FALL IS THE SEASON for the big literary prizes in France. Winning one guarantees an author visibility and sales, sometimes even best-seller status. On a November afternoon in 2004 Denise Epstein-Dauplé had just turned on the radio in her kitchen when she heard the announcement: the Renaudot Prize, one of the top fiction prizes, had been awarded to Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. Denise, who would be turning seventy-five the next day, sat down, feeling dizzy.1 Irène Némirovsky was her mother, whom she had last seen more than sixty years earlier. Arrested by French police on July 13, 1942, in the village where the family had taken refuge at the outbreak of the Second World War, Irène was sent to the camp at Pithiviers where Jews were being assembled for deportation. Two days later she was put on a transport to Auschwitz, where she died a month after her arrival.
And now this prize. No such prize had ever been awarded to a dead author, let alone for a book written half a century earlier. Suite Française was the novel Némirovsky had been working on when she was arrested. Unfinished, it had never been published, but the manuscript had survived in a suitcase of papers and photographs, the only inheritance her daughters could claim of her. Among the papers in the suitcase was a notebook filled with Némirovsky’s cramped handwriting, which they could not bear to read for years—they thought it was her diary. Sometime in the 1970s, Denise told me when I first met her in 2008, she finally read it and, realizing that it was an unpublished novel, spent months transcribing and typing up the manuscript.2 She and her younger sister, Elisabeth, thought about showing it to a publisher—after all, their mother had been a well-known, much-lauded novelist before the war. But Elisabeth, who was making a career as a translator and a rising young editor in Paris, worried that the novel was unfinished and not quite good enough to publish: Némirovsky had written it quickly and had had no chance to revise or polish it.
Denise did not insist. It was not until many years later, after Elisabeth herself had died, that Denise went back to her earlier typescript, retyped it on her computer, and showed the text to an acquaintance, the writer Myriam Anissimov, who had published well-regarded biographies of Primo Levi and Romain Gary. Anissimov read it, loved it, and showed it to her editor, Olivier Rubinstein, who was editor in chief of the Denoël publishing firm. He called Denise immediately. Within a year Rubinstein had published the novel, with a preface by Anissimov and an appendix containing excerpts from Némirovsky’s wartime journal and correspondence, which told the tragic story of her final years in Nazi-occupied France. Born in Kiev in 1903, Némirovsky had been living in France since she was a teenager and wrote all her works in French but had never obtained French citizenship. Under the Vichy regime she was classified as a foreign Jew, the most vulnerable kind of foreigner (and of Jew) at the time. Her husband, Michel Epstein, also an immigrant from Russia, suffered the same fate as Irène: arrested in October 1942, he was sent to the camp at Drancy on the outskirts of Paris and deported a few weeks later. Michel’s younger brother Paul, his older sister Sophie, and his older brother Samuel and Samuel’s wife were also deported from Drancy that year. None of them returned.
In a way the prize awarded to Némirovsky posthumously was also her daughter’s, since without Denise Epstein’s efforts the book would never have seen the light of day. I had the privilege of interviewing her several times before her death in April 2013 at the age of eighty-three. A devoted and much-loved mother and grandmother as well as something of a celebrity in her own right in the last decade of her life, Denise Epstein would still choke up on occasion when speaking about her parents. She was twelve years old when they disappeared from her life, and it was palpable that she never fully got over her loss. When she spoke about Némirovsky, whether in published interviews or in private conversation, she usually referred to her as Maman.
Was the awarding of the Renaudot Prize a compensatory gesture, a way to assuage France’s continuing feelings of guilt about its wartime collaboration in the Nazi persecution of Jews? Or was Suite Française a brilliant novel miraculously saved from oblivion, the work of an important novelist whose untimely death put an end to what would have been a major postwar career and who now had a chance to become known again—to be reborn? Plausibly, both of those claims are true. The shameful treatment of Jews by the Vichy regime is still a sore point in France, which prides itself on being the homeland of the first Declaration of Human Rights (in 1789) as well as the first country in Europe to grant full citizenship to Jews (in 1791). And if the victim of persecution was a well-known writer in a country that still venerates its writers, the shame is redoubled. But Suite Française is a brilliant novel, well deserving of the honor it received, and it would not have become an international best seller, translated into dozens of languages, if it had not touched a deep chord in readers.
Suite Française was written in the last two years of Némirovsky’s life, alongside dozens of short stories and three other books. She wrote during those final years as if the devil were at her heels or as if she knew she had very little time left. For today’s reader this novel has the strange quality of a letter found in a bottle washed up on the seashore. Written almost simultaneously with the events it recounts, it tells a story of France under the first year of German occupation. Part 1, titled “Storm in June,” is a tour de force, a description from multiple perspectives of what the French call the exode, the exodus of June 1940, when tens of thousands of civilians from Paris and the north took to the road in cars, on bicycles, on foot, carrying as much as they could of their household belongings, fleeing from the advancing Germans. Surprisingly few novelists have tried to describe the days of terror and confusion that followed the German invasion, before Marshal Philippe Pétain signed the armistice that initiated four years of German occupation with the collaboration of the French government at Vichy. Némirovsky tells this story by following the movements of a dozen or so characters from various walks of life, people who find themselves on the road as refugees. Her observations and insights are often stunning, delivered in a coolly objective or ironic tone. She is pitiless in relating the “hardships” suffered by some members of the privileged classes as they make their way in chauffeur-driven cars to country houses and luxury hotels; and she shows them back in Paris very soon after the armistice, ready to resume life as usual, even if it means accommodating themselves to the German occupants. The only characters for whom the author shows sympathy are a couple of poor but honest bank employees, the Michauds, who married for love many years earlier and whose only son is in the army. He is seriously wounded but he survives, and Némirovsky had grand plans for him, imagining him as a leader of the Resistance in subsequent volumes she did not live to write.
The novel’s second part, “Dolce,” set in a village during the first year of the Occupation, focuses on a much smaller cast of characters. Here Némirovsky’s insights are even more impressive than in the exode chapters. She seems to have understood right away what would be among the most painful questions for ordinary French people during the years of occupation: How to behave with the enemy? How to behave with one’s neighbors if they collaborated or, on the contrary, if they resisted? Némirovsky spent more than two years with her husband and daughters in an occupied village in Burgundy before being arrested, so she based the story on personal observation. She shows the gamut of human interactions that inevitably occur between the occupiers and the occupied, ranging from seething hatred to tender but impossible love. Describing the arrival of young, good-looking German soldiers in a town emptied of its able-bodied men, she writes, “The mothers of prisoners or soldiers killed in the war looked at them and begged God to curse them, but the young women just looked at them.”3 Although Némirovsky planned several more volumes (waiting to see what history would bring, she wrote in her journal), the novel in its current form does have an ending: the German soldiers in the village are ordered to depart “toward the East” on the day after Hitler’s declaration of war on the Soviet Union, in June 1941.
It is strange to read this novel today, when we have the advantage of historical hindsight. Leo Tolstoy, one of Némirovsky’s literary heroes, wrote War and Peace half a century after the events he recounts in fictional form. Némirovsky wrote her war novel when the war had just begun—and what makes it strange, almost uncanny, is that she writes about her present as if it were history. In other words, she looks at the life around her as if she were observing it from far away. Hers is the gaze of an outsider, one who knows the scene well but is not fully part of it and can therefore see it all the more clearly. Readers often ask why there are no Jews among the many French people Némirovsky depicts in this novel, on the road or in the occupied village, whose collective existence she details. Some see it as a sign of her troubled relation to Jewishness, which made her neglect—or refuse—to include Jews in her epic portrayal. But there is a Jew in this novel, and an omnipresent one at that, even though she is never named or otherwise identified. It is the narrator, whose steady gaze and judgment inform everything we are given to see. The narrator is the one who remarks on how appreciatively the young French women look at the German soldiers—she does not condemn them for it, but she takes note. Elsewhere, her observations are so cruelly precise that no explicit judgment is needed. The wealthy porcelain collector Charlie Langelet, for example, gets run over by a car after returning to Paris, having siphoned out the precious fuel from the gas tank of a young couple he tricked into befriending him on the road. The narrator observes at Charlie’s death, “The car’s fender had shattered his skull. Blood and brains spattered with such force that a few drops landed on the woman who was driving.” There is no need to tell us that the loathsome Charlie gets what he deserves. While the narrator mostly lets readers draw their own conclusions (Némirovsky was an admirer of Gustave Flaubert, famous for his objectivity), she does occasionally express an ironic put-down of a character she dislikes. Thus the wife of the local aristocrat writes a patriotic article in the newspaper exhorting farmers to donate all their grain to “le Maréchal” (Pétain) instead of feeding it to their hens. But the narrator remarks that the lady “naturally” excluded her own farmyard from that injunction, “for she was very fond of her hens.”
If Suite Française brought Némirovsky back from the dead, a first resuscitation had already been achieved a dozen years earlier, when Némirovsky’s younger daughter, Elisabeth Gille, published a book about her mother titled Le Mirador. When Le Mirador came out in 1992 Gille was a senior editor at a major publishing house and had translated more than fifty books by well-known American and British writers. Unlike Denise, Elisabeth had very few personal memories of her parents, as she was only five years old when they were arrested. However, as a successful Parisian editor and translator, she had a professional as well as a personal interest in her mother’s life and career. Le Mirador was Elisabeth Gille’s first book, and it garnered many positive reviews. She was invited to participate in radio and television programs about the “once well known writer Irène Némirovsky.”4 A woman of great poise and authority used to speaking about and with intellectuals, Elisabeth in these interviews always referred to her mother by name, not as Maman. Her stance was more that of a dispassionate analyst than of a bereaved daughter; one did not have to dig very far, however, to realize that her involvement with Némirovsky was a deeply personal one.
Like a number of her colleagues in French publishing, Elisabeth had grown up as an assimilated Jew who never thought much about questions of Jewish identity. Her former colleagues don’t recall her ever talking about it, despite the horrible loss she had suffered as a Jewish child during the war.5 But starting in the late 1970s she became preoccupied with her own and her family’s wartime history. This personal evolution coincided with the growing public memory of Jewish persecution under Vichy, which had been gaining momentum in France since the publication of Robert Paxton’s groundbreaking book Vichy France, in 1972, and its translation into French the next year. Paxton’s book, together with Marcel Ophuls’s film The Sorrow and the Pity, released in 1971, inaugurated what the historian Henry Rousso has called the period of obsession in France with the memory of Vichy, which continues to this day. The publication, in 1978, of Serge Klarsfeld’s monumental Memorial of the Deportation of Jews from France, which lists the date of every transport that left France “for the East” between 1941 and 1944, along with the names of all the deportees in each, allowed many French Jews who had survived the war to find out for the first time exactly when their loved ones had been deported. In the following decade the claims of “Jewish memory” became ever more pressing, even as renewed antisemitism and Holocaust denial flourished. The extradition of the former Nazi Klaus Barbie to France in 1983 and the four-year-long preparation of his trial kept the fate of the Jews under Vichy in the news.6
When Elisabeth decided to write about her mother she had all this in mind. But she was also aware that she would have to confront a problem: although Irène Némirovsky had died as a victim of the Holocaust, a persecuted Jew, her relation to Jews and Jewishness during her lifetime was fraught with ambivalence and self-contradiction. David Golder (1929), the novel about a Jewish financier that made Némirovsky famous at the age of twenty-six, was called antisemitic by some Jewish readers at the time (and later as well) because of the harsh way it portrayed its protagonist and other Jewish characters. Elisabeth herself was dismayed by what she called her mother’s obliviousness (inconscience) to the growing dangers facing Jews, especially poor Jews who did not have access to the comforts she herself enjoyed as a successful writer during the 1930s. “She lived in a privileged world without understanding what was happening around her,” Elisabeth told an interviewer in 1992.7 The challenge for Elisabeth was to write a book about her mother that would be sympathetic, without overlooking the problem or pretending it didn’t exist. If she was going to bring Némirovsky and her story back to life, she would, in a sense, have to reinvent her.
Le Mirador is in fact a reinvention. Elisabeth Gille called it “dreamed memoirs,” her imagined sense of what her mother might have written in an autobiography. Like Gertrude Stein writing the “autobiography” of her lifelong partner, Alice, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Elisabeth projected herself into her mother’s mind and voice. And the way she solved the problem of Némirovsky’s “obliviousness” was by having Irène tell her story at two moments widely separated in time, 1929 and 1942. In Elisabeth’s version, if Irène was oblivious to her own and other Jews’ precarious status when she wrote about her childhood and youth, she had become painfully aware of it by the time she told the rest of her story. Introducing yet another layer in time and consciousness, Elisabeth inserted one-page reminiscences of her own between the chapters about her mother, and by an interesting turnabout she wrote these autobiographical fragments about “l’enfant” (the child) in the third person. A few years later she made a similar choice in her novel Un »paysage de cendres (Shadows of a Childhood), which tells the bleak story of a young Jewish orphan girl during the war and in the years following. The book received rave reviews, but unfortunately Elisabeth Gille never lived to see them. She died of lung cancer in September 1996, the day before her novel appeared in bookstores.
It was through Gille’s Le Mirador that I first became acquainted with Irène Némirovsky. I was writing a book at the time which had a long chapter on child survivors of the Holocaust who later became outstanding writers, and I had read Gille’s novel about her childhood. After that I read her “dreamed memoirs” about her mother, whose story I found fascinating. But when I followed up by borrowing David Golder from Widener Library at Harvard (the original edition of 1929, its pages faded and brittle; most of Némirovsky’s books had long been out of print), I found the book disappointing. The writing was good, I thought, but conventional, and the story it told was conventional too. What did I care about the last days of a self-made Jewish businessman who has troubles with his unloving wife and his frivolous daughter? Truth to tell, I did not even finish the book.
But that was before Suite Française. I read that novel soon after it appeared and felt deeply moved by it, not only because of the author’s tragic backstory detailed in the appendix but also because of the message-in-a-bottle quality of the work itself. As a professor of French literature with a long-standing interest in Vichy France, I was astounded by how sharp and accurate Némirovsky’s understanding of that first year of German occupation was and by her ironic yet often sympathetic view of the French people whose lives she observed. Just as I was telling myself that I had perhaps been too hasty in my dismissal of her earlier work, her former French publishers started reissuing all her novels. I read them and, somewhat to my surprise, became a fan. I still considered her writing style to be conventional, typical of so-called quality writing by establishment authors of the 1930s. Personally, I was more interested in the avant-garde. Many of her plots were repetitive, chiefly stories about unhappy families, each one different in its own way, as Tolstoy said. Most of the characters were recognizable bourgeois types, stereotypes even: philandering or indifferent husbands, faithless or long-suffering wives, femmes fatales worried about growing old, children who dislike their parents or even hate them, together with venal politicians and greedy businessmen—all well-known figures to any reader of French realist fiction. A few of her works were set in Russia, while several others featured Russian immigrants in France. A number of them had Jewish protagonists, always portrayed as outsiders, out of place in their surroundings in one way or another. One novel, Les Biens de ce monde (All Our Worldly Goods), uncharacteristic in its portrayal of a happy marriage rather than a miserable or merely resigned one, features a French couple who marry for love and remain devoted to each other as they face the hardships of the First World War and other crises, right up to the Second World War.
While the focus is always on individual lives, History with its collective catastrophes, whether war, revolution, a pogrom, or a stock market crash, is never far away, ever ready to assert its heavy hand. Sometimes a fleeting allusion is all it takes to evoke a whole collective history. In one of Némirovsky’s very first published works, a novella about a Jewish boy poet from a dirt-poor family living in a Russian city that sounds like Odessa, the narrator tells us that the boy’s grandfather had once been “a usurer and rich,” until his house was burned down in a pogrom on Easter Sunday after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. This detail is totally superfluous to the plot, but it’s a touch that introduces a collective dimension into the family story, and it serves as well to alleviate the unflattering description of the grandfather as a usurer.8
Such touches are among the things that make Némirovsky’s prose, and gaze, compelling even when she indulges in commonplace stereotypes. French has a lovely adjective to describe someone you find endearing or admirable despite their flaws: attachant, literally, someone to whom you get attached. To me and to many other readers I have met since I began working on Némirovsky, she is une écrivaine attachante, an “attaching writer,” not only despite her flaws but also in some curious way because of them. If I notice her using a cliché, I slide over it, the way one overlooks a dear friend’s occasional or even more than occasional lapses of taste; if I wince at some of her descriptions of Jewish characters, I excuse them as being of her time, not ours, and find other descriptions of Jewish existence that strike me as extraordinarily clear-sighted and true.
When the English translation of Suite Française was published in 2006, it garnered generally glowing reviews in England and the United States. Some reviewers called it a noble effort but not quite attaining greatness, while others found it brilliant, dazzling, and incomparable. All of them mentioned Némirovsky’s personal story with great sympathy; a few in the United States remarked on the fact that Némirovsky did not include any Jewish characters among her large cast but did not condemn her for it. The book, in hardback and paperback editions, appeared for more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list. Suite Française was soon followed by translations of other works by Némirovsky, including David Golder, which appeared in 2007 in a volume with three other short works, accompanied by a thoughtful preface by the American novelist Claire Messud.9
Meanwhile, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York was preparing, in collaboration with the French archive that houses Némirovsky’s papers, to mount a major exhibition devoted to her. The exhibit opened in the fall of 2008, with many luminaries in attendance, including the author of the best-known Holocaust memoir, Night, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Elie Wiesel, and the former French minister of culture Jack Lang. Denise Epstein, who was almost eighty years old at the time, was there, together with Némirovsky’s British translator, Sandra Smith, as well as Olivier Philipponnat, who had published a thoroughly researched biography of Némirovsky with his collaborator Patrick Lienhardt in France the previous year. Philipponnat would go on to curate the expanded French version of the New York exhibit at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris and to edit Némirovsky’s complete works in two scrupulously annotated volumes, which appeared in 2012. Philipponnat, who in addition to his writing is an editor at a French publishing house, devoted close to ten years of painstaking work to Némirovsky’s oeuvre and became one of Denise Epstein’s most trusted friends.
By the time of the New York exhibit, however, Némirovsky’s image had become tarnished in the view of some readers. From a tragic heroine she had metamorphosed into something almost repellent. After the publication of David Golder in English, these readers had discovered what they perceived to be her antisemitic portrayals of Jews. A Jewish antisemite, a self-hating Jew—that is how they saw her, and they condemned her for it. The opening salvo had been fired in England, where some readers noted that a sentence in Myriam Anissimov’s preface to Suite Française, in which she had referred to Némirovsky as a self-hating Jew, had been removed from the English translation. The preface itself, which paints Némirovsky in sympathetic terms, had been moved to the back of the book. The omission of “self-hating Jew” was seen as a ploy by the British publisher, who feared alienating Jewish readers. The full attack, however, came in the United States, in the form of a long article in January 2008 in the New Republic that laid out “the nasty truth about a new literary heroine.” The author, Ruth Franklin, a senior editor at the magazine, had done her homework, buttressing her reading of David Golder with a biography of the author by the American scholar Jonathan Weiss, who had paid detailed attention to Némirovsky’s portrayals of Jews. Weiss had emphasized Némirovsky’s collaboration with the right-wing paper Gringoire, where she had published many of her stories and two of her novels in installments between 1934 and 1941. Weiss was quite harsh in his analyses of Némirovsky’s early works in which Jews appear, especially David Golder. But he judged that she had become more sympathetic toward the Jewish characters in her novel of 1939, Les chiens et les loups (The Dogs and the Wolves), which offers her fullest, most subtle treatment of Jewish “foreigners” in France. Franklin, however, would have none of that. In her eyes Némirovsky was deplorable from beginning to end, “the very definition of a self-hating Jew.” David Golder, with its “crude antisemitic stereotypes,” was “an appalling book by any standard,” a “racist travesty of a novel.” And worse still, “Némirovsky did it over and over again,” unwavering in her hostility toward Jews from novel to novel. Indeed, the absence of Jews from Suite Française was itself, according to Franklin, a sign of Némirovsky’s antisemitism. While no one could wish it on her, her deportation, Franklin concluded, was a supreme irony “that could have come directly from her own fiction,” for she “would die alone in an eastern country, far from her family, and leave behind a fortune in manuscripts.”10
Franklin’s passionate condemnation set the tone for others to come. When The Dogs and the Wolves appeared in England in 2009, the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement found its portrayals of the Jewish characters so repulsive that she claimed a “Nazi publishing house” intent on the “perpetuation of racial stereotypes” would have been very happy with it.11 Although other critics praised the book, as of January 2016 The Dogs and the Wolves had still not been published in the United States. In 2011, when All Our Worldly Goods was published in the United States, a long review in the widely read online journal Jewish Ideas Daily appeared under the headline “Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Hating Jew.” Given the total absence of Jews in this novel, the label may seem startling. But the reviewer, who calls All Our Worldly Goods “a marvelous, decades-spanning love story,” finds precisely that absence a cause for condemnation. Since the novel first appeared in 1941 (in serialized form under a pseudonym, Jewish authors having been banned by Vichy from publishing in the press), the reviewer finds it incredible that there is “not a single mention in the book of Jews, Jewry, or Judaism.” And he asks, “Why might this be?” The answer follows immediately: “Here we come to the problem with Némirovsky: She was an anti-Semite.” It does not occur to the reviewer that the only overt mentions of “Jews, Jewry, or Judaism” in the French press in 1941, when all opposition views had been silenced or gone underground, were necessarily hostile, ranging from simple slurs to vicious denunciations, so that Némirovsky’s silence about Jews was, if anything, a sign of anxiety, not of antisemitism. On the contrary, the reviewer pursues his indictment: “There is no evidence that she was a fascist; but, as Ruth Franklin reports in her definitive 2008 essay in the New Republic, Némirovsky trafficked in ‘the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes.’ ”12
To be sure, these accusations have not gone unchallenged. Smith and Philipponnat have both defended her, as have numerous ordinary readers. Others, also not surprisingly, have sided with the accusers. The result has been frustration on both sides, as the debate threatens to turn into a shouting match. I say this out of personal experience, having participated in a forum with Franklin at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York in December 2008. She reiterated there her earlier argument that Némirovsky’s novels are antisemitic, while I countered that one had to be more generous in reading these works. Ultimately, it came down to how to read »Némirovsky, both as a person and as a novelist. Perhaps the most surprising thing about that evening was the degree of heat, even anger, generated by that question. Why reasonable readers can argue with such passion about the alleged self-hatred (or not) of a Jewish writer who has been dead for almost three-quarters of a century is itself a subject worthy of discussion.
Is this debate a purely Anglo-American phenomenon? Is it a sign of historical shortsightedness, as readers today neglect to situate Némirovsky properly in the context of her time? The answer to both questions is yes and no. Yes, English and American readers have been the most indignant and outspoken, but they are not the only ones who have condemned Némirovsky as a self-hating Jew or who have read her fiction as trafficking in antisemitic stereotypes. In France similar views have been expressed in recent years, along with their opposite. As for history, it is true that perceptions of and attitudes toward antisemitism today are radically different from those of the 1930s and can lead to distorted judgments. But Némirovsky’s portrayals of Jews provoked condemnations as well as defenses among Jewish readers even in the 1930s.
While it is neither restricted to the English-speaking world nor distortedly presentist, the controversy over Némirovsky’s supposed antisemitism and self-hatred does seem to matter almost exclusively to Jews. Non-Jewish critics generally praise her work, or, if they have reservations, these don’t bear on her portrayals of Jewish characters. The Nobel Prize–winning novelist J. M. Coetzee, for example, in a long article devoted to Némirovsky in the New York Review of Books, stated outright that he would not broach that issue.13 The reason for the passion among Jewish readers, I think, is that the question of Némirovsky’s attitude toward Jews and Judaism touches on something much broader. It concerns ambiguities and dilemmas of Jewish identity in modern times, both before and after the Holocaust, in the United States and in Europe. Today’s responses to her life and work, which include her daughter’s book about her, highlight the differences between pre-Holocaust and post-Holocaust perspectives on antisemitism and on Jewish identity.
A totally dispassionate critic would probably place Némirovsky among the interesting but not major writers of the interwar period, who nevertheless stood out as one of the rare women novelists to be taken seriously by critics at the time. Perhaps alone among women of her generation she was designated by reviewers not as a “lady novelist,” or romancière, but as a romancier, a novelist in the masculine “universal.” Today’s dispassionate critic would also, no doubt, acknowledge that she wrote at least one great novel, Suite Française, and that she could have become a truly major writer if she had lived longer. Her writing was not experimental or avant-garde, even though she lived in the capital of both the English and French literary avant-gardes in the interwar period; not for nothing was James Joyce’s Ulysses first published in Paris, along with French Surrealist manifestos and poetry. Némirovsky’s writing leaned toward the establishment, not toward those who contested established modes. Stylistically, she can slip into clichés or formulas, and she often relies on stereotyped characters. Yet she has a way of looking at the world that is striking in its lucidity and unsentimentality. She was harsh toward almost all of her characters, including those that resembled her, and she was especially harsh toward Jews from poor backgrounds who succeed in fighting their way to the top, the people she knew best. David Golder, the novel that established her as a writer to be reckoned with, is the story of a Jewish businessman born in Russia who leaves behind his wretchedly poor family and works his way to wealth, emigrating to the United States before settling in France; but his wealth brings him no happiness, and he dies alone.
Novels by Jewish writers featuring poor Jews who become rich by dint of cleverness and fierce ambition and who are often morally compromised in the process are a familiar modern genre—think of What Makes Sammy Run? and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz—and they were already known when Némirovsky wrote David Golder. In the United States, Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky, a popular success published in 1917, tells the story of another poor Russian immigrant named David who makes his way to the top but finds himself a lonely man despite his riches. It is unlikely that Némirovsky had read Cahan, but she didn’t need to: she had her own father as a model. Léon, né Leonid, Némirovsky, born into a poor Yiddish-speaking family near Odessa, had made a for tune, first in various business ventures and then in banking, before the First World War and was able to reap profits even during the early days of the Russian Revolution. Irène was fascinated throughout her life by the phenomenon of Jewish upward mobility, with all of its stresses and contradictions, not least among them the class differences between rich Jews and poor Jews, between, in Hannah Arendt’s terminology, the assimilated parvenus and the ghetto pariahs. Within Némirovsky’s own family, her father resembled the pariah who succeeds in escaping from the ghetto but remains a “little Jew” in the eyes of those with higher pretensions. Némirovsky’s mother, Anna, or Fanny, as she was called, was one of the latter, the older daughter in a family in which French was the language of choice and Yiddish was looked down on. Anna’s family lacked money, but she could still feel superior to her husband. Mismatched couples are legion in Némirovsky’s fiction.
Irène loved her father and loathed her mother, who seems to have been singularly lacking in maternal feelings. She appears in photographs as a beautiful woman dressed to the nines, often accompanied by a younger man in addition to her husband; she made her daughter wear little-girl clothes as a teenager so that she herself would appear younger. Némirovsky’s fiction is full of neglectful or vengeful mothers hated by their daughters. After the death of her father in 1932, she and her mother rarely saw each other, and by the time the war started they had not been on speaking terms for years. Anna survived the war in Nice with a fake passport, then returned to her Paris apartment. After the war Denise and Elisabeth knocked on her door one day, accompanied by the woman who had saved them after their parents were deported. Anna refused to let them in. “Orphans have their place in an orphanage,” she said from behind the closed door.
Irène Némirovsky’s troubled relation to her mother adds one more knot to the complications and ambivalences that defined her being in the world. A foreigner in France at a time when foreigners were looked on with suspicion, a woman in a literary field where men set the rules and standards, Némirovsky succeeded, for a short time, in creating a life and a career others might envy. She had talent, ambition, and a desire to fit in. But she was a Jew in a time and a place where, increasingly, Jewishness was perceived as a death sentence. Did one have to cease being Jewish in order to survive and thrive? Could one cease being Jewish, even if one tried? These and similar questions about individual and group identity had preoccupied secularized Jews in Europe for over a century. Némirovsky’s way of dealing with them, and their reverberations among her descendants and among Jews today, are the subject of this book.