Irène Némirovsky

Némirovsky was born Irina Lvivna Nemirovska (Russian: Ирина Львовна Немировская) in 1903 in Kiev, then Russian Empire, the daughter of a wealthy banker, Léon (Lev) Némirovsky. Her volatile and unhappy relationship with her mother became the heart of many of her novels.[1]

Her family fled the Russian Empire at the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917, spent 1918 in Finland, and then settled in Paris, where Némirovsky attended the Sorbonne and began writing when she was 18 years old.

In 1926, Némirovsky married Michel Epstein, a banker, and had two daughters: Denise, born in 1929; and Élisabeth, in 1937.

In 1929, she published David Golder, the story of a Jewish banker unable to please his troubled daughter. It was an immediate success, and was adapted to the big screen by Julien Duvivier in 1930, with Harry Baur as David Golder. In 1930, her novel Le Bal, the story of a mistreated daughter and the revenge of a teenager, became a play and a movie.

The David Golder manuscript was sent by post to the publishing company Éditions Grasset with a poste restante address and signed Epstein. H. Muller, a reader for Grasset, immediately tried to find the author but failed, so Grasset advertised in newspapers for the author's identity. However, she was busy bearing her first child, Denise. When Némirovsky finally appeared as the author of David Golder, the unverified story is that the publisher was surprised that such a young woman was able to write such a powerful book.

Although she was widely recognized as a major author – even by some anti-Semitic writers like Robert Brasillach – French citizenship was denied to the Némirovskys in 1938.

Némirovsky was of Russian-Jewish origin, but was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in 1939 and wrote in Candide and Gringoire, two magazines with ultra-nationalist tendencies. After the war started, Gringoire was the only magazine that continued to publish her work, thus "guarantee[ing] Némirovsky's family some desperately needed income".

By 1940, Némirovsky's husband was unable to continue working at the bank, and Némirovsky's books could no longer be published, because of her Jewish ancestry. Upon the Nazis' approach to Paris, they fled with their two daughters to the village of Issy-l'Evêque (the Némirovskys initially sent them to live with their nanny's family in Burgundy, while staying on in Paris themselves; they had already lost their Russian home and refused to lose their home in France), where Némirovsky was required to wear the Yellow star.

On 13 July 1942, Némirovsky (then 39) was arrested as a "stateless person of Jewish descent" by policemen employed by Vichy France. As she was being taken away, she told her daughters, "I am going on a journey now." She was brought to a convoy assembly camp at Pithiviers, and on 17 July 1942, together with 928 other Jewish deportees, transported to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, in Poland. Upon her arrival there two days later, her forearm was marked with an identification number. She died a month later of typhus.[3] On 6 November 1942, her husband, Michel Epstein, was sent to Auschwitz and immediately murdered in the gas chambers.[4]

Némirovsky is now best known as the author of the unfinished Suite Française (Denoël, France, 2004, ISBN 2-207-25645-6; translation by Sandra Smith, Knopf, 2006, ISBN 1-4000-4473-1), two novellas portraying life in France between 4 June 1940 and 1 July 1941, the period during which the Nazis occupied most of France. These works are considered remarkable because they were written during the actual period itself, and yet are the product of considered reflection, rather than just a journal of events, as might be expected considering the personal turmoil experienced by the author at the time.

Némirovsky's older daughter, Denise, kept the notebook containing the manuscript for Suite Française for fifty years without reading it, thinking it was a journal or diary of her mother's, which would be too painful to read. In the late 1990s, however, she made arrangements to donate her mother's papers to a French archive and decided to examine the notebook first. Upon discovering what it contained, she instead had it published in France, where it became a bestseller in 2004. It sold 2.5 million copies by 2008 and has been translated into 38 languages.

The original manuscript has been given to the Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC), and the novel has won the Prix Renaudot – the first time the prize has been awarded posthumously.

Némirovsky's surviving notes sketch a general outline of a story arc that was intended to include the two existing novellas, as well as three more to take place later during the war and at its end. She wrote that the rest of the work was "in limbo, and what limbo! It's really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens."

In a January 2006 interview with the BBC, her daughter Denise said, "For me, the greatest joy is knowing that the book is being read. It is an extraordinary feeling to have brought my mother back to life. It shows that the Nazis did not truly succeed in killing her. It is not vengeance, but it is a victory."

Several reviewers and commentators[5][6] have raised questions regarding Némirovsky's conversion to Catholicism, her generally negative depiction of Jews in her writing and her use of ultra-nationalist publications to provide for her family.

Myriam Anissimov's introduction to the French edition of Suite Française describes Némirovsky as a "self-hating Jew," due to the fact that Némirovsky's own situation as a Jew in France is not at all seen in the work. The paragraph was omitted from the English edition.[7]

A long article in The Jewish Quarterly argued that there had been an "abdication of critical responsibility in exchange for the more sensational copy to be had from Némirovsky’s biography" by most reviewers in the British press.[8]

In 2007, another novel by Némirovsky was published, after a complete manuscript was found in her archives by two French biographers. Chaleur du sang – translated to English by Sandra Smith as Fire in the Blood – is a tale of country folk in a Burgundy village, based on Issy-l'Évêque where Némirovsky and her family found temporary refuge while hiding from the Nazis.[9]

• 2004: Prix Renaudot, for Suite française

• An opera made from the 1930 novel Le Bal was first performed in 2010 at the Hamburg Opera House, Germany (composed by Oscar Strasnoy, adapted by Matthew Jocelyn.)
• A dramatization of the 1930 novel Le malentendu was broadcast by BBC Radio as The Misunderstanding in January 2019.

A biography of Némirovsky, Irene Nemirovsky: Her Life And Works, written by Jonathan Weiss, was published in 2006.

• Hélène Berr – French diarist
• Hana Brady – Jewish girl and Holocaust victim; subject of the children's book Hana's Suitcase
• Helga Deen – wrote a diary in Herzogenbusch concentration camp (Camp Vught)
• Etty Hillesum – wrote a diary in Amsterdam and Camp Westerbork
• Věra Kohnová – Czech diarist
• David Koker – wrote a diary in Herzogenbusch concentration camp (Camp Vught)
• Janet Langhart – author of a one-act play, "Anne and Emmett"
• Rutka Laskier – Polish diarist
• Bruce Marshall – Scottish novelist; his life has parallels with Némirovsky's and his novel Yellow Tapers for Paris is similar to Suite Française
• Tanya Savicheva – Russian child diarist
• Sophie Scholl – German student executed by the Nazis
• Henio Zytomirski – Polish boy who was a Holocaust victim
• The Dogs and the Wolves (novel)

• Lise Jaillant, "A Masterpiece Ripped from Oblivion: Rediscovered Manuscripts and the Memory of the Holocaust in Contemporary France", Clio 39.3 (Summer 2010): 359–79.
• Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942, London: Chatto & Windus, 2010. Translated by Euan Cameron. ISBN 978-0-7011-8288-5. Available in U. S. May 4, 2010.
• Jonathan Weiss, Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-8047-5481-1.
• Élisabeth Gille, Le Mirador, Mémoires rêvées (by Nemirovsky's youngest daughter, a "dreamed biography" of her mother), Presses de la Renaissance (1992), ISBN 2-85616-629-6, Available in English from Knopf, Fall 2006.
• Cynthia Zarin (May 15, 2017). "A Strange and Beautiful Book About a Mother Who Disappeared". The New Yorker Magazine. Retrieved April 10, 2020.

• Gray, Paul (April 9, 2006). "As France Burned". The New York Times. Retrieved August 10, 2008.
• Serge Klarsfeld, Le Memorial de la Deportation des Juifs de France, Paris, 1978. No pagination.
• Olivier Corpet and Garret White (editors), Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Française (with a short story, "The Virgins" by Irène Némirovsky, Five Ties Publishing, September 1, 2008. ISBN 9780979472756.
• Angela Kershaw, Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France, Routledge, August 1, 2009. ISBN 9780415957229
• Olivier Philipponnat, "The 'Ambiguities' of Irène Némirovsky" (review of Angela Kershaw's Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-war France, 18 April 2013, translated into English by Susannah Dale.

• Website dedicated to Irène Némirovsky
• (in French) Site dédié à l'écrivain Irène Némirovsky
• Irene Nemirovsky at Random House Australia
• (in French) Université McGill: le roman selon les romanciers Archived 2017-12-10 at the Wayback Machine Inventory and analysis of Irene Némirovsky's non-novelistic writings about novel
• Interview of Denise Epstein & Sandra Smith WAMU American University Radio
• Jewish Literary Review: "Tell the full story of Irène Némirovsky"
• Author Profile at Persephone Books Archived 2016-04-14 at the Wayback Machine

Critical reviews of Suite Française

• Gray, Paul (April 9, 2006). "As France Burned". New York Times. Retrieved 2008-08-10.
• Peter Kemp in The Times
• Andrew Riemer in The Sydney Morning Herald
• A review by: Paul La Farge