1. Interview with Denise Epstein (Dauplé was her married name, which she continued to use on official documents), Toulouse, June 6–7, 2008.
2. In fact, Denise Epstein was aware of the manuscript’s existence as early as 1957. For the full story, see chapter 7 below.
3. Némirovsky, Suite Française, trans. Sandra Smith, 221.
4. The radio and television programs in which Gille participated are preserved in the archives of the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. For full references, see chapters 6 and 7.
5. I conducted interviews with a number of people who worked with Gille at various publishing firms and reference them in chapters 6 and 7.
6. Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War, chaps. 2, 4.
7. René de Ceccatty, interview with Elisabeth Gille in Il Messagero, January 1992; reprinted as “Postface” to Gille, Le Mirador, 418.
8. Némirovsky, “L’enfant génial,” 211.
9. Among the notable American reviews were Paul Gray’s front-page review in the New York Times Book Review, Alice Kaplan’s in The Nation, and Ruth Kluger’s in the Washington Post. I reviewed it in the Boston Globe.
10. Franklin, “Scandale Française”; Weiss, Irène Némirovsky. Franklin wrote a very positive review of Elisabeth Gille’s Le Mirador a few years later—in which she reiterated her views about Némirovsky, however. Franklin, “Elisabeth Gille’s Devastating Account of Her Mother, Irène Némirovsky.”
11. Price, “Out of the Ghetto.”
12. Dan Kagan-Kans, “Portrait of the Artist as a Self-Hating Jew,” was posted on October 25, 2011, and received numerous responses from readers over the next few weeks: http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/990/features/portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-self-hating-jew/. The JID ceased publication in June 2013, but its archive is still available; it was replaced by the online daily Mosaic.
13. Coetzee, “Irène Némirovsky: The Dogs and the Wolves,” 35.
1. Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen. Varnhagen was among those featured in the exhibition on Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation (2005), at the Jewish Museum in New York City—see the exhibition catalog by that title. An excellent history of the Jews in Germany, among hundreds of books on the subject, is Amos Elon’s The Pity of It All.
2. Lessing’s book has not been translated into English but has been into French: Lessing, La Haine de soi.
3. Reitter, On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred, 36. Reitter’s book is an extremely thorough and balanced discussion of this term.
4. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 11.
5. Marx’s essay, in two parts, with substantive excerpts from Bauer’s, is in Marx, Selected Writings.
6. Toury, “The Jewish Question,” 99; for a massive historical study, see Bein, The Jewish Question.
7. Toury, “The Jewish Question,” 92, 100 (italics added).
8. Caron, “The ‘Jewish Question’ from Dreyfus to Vichy,” 176. Caron sees the “Jewish question” as synonymous with antisemitism; her essay is about the historiography of antisemitism in France.
9. Brasillach’s article “La Question Juive” appeared on the front page of Je suis partout on April 15, 1938; Rebatet’s “Esquisse de quelques conclusions” appeared on page 9. A note on page 1 states that the articles in this special issue, which also contains a large number of antisemitic cartoons, were written and assembled by Rebatet.
10. See Robertson, The “Jewish Question” in German Literature, 1749–1939, especially on the period after emancipation, 1871 in Germany and 1867 in Austria.
11. This material is taken in large part from what I wrote in the long introduction to Suleiman and Forgács, Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary, xxiii–xxiv.
12. See Hanák, ed., Zsidókérdés, 21; this volume reprints some of the responses to the survey. My translation.
13. Bein, The Jewish Question, 20.
14. Hanák, Zsidókérdés, 58, 59.
15. For the classic work on this division in the German context, see Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers. In his reflections on the critical reception of the book, which figured as the introduction to the updated edition, Aschheim noted that his emphasis on “intra-Jewish tensions” had caused “acute discomfort” among some readers, so much so that a major German publishing house had refused to publish the book in translation (xxii).
16. Quoted in Fejtó, Hongrois et juifs, 209–10. Fejtó gives an excellent summary of the 1917 survey and of its significance.
17. Jankélévitch, “Le Judaisme, problème intérieur,” 55, 56.
18. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 66.
19. “Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday,” in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 328.
20. “We Refugees,” in ibid., 272.
21. “Letter to Gershom Scholem,” in ibid., 466.
22. Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923, quoted in Begley, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, 63.
23. Birnbaum, Les Fous de la République. For an excellent general history of Jews in France, see Becker and Wieviorka, eds., Les Juifs en France de la Révolution à nos Jours.
24. Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy, chap. 2, “The Golden Age of Symbiosis.”
25. Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 46.
26. For Arendt’s discussion of Lazare in “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” see Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 183–86. Most of Lazare’s articles on Jewish issues, written between 1890 and 1901, are collected in Lazare, Juifs et antisémites. For an excellent, detailed account of the Dreyfus Affair, including Lazare’s role in it, see Bredin, The Affair.
27. “We Refugees,” in Arendt, The Jewish Writings, 270.
28. See Les Temps Modernes, December 1945, 535–47; the article “Vie d’un Juif” appeared in November 1945, 338–43; no author is credited for either article, but “Vie d’un Juif” was reprinted in Robert Misrahi’s book Un Juif laïque en France (2004). I thank Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat for alerting me to this fact. A note in the inaugural issue of Les Temps Modernes in October explained that these “Lives” of typical individuals would be published regularly as quasi-ethnographic documents, but the series does not seem to have been continued beyond the first few issues.
29. Berl explained himself to Patrick Modiano shortly before his death in their joint book, Interrogatoire; see also the biography by Revah, Berl, un Juif de France; and Raczymow, Mélancolie d’Emmanuel Berl.
30. Guedj, “Les Juifs français face aux Juifs étrangers,” p. 21 of online version: http://cdlm.revues.org/index4637.html.
31. Meyer, “Les Juifs et la littérature,” L’Univers israélite, October 30, 1925.
32. Weinberg, A Community on Trial, 26.
33. For a set of photographs and useful timeline of Némirovsky’s life, see the lavishly illustrated catalog of the exhibit at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Française (2008).
34. Journal and draft of “Fraternité,” IMEC, ALM 2999.13.
35. “Ses lèvres, toujours sèches, semblaient fanées par une soif millénaire, une fièvre transmise de génération en génération. ‘Mon nez, ma bouche, les seuls traits spécifiquement juifs que j’aie gardés.’ ” Némirovsky, “Fraternité,” OC 1:1623.
36. “C’était donc avant votre père. Tous les Rabinovitch viennent de là-bas” (OC 1: 1629); “Qu’y avait-il de commun entre ce pauvre Juif et lui?” (1630).
37. “Où Dieu ne jette-t-il pas le Juif? Seigneur, si seulement on pouvait être tranquille! Mais jamais, jamais, on n’est tranquille! A peine a-t-on gagné, à la sueur de son front, du pain dur, quatre murs, un toit pour sa tête, qu’arrive une guerre, une révolution, un pogrom, ou autre chose, et adieu! ‘Ramassez vos paquets, filez. Allez vivre dans une autre ville, dans un autre pays. Apprenez une nouvelle langue—à votre âge, on n’est pas découragé, hein?’ Non, mais on est fatigué.” OC 1:1631.
38. “Heureux ceux qui sont nés ici. Voyez, à vous regarder, à quelle richesse on peut arriver! Et, sans doute, votre grand-père venait d’Odessa, ou de Berditchev, comme moi. C’était un pauvre homme . . . Les riches, les heureux, ne partaient pas, vous pensez! Oui, c’était un pauvre homme. Et vous . . . Un jour peut-être, celui-là . . .” Ibid., 1631–32, ellipses in the text.
39. “Misérable créature! Était-il possible qu’il fùt, lui, du même sang que cet homme? De nouveau il pensa: ‘Qu’y a-t-il de commun entre lui et moi? Il n’y a pas plus de ressemblance entre ce Juif et moi qu’entre Sestres et les laquais qui le servent! Le contraire est impossible, grotesque! Un abîme, un gouffre! Il me touche parce qu’il est pittoresque, un témoin des âges disparus. Oui, voilà comment, pourquoi il me touche, parce qu’il est loin, si loin de moi . . .’ ” Ibid., 1632–33, ellipses in the text.
40. “C’est de cela que je souffre. . . . C’est cela que je paie dans mon corps, dans mon esprit. Des siècles de misère, de maladie, d’oppression. . . . Des milliers de pauvres os, faibles, fatigués, ont fait les miens.” Ibid., 1633.
41. Journal and draft of “Fraternité,” IMEC, ALM 2999.13. The French quotes in this paragraph are “le riche est (se croit) délivré de sa religion, mais le pauvre aussi. La fraternité ne réside pas dans la religion, mais dans la race, oh Hitler, tu n’as pas tort.” “Et pourtant, il y a, avant tout, au-dessus de tout, le droit imprescriptible de la vérité.” “Recommencer, et encore recommencer, plier le dos, et recommencer. Mais celui qui n’a pas eu besoin de ça, le riche, il lui reste sickening fear, cet héritage.” “En somme, je démontre l’inassimilabilité, quel mot, Seigneur . . . Je sais que c’est vrai.”
42. Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 284–85; cf. Gille, Le Mirador, 366.
43. “Une expérience communiste. kon, dit bela kun,” Récit historique inédit par Georges Oudard, Gringoire, February 5, 1937.
44. Suleiman and Forgács, introduction to Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary, xxvii–xxviii.
45. P. Loewel, Tableau du Palais.
46. Journal and draft of “Fraternité,” IMEC, ALM 2999.13.
47. “Toi qui nous regardes de haut, qui nous méprises, qui ne veux rien avoir de commun avec la racaille juive! Attends un peu! Attends! et on te confondra de nouveau avec elle. Et tu te mêleras à elle, toi qui en est sorti, toi qui as cru en échapper!” Les chiens et les loups (1940), in OC 2:645.
48. Endelman, Leaving the Jewish Fold, 4.
49. “C’était son tour maintenant. Ce n’était plus d’un enfant chinois, d’une femme espagnole, d’un Juif d’Europe centrale, de ces pauvres charmants Français qu’il s’agissait, mais de lui, Hugo Grayer!” “Le Spectateur,” in OC 2:448–49.
50. I discussed “Le Spectateur” and Némirovsky’s other wartime stories at the conference “Between Collaboration and Resistance,” organized by the New York Public Library in conjunction with their exhibition by that title: April 3, 2009. Nathan Bracher has argued persuasively that Némirovsky’s “ethical turn” largely preceded the writing of Suite Française. In particular, he contests Angela Kershaw’s claim that this ethical turn was a sign of her espousal of “Pétainist and Vichy themes,” since these stories date from earlier in the war. See Bracher, “Mere Humanity.”
51. “Ces foules ressemblaient aux volailles qui laissent égorger leurs mères, leurs soeurs en continuant à glousser et à picorer leurs grains, sans comprendre que c’est cette passivité, ce consentement intérieur qui les livrerait, elles aussi, le jour venu, à une main forte et dure.” OC 2:449.
52. Bracher, After the Fall, esp. chap. 4. Bracher discusses several other contemporary accounts of the 1940 defeat and of the exode (including works by Jews), none of which singled out the situation of Jews at that time. In fact, the Vichy anti-Jewish laws came several months later.
Epigraph: “Croire de tout son cœur que la vie est peuplée de monstres. Et plus tard, la vie n’arrivera pas à vous détromper. Elle fera de son mieux souvent. Elle vous comblera des biens de ce monde, richesses, honneurs, et même affections vraies. Vous la verrez jusqu’au dernier jour avec vos yeux d’enfant: une mêlée horrible.” IMEC, ALM 2999.1.
1. Interview with René de Ceccatty, published in the Italian newspaper Il Messagero in January 1992; reprinted as “Postface” to the 2000 edition of Gille, Le Mirador, 417–18.
2. Bérard-Zarzycka, “Les écrivains russes,” 352. The historian Catherine Gousseff, who has studied this in detail, writes that the great majority of Russian exiles left the country in 1920, with only a small minority (around 7 percent) leaving in 1917 and 1918, the year the Némirovskys left. See Gousseff, L’exil russe, 23.
3. Claude Perrey, article in Chantecler, March 8, 1930; reprinted in Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 429. The photos mentioned here, along with many others, are reproduced in the exhibition catalogue Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Française. I saw the original photos in the album shown to me by Denise Epstein when I first visited her in Toulouse, June, 6–7, 2008; all the photos have since been deposited at IMEC.
4. Beauvoir, Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, 106. While a realist about her situation, Beauvoir’s father, as she explains later in the book, was not happy that his older daughter harbored serious intellectual ambitions.
5. Kershaw, Before Auschwitz, 43–44. Philipponnat and Lienhardt mention only 1921–24, but Kershaw also found a dossier recording Némirovsky’s certificat in Russian philology in March 1925.
6. One notebook (IMEC, NMR 7.1) contains a number of poems in Russian, written around 1919. Némirovsky used empty pages in this notebook to make much later notations, dated 1937 and later.
7. See Berberova’s autobiography, The Italics Are Mine.
8. “Nonoche chez l’extra-lucide” appeared on August 1, 1921, in the biweekly Fantasio and is the inaugural text in Némirovsky’s two-volume Complete Works. (OC 1:49–55.) The three other pieces about Nonoche, which remained unpublished, are also included in this volume.
9. Letter dated “Paris le lundi,” with no date, but one can piece together that it is from July 1922. Most of the letters to Madeleine are undated. They are all at IMEC, NMR 5.2.
10. Undated letter, “Paris-Plage, le vendredi,” possibly summer 1921 since it refers to a costume ball at the beach resort, where Irène was dressed as a “bohémienne,” a gypsy. There are several photos of her in this costume, one of them reproduced in the exhibition catalogue Woman of Letters, 31.
11. Weiss, Irène Némirovsky, 26.
12. Letter dated March 15, 1922.
13. Letter dated “Paris, le lundi,” probably from 1922.
14. Courrière, Pierre Lazareff, 223–25. Lazareff was Hélène Gordon’s second husband.
15. Le Vin de solitude, in OC 1:1275–76.
16. Undated letter, “Paris, le lundi,” most likely from 1922 or 1923.
17. Undated letter, “Paris le jeudi” [January 1925].
18. See Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 134.
19. E. Epstein, Les Banques de commerce russes, 110.
20. Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 134–37. Samuel Epstein’s connection to the film production company Albatros doubtless came through Alexandre Kamenka, the major stockholder of the company, whose father was president of the Bank of Azov-Don, where Samuel’s father had held an important post. The strong presence of Russian emigrés in the film business in Paris during the 1920s is studied in detail by François Albera in Albatros: des Russes à Paris. Samuel Epstein’s name is mentioned, as S. Epstein, on p. 93; Kamenka’s bank connection, on p. 92.
21. Interview with Denise Epstein, Toulouse, June 7, 2008.
22. Courrière, Pierre Lazareff, 223–27.
23. See the detailed chronology in Sarraute, Œuvres complètes.
24. For a recent biography, see Bona, Clara Malraux. Clara Malraux’s most important works are her six volumes of autobiography, published between 1963 and 1979.
25. For a brief biography of Simone Kahn, see Rosemont, ed., Surrealist Women, 16–17. On the ups and downs of Kahn’s marriage with Breton (they divorced in 1929), see also the chatty book by Georges Sebbag, André Breton, L’amour-folie, 82 and passim. The biography of reference for Breton is Mark Polizzotti’s Revolution of the Mind.
26. Sylvia Bataille is mentioned briefly in biographies of Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan; her best-known film role was in Jean Renoir’s A Day in the Country (Partie de campagne, 1936). A mini-biography by David Stevens is on the movie database IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0060663/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm.
27. Aragon and Triolet, Œuvres romanesques croisées d’Elsa Triolet et Aragon.
28. Arban, Je me retournerai souvent. A literary critic and essayist after the war, Arban wrote several books on Dostoevsky as well as other works before publishing her autobiography in 1990. Massis was the author of dozens of books, including Défense de l’Occident (1927). He was elected to the Académie Française in 1960.
29. Quoted by Arendt in her introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 53 n. 12. The full letter appears in a slightly different translation in Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, 289.
30. On women writers in the interwar years, see Milligan, The Forgotten Generation, esp. chaps. 1–2. The Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1909; three other women, including the American Pearl Buck (1938), received the prize in the years before the Second World War.
31. “Êtes-vous partisan de l’entrée d’une femme à l’Académie Française ?,” Toute l’édition, April 15, 1939.
32. On Bernard Grasset, see Bothorel, Bernard Grasset.
33. Némirovsky tells this story in her interview with Frédéric Lefèvre in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, January 11, 1930, which I discuss below.
34. Courrière, Joseph Kessel, 242.
35. Bourget-Pailleron, “La nouvelle équipe.”
36. The website of the current Revue des Deux Mondes contains the tables of contents of every issue since 1829, with the notable exception of the months between June and December 1940, the first months of the Vichy regime inaugurated by Maréchal Pétain, who contributed two articles to the Revue during those months: http://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/archive/tocs. I discuss the effect of Vichy on Némirovsky’s life and career in chapter 3.
37. I am grateful to Olivier Philipponnat, who discovered this cache of manuscript letters in 2010, for directing my attention to it. All of the quotes that follow are from letters at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Paris, cat. MS 15621.
38. Chérau, “Irène Némirovsky,” L’Intransigeant, October 25, 1933, 6.
39. Letters to Henri de Régnier dated January 29, 1930 and June 21, 1934, at the Bibliothèque de l’Institut, cat. 5708.
40. Telegram to Marie de Régnier, date stamp unreadable but probably May 1936, at the Bibliothèque de l’Institut, cat. 5696. Under the pen name Gérard d’Houville, Marie de Régnier published music criticism throughout the 1930s in the Revue des Deux Mondes and was the author of more than a dozen novels, none of which is remembered today. She had a somewhat scandalous reputation for her many amorous liaisons with well-known writers.
41. The author of a long article published in July 1925, for example, argued that although the Jews fleeing pogroms deserved “all our sympathy,” they must be encouraged to get rid of their old habits, stop speaking Yiddish, and learn “the beautiful French language” if they were to be welcomed in France. Meyer, “L’assimilation des Israélites étrangers.” An excellent recent overview of French Jews’ attitudes toward Jewish immigrants in the interwar period is provided by Jérémy Guedj, “Les Juifs français face aux Juifs étrangers,” A classic study of the subject is David Weinberg, A Community on Trial.
42. Weinberg, A Community on Trial, 81–82. For a good recent biography of Blum that emphasizes his Jewish ties, see Birnbaum, Léon Blum.
43. “Nativité” appeared on December 8, 1933. Despite its title and its allusion to Christmas, the story was more about death than about birth. It features an exhausted woman who gives birth to a premature baby and lies dying while her younger sister, recently engaged, wonders whether she will suffer the same fate one day.
44. These figures are given by Courrière, Joseph Kessel, 330.
45. Gary, La promesse de l’aube, 212–13; see also Anissimov, Romain Gary le caméléon, 145. Anissimov notes that his first stories in Gringoire appeared under his real name, Romain Kacew.
46. Courrière, Joseph Kessel, 330.
47. Carbuccia, Le Massacre de la Victoire, 1919–1934, 410–11.
48. Béraud, “Assez!,” in Béraud, Gringoire: Écrits, 1928–1937, 143–46.
49. “Minuit, Chrétiens,” in ibid., 361–65.
50. “Je vais te répondre,” in ibid., 371–74. It is doubtful that Alexander Kerensky was Jewish, but Béraud evidently thought he was. The others he lists came from assimilated Jewish families.
51. IMEC, NMR 4.13.
52. Béraud, “Encore Blum, toujours Blum,” Gringoire, May 1, 1941, 1. On January 9 an unsigned front-page text appearing beneath a stereotyped caricature of Blum called him a “Jew without nationality.”
53. Henriot, “Place aux Français de France!,” Gringoire, April 10, 1941, 2.
54. Béraud, Les derniers beaux jours.
55. Biographical information on the database of the French National Assembly, where Carbuccia held a seat as deputy from Corsica from 1932 to 1936, is online at http://www.assembleenationale.fr/sycomore/fiche.asp?num_dept=1435.
56. See my discussion of “Fraternité” in chapter 1.
57. Journal entry for June 25, 1938, in journal and notes for Le Charlatan, IMEC, ALM 2999.1. The earlier entry is dated June 13 and begins as follows: “I have just learned that we owe 50,000 to a dirty Jewess [Je viens d’apprendre que l’on doit à une sale Juive 50.000]. Absolutely nothing in the cash drawer. M. even took a month’s advance. The only salvation lies in selling the novel, and even if that succeeds it will only go to pay what we owe.” She then uses their own situation as a way of understanding the main character of the novel she is working on, a dishonest doctor who is always in need of money.
58. Kershaw, Before Auschwitz, 33–34.
59. Foreword by Olivier Philipponnat to “Rois d’une heure,” deposited along with copies of the article in Némirovsky’s papers at IMEC, not yet catalogued. I thank Olivier Philipponnat for sharing his discovery with me. The only known copies of Le Magazine d’aujourd’hui are at the Bibliothèque Carnegie in Reims.
60. Némirovsky, “Rois d’une heure,” 1934, Le magazine d’aujourd’hui, May 16, 1932, 3. The full article ran on May 16, 23, and 30, 1934 (issues 32–34).
61. Review of “Les Races, 8 tableaux de Ferdinand Brückner, adaptation de René Cave,” Aujourd’hui, no. 323, March 10, 1934, 14. Aujourd’hui was a daily newspaper unrelated to the weekly Magazine d’Aujourd’hui, where “Rois d’une heure” appeared. It was owned by Paul Lévy, an Israélite of quite conservative but anti-Nazi political views. I thank Olivier Philipponnat for sharing this article with me.
62. Philipponnat, introduction to Némirovsky, Oeuvres complètes, 1:10.
63. On the complicated zigzagging of naturalization laws in the 1920s and 1930s, see Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français?, chap. 3. The law of 1927 is discussed on 76–78, and the statistics cited are on 79, 80. See also Caron, Uneasy Asylum.
64. Quoted by Schor, “Le Paris des libertés,” 30.
65. Weil, Qu’est-ce qu’un Français?, chap. 4.
66. These figures are given by Guedj in “Les Juifs français face aux Juifs étrangers,” pp. 3–4 in the online version: http://cdlm.revues.org/index4637.html.
67. Spire, “Devenir français en 1931,” 106.
68. Letter from Jean Vignaud, September 1, 1939, IMEC 5.38. Other letters and documents concerning the application for naturalization are also in this dossier.
69. Letter to Gaston Chérau, October 22, 1930, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, cat. MS 15621.
70. “Deux questions,” unsigned item under the weekly rubric “À Paris et ailleurs,” Les Nouvelles Littéraires, November 22, 1930, 2.
71. The differences between France and Germany as far as opportunities for Jews were concerned have been a subject of constant interest to historians. Among the more recent works on this is the volume edited by Brenner, Caron, and Kaufman, Jewish Emancipation Reconsidered: The French and German Models.
72. See, for example, Dreyfus’s retrospective look reaffirming his faith in France, in the book of “memories and correspondence” published by his son Pierre after Dreyfus’s death: Dreyfus, Souvenirs et correspondance.
73. Gugelot, La conversion des intellectuels, 203. Gugelot’s detailed study is my chief source for the information on conversions given here.
74. On the figure of 769, see ibid., 173, and also Gugelot’s article “De Ratisbonne à Lustiger,” 9. On the Jewish population in Paris between the wars, see Benbassa, Histoire des Juifs de France, 226. On the estimate, by Raymond-Raoul Lambert, of the total conversions in France between 1910 and 1930, see Gugelot, “De Ratisbonne à Lustiger,” 9.
75. Gugelot, La conversion des intellectuels, chap. 9.
76. Chalier, Le désir de conversion, 108.
77. Valéry’s speech is available on the Académie’s website: http://www.academie-francaise.fr/allocution-prononcee-loccasion-de-la-mort-de-m-henri-bergson.
78. Chalier, Le désir de conversion, 142–43; also Gugelot, La conversion des intellectuels, 177 n. 15.
79. Gille, Le Mirador, 385.
80. This wording appears on the baptism certificates of Michel Epstein, “husband of Irène-Irma Némirovsky,” Denyse-France-Catherine Epstein-Némirovsky, and Irène-Irma Némirovsky, “wife of Michel Epstein,” all duly signed and dated February 2, 1939. There is no certificate for Elisabeth Epstein, possibly because she was not yet two years old and could therefore not sign it and make a profession of faith.
81. Gugelot, “De Ratisbonne à Lustiger,” 21. In the pages of L’Univers Israélite one finds frequent condemnations of conversion by Jews.
82. IMEC, ALM 2999.1, dossier on Le Charlatan. The French text, dated June 15, 1938, reads, “Je mêle à tout ceci, je ne sais pourquoi, une idée de Grâce. Un roman devrait toujours être par la plupart des côtés sordide, sombre, plein des intérêts et des passions humaines, et par d’autres, que l’on entrevoit les âmes. Jésus n’est qu’un homme comme nous; c’est à dire qu’il est un Dieu. Cette parole: ‘Vous ne pensez pas aux choses du Ciel; vous n’aimez que les choses de la terre.’ Humainement, humblement, raisonnablement, on ne peut, on ne doit s’attacher qu’à décrire ceux-là.” And on the reverse side: “La parole de Jésus: ‘Vous, soyez des enfants de lumière.’ ” The biblical verse ( John 12:36) reads, in French: “Croyez en la lumière, afin que vous soyez des enfants de lumière” (Believe in the light, so that you may be children of light).
83. Ibid. “Vu C. hier. Mieux marché que je ne l’espérais, Dieu merci. Et, parallèlement à ceci, une sorte de paix. Si on pouvait ne pas désirer, ne pas craindre surtout. Non, ne pas désirer, c’est impossible. Mais ne pas craindre et, en même temps, sourire, se résigner, s’effacer, que la vie serait facile! Il y a une parole que je ne peux me lasser de répéter: Ne crains pas, Zaïre, crois seulement . . .”
84. Voltaire, Zaïre, act III, scene 5.
85. Morand met Hélène Christoveloni Soutzo in 1916, when she was still married. She divorced Dimitri Soutzo in 1924 and married Morand three years later. See the detailed chronology in Morand, Nouvelles complètes, 1:xlii, xlvi, xlviii.
86. Letter to Vladimir Ghika, December 21, 1938, in the Archives of the Institut Vladimir Ghika (Châtillon-sur-Seine). I am grateful to Olivier Philipponnat for having given me copies of the fifteen manuscript letters Némirovsky addressed to Monsigner Ghika between December 21, 1938, and July 3, 1939.
87. Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 317–18.
88. In a letter to Hélène Soutzo Morand dated February 12, 1942, Némirovsky mentions that she has tried to contact Monsignor Ghika recently but has received no reply. However, the Némirovsky papers contain a postcard from him from Bucharest, dated March 2, 1942, whose battered state (it’s partly torn and full of official stamps from government censors) suggests that it took a long time getting to its destination (IMEC, NMR 5.25). Némirovsky’s letter to Hélène Soutzo Morand is in the Archives of the Bibliothèque de l’Institut. It was shown in the exhibit on Némirovsky at the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris, Fall–Winter 2009–10.
89. Because of the beatification a great deal of information on Monsignor Ghika is available online. I consulted the biography written by Pierre Hayet, secretary-general of the Institut Vladimir Ghika: http://blog.lanef.net/index.php?post/2013/08/01/Mgr-Vladimir-Ghika-b%C3%A9atifi%C3%A9-%C3%A0-Bucarest-le-31-ao%C3%BBt-2013.
90. His certificate of baptism is dated October 7, 1943. He wrote later that his wife and grown children also converted (Bernard, Mon père Tristan «[[?a id="page_308"/>»Bernard, 263). However, the Archives of the Catholic Archdiocese in Paris, which sent me a copy of his baptism certificate, have no documents for the rest of his family.
91. Bernard, “Judaïsme et Christianisme,” Le Figaro, November 1, 1946, 2.
92. Bernard, Mon père Tristan Bernard, 259.
93. Bernard, Le camp de la mort lente, 69.
94. Ibid., 68.
95. Weiss, Irène Némirovsky, 90.
Epigraph: “Sa vie devrait se poursuivre, longue et féconde, mais tout se passe comme si quelqu’un avait prononcé la phrase si souvent entendue par Tchekhov: ‘L’ouvrage doit être prêt à telle date . . .’ Sur la page on trace déjà le mot: fin.” OC 2:800.
1. Interview with René de Ceccatty, published in the Italian newspaper Il Messagero in January 1992; reprinted as “Postface” to the 2000 edition of Gille, Le Mirador, 417–18.
2. Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 671–76. Recent historical studies focusing in detail on the wartime lives of Jews in France include Semelin, Persécutions et entraides dans la France occupée, and Mariot and Zalc, Face à la persécution. One of the earlier works to pay close attention to individual stories is Poznanski, Les Juifs en France pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.
3. The figures for France cited here and below are those arrived at by Serge Klarsfeld, who has done the most thorough research on this subject. His four-volume work La Shoah en France, published in 2001, consists of updated individual studies he originally published between 1983 and 1995. I cite his figures here as reported by Semelin, Persécutions et entraides, 25–26. The figures for Holland and Belgium are given by Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 402.
4. As it turned out, many children were separated from their parents and deported separately. On Laval’s behavior in this matter, see the detailed discussion by Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, 163–69. As for French versus foreign Jews, it’s true that Laval and Pétain were generally more hostile to the latter, but that didn’t prevent their persecution of the former.
5. “C’était la première nuit de la guerre. Dans les guerres et les révolutions, rien de plus extravagant que ces premiers instants où l’on est précipité d’une vie dans une autre, le souffle coupé, comme on tomberait tout habillé du haut d’un pont dans une rivière profonde, sans comprendre ce qui vous arrive, en conservant au coeur un absurde espoir.” “La nuit en wagon,” in OC 2:389; originally published in Gringoire, October 5, 1939, and later collected in a volume prepared by Denise Epstein, Destinées et autres nouvelles.
6. Quoted in Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 669.
7. “Brusquement, les gens ne paraissaient plus se connaître. . . . Les voyageurs s’étaient séparés sans un mot.” Ibid., 404.
8. Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre. This four-hundred-page volume, published after Sartre’s death, contains one of several notebooks he filled between September and May; the others were lost.
9. Beauvoir, Journal de guerre.
10. Gille, Le Mirador, 385.
11. Denise Epstein, Survivre et Vivre, 59–60. This slim book of recorded conversations with the writer Clémence Boulouque appeared in 2008. Denise Epstein sometimes spoke of writing a full-fledged memoir but did not consider herself an author. She died before undertaking the project.
12. See Drake, Paris at War, 13–15. Henri Borland, in his memoir Merci d’avoir survécu, remembers being sent away from Paris at that time.
13. Several letters were exchanged between Michel Epstein and his former employers after June 1940, letters in which he asks to be reinstated, to no avail; IMEC, NMR 5.15 and 5.45.
14. “Je sens bien qu’il faudrait faire une ou deux nouvelles, tant qu’on peut encore—peut-être—les placer. Mais . . . incertitude, inquiétude, angoisse partout: la guerre, Michel, la petite, les petites, l’argent, l’avenir. Le roman, l’élan du roman coupé net.” Journal entry dated June 6, 1940, Issy-l’Évêque; IMEC, ALM 3000.2.
15. I base my historical summary of France under Vichy, here and in what follows, mainly on Robert Paxton’s classic study, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, and on Julian Jackson’s more recent France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944.
16. See Revah, Berl, un Juif de France, 253–61; also Raczymow, Mélancolie d’Emmanuel Berl.
17. The annotated document is reproduced in the exhibition catalogue: Peschanski and Fontaine, La Collaboration, 36. The curators note that it was discovered only in 2010, when an anonymous donor gave it to the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris.
18. Paxton, Vichy France, 170–71.
19. Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, 4.
20. “Loi du 3 octobre 1940,” published in the Journal Officiel on October 18, 1940. Full text on http://pages.livresdeguerre.net/pages/sujet.php?id=docddp&su=103&np=876. This site contains full texts of all the Vichy anti-Jewish legislation between July 1940 and December 1942.
21. Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, 3.
22. Archives départementales de Saône-et-Loire, dossier 1714W127. A copy of this report is also at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine in Paris (Document DCCCXCII-12).
23. Marrus and Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, 13–15; Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 355 and passim. Jackson writes that Vichy issued its first anti-Jewish statute in October 1940 “almost apologetically” (354), but I detect no note of apology in the text of the statute, and none of the administrative correspondence I have read, by and to Vichy prefects (admittedly, only a sampling) suggests unease. On the contrary, everything sounds extremely cold and bureaucratic, with no hint of apology.
24. Serge Klarsfeld, in his four-volume “calendar” of Jewish persecution in France, reproduces some of these cards as well as registration forms: see Klarsfeld, Le Calendrier de la persécution des Juifs de France, 1:40–45, 166–69.
25. Mariot and Zalc, Face à la persécution.
26. Semelin, Persécutions et entraides, 212.
27. According to his biographer, Kessel was courted by Vichy officials in the summer of 1940 and was even offered a job at Vichy that he refused. He remained somewhat optimistic even after the Statut des Juifs of October 1940, writing to his brother in Hollywood that France was not “nazified and not antisemitic.” But he lost all illusions by June 1941, participated in Resistance activities, and left the country illegally via Spain after the Germans occupied all of France in November 1942. He spent the rest of the war mostly in London as a journalist, writing in support of de Gaulle and the Resistance, and also published a novel that Jean-Pierre Melville later adapted into the now-classic film L’Armée des ombres (Army of shadows). In 1943 Kessel wrote the lyrics for what became the most famous song of the Resistance in France, “Le Chant des Partisans.” See Courrière, Joseph Kessel, 541–94.
28. Ibid., 197.
29. Badinter, “Mort d’un Israélite français,” 103–4.
30. Semelin, Persécutions et entraides, 196.
31. Ibid., 123–24. Semelin relies here on reports given by survivors, and some historians have reproached him for not distinguishing between such sources, which may not always be totally reliable as to precise facts, and more objective documentary ones.
32. “Aujourd’hui, pluie, froid, hier neige. Ma chambre pleine de fumée. 6 ou 7 hommes silencieux, doux d’aspect, courtois qui boivent de la bière et sourient à ‘Elissabeth.’ Ce matin, 2 prisonniers emmenés entre 2 hommes au fusil. On leur a donné un quart d’heure pour se préparer. Radio française—chansonnettes idiotes. Je suppose que la radio française est pour faire plaisir aux enfants.” IMEC, ALM 3000.2.
33. “Je ne puis croire, Monsieur le Maréchal, que l’on ne fasse aucune distinction entre les indésirables et les étrangers honorables qui, s’ils ont reçu de la France une hospitalité royale, ont conscience d’avoir fait tous leurs efforts pour la mériter. Je solicite donc de votre haute bienveillance que ma famille et moi-même soyons compris dans cette deuxième catégorie de personnes, qu’il nous soit permis de résider librement en France et que je puisse continuer à y exercer ma profession de romancière.” Letter to Maréchal Pétain, carbon copy at IMEC, NMR 5.39. The letter is reproduced in full in Gille, Le Mirador, 388–89.
34. Pétain, “L’Éducation nationale.” The rewriting of “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” is the last sentence, p. 253. This article was later reprinted as a separate pamphlet by the Comité France-Amérique, Cahiers de Politique Nationale no. 2, n.d. [1941?].
35. Pétain, “La politique sociale de l’avenir.” The phrases quoted are on p. 116.
36. Robert Esménard to IN, August 28, 1939; IMEC, NMR 6.6.
37. IN to Mademoiselle Le Fur, September 8, 1940; IMEC, NMR 6.11.
38. The correspondence with Esménard is at IMEC, in the folders of general correspondence with Albin Michel. His and her letters are separated, making them difficult to read in sequence; his are in dossier NMR 6.1–6.8, hers in 6.9–6.12. A few of these letters are reproduced in the appendix to Suite Française.
39. “Par moments, angoisse insupportable. Sensation de cauchemar. Ne crois pas à la réalité. Espoir (ténu?) et absurde. Si je savais trouver un chemin seulement pour me tirer d’affaire, et les miens avec moi. Impossible de croire que Paris est perdu pour moi. Impossible. La seule issue me paraît ‘l’homme de paille’, mais je ne me fais aucune illusion sur les difficultés folles que ce plan présente. Pourtant, il faut.” IMEC, ALM 3000.2.
40. “Réalisme absolu et mystère.” Ibid. The story whose kernel she describes here, featuring a painter and his two grotesque, hidden offsprings, was “L’incendie” (The fire), published in Gringoire on February 27, 1942. It was the last work of hers to appear in Gringoire.
41. See Némirovsky, OC 2:859–60. However, this letter (which I discuss below) was written in February 1942, not December 1940. As far as I know, there is no trace of an earlier letter from her to Carbuccia, but the fact that he published her work for over a year under pseudonyms suggests that she had an understanding with him.
42. Taguieff, ed., L’Antisémitisme de plume. This book includes a selection of articles by Coston and other antisemitic ideologues, most of them unknown today, that appeared in the collaborationist press in Paris, endlessly repeating the same argument: the Jews, an international conspiracy, were depraved and bloodthirsty and solely responsible for the war as well as for Bolshevism. Béraud was arrested in September 1944 and condemned to death for his writings in February 1945, around the time Brasillach was executed for his. These condemnations fell under the heading of “intelligence with the enemy” (article 75 of the penal code), that is, treason, and were not linked to antisemitism. Béraud’s sentence was commuted to life in prison by de Gaulle, and no other writer was executed after Brasillach. Brasillach was an outspoken advocate of collaboration with Germany, while Béraud hammered home his enmity toward England and the United States. Carbuccia, for his part, began to soften the tone of Gringoire after the Allied victories of November 1942 in North Africa and the occupation of all of France by the Germans—to the point that Béraud, who was no longer welcome at the paper, even published a pamphlet against him in June 1944. Carbuccia fled the country in 1945, was condemned to prison in absentia in 1950, then retried in person and acquitted of all charges in 1955. See Pascal Fouché, L’Édition française sous l’Occupation, 2:250–51. All of Béraud’s articles published during the Occupation have been collected in Béraud, Gringoire: Ecrits 1940–1943; his pamphlet against Carbuccia, Les Raisons d’un silence, and Carbuccia’s unpublished response, written after 1945 (made available by his son Jean-Luc de Carbuccia), are in Fouché, 437–67.
43. See Taguieff’s introduction in L’Antisémitisme de plume, esp. 30–41, and his essay in the same book, “L’antisémitisme à l’époque de Vichy: la haine, la lettre et la loi.”
44. IN to Robert Esménard, May 10, 1941; IMEC, NMR 6.12; reprinted in the appendix to Suite Française, 545. She writes to thank him on May 17. The average salary of a worker in the Paris region in 1940 was around twelve hundred francs per month (counting a six-day workweek), so Némirovsky’s monthly stipend of three thousand to support the family in the countryside was quite comfortable, though by no means luxurious. For a table of salaries in 1940, see http://noisy93160.histoire.free.fr/documents/2013-01-17_priL’x_et_salaires_19_&_20eme_siecles_RP.pdf.
45. Letter from Robert Esménard to Julie Dumot, May 27, 1942. He addresses the letter to her instead of to Némirovsky because Dumot was the one receiving the stipends. IMEC, NMR 6.14.
46. IN to André Sabatier, October 14, 1941, IMEC, NMR 6.13; IN to Robert Esménard, October 30, 1941, IMEC, NMR 6.12. The originals of all of Némirovsky’s letters to Sabatier are at the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris. Copies are at IMEC, where I consulted them: NMR 6.13. Hereafter I will mention only their dates in the text, with no note.
47. Robert Esménard to IN, October 27, 1941, IMEC, NMR 6.8; IN to Esménard, October 30, 1941, IMEC, NMR 6.12.
48. Letters exchanged between “Julie” and Sabatier or Esménard in 1941 and early 1942 (before Irène’s arrest) are at IMEC, NMR 6.14–15. Olivier Philipponnat, in his foreword to Les Biens de ce monde in Némirovsky’s Complete Works (OC 2:906), mentions a contract with Julie’s name on it, signed in December 1941, but I was not able to find it among Némirovsky’s papers at IMEC. The letters, however, clearly indicate that Esménard was willing to go along with the fiction of Julie as the author of Némirovsky’s wartime writings.
49. IMEC, NMR 6.8. According to this report, The Dogs and the Wolves had sold quite well (though Esménard had complained about few sales in 1940), with two printings and more than 17,000 copies sold. The biggest seller was Deux, recounting a bourgeois marriage from its passionate beginnings to the “resigned” middle age of husband and wife; it had had four printings, with 21,600 copies sold.
50. An updated bilingual edition of the 1942 list, titled “Undesirable Literature in France” (Unerwünschte Literatur in Frankreich / Ouvrages Littéraires Non-Désirables en France), appeared in May 1943. It contained an appendix of hundreds of names of Jewish authors writing in French, along with their publishers. Némirovsky’s name was on it, spelled Némirowsky, but curiously her publisher was listed as Flammarion, the owner of the journal where she had published her very first works. The 1940 and 1943 publications are available online through the Bibliothèque Nationale de France: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8626072f and http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b86260674/f11.item.r=Ouvrages%20litteraires%20francais%20non-desirables, respectively.
51. IN to Madeleine (Avot) Cabour, December 5, 1940; IMEC, NMR 5.1.
52. IN to Madeleine Cabour, April 14, 1941, IMEC, NMR 5.1.
53. IN to Madeleine Cabour, September 9, 1941, at IMEC, NMR 5.1.
54. IN to André Sabatier, November 20, 1941.
55. I read these reports in Mâcon in October 2013 and would like to thank the archivist Cécile Mariotte and her colleagues for their help.
56. IN to Julie Dumot, June 22, 1941; IMEC, NMR 5.40.
57. There is a fascinating exchange of letters between Némirovsky and an agent of her mother’s, one W. I. Pahlen Heyberg, who wrote to her in August 1941 demanding that she return the furs she had taken from her mother’s trunk. Némirovsky replied that she had indeed taken the furs and a few other items and sold them immediately. She assumed her mother would be happy to know that this had allowed her granddaughters to subsist for a while, “[for] she must have guessed that I had neither money nor work at the time she fled from Paris” (IMEC, NMR 5.1). The poisonous relationship between Irène and her mother obviously persisted into the war.
58. Postcard from Raïssa Adler, October 13, 1944; IMEC, NMR 6.16.
59. Louis Bazy’s secretary replied to Michel Epstein on August 3, 1942, mentioning that he was traveling on business but had received the letter and would do everything he could to help. Michel mentions him to Sabatier in his letter of August 9. Both of these are reprinted in the appendix to Suite Française, 558–59.
60. I consulted the minutes from February 1941, when Louis Bazy was elected president, to October 1942, when he was forced out by Pierre Laval and replaced by Albert de Mun, at the Germans’ insistence. Available at the headquarters of Croix Rouge Française, Paris.
61. On the history of Pithiviers and Beaune-la Rolande, see the essays by Katy Hazan (“Comment en est-on arrivé là?”) and Benoît Verny (“Les camps d’internement du Loiret”) in Hazan et al., eds., Pithiviers–Auschwitz 17 juillet 1942, 6h15, 8–20. The Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur les Camps d’Internement dans le Loiret (Cercil), which is both a research center and a museum (its full name now is Cercil-Musée-Mémorial des Enfants du Vél d’Hiv), was founded in 1991 and is supported by the municipalities of Orléans, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande as well as the Fondation de la Mémoire de la Shoah and various government agencies. Its current president and one of its founders, Hélène Mouchard-Zay, is the daughter of Jean Zay, who was minister of education and held other government posts in the 1930s; his father was Jewish, and he was murdered by the French Milice in 1944. I thank Hélène Mouchard-Zay for kindly guiding me through Pithiviers and introducing me to the staff of the Centre in Orléans, who were very helpful in providing documents about the camp.
62. Klarsfeld, Le Calendrier de la persécution, 1:345–48. The full listing of all the transports from France, in chronological order, with deportees listed alphabetically, was assembled and first published by Serge Klarsfeld in 1978. His Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France was the work that first provided family members of deportees who had perished access to this information. Today, a number of online summaries list the numbers and dates of all the transports and the number of survivors (the latter not always accurate).
63. One such letter of instructions, addressed by the Préfet of the Department of Haute-Saône to police commissioners of the areas under his jurisdiction, is reprinted by Klarsfeld in Le Calendrier de la persécution, 1:385–86. The Préfet underlines that Jews are to bring their “carte de textile” ration card with them when they pick up their stars at the police stations.
64. The report, dated Orléans, June 29, 1942, and signed by S.S. Hauptsturmführer Westphal, is included, in French translation, in Klarsfeld, Le Calendrier de la persécution, 1:431.
65. See Olivier Philipponnat’s note on the text of Les Feux de l’automne in OC 2:1182.
66. Letter from IN to the Kreiskommandantur, February 11, 1942; IMEC, NMR 5.13.
67. Letter to Hélène Soutzo Morand, Archives de l’Institut, 2 AP7 MS 442.
68. Ibid.
69. These letters were deposited at IMEC by Denise Epstein in 2011: NMR 25.2. She and Julie were away during most of April and May, starting and ending their trip in Paris, with several weeks in between in the Bordeaux region, where Julie Dumot’s family lived.
70. Alan Riding has chronicled this in his highly readable account And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris.
71. Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, 454–67.
72. Manuscript draft of letter to Horace de Carbuccia, no date, but his reply in March mentions the date of her letter: February 20, 1942. IMEC, NMR 5.30, 5.33.
73. Horace de Carbuccia, typed letter to IN, Paris, March 17, 1942. IMEC, NMR 5.33.
74. The report of the sous-préfet at Autun, R. P. Coldefy, sent to the Police des Questions Juives in Dijon, dated June 16, 1942, is at the Archives Départementales de Saône et Loire, Mâcon, AD71 1081W1. Elisabeth Gille, in her mother’s voice, refers to the star in Le Mirador, 283. I thank Madeleine and Denise Jobert for sharing their memories with me and also for showing me the church registry in which Denise Epstein’s first communion is recorded. Copies of school registries showing Denise’s and Elisabeth’s names were kindly given to me by the secretary of the mairie, M. Granger, whom I wish to thank.
75. “Mon cher aimé, mes petites adorées, je crois que nous partons aujourd’hui. Courage et espoir. Vous êtes dans mon coeur, mes biens-aimés. Que Dieu nous aide tous.” Copies of all three letters are at IMEC, NMR 5.7 (the originals are at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, CDJC); the first and third, erroneously designated as the “last two” she wrote, are reprinted in the appendix to Suite Française, 549–50. These three letters were her last ones.
76. These lists are reproduced in Hazan et al., Pithiviers–Auschwitz, 348–49.
77. I wish to thank Catherine Thion, an archivist at the Cercil-Musée-Mémorial des Enfants du Vél d’Hiv in Orléans, for explaining this notation to me. Copies of all the detainees’ fiches from Pithiviers can be seen at the CDJC in Paris as well as at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
78. For these and other details on transport #6, see Klarsfeld, Le Calendrier de la persécution, 1:530–31. The seven departments under the jurisdiction of Dijon, including the Saône et Loire, are listed in Hazan et al., Pithiviers–Auschwitz, 359.
79. The text of the telegram is cited in the work of two local historians, Roger Marchandeau and Georges Legras, La Tragédie des Juifs montcelliens (1940–1945), which is deposited at the Archives Départementales de Saône et Loire in Mâcon (cat. 2950).
80. These numbers are furnished in ibid., 21.
81. All of this correspondence, right up to Michel’s arrest in October, is at IMEC, NMR 6.26. Much of it is reprinted in the appendix to Suite Française, 549–65. I discuss it in detail in chapter 6.
82. The complete list, often difficult to read, is reproduced in Hazan et al., Pithiviers–Auschwitz, 337–49. Némirovsky’s name appears on the list of women, where her name is again misspelled, as Nimierovsky (349). On the same page there is a separate list of fifteen names, of women who arrived in the camp on July 16, which does not include her. This book contains brief biographies of some victims from the transport, written by members of their family. Némirovsky’s, written by Denise Epstein, is on pages 273–75. This particular transport is especially well documented, for there exists another volume with testimonies and brief biographies of other victims: Antoine Mercier, Convoi No. 6. Destination: Auschwitz. juillet 1942 (Le Cherche Midi, 2005), reissued in 2008 in an updated version under the title Un Train parmi tant d’autres, 17 juillet 1942. According to the list published in the latter, ninety-four people survived, almost all of them men.
Epigraphs: Roth, “Writing about Jews,” in Reading Myself and Others, 200; “Ce qui me tient le plus à coeur: le Juif,” undated entry, journal and drafts of “Le Charlatan,” IMEC, ALM 2999.1.
1. Shteyngart, Little Failure, 29–30.
2. Reed, “Fade to White,” New York Times, February 5, 2010.
3. The most recent report, published in October 2013, is the 314-page “A Portrait of Jewish Americans.” It is available in full and in summaries on the Pew Center’s website: http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/10/jewish-american-full-report-for-web.pdf.
4. “Defender of the Faith” appeared in the New Yorker in April 1959. Roth tells the story about letters to the editor from Jewish readers in Reading Myself and Others, 203–4.
5. Ibid., 201. “Writing about Jews” was first published in Commentary, December 1963.
6. Quoted by Jules Chametzky, in his introduction to Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky, xvi.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., xviii.
9. Ertel, Le roman juif américain, 39 and passim; Homberger, “Some Uses for Jewish Ambivalence: Abraham Cahan and Michael Gold,” in Cheyette, ed., Between “Race” and Culture, 168.
10. Robert le Diable [Robert Brasillach], review of David Golder, in L’Action Française, January 9, 1930. Other, similarly positive reviews appeared in Le Figaro, January 28, 1930, Le Temps, January 10, 1930, the weekly Gringoire, January 31, 1930—all establishment papers, it must be said—and many others. An unsigned American review appeared in the New York Times, November 23, 1930. For an extended discussion of the press reception, see Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky, chap. 6.
11. Unsigned review of David Golder, La Tribune Juive, no. 19 (May 1930): 285–86. Ida R. See, “Un chef-d’oeuvre?,” Réveil Juif, January 31, 1930.
12. Interview with Madame Denise Weill, Paris, July 12, 2010.
13. The letter was reproduced in Auscher, “Nos Interviews: Irène Némirovsky,” 669.
14. “Rue des Rosiers,” unsigned article under the rubric “Nos Échos,” L’Univers Israélite, January 31, 1930.
15. Gourfinkel, “L’expérience juive d’Irène Némirovsky,” 677.
16. Lacretelle, Le Retour de Silbermann, 104.
17. I have analyzed some of the unintended “antisemitic effects” in Sartre’s portrayal of “the Jew” in Antisemite and Jew in three articles: “The Jew in Sartre’s Réflexions” (1995); “Rereading: Further Reflections” (1999); and “Réflexions sur la question américaine” (2005). The first of these occasioned some heated discussions, which is why I wrote the other two, but they failed to persuade those who disagreed with me—yet another demonstration of the subject I am treating in these pages.
18. Gourfinkel, “L’expérience juive d’Irène Némirovsky,” 678.
19. Auscher, “Sous la lampe: Irène Némirowsky [sic],” Marianne, February 13, 1935. Auscher’s earlier interview with Némirovsky was “L’actualité littéraire: Les romancières et leur métier,” Marianne, May 16, 1934.
20. Auscher, “Nos interviews: Irène Némirovsky,” 669.
21. Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. This essay was first delivered as a lecture to the World Jewish Congress in London in 1958.
22. Derrida, “Avouer—l’impossible,” in Le dernier des Juifs, 15–65; this paper first appeared in the proceedings of the 1998 colloquium Comment vivre ensemble?, ed. Halpérin and Hansson, 179–216.
23. Auscher, “Nos interviews,” 670.
24. A few titles that come to mind, among many others: Angenot, Ce que l’on dit des juifs en 1889; Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema; Cheyette, ed., Between “Race” and Culture; Cheyette and Valman, eds., The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture; Nochlin and Garb, eds., The Jew in the Text.
25. Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, new edition and a response to the critics, 1–2; hereafter, page references to this work will be given in parentheses in the text.
26. Amossy and Herschberg Pierrot, Stéréotypes et clichés, 35. This short book offers a thorough, useful survey of the large body of work done by social scientists on stereotypes, from Walter Lippmann to Erving Goffman and others.
27. I owe this information to my Harvard colleague Karen Thornber, who is a specialist in the culture of contemporary China.
28. A recent discussion of this gender dichotomy is in Maurice Samuels’s essay, “Jews and the Construction of French Identity from Balzac to Proust,” 407.
29. This example is given by Amossy and Herschberg Pierrot, Stéréotypes et clichés, 99.
30. Julius, T. S. Eliot, 61, 73.
31. The “pamphlets” are Bagatelles pour un massacre (1937), L’École des cadavres (1938), and Les Beaux Draps (1939). There is very little difference in style or in the persona of the narrator between the pamphlets and Céline’s late novels.
32. Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories, 123.
33. Bragin, “British Film Gives ‘An Education’ in Anti-Semitism,” film review, Jewish Journal, Los Angeles, December 1, 2009. Consulted online: http://www.jewishjournal.com/film/article/british_film_gives_an_education_in_anti-semitism_20091201/.
34. Suleiman, “Ideological Dissent from Works of Fiction.”
35. Jonathan Weiss, in his discussion of this work, writes that Mr. and Mrs. Kampf are “converted Jews” who had become Catholics out of social ambition (Irène Némirovsky, 59). But the novella mentions only Mr. Kampf’s conversion (he is the only converted Jew in Némirovsky’s fiction), and he is still described as a “dry little Jew.” His wife, Rosine, is his former mistress, whom he married when their daughter was about to be born. Rosine is not Jewish: she reminds her husband that her relatives had stopped seeing her when she married a Jew. See Le Bal, OC, 1:360, 368.
36. “Je continue à peindre la société que je connais le mieux et qui se compose de désaxés, sortis du milieu où ils eussent normalement vécu, et qui ne s’adaptent pas sans choc ni sans souffrances à une vie nouvelle.” Radio interview, 1934, quoted as wall text at the exhibit, “Irène Némirovsky: ‘Il me semble parfois que je suis étrangère,’ ” Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris, October 2010–March 2011.
37. Durkheim’s Le Suicide: Étude de sociologie appeared in 1897 and has been continuously reprinted since then. See his chapter titled “Anomic suicide,” book 2, chap. 5.
38. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 8.
39. Quoted in Begley, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, 74. For an excellent discussion of Proust’s ambivalence toward Jews and Jewishness in À la recherche du temps perdu, see Samuels, Inventing the Israelite, 239–61. Piperno, by contrast, accuses Proust bluntly of antisemitism: Proust antijuif.
40. Beauvoir, La Force des choses, 188.
41. “A mesure qu’il devenait plus vieux et malade, il se fatiguait davantage des gens, de leur tumulte, de sa famille et de la vie.” OC 1:436–37.
42. “Quel besoin avait eu Gloria de l’inviter, celui-là? Il le regarda avec une sorte de haine comme une caricature cruelle. Il se tenait debout sur le pas de la porte, un petit Juif gras, roux et rose, l’air comique, ignoble, un peu sinistre, avec ses yeux brillants d’intelligence derrière les fines lunettes à branches dorées, son ventre, ses petites jambes faibles, courtes et tordues, ses mains d’assassin qui tenaient tranquillement une boîte de porcelaine, pleine de caviar frais, collée contre son coeur.” OC 1:436–37.
43. Franklin, “Scandale Française,” 40.
44. “Plus tard, Soifer devait mourir seul, comme un chien, sans un ami, sans une couronne de fleurs sur sa tombe, enterré dans le cimetière le meilleur marché de Paris, par sa famille qui le haïssait, et qu’il avait haïe, à qui il laissait pourtant une fortune de plus de 30 millions, accomplissant ainsi jusqu’au bout l’incompréhensible destin de tout bon Juif sur cette terre.” OC 1:511.
45. “Il possédait une espèce de sombre humour qui était assez semblable à celui de Golder lui-même et les faisait se plaire ensemble.” Ibid.
46. “ ‘Quelle sale juiverie, hein? dit-il tendrement: qu’est-ce que ça vous rappelle?’ ‘Rien de bon,’ dit sombrement Golder.” Ibid., 514.
47. “ ‘C’est un long chemin,’ dit-il tout haut. ‘Oui,’ dit le vieux Soifer, ‘long, dur et inutile.’ ” Ibid., 516.
48. This interpretation of the novel’s ending was offered by Ruth Franklin in a public discussion we had, with Maurice Samuels, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, December 8, 2008.
49. Price, “Out of the Ghetto,” 21.
50. Ezrahi, “After Such Knowledge, What Laughter?,” 290.
51. Weiss, Irène Némirovsky, 10.
52. See, for example, the thoughtful article by Michel Leymarie, “Les frères Tharaud,” which starts by asking how the Tharauds’ “indubitably antisemitic” works could have had such success at the time, even among many Jewish readers. Leymarie suggests that the ambivalence of the Tharauds’ “exotic portraits of foreign Jews” led readers astray (89).
53. “Les enfants naissaient dans le quartier comme pullule la vermine.” OC 1:212; “[Ils] prospéraient comme les rats qui couraient sur la plage autour des vieux bateaux.” Ibid., 1:213.
54. “Jamais le petit ne réfléchissait d’avance à ce qu’il allait dire: les paroles s’éveillaient en lui comme des oiseaux mystérieux auxquels il n’y avait qu’à donner l’essor, et la musique qui convenait les accompagnait aussi naturellement.” Ibid., 216.
55. “Autrefois, il avait été un enfant génial; à présent, il n’était plus qu’un garçon gauche et stupide, comme les autres . . . La Princesse le regardait de ses yeux froids.” Ibid., 241 (ellipsis in the text). The definition of peiss is on page 211.
56. “Awakening” (1930), in Babel, The Collected Stories, 305, 309. I thank Steve Zipperstein for directing me to this story.
57. Weiss, Irène Némirovsky, 11.
58. “Pourquoi s’étaient-elles tues, les chansons qui naissaient autrefois spontanément sur ses lèvres? . . . Son génie avait-il été une espèce de morbide fleur, éclose seulement parce que sa vie avait été violente, excessive, malsaine? . . . Hélas! C’était tout simplement qu’il entrait dans la difficile période de l’adolescence. . . . Mais personne ne le lui disait; personne ne lui faisait espérer retrouver plus tard le don délicieux et fatal, plus tard, quand il serait un homme. . . . Personne n’était là pour lui chuchoter: ‘Attends, espère. . . .’ Ils étaient tous penchés sur lui, autour de lui, accrochés à lui, comme des humains qui veulent ouvrir de force de leurs doigts sacrilèges une fleur.” OC 1:243.
59. “Écoute, je vais te dire. Ne le répète à personne. Peut-être . . . je n’ose pas le dire tout haut . . . peut-être qu’ils sont morts, mes oiseaux merveilleux.” OC 1:246.
60. I owe the insight about Ismael’s name to Elena Quaglia, who is completing a doctoral dissertation in Italy on Jewish identity in Némirovsky and other French writers. See Quaglia, “L’Enfant génial di Irène Némirovsky.”
Epigraphs: Cixous, “Coming to Writing,” in Coming to Writing and Other Essays, 21 (in French, La Venue à l’écriture, 28); Le Vin de solitude, OC 1:1201.
1. “Le sujet n’est pas la confession d’un ivrogne solitaire, quoique ce serait, ma foi, assez amusant à traiter, ne le pensez-vous pas? Non, ce titre dans ma pensée veut exprimer l’espèce d’enivrement moral que donne la solitude (morale également) dans l’adolescence et la jeunesse. À vous, mais à vous seul, je confierai que ce livre-ci est le roman presque autobiographique que l’on écrit toujours, fatalement, tôt ou tard. J’espère qu’on ne l’éreintera pas trop, mais c’est un de ces livres surtout pour soi que l’on se résigne facilement à ne pas voir aimés . . .” Letter to Gaston Chérau, February 11, 1935. Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, cat. MS 15621. Emphasis added.
2. Ramon Fernandez, review of Le Vin de solitude, Marianne, October 9, 1935. Henri de Régnier’s review appeared in Le Figaro, November 2, 1935.
3. “ ‘Les bateaux . . . Le pétrole . . . Les pipe-lines . . . Les bottes . . . Les sacs de couchage . . . Le paquet d’actions . . . Millions . . . Millions . . . Millions . . .’ [. . .] Seul l’argent passionnait les hommes autour d’Hélène. Tous s’enrichissaient. L’or coulait.” OC 1:1245–46. Hereafter I give the French text in notes only for longer quotes; for others, page numbers will be cited in parentheses after the quote.
4. “ ‘Ce ne sont que les années d’apprentissage. Elles ont été exceptionnellement dures, mais elles ont trempé mon courage et mon orgueil. Cela, c’est à moi, ma richesse inaliénable. Je suis seule, mais ma solitude est âpre et envirante.’ ” OC 1:1363.
5. “Marcel devient écrivain” is how Gérard Genette sums up, with a bit of irony, the plot of the novel in his classic study of narrative, “Discours du récit.”
6. Abel et al., eds., The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. See also Miller, The Heroine’s Text, for a study of the punishment / reward pattern in eighteenth-century fiction about women.
7. Showalter, A Literature of their Own; Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic; Milligan, The Forgotten Generation.
8. “Ce qui m’intéresse toujours c’est d’essayer de surprendre l’âme humaine sous les dehors sociaux . . . , de démasquer, en un mot, la vérité profonde qui est presque toujours en opposition avec l’apparence.” Frédéric Lefèvre, “En marge de L’Affaire Courilof, Radio-dialogue entre F. Lefèvre et Mme I. Némirovsky,” Sud de Montpellier, June 7, 1933; reprinted in Philipponnat and Lienhardt, La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky, 432 (emphasis added).
9. “Il n’y avait pas une figure sur laquelle Hélène en esprit ne pût lever le masque d’insouciance et de luxure qui recouvrait des traits tirés et anxieux.” OC 1:1352.
10. “C’était un dimanche d’automne. Le déjeuner finissait. Max était là. . . . Tous se taisaient et écoutaient distraitement les coups de feu, légers et lointains, qui, jour et nuit, résonnaient dans les faubourgs, mais auxquels personne ne prenait plus garde.” OC 1:1252.
11. “Le père pense à une femme qu’il a rencontrée dans la rue, et la mère vient seulement de quitter un amant. Ils ne comprennent pas leurs enfants, et leurs enfants ne les aiment pas; la jeune fille pense à son amoureux, et le garçon aux vilains mots qu’il a appris au lycée. Les petits enfants grandiront et seront pareils à eux. Les livres mentent. Il n’y a pas de vertu, ni d’amour dans le monde. Toutes les maisons sont pareilles. Dans chaque famille il y a le lucre seulement, le mensonge et l’incompréhension mutuelle.” OC 1:1253.
12. Proust, Du côté de chez Swann, 180.
13. “C’est partout pareil. Et chez nous aussi, c’est pareil. Le mari, la femme et . . .
Elle hésita et écrivit:
L’amant . . .
Elle effaça le dernier mot, puis l’écrivit encore, jouissant de le voir sous ses yeux, puis, de nouveau, l’effaça, ratura chaque lettre, la hérissa de fléchettes, de boucles, jusqu’à ce que le mot eût perdu son apparence première et fût devenu semblable à une bête bardée d’antennes, à une plante ornée de piquants. Ainsi, il avait un aspect maléfique bizarre, secret et rude qui lui plaisait.” OC 1:1254.
14. “Mais elle est folle! . . . [. . .] Quand on pense, quand on ose penser des choses pareilles, aussi imprudentes, aussi idiotes, on ne les écrit pas, du moins, on les garde pour soi! Oser juger ses parents!” “Elle te détache de tes parents! Elle t’apprend à les mépriser! Eh bien, elle peut faire ses paquets, tu entends!” OC 1:1255.
15. Journal and drafts for Le Vin de solitude, IMEC, ALM 2998.9. The excerpt about Yiddish was published in Le Magazine Littéraire, no. 454 ( June 2006): 97.
16. “Des Russes, des Juifs de ‘bonne famille’ (ceux qui parlaient anglais entre eux et suivaient avec une orgueilleuse humilité les rites de leur religion), et les nouveaux riches, sceptiques, libres penseurs, et bourrés d’argent.” OC 1:1275–76.
17. “ ‘Elle ne t’aime pas. Elle a voulu se venger de moi, te prendre à moi . . . Malheureux enfant . . . Elle qui n’était rien, a mere nobody,’ disait-elle amèrement, trouvant dans son malheur une consolation de pouvoir l’exprimer en anglais, naturellement, et non comme Bella, qui l’avait appris, sans doute, d’un amant de passage.” OC 1:1325.
18. “Non, elle n’était pas comme les autres . . . pas tout à fait [. . .]. Il lui semblait parfois que dans son corps deux âmes habitaient sans se mêler, se juxtaposaient sans se confondre”; “En Russie, ils ne comprendraient pas la langue du pays. Ils ne sauraient pas ce que pense un marchand, un cocher, un paysan . . . Moi, je le sais. [. . .] Je suis une petite fille, mais j’ai vu plus de choses qu’eux dans toute leur longue, ennuyeuse vie.” OC 1:1222.
19. This is the conclusion arrived at by Norman David Thau, in his study of five French and German novelists of the interwar period, including Némirovsky: Romans de l’impossible identité, 217–18.
20. Coming to Writing and Other Essays, 12–13; La Venue à l’écriture, 20.
21. Auscher, “Sous la lampe, Irène Némirowsky [sic],” Marianne, February 13, 1935.
22. The story, “La Niania,” appeared in the daily Le Matin on May 9, 1924, under a rubric run by Colette, “Les Mille et un Matins.” Colette’s comment on Duvivier’s David Golder was published in Le Figaro, along with comments by fifteen other writers and artists, on March 6, 1931; only four mentioned the novel on which the film was based.
23. “Lu le livre de Colette. Si c’est tout ce qu’elle a pu tirer de juin je suis tranquille.” (Read Colette’s book. If that’s all she was able to do with June, I’m not worried). Entry dated April 24, 1941, IMEC, ALM 3000.2. The book by Colette she refers to is Journal à rebours, a collection of short pieces that contains a section on “June 1940.” Némirovsky had just finished the first part of Suite Française, “Storm in June,” which describes the exode of June 1940. She was obviously relieved that Colette had not “done more” with the theme.
24. “Elle effaça le dernier mot, puis l’écrivit encore, jouissant de le voir sous ses yeux, puis, de nouveau, l’effaça, ratura chaque lettre, la hérissa de fléchettes, de boucles, jusqu’à ce que le mot eût perdu son apparence première et fût devenu semblable à une bête bardée d’antennes, à une plante ornée de piquants” (italics added).
25. “Écrire! Pouvoir écrire! cela signifie la longue rêverie devant la feuille blanche, le griffonnage inconscient, les jeux de la plume qui tourne en rond autour d’une tache d’encre, qui mordille le mot imparfait, le griffe, le hérisse de fléchettes, l’orne d’antennes, de pattes, jusqu’à ce qu’il perde sa figure lisible de mot, mué en insecte fantastique.” La Vagabonde, in Colette, Oeuvres, ed. Claude Pichois (Gallimard, 1984), 1:1074.
26. Journal and drafts for Le Vin de solitude, IMEC, ALM 2998.9. Colette’s sentence about solitude and wine is in La Vagabonde, 1073. For details about Colette’s life, see the chronology in Oeuvres, vol. 1, and Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh.
27. Beauvoir, La Force des choses, 284.
28. Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh, 470.
29. Gary, La Promesse de l’aube, 24.
30. “Quant au confort, aux petits plats tendrement préparés, au chapeau que l’on chiffonne avec un mètre de ruban acheté en solde, quant aux douces veillées sous la lampe, en face d’un mari qui, les pieds dans ses pantoufles, lit son journal, un enfant endormi sur ses genoux, quant à cette vie française si belle, si harmonieuse, si enviable, c’était . . . ce devait être agréable, mais aussi difficile, aussi étranger à Ben et Ada que pour les nomades l’existence des sédentaires dans de riches plaines . . .” Les chiens et les loups, in OC 2:611. Hereafter, for shorter quotes I will give page numbers in parentheses after the quote.
31. “Que diront les couillons? ‘Mme Némirovsky reste fidèle au roman pénible . . .’ ou d’autres coneries [sic]. Je devrais être blindée, mais enfin . . . C’est drôle qu’en 1938 il y ait encore ce désir de voir la vie en rose.” Dossier on “Le Charlatan,” IMEC, ALM 2999.1: journal entry dated June 9, 1938.
32. An early draft of the novel is at IMEC, ALM 2999.3. The first page is dated January 24, 1939.
33. Journal and draft for “Fraternité,” IMEC, ALM 2999.13.
34. Gourfinkel, “L’expérience juive d’Irène Némirovsky,” 678.
35. The quasi-pathological association of Jewishness with a devalued femininity found one expression in Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character (1903), a remarkably influential book which is often cited as the ultimate example of Jewish self-hatred. Weininger, a Viennese Jew slated for philosophical stardom, committed suicide in 1903 at the age of twenty-three, shortly after publishing his book.
36. “Un tel était né dans le Ghetto. A vingt ans, il avait quelques sous; il montait d’un échelon dans la vie sociale: il déménageait et allait s’installer loin du fleuve . . . ; à son mariage il habiterait déjà le côté pair (interdit) de la rue; plus tard, il monterait encore: il s’établirait dans le quartier où, selon la loi, aucun Juif n’avait le droit de naître, d’exister, de mourir. On le respectait; il était en même temps pour les siens un objet d’envie et une image d’espoir: on pouvait monter jusqu’à de telles hauteurs.” OC 2:516.
37. “Guy de Maupassant,” in Babel, The Collected Stories; Aleichem, “Shprintze,” in Tevye the Dairyman.
38. “Mais, ainsi que cela lui arrivait parfois, elle était habitée en même temps par deux pensées différentes: l’une naïve, enfantine, et l’autre plus mûre, indulgente et sage; elle sentait en elle deux Ada, et l’une des deux comprenait pourquoi on la chassait, pourquoi on lui parlait avec colère: ces enfants affamés surgissaient devant les riches Juifs comme un rappel éternel, un souvenir atroce et honteux de ce qu’ils avaient été ou de ce qu’ils auraient pu être. Personne n’osait penser: ‘ce qu’ils pourraient redevenir un jour.’ ” OC 2:562.
39. “Mon affaire, peindre les loups! Je n’ai que faire des animaux en tribu, ni les animaux domestiques. Les loups, c’est mon affaire, mon talent.” Entry dated May 26, 1938, dossier on “Le Charlatan,” IMEC, ALM 2999.1. The first mention of a novel about Russian Jews, involving two opposing types of men and a woman, is in ALM 2999.2 and is dated July 21, 1938.
40. Price, “Out of the Ghetto.”
41. “Toi qui nous regardes de haut, qui nous méprises, qui ne veux rien avoir de commun avec la racaille juive! Attends un peu! Attends! Et on te confondra de nouveau avec elle! Et tu te mêleras à elle, toi qui en es sorti, toi qui as cru en échapper!” OC 2:645.
Epigraphs: Cyrulnik, preface to Jablonka, ed., L’Enfant-Shoah, 7; Gille, on radio program “Pentimento,” France Inter, September 4, 1994; Epstein, Survivre et vivre, 87.
1. Interview with Arlette Stroumza, December 13, 2010. For the other information in this paragraph, see Gille, Le Mirador, 315–23, and Epstein, Survivre et vivre, 69.
2. Michel Epstein (henceforth ME) to Ambassador Otto Abetz, July 27, 1942. IMEC, NMR 5.10. Much of this correspondence was reproduced in the appendix to Suite Française. I consulted the original documents at IMEC.
3. André Sabatier to Hélène Morand, July 29, 1942. IMEC, NMR 6.25.
4. André Sabatier to ME, August 12, 1942. IMEC, NMR 5.19.
5. André Sabatier to Jacques Bénoist-Méchin, July 15, 1942. IMEC, NMR 6.25.
6. ME to Madeleine Cabour, August 14 and 20, 1942. IMEC, NMR 5.10.
7. Mavlik to Michel Epstein, July 29, 1942, IMEC NMR 5.17. The Drancy camp registration cards as well as the Préfecture de Police cards (from October 1940) for Paul, Samuel, and Alexandrine Epstein are at the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine (CDJC) in Paris and are on microfilm at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. All the cards bear stamped or handwritten notes indicating the dates they were deported.
8. IMEC, NMR 5.14.
9. IMEC, NMR 5.19.
10. ME to Sabatier, September 19, 1942. IMEC, NMR 6.26; Sabatier to ME, September 23, 1942. IMEC, NMR 5.19.
11. IMEC, NMR 6.26.
12. Copy of letter to M. Sabatier senior, enclosed with letter to André Sabatier, October 8, 1942; IMEC, NMR 6.26.
13. A copy of this document, bearing the stamp of Maître Charles Vernet, is at IMEC, NMR 8.12.
14. The postcards to Julie Dumot are at IMEC, NMR 5.12; the card to Sabatier is in NMR 5.14.
15. The telegram of October 8 from Dijon is referred to in a police report from Montceau-les-Mines, sent to the souspréfet in Autun, René Coldefy—cited in Marchandeau and Legras, La Tragédie des Juifs montcéliens (1940/1945), 25. Michel Epstein’s two postcards to Julie were dated by him and also stamped by the post office in Le Creusot with the dates clearly indicated; his postcard to Sabatier is dated by him, “19–10–42.” The record of the arrival of Jews from Le Creusot to Drancy is cited by Klarsfeld, Le Calendrier de la Persécution des Juifs de France, 1940–1944, 3:1228. The statistics given for the transport of November 6, 1942, are in ibid., 1255–56. Michel’s and Sophie Epstein’s names appear on the alphabetical list of the transport in Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France.
16. The teacher, Madame Ravaud, wrote Denise Epstein two letters, dated August 8 [1990] and April 16 [1992], containing slightly different accounts of the incident in which she hid her (or, in one version, Elisabeth as well) in her apartment; copies of both are at IMEC, NMR 5.27. The originals were given by Denise Epstein to Madame Ravaud’s daughter, Elisabeth Kulik, a retired English teacher who now lives in Issy-l’Évêque. Mme Kulik kindly showed me around Issy in June 2014 and told me about her mother. The story of the German officer who let the girls go after their arrest was told by Denise and Elisabeth on numerous occasions—see, for example, Epstein, Survivre et vivre, 69–70; Dupont, “A Daughter’s Painful Quest” [interview with Elisabeth Gille], International Herald Tribune, March 31, 1992; Anissimov, “Les filles d’Irène Némirovski,” 74.
17. Epstein, Survivre et vivre, 74–75.
18. Ibid., 72; also in Anissimov, “Les filles d’Irène Némirovski,” 74.
19. Denise’s and Elisabeth’s letter of December 25, 1942, to Sabatier is at IMEC, NMR 6.14. Denise’s letters to her parents went from April 8 to May 21, 1942. IMEC, NMR 25.2. A few letters from Irène to Denise during that time are in NMR 5.42.
20. The full version of Lichtenberger’s book that I summarized is titled Mon «[[?a id="page_326"/>»Petit Trott (Plon, 1931); the picture book of 1935 is Le Petit Trott. Le Noel de Trott, with illustrations by Paule Gaillard de Champris (Plon, 1935); the illustrated version from 1954 is Mon petit Trott (Bibliothèque Rouge et Or, Plon, 1954). Lichtenberger’s pamphlet Pourquoi la France est en guerre (1940) was published by the Comité Protestant des Amitiés Françaises à l’Étranger, a Protestant organization of which he was a member; it was translated into English.
21. Denise Epstein to Madeleine Cabour, April 23, 1943, in Denise Epstein’s personal archive; Julie Dumot’s letter of April 25, 1943, to André Sabatier, from “Cézac par Cavignac,” is at IMEC, NMR 6.14. Julie’s letter to Madeleine Cabour, also from Cézac, is undated, but internal evidence, including the reference to Babet’s upcoming communion, allows us to date it from around the third week of April 1943. IMEC, NMR 5.46. Copies of the documents I cite from Denise Epstein’s personal archive were kindly provided to me by Olivier Philipponnat.
22. The information about transports of Jews from Bordeaux is in Klarsfeld, Le Calendrier de le persécution des Juifs de France, vol. 3, by date: the last convoy from Bordeaux to Drancy arrived on May 14, 1944; the last transport from Drancy to Auschwitz was on July 31. The exact date when Denise and Elisabeth were taken out of the convent school is not certain, although Denise Epstein recalled it as being in October 1943. This date was repeated by Elisabeth Gille in Le Mirador, but she based all of the wartime dates on Denise’s memory. Julie Dumot, in a letter to Madeleine Cabour dated November 2, 1944, wrote that the “girls had not been in school since the end of February,” which suggests that they left the school at that time, not the previous October (IMEC, NMR 5.46). The only certain fact is that they left the school no later than the end of February and spent several months in hiding.
23. Epstein, Survivre et vivre, 74–75.
24. Julie Dumot to Madeleine Cabour, November 2, 1944. IMEC, NMR 5.46.
25. Cyrulnik, Un merveilleux malheur, 47–51. Psychological studies of hidden children have multiplied in France in recent years. Among the most important ones, in addition to Cyrulnik, are Frydman, Le Traumatisme de l’enfant caché (2002); Feldman, Entre trauma et protection (2009); Zajde, Les enfant cachés en France (2012). I have proposed the term “1.5 generation” to designate the specific age group of child survivors: Suleiman, “The 1.5 Generation.”
26. Copfermann, Dès les premiers jours de l’automne, 95.
27. See Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War, chap. 8, “The Edge of Memory.”
28. For a detailed study of the return of the deportees, see Wieviorka, Déportation et Génocide.
29. Ibid., 101, 118.
30. Julie Dumot to Madeleine Cabour, undated (summer 1945?) and September 8, 1945. Both are at IMEC, NMR 5.46.
31. “Pentimento,” radio program on writers’ childhoods, France Inter, September 4, 1994. Inathèque de France, DL R 19940904 FIT 12.
32. Julie mentions three thousand francs as the monthly amount in this letter, although Esménard had written shortly before Irène was deported that he was raising it to five thousand. I don’t know whether the increase ever took place.
33. Typed letter from M. Ginoux, who identifies herself as former secretary of Michel Epstein, to Julie Dumot, June 22, 1945. In Denise Epstein’s personal archive.
34. Letter from Marc Aldanov, April 5, 1945, and reply from R. Esménard, April 11, 1945; IMEC, NMR 6.16.
35. Robert Esménard to Mlle Le Fur, December 7, 1945, IMEC, NMR 6.16.
36. The information that follows about the Avot family is based in large part on my interview with Madame Edwige (Avot) Becquart, Versailles, October 9, 2014. I thank Madame Becquart for showing me family photographs and letters as well as sharing her personal memories of Elisabeth.
37. Julie Dumot to André Sabatier, August 29, 1945. IMEC, NMR 6.15.
38. Epstein, Survivre et vivre, 91.
39. Interview with Denise Epstein, Toulouse, June 23, 2011.
40. The school records for Denise and Elisabeth Epstein were communicated to me over the telephone by the school secretary on June 25, 2010. Student transcripts are destroyed after seven years, I was told, but the school keeps records of students’ years of attendance.
41. Letter in Denise Epstein’s personal archive. The biographical information is based on my interviews and conversations with Denise Epstein in Toulouse, in June 2008 and June 2011. She also recounts much of it in her book Survivre et vivre, 95–99.
42. Interview with Fabrice Gille, San Diego, April 29, 2010; interview with Edwige Becquart, Versailles, October 9, 2014. The four letters I saw from Elisabeth Gille to René and Hortense Avot are dated January 25, 1974 (to Hortense), July 5, 1974 (to René), December 23, 1974 (Hortense), and December 27, 1976 (Hortense).
43. Elisabeth Epstein’s exam results and diplomas are in the following cartons at the Archives Nationales: June 1954, carton 19910563/1, “Certificats d’études littéraires générales,” did not count toward the licence; November 1955, carton 19910563/79, “Certificat d’Études Supérieures, Littérature étrangère (anglais)” and “Études pratiques (anglais)”; June 1956, “Certificat d’Études Supérieures, Philologie anglaise.” Her individual student registration card, in carton 19800246/58, shows that she was registered at the Sorbonne from 1953 to 1958 and lists the American literature and civilization course in 1957–58. But there are no exam results in either 1958 or 1959, which bears out Edwige Becquart’s remark that her mother was chagrined at Elisabeth’s not obtaining a licence.
44. Interview with Anka Muhlstein, New York City, February 26, 2015. Anka Muhlstein was a close friend of Elisabeth Gille in the 1970s, when they both worked at the Denoël publishing firm. They remained in touch and saw each other regularly after Anka moved to New York, where she lives with her husband, the novelist Louis Begley.
45. Interview with Jean-Luc Pidoux-Payot, Paris, June 21, 2012.
46. Jean-Jacques Bernard to Mme Pasquier at Albin Michel, October 1, 1953; IMEC, NMR 6.20. I discuss Bernard’s Le camp de la mort lente in chapter 3.
47. Interview with Denise Epstein, Toulouse, June 23, 2011.
48. André Oudard to Madame [Denise] Dauplé, January 14, 1957. Personal archive of Denise Epstein.
49. IMEC, NMR 6.20.
50. The letter is signed “D. Dauplé, daughter of Irène Némirovsky.” IMEC, NMR 6.20.
51. Denise Epstein (signature) to Robert Esménard, December 31, 1954; IMEC, NMR 6.21.
52. Interview with Denise Epstein, Toulouse, June 23, 2011; the information about André Dauplé’s job at SVP was provided by Denise’s daughter, Irène Dauplé, whom I interviewed separately on the same day. See also Epstein, Survivre et vivre, chap. 5, “Militantisme.” Denise’s son Nicolas, whom I interviewed in June 2014, provided the information about her job at the government agency. I have not been able to find any official documents relating to it.
53. Julie Dumot to the Payeur Général, October 26, 1954. A copy of this letter was in Denise Epstein’s personal archives, along with Julie Dumot’s American identity cards. They must have been among Dumot’s papers found after her death, many of which were given to Denise.
54. Survivre et vivre, 64–65. I met Cécile Michaud’s daughter Renée in Issy-l’Évêque in June 2014. She graciously showed me the house, now renovated, where her mother had grown up and where Denise and Elisabeth had been sent to live during the first months of the war.
55. Interview with Anka Muhlstein, New York City, February 26, 2015.
56. Feldman, Entre trauma et protection, 233–70.
57. Copfermann, Dès les premiers jours de l’automne, 99.
58. Kofman, Rue Ordener rue Labat.
59. Burko-Falcman, Un prénom républicain, 92; the earlier quote, about feeling Catholic in her own way, is on page 203. Burko-Falcman’s earlier works are novels loosely based on her wartime experiences: La Dernière vie de madame K. (1982), Chronique de la source rouge (1984), L’enfant caché (1997).
60. Interview with Denise Weill, Paris, July 10, 2010. Denise Weill, the mother of the journalist and essayist Nicolas Weill, was born in 1926 and died in 2015.
61. Cyrulnik, Je me souviens, 49. In 2012 Cyrulnik published a full-length memoir about his childhood and youth in which he juxtaposes his personal story with general observations about the psychology of trauma and survival: Cyrulnik, Sauve-toi, la vie t’appelle.
62. Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide, 167–76.
63. Interview with Fabrice Gille, San Diego, April 29, 2010.
64. Interview with Irène Dauplé, Toulouse, June 23, 2011.
65. Of all the name changes in France between 1803 and 1957, 85 percent were done after 1945. See Grynberg, “Après la tourmente,” 262–68.
66. Interview with Emmanuel Dauplé, Toulouse, June 25, 2013.
67. “Pentimento,” radio program, France Inter, April 4, 1994.
68. Friedlander, Quand vient le souvenir (When memory comes); Vegh, Je ne lui ai pas dit au revoir (I didn’t say goodbye).
69. Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy; Samuel Moyn has argued that the specificity of Jewish deportation first came to the fore in 1966, when Jean-François Steiner published his “nonficton novel” Treblinka. The novel caused a brief but fiery controversy, some critics accusing Steiner of Jewish racism because of his emphasis on Jewish deportation (vs. that of résistants). See Moyn, A Holocaust Controversy.
70. Interview with Jean-Luc Pidoux-Payot, June 23, 2012. He kindly gave me a copy of Elisabeth Gille’s official record of employment, established by French Social Security, which lists October 1968 as the date of her employment by Denoël. Pidoux-Payot was a good friend of Gille’s and helped the family with bureaucratic details after her death.
71. Quoted in Foran, Mordecai, the Life and Times, 263.
72. Richler, L’Apprentissage de Duddy Kravitz, trans. Elisabeth Gille.
73. Deutscher, “The Non-Jewish Jew,” in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, 26–27, for the quotes in this paragraph. Elisabeth’s translation was published by Editions Payot, Paris, 1969.
74. L’Express, October 28, 1978. The interview, by the journalist Philippe Ganier Raymond, created a huge stir. Henry Rousso, in his book Le syndrome de Vichy (The Vichy Syndrome), analyzes this incident as a major step in the revival of “Jewish memory” in France in the 1970s.
75. The term “nouvelle judéophobie,” referring specifically to Islamic anti-Judaism, was put into circulation by Pierre-André Taguieff in his book by that title (La nouvelle judéophobie), published in 2002. The exemption of traditional French antisemitism seems to have been premature, however.
76. Vidal-Naquet, Les Juifs, la mémoire et le présent, 12.
Epigraphs: Denise Epstein, “Une photographie,” preface to Irène Némirovsky, Destinées et autres nouvelles, 10; interview with Léa Dauplé, Paris, June 9, 2014.
1. Macha Séry, “Le pays où l’archive est reine,” Le Monde, October 10, 2014, p. 6 of book section.
2. The typescript on onionskin is at IMEC, NMR 2.5–2.10. Denise showed the manuscript to the journalist Catherine Descargues in 1957, as I discuss below. Her mention of the “fat manuscript” came during the radio program devoted to Némirovsky, “Une vie, une oeuvre,” France Culture, March 12, 1992, INA 00740130; Elisabeth mentions it in Le Mirador, 286, 308, 370. That Denise’s children knew about the manuscript of Suite Française from an early age was told to me by her daughter Irène Dauplé (interview June 11, 2011) as well as by her son Emmanuel Dauplé (interview June 25, 2013), who repeated it in an interview published online in the newspaper La Dépêche.fr on April 5, 2015: http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2015/04/05/2081288-irene-nemirovsky-suite-francaise-eu-fin-tragique.html.
3. Bernard, preface to La Vie de Tchekhov, OC 2:709.
4. “Au moment où paraît son dernier livre: Souvenez-vous d’Irène Némirovsky,” Tribune de Lausanne, April 14, 1957, 7. Accessed online on April 8, 2015: http://scriptorium.bcu-lausanne.ch/#.
5. IMEC, NMR 6.21 mentions the sum of 125,000 francs (about 2,600 euros or $3,000 in today’s terms), with 75,000 to Denise and 50,000 to Elisabeth.
6. Catherine Descargues to Denise Epstein Dauplé, April 12, 1957. Personal archives of Denise Epstein.
7. Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy; Conan and Rousso, Vichy: Un passé qui ne passe pas.
8. Letter from C. Gille-Némirovsky to Albin Michel, February 1, 1965; Albin Michel sent the accounting on February 4. Both are at IMEC, NMR 6.23.
9. Letter from Jean-Louis Meunier to Albin Michel, requesting information, July 12, 1983. IMEC, NMR 6.26.
10. Interview with Rachel Ertel, Paris, July 7, 2010.
11. www.cercle-gaston-cremieux.org. Vidal-Naquet discusses his own early participation in the group in his Mémoires 2:261–62.
12. Marienstras, Être un peuple en diaspora, 101.
13. Interview with Arlette Stroumza, December 13, 2010.
14. Anissimov, “Les filles d’Irène Némirovski,” 70. This interview provides the most details about the original project and its evolution. Denise spoke about it with me in personal interviews, June 2008 and June 2009.
15. The date of the return visit to Issy-l’Évêque is referred to in the schoolteacher Madame Ravaud’s letter of August 8 [1990]: she expresses regret at having been out of town and not seeing them, “after so many years” (IMEC, 5.27).
16. Styron, Reading My Father; Cheever, Home Before Dark; Fernandez, Ramon.
17. Anissimov, “Les filles d’Irène Némirovski,” 72.
18. Ibid., 72–73.
19. Gille, Le Mirador, 287.
20. P.R., “Grand Prix des Lectrices 1992,” Elle, March 23, 1992, 67. Le Mirador was a finalist for this annual prize awarded by the magazine, though it did not win.
21. Revah, in his biography of Berl, quotes his articles in Pavés de Paris, a weekly publication he wrote and edited almost singlehandedly. Berl’s attitude toward immigrants, not only Jews but including them, was extremely hostile and was praised by antisemites like Charles Maurras. See Revah, Berl, un Juif de France, 232–34.
22. Céline, Écrits polémiques.
23. Journal entry dated May 26, 1938, IMEC, ALM 2999.1.
24. “Ah, Dieu, si je le décrivais, moi, le Juif . . . Oui, évidemment, il y a eu Golder, mais . . . Mais je n’ose pas, j’ai peur, il a raison Céline. J’aime bien Bagatelles.” Journal entry dated June 17, 1938. Ibid.
25. Quoted in Begley, The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head, 74.
26. Gide, “Les Juifs, Céline et Maritain,” Nouvelle Revue Française, April 1938.
27. Email communication from Olivier Philipponnat, June 15, 2015.
28. Sapiro, La Guerre des écrivains, chap. 8.
29. Interview with Arlette Stroumza, Paris, December 13, 2010.
30. Rocheman, “Spectatrice malgré elle,” Actualité Juive Hebdo, no. 282, February 13, 1992. The other reviews referred to in this paragraph are Edgar Reichmann, “La Comète Némirovsky,” Le Monde, February 7, 1992; Gérard Maudel, “Ma mère, mon héroine,” Libération, February 13, 1992; Jacques Bonnet, “Ma mère, souviens-toi,” L’Express, May 12–18, 1992; P.R., “Irène,” Elle, March 2, 1992.
31. “Une vie, une oeuvre,” France Culture, March 12, 1992; INA, 00740130. The interview in the International Herald Tribune, by Joan Dupont, appeared on March 31, 1992.
32. Interview with René de Ceccatty, Paris, July 7, 2010.
33. Gille, Le Crabe sur la banquette arrière, 140; Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 3.
34. “Le Crabe sur la banquette arrière,” telefilm directed by Jean-Pierre Viergne, aired on France 2 on December 4, 1996; at INA, CPB96008153.
35. “Pentimento,” France Inter, September 4, 1994, INA DLR 19940904 FIT 12.
36. Interview with René de Ceccatty, Paris, July 7, 2010.
37. Interview with Patrick Salvain, Paris, December 13, 2010.
38. Anissimov, “Les filles d’Irène Némirovsky,” 72. The “Colloques d’intellectuels juifs de langue française” published its conferences, and Jankélévitch’s name appears regularly until the early 1970s; he died in 1985.
39. Gille, Un Paysage de cendres, 201, 185.
40. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 81; Friedländer, Quand vient le souvenir, 162.
41. Anne Diatkine, “L’éditrice Elisabeth Gille rattrapée par le ‘crabe,’ ” Libération, October 1, 1996. Elisabeth’s friends René de Ceccatty and Jean-Marc Roberts published moving obituaries as well, in Le Monde (October 2, 1996) and Journal du Dimanche (October 6, 1996).
42. TF 1, “20 heures,” INA 0410837001025.
43. Email correspondence from Jonathan Weiss, May 4, 2015.
44. Epstein, “Une photographie,” preface to Irène Némirovsky, Destinées et autres nouvelles, 10; the other quotes in this paragraph are on pp. 7–8.
45. Christine Rousseau, “La fiction au ‘top,’ ” Le Monde, February 10, 2005, consulted online, April 29, 2015: http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2005/02/10/la-fiction-au-top_397. Criticisms of the posthumous award were reported in an unsigned article in Le Monde: “Le Renaudot attribué, à titre posthume, à Irène Némirovsky,” November 9, 2004; consulted online, April 29, 2015: http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2004/11/09/le-renaudot-attribue-a . . . . See also Josyane Savigneau, “Renaudot, Goncourt et marketing littéraire,” Le Monde, November 11, 2004. Savigneau mentions the book’s success at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Consulted online, April 29, 2015: http://abonnes.lemonde.fr/archives/article/2004/11/11/renaudot-goncourt-et . . .
46. “Sept à huit,” segment on Suite Française: TF 1, November 7, 2004; INA CLT 20041107 TF1 16h.
47. Letter from Denise Epstein to Gilbert Vachet, then mayor of Issy-l’Évêque, September 6, 2005, in which she thanks him for the “unforgettable day” of the ceremony. A copy was given to me in June 2014 by the current mayor’s office, along with other materials relating to the ceremony.
48. Interview with René de Ceccatty, Paris, July 7, 2010. Interview with Nicolas Dauplé, Volnaveys-le-Bas, near Grenoble, June 6, 2014; interview with Léa Dauplé, Paris, June 9, 2014.
49. Email communications from Olivier Philipponnat, May 13 and 14, 2015.
50. The graphic novel is by Emmanuel Moynot: Suite Française: Tempête en juin; the telefilm “Deux” aired on the Franco-German station Arte on March 27, 2015; the feature film is Suite Française, dir. Saul Dibb.
51. I saw the film at the preopening screening in Paris, on March 10, 2015.
52. http://frenchmorning.com/villes-americaines-aux-accents-francais/; and http://frenchmorning.com/travailler-moins-mieux-france-francais-revue-de-presse/.
53. Interview with Emmanuel Dauplé, Toulouse, June 25, 2013.
54. Interview with Irène Dauplé and her daughter Juliette, Toulouse, June 23, 2011.
55. Interview with Nina Denat, Lille, January 20, 2016.
56. Interview with Marianne Féraud, Aix-en-Provence, July 20, 2010.
57. The results of the survey of 2007 (conducted in December 2006) were reported by the British newspaper the Telegraph on January 10, 2007, in a story headlined “France No Longer a Catholic Country.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1539093/France-no-longer-a-Catholic-country.html, accessed May 22, 2015. The figure of 3 percent for devout Catholics in 2014 is given by Birnbaum, Sur un nouveau moment antisémite, 45.
58. Interview with Benjamin Dauplé, Paris, June 15, 2015.
59. Schaffner, “L’échec de La Revue Juive d’Albert Cohen,” consulted online: http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1013324ar.
60. Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire, 126.
61. Email from Nicolas Dauplé, January 9, 2015.
62. See Birnbaum, Sur un nouveau moment antisémite, 57–122. Taguieff explicitly contests the analogy with earlier forms of antisemitism in La nouvelle judéophobie, 28–29, and Une France antijuive?, 22. Birnbaum cites Gilles Kepel’s remarks about the joining of two different strains of antisemitism in Sur un nouveau moment, 118, 143–44.
63. Zaretsky, “Next Year in Paris,” The Forward, May 11, 2015; Pinto, New Republic, March 16, 2015; the special section of Libération mentioned in the preceding paragraph, “Juifs français, la tentation du départ,” by Bernadette Sauvaget, appeared on September 26, 2014.
64. Reported in Le Figaro, among other newspapers, on January 10, 2016: http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2016/01/10/97001-20160110FILWWW00025-valls-sans-les-juifs-de-france-la-france-ne-serait-pas-la-france.php, consulted on April 16, 2016.