An Unfinished Writer
Is it possible that one of the most talented Jewish writers of the twentieth century, a victim of the Holocaust no less, was also an anti-Semite? Was she in league with the forces that would single her out and eventually kill her? Did she share their demeaning images of Jews and lean on their personal support, even as her livelihood, her freedom, her very life hung in the balance? Critics have argued that this was precisely the case with Irène Némirovsky, whose background was Russian and Jewish and who published prolifically in France between the wars before being deported to Auschwitz in 1942.
Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. Her mother, Anna, vain and selfish, was from an affluent, cultivated Jewish family. Her father Leonid’s background was humble, but he made his fortune as an industrialist, an international deal-maker and finally a banker. This fortune was large enough to support his wife’s appetite for luxury, a French nanny to keep Irène away from her and annual visits to fashionable French watering holes like Nice and Biarritz. France was the country of her dreams, and French became Irène’s first language. As their wealth grew, the family moved to St. Petersburg when Irène was 10 years old, then fled the country during the Russian Revolution, first to Finland, then to Sweden and France.
In the Paris of the 1920s, Irène lived the high life of a flapper before settling down to study literature. In 1926 she married another Russian Jew, Michel Epstein, a banker’s son, and took up writing, for which she showed an early, fluent gift. Her first published works were satirical sketches, but she also worked for four years on a serious novel, David Golder, that channeled a nightmarish version of her own family. Set in the wealthy émigré world of Biarritz and Paris, it centered on a narcissistic, promiscuous mother; a father, the title character, who lives to make money; and their grasping daughter, the apple of her father’s eye, who turns out to be the offspring of one of her mother’s lovers. Although Golder eventually discovers this, he works himself to death to ensure the girl an inheritance. Focusing on the mother’s vanity, the father’s materialism and the daughter’s ingratitude, David Golder could serve as a melodrama for the Yiddish stage, yet its Dostoyevskian intensity makes it difficult to put down. The 1929 book made Némirovsky famous; it was translated into several languages, adapted as a play and turned into a successful film.
Némirovsky’s fame, if not her large sales, continued through the decade, but a shadow was cast over it. Although some noted that the novel’s hook-nosed, money-grubbing characters read like anti-Semitic stereotypes, others welcomed it for the same reason. France between the wars, though it gave grudging shelter to refugees from Eastern Europe, was also a hotbed of anti-Semitism, especially after the exposure and suicide in 1934 of a con man named Stavisky, the Madoff of his day. Even before this affair brought down the government, right-wing nationalists, who charged that their country was being overrun by aliens, filled their newspapers and magazines with invective against Jews, especially the “foreign” Jews, poor and unassimilated, who crowded the Marais quarter of Paris. The same publishers were bringing out Némirovsky’s work; the same reactionary editors and writers became her closest literary friends. It seemed as though a talented, “exceptional” Jew was confirming their worst prejudices against her own people. After the German takeover, many of them became notorious collaborators.
Némirovsky’s defense was that her work was personal, not political. Jews were her material, and “this was how I saw them.” Besides, she asked disingenuously, “Why would a people refuse to be seen as they are, with their good qualities and faults?” The same hollow argument rings even less true in the hands of her biographers, Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, whose diligent but often tone-deaf work, too literally translated by Euan Cameron, is marred by special pleading on this issue. As Hitler came to power, with Jews as his designated victims, they insist that she did not let this affect her writing: “She was not going to fall into the trap of commiseration.” Defending “her own indifference to her Jewish roots,” which led to her conversion to Catholicism in 1939, they approvingly cite Virginia Woolf’s “freedom from unreal loyalties,” such as tribe, nation or religion. Yet Némirovsky remained unswervingly loyal to France even as it isolated and abandoned her, rejecting her urgent bid for citizenship well before the war.
Thanks to their assiduous research, Némirovsky’s biographers supply helpful contexts for understanding her work: her Russian and family background, her copious working notes for each book, the reactions of contemporaries to her work, and the shifting political tides that finally swamped her life. But they offer little literary sense of her books except to troll them for biographical detail. Their own writing too often aims for the lyrical and rhetorical, in a barely translatable French style, when it should be novelistic and direct. Above all, they have a faulty sense of Jewish issues, as when they describe the three classic Yiddish writers as “Sforim, Peretz, and Aleichem,” as if these were all their real last names, or explain that “in receiving unction, Irène Némirovsky was displaying a Jewish awareness. For nothing was preventing her, after all, from remaining irreligious.” Elsewhere they describe her Jewish stereotypes as her way of exposing such stereotypes.
Némirovsky’s only loyalty to Jews was as subjects; they were her “guinea pigs.” Except for the care of her devoted nanny, her childhood was cold and emotionally deprived. In book after book, she returns to the monstrous, self-absorbed mother; the distracted father wheeling and dealing, and the bright castaway daughter, starved for affection. She is obsessed by the “child who has not been loved, and who, later, never has enough love,” and writes with special feeling about “the little girl who loathes her mother.” The inconsistency of Némirovsky’s work is that she hated the rich Jews who surrounded her as she grew up, took revenge on them in her fiction, yet shared their prejudice against the poor Jews with whom they hated to be identified.
This reliance on personal history ends with the war and especially the German oc-cupation that began in 1940. As Némirovskydiscovers that neither her conversion, her literary fame nor her collaborationist friends can protect her family, she turns into a different kind of writer. Still too trusting, too fatalistic to try to flee occupied France, she takes refuge in a village in Burgundy and conceives a vast historical novel, loosely modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, that would convey the intimate experience of the French defeat, the desperate and chaotic exodus from Paris and the occupation itself, as observed within a town much like the one where she was living. Working anxiously under ominous conditions, cut off from her income and suspecting that this would be a posthumous work, she managed to complete two of the five novellas that would have composed her Suite Française. She was arrested by French police on July 13, 1942, and within two days was shipped to Auschwitz, where she died a month later, probably of typhus. The unfinished novel, discovered by her daughter among her papers and published more than 60 years later, brought her far greater fame than David Golder, but it also renewed the old controversies about her writing and her unsavory political associations.
In this last work, Jews are hardly mentioned; it’s ordinary French and Germans, strange, suspicious bedfellows, who preoccupy her.
Némirovsky is writing history as it unfolds, rooted in the rural French society around her, with its ingrained folkways, class differences and thwarted youthful passions. She had always been a gifted storyteller, poised between a cool irony that undercuts her characters’ self-deceptions and a detached empathy for their dreams and disappointments. Yet in some ways it is her story, for it depicts individual lives helpless in the grip of large historical forces. In revealing passages, she shows what it is like to live day to day in the lion’s mouth, “constantly in fear of death,” and she evokes the pressing need to write stories as if “something inside...was knocking on an invisible door.” In this remarkable work, addressed to posterity, a writer who had long traded in vividly imagined caricatures, founded on personal grievance, taps into a clear spring of humanity that would not have embarrassed Tolstoy or Chekhov.
Morris Dickstein teaches English and film at the CUNY Graduate Center. His most recent book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, has just been published in paperback by W. W. Norton.
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