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A Cool Head and a Hard Heart: Irène Némirovsky's Fiction
Hudson Review, The, Autumn 2006 by Lewis, Tess
A Cool Head and a Hard Heart: Irène Némirovsky's Fiction
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BY NOW MOST READERS HAVE HEARD the dramatic story of Irène Némirovsky's unfinished epic, Suite Française. Against all odds, the manuscript, a leather-bound notebook, survived World War II hidden in a suitcase the author's adolescent daughter, Denise Epstein, carried faithfully from one hiding place to another in tiny villages, convents, and cellars throughout occupied France. She would not learn for several years that her mother had died of typhus one month after arriving at Auschwitz in July 1942, nor that her father, Michel Epstein, was gassed immediately after his arrival there four months later. Instead, Denise and her younger sister returned to the Gare de l'Est every day after the War, holding up signs with their parents' names. The girls eventually realized their parents would not return and were taken in by family friends after their maternal grandmother, who had survived the War comfortably in Nice, refused even to open her door to them. As an adult, Denise had occasionally tried to decipher her mother's miniscule handwriting-paper was hard to come by in Vichy France, so Némirovsky had used as little as possible. But she always gave up, afraid that the work was a personal journal and that reading it would be too painful. Six decades after her mother's deportation, she finally summoned the courage to read the notebook she had kept like a talisman on her bookshelf. Not only was it a novel, but even incomplete, it surpassed her mother's fifteen previous works of fiction. Suite Française was a literary sensation when it was finally published in France in 2004, winning the prestigious Prix Renaudot, an award otherwise given only to living writers.
Yet few readers outside of France are aware of a disturbing side to Irène Némirovsky's story. The English translation of Suite Française1 could have brought more complexity to the story of Némirovsky's legacy but opts instead for a simplified tale of victimization. It includes a shortened version of the scholar Myriam Anissimov's preface to the French edition with Anissimov's detailed account of Némirovsky's tragedy, but not her discussion of the extent to which Némirovsky's previous novels were riddled with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Jewish characters in her books are marked, with few exceptions, by hooked noses, flaring nostrils, flaccid hands, sallow complexions, dark, oily curls, hysteria, avarice, unscrupulous business practices, and an atavistic ability to trade in commodities and goods. The list goes on. Gone too are references to Nemirovsky's friendships with prominent anti-Semitic writers and all but one mention of her contributions to such antiSemitic journals as Gnngpire. In fairness, Gringoire alone allowed her to write pseudonymously and earn a meager living for a time after Jewish writers were prohibited from publishing in 1941. Of course, her stories did fit their ideological mold.
Without this context, a letter in the appendix from Nemirovsky's husband to the German ambassador in Paris seeking her release, comes as a bit of a surprise. Epstein mentions their conversion to Catholicism in 1939 and the loss of both their families' fortunes in the Russian Revolution. He then appeals to the Nazi official's better judgment by repeatedly invoking Irene's lack of "affection" for Jews.
I am convinced you are a ... just man. And it seems to me both unjust and illogical that the Germans should imprison a woman who, despite being of Jewish descent, has no sympathy whatsoever-all her books prove this-either for Judaism or the Bolshevik regime.
Epstein was desperate. This letter, meant to be hand delivered by the wife of Paul Morand, one of Nemirovsky's anti-Semitic friends, helped Epstein and Némirovsky as little as their conversion did. He was deported a few months later.
Perhaps Knopf felt such details might deter some readers-martyrs are best appreciated without blemishes-but bowdlerizing Anissimov's essay does a disservice to Némirovsky. Her anti-Semitism is an essential and fascinating, albeit unfortunate, part of the background story that is being exploited in marketing Suite Française to such an extent that it threatens to overshadow the book itself. If her story is to be used, it should be used without whitewashing.
In Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Worfa,2 a short biography published in France last year, Jonathan Weiss addresses Nemirovsky's "lack of sympathy" for her fellow Jews and her willingness to write for the farright anti-Semitic press. Without excusing her or dwelling excessively on her faults, Weiss wishes to "clear the air that surrounds her" in order for her importance as a French writer to be properly recognized. To a certain extent he succeeds. He combs her background and her fiction for evidence and explanations of her racist impulses. She was, he concludes, a writer torn between two worlds and at home in neither. Caught between her desire to escape the crass materialism of her parents' Jewish circles and her desire to belong to a France she had idealized since childhood, she turned to fiction in search of an identity she could embrace and a moral order that transcended monetary values.
