Review by New York Times Review
IN the spring of 1942, the Russian-born novelist Irène Némirovsky, then living in France, began to suspect that her recent conversion to Roman Catholicism was unlikely to exempt her from Hitler's plans for the Jews. Already considering her works-in-progress "posthumous," she jotted this entry in her notebook: "Try to do as many discussions and things as possible . . . that may interest people in '52 or 2052." In fact, that revival of interest occurred roughly midway between those dates, and more than 60 years after Némirovsky 's death at Auschwitz. In 2004, her novel "Suite Française" - the manuscript had survived in a suitcase kept by her daughter - was published for the first time and went on to become an international best seller. Divided into two sections, one dealing with its French characters' flight into the countryside to escape the German invasion, the other with small-town tensions under the occupation, the novel inspired comparisons to Camus and Tolstoy, and reached a wide audience moved by its tragic yet triumphant publication history and its portrait of a population reeling from a violent insult to its sense of security and identity. But when the book's success inspired a parallel interest in Némirovsky's life, the story that emerged was rather more complex. Although admired and famous in her own time, she was the author of several anti-Semitic novels as well as a regular contributor to xenophobic and racist French journals. These controversial aspects of her career may be responsible for the impression conveyed by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt's "Life of Irène Némirovsky," which seems not so much written as transcribed from one of those French talk shows in which the participants convene to argue and shout and wave their arms. You can't entirely blame the book's translator, Euan Cameron, for the overwrought, ungrammatical text; the clichés ("For Grasset was not born yesterday: the 'novel that spelled money' had the wind behind it"), mixed metaphors and infelicitous word choices (a rough draft is described as "born of an impatient womb, brimming with outlines, dead ends, changes of direction and false starts"); or for the frequency with which a sentence's meaning is obscured by nearly impenetrable convolution. The notebook containing the manuscript of "Suite Française." Ultimately, though, the effort of reading pays off, partly because Némirovsky's life raises so many intriguing questions and partly because the sheer weirdness of her biographers' method tells us so much (some of it unintentional) about France's continuing efforts to deal with its anti-Semitic past - and with the residue of anti-Semitism that still remains, in far more places than the bombast of ultra-right-wing politicians. The book opens on an Auschwitzbound transport. The authors have little new to add to the story of Némirovsky's last days, aside from a mystifying generalization about the transit camp at Pithiviers: "The French police put in charge of guarding the camp are not bad men. Just disciplinarians." The preface ends with what are presumably Némirovsky's reflections before her death from typhus, at 39: "'And so,' she thinks, 'I regret nothing. I have been happy.'" But the punctilious reader of endnotes will discern that this is actually a quotation from her 1940 novel, "The Dogs and the Wolves." Philipponnat and Lienhardt seem uninterested in the line between autobiographical fiction and historical fact, presenting passages of fictional dialogue as if they were actual conversations. The confusion this occasions only grows when, later on, they write that Némirovsky herself "discouraged these simplistic parallels," claiming that "I have certainly made use of real-life aspects, but sparsely." Still, the authors manage to put many pieces of the Némirovsky puzzle together, even if some of them appear to have come from another puzzle. Her father was a banker struggling to balance his love for gambling with his career in finance, her mother a vain, competitive monster given to flaunting her adulterous affairs. Moving from Kiev to Odessa and then St. Petersburg, the family summered in France and provided Irène with everything but parental affection. After evading successive onslaughts of anti-Semitic violence, the Némirovskys left Russia in 1918; they came to rest in France when Irène was 16. She began publishing humorous sketches of flapper life in a men's magazine and married Michel Epstein, a fellow Russian émigré with whom she had two daughters. Her 1929 novel "David Golder," an instant hit, was adapted for both the stage and the screen. Its protagonist is described by its author as "a thin little Jew." Philipponnat and Lienhardt explain that Golder's "miserable youth" has "taught him dirty tricks"; "a compulsive businessman, capable of driving his own partner to suicide," he is married to "the daughter of a usurer from Kichinev, who covets jewelry 'like a barbarian idol' and who only knows that her first name was previously a Yiddish one." In a novel written around the same time, Némirovsky made her hero a banker who is a "rich young Jew"; his clerk, also Jewish, has flabby hands and "an almost unseemly nose and a filthy gray beard." "Were they anti-Semitic clichés?" the authors ask. The question is more reasonable than their answer: "As a young French writer, Irène Némirovsky borrowed these stylistic accessories, almost without thinking, . . . as one of the ingredients of French wit that she envied. Even if it meant writing offensively. That a young émigrée writing in French should have taken mimicry so far that she was copying people's prejudices proved only one thing: the triteness of the anti-Semitic cliché. Without it, the French writer's full array of skills would not have been complete." Even readers who prefer biographies sympathetic to their subjects may be taken aback by the extent to which these particular biographers become apologists, by the contortions they engage in as they try to explain Némirovsky's images of greasy Russian Jews, "chatty, obsequious, hopping about like old wading birds that had lost their feathers, and who . . . sold everything and bought even more." This, they propose, indicates a Freudian eruption of memories repressed by her mother, "like so many hidden mirrors reminding the 'assimilated' young woman of her consanguinity with the ghetto." In considering Némirovsky's willingness to write for loathsome publications, her biographers remind us that she was a writer, not a polemicist, and that, needing money, she could hardly afford to be difficult. Perhaps, they suggest, her "fierce individuality" (in a letter to Marshal Pétain, she distinguished between "respectable foreigners" like herself and "those who are unwanted") was the cause of her "own indifference to her Jewish roots." In 1938, they add, "Virginia Woolf described this as 'freedom from unreal loyalties.'" Yet they don't have much to say (apart from ascribing it to a "feverish state of mind") about Michel Epstein's plea to the German ambassador for help after Némirovsky's arrest: "Even though my wife is of Jewish descent, she does not speak of the Jews with any affection." How disturbing that a biography so passionate in its denunciation of the horrors of Russian, German and French antiSemitism should have the effect of making us flinch each time the word "Jew" appears in its pages. What precisely are we meant to make of jaw-droppers like this: "She told herself not to spare anyone and she did not feel bound by any loyalty or any indulgence just because of the coincidence of her birth. Had 'David Golder' been written in 2009 by Bernard Madoff's daughter, who would dream of accusing her of anti-Semitic views?" Reading "Dimanche," Bridget Patterson's new translation of 10 Némirovsky short stories, has the effect of solidifying the impressions generated by "The Life of Irène Némirovsky." The collection may also be a reminder of certain hesitations that were felt about "Suite Française." One novella-length entry, "Flesh and Blood," is a skilled, moody evocation of the ennui and resentments of family life, a bit like a Chabrol film before the killing starts. But too many of the other stories suffer from the same fault as "Suite Française": a tendency to substitute stereotype for character. Once again, we are presented with the shallow aesthete, the self-important writer, the godly priest, the good-hearted whore, the brittle beauty, the older man mad for his cheating young wife, the bitter woman fearing age and mourning her lost youth. In "Brotherhood," Christian Rabinovitch, an assimilated French Jew, is horrified by a chance meeting with a pathetic Jewish refugee who gesticulates comically, looks "almost like a monkey" and shares his last name. The inability to distinguish caricature from character is the hallmark of a writer unable to see the problem with doggedly insisting on the "honesty" of repeatedly painting slight variations on the all-too-familiar portrait of a long-nosed, scheming, unhygienic, miserly Jew. In the end, the biography and the stories leave one feeling both sad and intensely conscious of the disparity between Irène Némirovksy's literary offenses and the fate that awaited her at Auschwitz. What we're left with are the paradoxes. A woman who wrote so often about the terror of aging was never given a chance to find out if old age was really as bad as she feared. A woman obsessed with defining her own identity learned how little her opinion mattered to authorities with their own criteria for determining who she was. This biography tells us much (some of it unintentional) about France's efforts to deal with anti-Semitism. Francine Prose's most recent book is "Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 2, 2010]
Review by Booklist Review
The reclamation and translation of Némirovsky's fiction continues with this gorgeous collection of short stories. One can appreciate why the tale that carries the book's title was so designated, Dimanche is a jewel, refracting so much of human experience through the prism of one interminable and heartbreaking Sunday in the life of a French family whose ties are growing frayed. But the title of an even more encompassing tale, Liens du sang ( flesh and blood ) is the better phrase for what Némirovsky explores in these elegant, magnetic, and devastating stories of marriage, mothers and daughters, youth and age, rich and poor. Each faceted, cutting tale exposes the barely concealed resentments and envy underlying marriages desiccated by routinely unfaithful husbands, martyred wives, and shiny, selfish children, especially beautiful daughters who hold their muted mothers in contempt. A Russian Jewish emigrant to France who died of typhus at Auschwitz at age 39, Némirovsky was an empathic, prescient, and boldly clinical dramatist in the mode of Chekhov, Maupassant, and Colette. A Némirovsky biography is on the way.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Ten luminous and newly translated stories by Nemirovsky (Suite FranAaise), who died at Auschwitz, expose the miseries that undermine happy families. Set mostly in France, where the author immigrated after the Russian revolution, these accomplished tales create worlds full of secrets and treacheries, such as in the title story, set on one typical Sunday at a bourgeois Parisian home where the middle-aged wife and mother, Agnes-once embittered by her husband's taking of a mistress, but now apathetic to his wanderings-remembers her own lost love. "Flesh and Blood" is a masterpiece of familial subterfuge revolving around an aged matriarch who falls ill and tries to keep peace among her three self-absorbed sons and their grasping wives. In "The Spell," a young visitor to a messy Russian household gleans dark mysteries around a lovelorn aunt's romantic sorcery; several of the tales, such as "The Spectator" and "Monsieur Rose," capture aloof, prosperous gentlemen fleeing Paris in advance of the Nazis. In this superlative translation, Nemirovsky's characters emerge full-fleshed, and her voice remains timeless and relevant. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
