A Cool Head and a Hard Heart: Irène Némirovsky's Fiction

Lewis, Tess

A Cool Head and a Hard Heart: Irène Némirovsky's Fiction

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.

Weiss's biography is a useful introduction to Némirovsky's life and works, but his contention, that she was sketching out various identities -some decidedly less palatable than others-which she wanted to assume at different points in her life, feels inadequate. The letters he quotes and the testimonies of those who knew her reveal an unusually self-confident, determined woman. It seems, rather, that her critical eye, the "pitiless gaze" which won praise from so many critics, was too often under the sway of a personal animus that was also a source of literary inspiration. Her environment, steeped in anti-Semitism, so colored her view of the world that she was too blinkered-literally and imaginatively-to see beyond a set array of social stereotypes. This was a failure of imagination she would not overcome until well into her thirties.

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903 to the wealthy businessman Léon Némirovsky and his wife Fanny. The Némirovskys were as assimilated as Jews could be in Tsarist Russia. They spoke French at home, traveled widely, and lived in a well-to-do neighborhood reserved for the few select Jews, far closer to the Christian neighborhoods than to the slums that housed most of the city's Jewish inhabitants. In 1913, they moved to St. Petersburg until ill-advisedly seeking refuge from the Revolution in Moscow. Late in 1917, the Némirovskys fled to Finland and Sweden, finally landing in Paris in 1919, where Léon soon rebuilt the fortune he had lost to the Bolsheviks.

Although Némirovsky would certainly have heard of the pogroms that swept through the Ukraine in 1905, they seem to have had little direct impact on her family. Her childhood was profoundly marked by her difficult relationship to her mother, a vain and frivolous woman who resented her daughter as a constant reminder of her age. Némirovsky would extract her literary revenge with brutal portraits of neglectful, narcissistic mothers in several novels and stories, most powerfully in her highly autobiographical novel Le Vin de solitude (The Wine of Solitude). Her father, fond but often absent, could not make up for the lack of maternal affection.

Némirovsky's intense imaginative identification with France was fueled by summers on the Côte d'Azur and a French governess who served as a surrogate mother, then cemented by life in the City of Lights. For all her ambivalence about wealth and materialism, Irène still enjoyed glamorous balls and elegant dinner parties in Paris as well as in Nice and Biarritz. She studied literature at the Sorbonne and married a fellow Russian Jewish émigré, Michel Epstein. In the early 1920s, she began writing stories for periodicals, then was catapulted to fame in 1929 by her second novel, David Colder. Made into two movies, this novel tells the story of a Jewish financier who ruins a Christian business partner and is in turn exploited by his extravagant wife and his, unbeknownst to him, illegitimate daughter.

Subsequent novels appeared at the rate of almost one a year until 1941, along with several collections of short stories. Many of these works are tainted by major or minor characters of singularly unimaginative and predictable anti-Semitic stereotypes. Weiss examines these passages unflinchingly, before subjecting them to the best possible interpretation. "She chose to write [such novels] because she wished to be recognized as a Jewish author who could cast a critical eye on her own community," he generously offers. One would have thought there already were enough critical eyes to go around. He also contends that some of the stories she wrote for Gringoire actually undermine their anti-Semitic rhetoric from within. In such stories, her anti-Semitic readers saw only confirmation of their belief that Jews are a separate race, never to be assimilated into French society. Her more discerning contemporaries, however, could recognize that Némirovsky was presenting Jews as victims, their otherness arising "not from a deficiency of character, but from centuries of persecution," and the Jewish preoccupation with wealth not as greed, but as the determination to create a bulwark against future catastrophes. That may be, but it depends on the good faith of the reader. In any case, these more tempered portrayals of Jews in Némirovsky's fiction appear only after 1937, when history began breathing down her own neck.

In that year, Némirovsky and her family experienced few immediate threats but were surrounded by danger signs. When they left Paris for the small town of Issy-1'Evêque, they did so less out of fear than because food was more plentiful there. It was only a few kilometers from the free zone, but they never tried to cross over. Although they had been eligible to apply for French citizenship since 1921, she and Michel did not do so until 1938. By then it was too late. Despite impeccable letters of recommendation-again her anti-Semitic friends rallied to her cause-their applications were simply ignored. In 1939, the entire Epstein family converted to Catholicism. Weiss claims, rather disingenuously, that since there is no evidence Némirovsky believed converting would help her gain citizenship or protect her, should the Nuremberg Laws be applied in France, we must turn to her literary works for clues as to her motivations. There, he finds proof that her conversion was "something strictly personal." It undoubtedly was a deeply personal decision, yet there are in fact traces of calculation as well. Weiss claims that Némirovsky "would never try to gain advantage from her adherence to the Catholic faith to avoid the restrictive measures leveled against Jews," yet he later quotes from a letter she wrote to the local military commander requesting permission to go to Paris in 1942 after travel was forbidden to Jews. "I am Catholic but my parents are Jews," she informs the Kriegskommandant. True, she is not denying her origins, but she is also implicitly using her conversion to gain permission to travel.

Weiss notes that Némirovsky would counter objections to her negative portrayals of Jews with the claim that "she was merely giving a faithful portrait of characters she knew from her own life: 'that is the way I saw them.'" Indeed she did not have to look far for inspiration. Weiss mentions that when Nemirovsky's mother, protected by a forged Latvian passport, learned in 1940 that her daughter had sold some of Fanny's furs in order to finance her flight from Paris, she demanded restitution. However well-grounded Nemirovsky's rationalizations may be, they underscore the personal element of her creative work. Still, why was this otherwise perceptive woman unable to see beyond such crude stereotypes for so long?

Irène Némirovsky was too incisive a writer to be satisfied with the moralizing she found so seductive in her early works, even if she indulged in it too often. There are hints in her writing of awareness that her depictions were too simplistic. In TAe Wine of Solitude, the young protagonist Hélène is consumed with hatred for her demanding, egocentric mother. She decides to revenge herself by seducing her mother's lover. This she does with an ease that surprises her. Her conscience pricks her occasionally, but she reflexively stifles any second thoughts.

Again, Hélène pictured her mother as a child, a big girl with a round face, her hair held back with a comb. But she quickly banished the image: the thought that her mother, so feared and reviled, had once been a little girl like any other, and that she, too, had the same right to reproach her parents, brought too much nuance to the violent and summary picture Hélène had long ago formed in the depths of her heart.3

Némirovsky, too, was prone to "violent and summary" pictures when wounded, even though at some level she must have recognized them as lacking. In Suite Française, her target is no longer her mother or wealthy Jewish circles, but the French middle class. Writing on the situation in France in June 1941, Némirovsky turns from despair to resolve.

My God! what is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life. And the other countries? What are they to me? Empires are dying. Nothing matters. Whether you look at it from a mystical or a personal point of view, it's just the same. Let us keep a cool head. Let us harden our heart. Let us wait.

The French had been her people-until now. This was not an identity she was trying on. She did not bother to be naturalized before 1938, but probably because, in her idealization of France as a bastion of rights and civility, it had never occurred to her that it would be necessary. Her heart did indeed harden against those who had seemed to offer an alternative to soulless materialism but proved as driven by self-interest and fear as any others.

A few days after Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and invaded Russia, Némirovsky observed the German soldiers packing up to leave Issyl'Évêque for the Eastern front with genuine sorrow. Even with the proliferating decrees that humiliated them and endangered their lives, she and her husband grew close to some soldiers living near them. In her working notes for Suite Française, she wrote:

I swear here and now never again to take out my bitterness, no matter how justifiable, on a group of people, whatever their race, religion, convictions, prejudices, errors. I feel sorry for these poor children [the soldiers]. But I cannot forgive certain individuals, those who reject me, those who coldly abandon us, those who are prepared to stab you in the back.

Despite this resolution, the French bourgeoisie-those she felt had betrayed her-remained at the mercy of her pen.

For Suite Française, Némirovsky had planned a five-part novel, based loosely on a musical structure, and managed to complete the first two sections. The prelude, "Storm in June," is a bitterly satiric portrait of French middle-class refugees jockeying for survival and advantage in the mass exodus out of Paris before the German army's advance in June 1940. Némirovsky interweaves the stories of several of the 8 million French citizens who fled the first bombing raids that spring. They are, for the most part, the happy few with chauffeurs and petrol. There is the wealthy Péricand family, part of that class for whom their children's education is more important than bread. Yet they also know when charity becomes a luxury they can no longer afford and hoard their supplies accordingly. Also in flight is the solitary aesthete Charles Langelet, who prizes his collection of porcelain far above his fellow refugees. The prominent writer Gabriel Corte is appalled to find his credit no longer suffices. He uses all his influence and cash to bribe a restauranteur for a meal, only to have it snatched, unopened, from his hands. Despairing of France's lost greatness, he is soon calculating what might help him win favor with the new government. The banker Corbin, forced to decide whether or not to allow his mistress a seat in his car with his wife, takes out his frustration on two employees, Jeanne and Maurice Michaud. When the Michauds are unable to join him in Tours because the railways have been bombed, he fires them. They, in turn, can think of little besides the fate of their son Jean-Marie who has been missing in action. "Storm in June" ends in a state of deceptive calm and muted hope. The bombs have stopped falling, and survivors are slowly making their way back to Paris, or on to safer lands.

The second section, "Dolce," though dark, is more serene, a stately Allemande dance interval. The Germans have arrived and are billeted in the small Burgundian village of Bussy, closely modeled on Issy-l'Evêque. The Germans are correct and cultured, carrying out their orders of requisitioning and control with discipline, even regret. They serve as another foil against which the French bourgeoisie reveals its true nature, not to particular advantage. A young woman, Lucile Angellier, is relieved that her boorish husband has been sent to the front but distressed by his capture. She falls in love with Captain Bruno von FaIk, the handsome and refined German officer living in their home. Even though eminently correct, both suffocate under the close scrutiny of Lucile's mean-spirited, judgmental mother-in-law. When forced to choose between this first and perhaps only chance for love and her sense of duty, however, Lucile opts for the latter. Némirovsky presents Lucile's emotional conflict with great nuance and power. Hers is just one of the many variations Némirovsky plays on the theme of resistance, fraternization, and collaboration. Responses to the enemy range from women willing to be kept by German officers, to those like Lucile's mother-in-law who, as long as her son is a prisoner of war, refuses to acknowledge the Germans as anything but brutes. In between are a farmer who kills the German officer billeted in his home as much out of jealousy as patriotism, and others who maintain their distance from the enemy but are moved by simple compassion. There are also members of the privileged classes who, once appointed to positions of authority by the occupiers, feign indignation at having to endure contact with the Germans. Privately, they are relieved to see their status respected. "What separates or unites people," a Viscountess muses, "is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork."

Némirovsky had tentatively titled the following sections "Captivity," "Battles," and, optimistically, "Peace," but had only begun outlining "Captivity," the third. The characters from the first two sections were to become increasingly intertwined around the central story of Jean-Marie Michaud's capture and escape. Némirovsky's plan was ambitious. All five parts were to illustrate the "struggle between personal destiny and collective destiny" through the choices her characters must make in extraordinary circumstances. Their choices, mostly between personal gain or the greater good, seem almost predestined. One narrative aside posits that "[i]mportant events-whether serious, happy, or unfortunate-do not change a man's soul, they merely bring it into relief." While Némirovsky does not deny her characters free will, it is a scarce commodity indeed.

Individual souls interest Némirovsky far more than grand abstractions like égalité, fraternité, or la patrie. While planning the novel, she reminded herself that

The most important and most interesting thing here is the following: the historical, revolutionary facts etc. must be only lightly touched upon, while daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides must be described in detail.

Her comedy is unfailingly black, but no less amusing for that, its success due to her assured sense of daily life's minor absurdities. One of the great strengths of Suite Française is Némirovsky's ability to view larger, collective aspects of the cataclysm through the prism of the personal. The reaction of a young peasant woman to the officer billeted in her home runs in an instant through the gamut of emotions with which her country responds to the occupation on a larger scale.

It was strange: she didn't hate the Germans-she didn't hate anyone -but the sight of that uniform seemed to change her from a free and proud person into a sort of slave, full of cunning, caution and fear, skilful at cajoling the conquerors while hissing "I hope they drop dead!" behind closed doors ... She was ashamed of herself.

But Némirovsky still cannot quite resist the temptation of the broad brushstroke. None of the well-to-do or even comfortably off in Suite Francaisezre admirable. Even the Pericands' eldest son, Father Philippe, who has renounced worldly goods, suffers from excess-a wealth of hypocritical piety. Father Philippe has been charged with evacuating a group of delinquents who had been housed in the institution set up by his grandfather. He prays constantly for the strength to overcome his instinctive dislike for the boys under his care. The boys intuit his disgust as acutely as dogs smell fear. When he tries to stop them from raiding an abandoned château, they stone him to death. The only unqualifiedly good French characters are the Michaud family and Lucile. The peasants are generally good but motivated primarily by selfishness or tribal interest.

In contrast, the German soldiers are implausibly cultured. Bruno von FaIk reads classics in several languages, plays the piano with sensitivity and taste, and had even wanted to be a composer. One of his subordinates plays the violin. He packs his instrument and a few gardening books to take to the Eastern front because as a civilian he designs classical gardens in the style of Louis XIV. The lieutenant shot for flirting with a farmer's wife who reminded him of a portrait from the Flemish school was "gifted at all the arts" and susceptible to "intellectual and sensual intoxication." The farmer himself, who shot him, can barely get a sentence out. Madame Angellier happily risks her life to save the farmer, but, when he is hidden in her home, she is careful not to serve him anything better than table wine. The French in Suite Française are almost all suspicious of music and jealous of their possessions, even if these are just gaudy vases kept only for fear of offending the relative who had made a present of them.

Whether in the hands of Jewish financiers or the French middle class, wealth is still the poison. The element of caricature, so disastrous to Némirovsky's early fiction, persists in Suite Française but is muted and ironized enough to be occasionally revelatory rather than simply deadening.

Further evidence of Némirovsky's growing compassion and breadth of vision-literary as well as moral-can be found in her biography of Chekhov. She wrote A Life of Chekhov in 1940 and '41, at the same time as she was working on Suite Française, stranded in Issy-L'Evêeque, without her books and uncertain whether prohibitions against Jewish writers publishing their works applied to her or not. It was not published until 1946, and the 1950 English translation has long been out of print. It is a charming book, particularly in its novelistic evocation of Chekhov's family and difficult childhood. Her reading of Chekhov-her slow appreciation of the way his writing "teaches nothing"-reflects tellingly on the greater mastery of style and structure in her late fiction. She prized the inconclusiveness of Chekhov's best work, its subtlety and understatement, and especially his balance between characters.

Whenever, in a short story or novel, one hero or one event is thrown into relief, the narrative itself is impoverished: the complexity, beauty and depth of reality depend on the innumerable ties that exist between one man and another, one life and another, between joy and suffering.

Némirovsky's earlier books are dominated by intense emotions, starkly portrayed, and focus on at most a handful of prominent, sharply defined characters and the most obvious of the innumerable ties that bind them. She was beginning to appreciate the way Chekhov used characters and incidents in their particularity, rather than as set types of a class or race, and to improve her own fiction with less forced characterization.

A number of critics reviewing Suite Française have noted the absence in it of any Jewish characters, a void they find particularly surprising as she was writing in a time of increasing prohibitions against Jews. However, there is one pointed entry in her notes-an entry even Weiss fails to mention-which Némirovsky capitalized for emphasis. "FOR CAPTIVITY FOR THE CONCENTRATION CAMP THE BLASPHEMY OF THE BAPTISED JEWS "MAY GOD FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES AS WE FORGIVE YOU YOURS"-Obviously, martyrs would not have said that." Whether or not she had come to have second thoughts about her own conversion, it is clear that her depictions of all her characters, Jew or gentile, would have been far more nuanced and human.

Indeed, almost two years earlier, in a 1939 interview, Némirovsky admitted, "How could I write such a thing? If I were to write David Golder now, I would do it quite differently . . . The climate has changed." Not only had Irène Némirovsky's writing improved immeasurably, but, at incalculable cost, the myopia of her moral imagination had been corrected. The enormous leap in quality and promise evident in Suite Française would never be realized.

1 SUITE FRANÇAISE, by Irène Némimvsky. Tran». by Sandra Smith. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.00.

2 IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY: Her Life and Works, by Jonathan Weiss. Various translators. Stanford University Press. $24.95.

3VIN DE SOLITUDE, by Irène Némirwdiy. Éditions Albin Michel. euro17.50. The translation is mine.

Copyright Hudson Review Autumn 2006
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