Irène Némirovsky
Irène Némirovsky (born February 11, 1903, Kiev, died August 17, 1942, Auschwitz, Poland) was a Jewish novelist and biographer born in the Ukraine, who lived and worked in France.
Biography
Irène Némirovsky was the daughter of a rich Jewish banker from the Ukraine, Léon Némirovsky. Her mother was not interested in her, and often denied that she had a daughter because it would make her "look old".
The Némirovskys lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia where she was brought up by a French gouvernante, almost making French her native tongue. Irène also spoke Basque, Finnish, Polish, English and Yiddish (probably by strolling the Rue des Rosiers in Paris, according to an interview).
The Némirovsky family lived for a year in Finland in 1918 following the Russian Revolution, and then, in 1919, moved to Paris, France, where Irène attended the Sorbonne and started writing when she was only 18 years old.
In 1926, Irène 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, which 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. Irène Némirovsky quickly became a well-known and admired author.
The David Golder manuscript was sent by post to the Grasset publisher with a Poste restante address and signed Epstein. H. Muller, a reader for Grasset immediately tried to find the author but couldn't get hold of him/her. Grasset put an ad in the newspapers hoping to find the author, but the author was "busy": she was having her first child, Denise. When Irène finally showed up 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 universally recognized by Jewish authors such as Joseph Kessel and anti-semitic authors like Robert Brasillach, French citizenship was denied to the Némirovskys in 1938, and they would soon be required to wear the Yellow badge.
Irène Némirovsky was Jewish, but converted to Catholicism in 1939 and wrote in Candide and Gringoire, two anti-Semitic magazines - all in an unsuccessful ettempt to protect her children from growing anti-Semitism.
In 1940, Némirovsky's husband was unable to work at his job at the bank anymore, and Irène's books could no longer be published because of her Jewish origins. Upon the Nazis' approach to Paris, they fled with their two daughters to the village of Issy-l'Evêque (the Nemirovskys 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).
On July 13, 1942, the 39-year-old Nemirovsky was arrested as a "stateless person of Jewish descent" by French police under the occupying German law, and transported to Auschwitz where, according to offical papers, she died a month later of typhus. As she was being taken away she told her daughters, "I am going on a journey now."
Her husband was sent to Auschwitz shortly thereafter, and was immediately put to death in the gas chambers.
The rediscovery
Némirovsky is now best-remembered as the author of the unfinished Suite Française (Denoël publishing, France, 2004, ISBN 2207256456) (Translation by Sandra Smith, Knopf, 2006, ISBN 1400044731), two novellas portraying life in France between June 4, 1940 and July 1, 1941, the period during which the Nazis occupied Paris. 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. They are possibly the first works of literary fiction about World War II.
Némirovsky's elder 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.
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.
Ironically, the notebook sketches 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."
The author
Works published during the author's life
- L'Enfant génial (Editions Fayard, 1927), was renamed by the publisher "L'enfant prodige" in 1992 with the okay of Némirovsky's daughters, because the french term génial became a teenager word like awesome and sounded funny.
- David Golder (Editions Grasset, 1929)
- Le Bal (Editions Grasset, 1930)
- Le malentendu (Editions Fayard, 1930)
- Les Mouches d'automne (Editions Grasset, 1931)
- L'Affaire Courilof (Editions Grasset, 1933)
- Le Pion sur l'échiquier (Editions Albin Michel, 1934)
- Films parlés (Editions Nouvelle Revue Française, 1934)
- Le Vin de solitude (Editions Albin Michel, 1935
- Jézabel (Editions Albin Michel, 1936)
- La Proie (Editions albin Michel, 1938)
- Deux (Editions Albin Michel, 1939)
- Le maître des âmes (Revue Gringoire, 1939, published as weekly episodes)
- Les Chiens et les loups (Editions Albin Michel, 1940)
Works published during the author's death
- La Vie de Tchekhov (Editions Albin Michel, 1946)
- Les Biens de ce monde (Editions Albin Michel, 1947)
- Les Feux de l'automne (Editions Albin Michel, 1957)
- Dimanche (short stories) (Editions Stock, 2000)
- Destinées et autres nouvelles (Editions Sables, 2004)
- Suite française (Editions Denoël, 2004. Winner of the Renaudot prize 2004) English translation by Sandra Smith published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus, 2004) Published in the U.S. by Alfred A. Knopf 2006)
- Le maître des âmes (Editions Denoël, 2005, published as a book)
References
- Le Mirador, Mémoires rêvées, Elisabeth Gille, Nemirovky's youngest daughter, A "dreamed biography" of her mother. Presses de la Renaissance (1992) ISBN: 2856166296, Available in English from Knopf in Fall 2006.
- As France Burned, Paul Gray, New York Times Book Review, April 9, 2006