughter Juliette affirm their Jewishness when they hear antisemitic remarks made in their presence, and Nicolas Dauplé wrote to me, after the latest incident of anti-Jewish terror in France in January 2015, “I believe that my family’s past and my Jewish origins have forever prepared me for the folly of humans.”61
Over the past decade and a half, the “folly of humans” in its specifically anti-Jewish form has manifested itself in Europe, especially in France, with increasing frequency and violence, prompting anguished, often heated discussions among Jews and non-Jews alike. This is not the place to rehearse the full list of attacks against Jews that have created shock waves, from the kidnapping and murder of Ilan Halimi in Paris in 2006 to the murder of Jewish schoolchildren and a teacher in a religious school in Toulouse in 2012 to the murder of Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris following the bombing of the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. Religious Jews, who constitute a visible target, have been the most affected. Guards and heavily protected entrances have been the rule in most synagogues and other Jewish institutions for years now, including the Mémorial de la Shoah in the center of Paris, and after January 2015 they were reinforced by armed troopers in military garb. Threats and attacks against businesses owned by Jews as well as antisemitic incidents in some public schools, which have occurred at intervals for several decades, have also multiplied in recent years. And for the first time since the 1930s, cries of “Death to the Jews” and “Jews, France is not for you” have been heard on the streets of Paris. In a mass antigovernment demonstration in January 2014 dubbed Day of Wrath by its organizers, far-right Catholic groups—the so-called identitaires, who rail against gay marriage, “gender theory,” and other social phenomena they blame for France’s supposed decline, attributing them largely to Jewish influence—marched side by side, shouting antisemitic slogans, with militant Islamists from the ghettoized suburbs, who identify all Jews with the state of Israel and its current policies. Joining them were various left-wing groups that define themselves as “anti-Zionist but not antisemitic,” some of whose members have long associations with Holocaust denial. Six months later, in July 2014, mass demonstrations against the Israeli incursion in Gaza featured many of the same participants and produced similar slogans.
The historian and political scientist Pierre Birnbaum, whose many books on Jews in France make him an authority on the subject, is in agreement with the noted specialist on contemporary Islam Gilles Kepel in calling this a totally new alliance between partners who otherwise have nothing in common. Birnbaum sees in this alliance “a new antisemitic moment” that both recalls and reconfigures earlier such moments during the Dreyfus Affair and the Vichy years. Pierre-André Taguieff, the author of many books on racism and antisemitism, does not fully share this assessment. According to him, the “new Judeophobia” of the twenty-first century, founded mainly on religious and ideological grounds, cannot be compared to the old, racial antisemitism that predominated during the Dreyfus Affair and Vichy. This seems like too fine a point, however, for it’s not always possible to distinguish “racial” from “ideological” antisemitism: the old and the new can coexist quite comfortably in that domain. Thus the far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen (though not his daughter Marine, who currently heads the Front National and is seeking political legitimacy for the party), whose brand of antisemitism is of the old, racial variety, has no trouble marching with the “anticapitalist” and “anti-Zionist” ideologue Alain Soral, who blames all of France’s current problems on what he calls the empire of worldwide Jewish dominance. They are united in their espousal of Holocaust denial, among other convictions they share with some radical Islamists, and they are all united in their support of the militantly antisemitic comedian Dieudonné, who was among the first to defend the terrorists of January 2015.62 He was arrested, and his performances were forbidden by the French government as a result.
All this is cause for worry, though perhaps it was eclipsed by the terrorist attacks of November 2015 that targeted not just Jews and journalists the murderers considered offensive, but all Parisians at random. Jewish emigration from France, mostly to Israel, increased dramatically between 2012 and 2014 and continued to do so in 2015. In September 2014 the liberal daily Libération published a special section on the theme “Are the Jews Leaving France?” in which they quoted some well-known, fully integrated secular Jewish intellectuals who said that for the first time they had felt scared when they heard the marchers earlier that year shouting slogans from the 1930s. In the United States, alarm bells have been rung: the journalist Jeffrey Goldberg published a long article in the Atlantic in March 2015 with a title whose question is merely rhetorical: “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?”
In fact, most Jews in France are staying put. The writer Diana Pinto, who identifies herself as a “daughter of Italian Jews who lives in Paris,” responded specifically to Goldberg’s article in her own long piece in the New Republic: “I’m a European Jew—and No, I’m Not Leaving.” Robert Zaretsky, an American intellectual historian who is a frequent commentator on developments in France, concluded, after interviewing a number of French Jewish leaders and scholars as well as journalists in May 2015, that their concern is “not about leaving France. [Their] question is how to stay.”63 Birnbaum and others stress that, despite the identical slogans one may hear on the street, there is an enormous difference between the current situation and the one in the thirties, let alone the war years. Today, the French government is not party to antisemitic agitation. On the contrary, Prime Minister Manuel Valls declared very soon after the murders of January 2015, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel had invited French Jews to emigrate to Israel, that “France without the Jews of France is not France.” He repeated the message in January 2016 at a ceremony commemorating the anniversary of the event.64
I end this book in the fervent hope that history will not repeat itself, for Jews or any other vulnerable minority. And that Némirovsky’s descendants, along with all the many other kinds of Jews in France—from those who consider themselves merely of distant “Jewish origin” to orthodox observers of all 613 Jewish laws, or mitsvot—will be able to continue asking themselves, and each other, the endless questions that have characterized Jewish existence for centuries.