L'Affaire Némirovsky

By the time it appeared in Paris bookstores in 2004, "Suite Française," an unfinished novel by an unknown author who had been dead for 62 years, announced a publishing phenomenon. Translated into 30 languages, the hardcover edition sold close to 1 million copies worldwide, remaining on the New York Times best seller list for 102 weeks. Word of mouth played a crucial part in Irène Némirovsky's extraordinary posthumous success. Before the book was reviewed here, everyone, it seems, had a friend who insisted — in the urgent tone of a moral obligation: "You must read this."

Planned as a work in five volumes, Némirovsky only completed two, but the circumstances of the interrupted work — the author's arrest, deportation, and death from typhus in Auschwitz in July 1942, followed by the miraculous recovery of the tiny notebook containing the manuscript, unread and forgotten in a suitcase for over half a century — this cycle of suffering, disappearance, and resurrection conferred upon the book the nimbus of a sacred text.

Who was this woman, author of 13 earlier novels, her name erased for so long from literary history? The face that stares from the close-up, filling the front jacket of the French edition, is a portrait in contradiction. The classically Semitic features, somber expression, dark, close-set eyes that seem to see the horrors to come, play oddly against the glamour of the 1930s Hollywood-style "glossy" the back-lit head and fashionable coiffure, neck framed in fur. In a brilliant stroke of marketing, the English-language publishers created an alternative script: Némirovsky's haunted gaze has been replaced by another period photograph; the couple on the verge of parting (suitcase in the foreground) are drenched in the colorized nostalgia of a 1940s movie still. We've seen that blond Bergman-esque young woman and her dark stocky lover before. Their destination isn't Auschwitz, it's Casablanca!

Rescued from oblivion , the author and her work were soon at risk of burial by hype and hagiography. Némirovsky's talent, if not genius, was compared to Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Proust, and Chekhov, whose biography was her only nonfiction work. Following the sensation of "Suite Française," Némirovsky's previous novels, most to be translated for the first time, have now been scheduled for re-issue: "David Golder" will be published in America later this year; "Chaleur du Sang" (Fire in the Blood) and "Les Chiens et les Loups" (Dogs and Wolves) will follow in the near future. All three are key to understanding the evolution of the writer. Letters, notebooks, and sections of journals have been released by her daughter, who also provided interviews to selected journalists and writers. Jonathan Weiss's study of Némirovsky (Stanford University Press, 224 pages, $24.95) was published here in 2006, and another biography will appear in France this fall. Newly recovered evidence has placed the author within the context of her times — the shameful France of the 1930s — leading to fresh scrutiny of her life and work. Both have been exposed as rife with dubious political and moral choices.

An only child, Irène Némirovsky was born into a world of precarious privilege. Her father, Léon, along with her future father-in-law, Efime Epstein, belonged to an elite of Russian Jews, centered in Kiev, who had risen from its ghettos and the shtetls of the Pale to amass vast fortunes as bankers to the tsars, and as speculators in oil and land. Wealth and imperial favor had enabled them to escape the nightmare of pogroms, only to find that their protected status made them enemies of the Revolution. In 1917, when Irène was 14, she and her family fled for their lives — first, to the remote countryside of Finland, then to Sweden. In 1919, they arrived in Paris, where, unlike the archdukes famously driving taxicabs, Léon returned to banking and, helped by the boom years of the 1920s, he rose straight to the top once again.

They were a clannish crowd, the Ukrainian émigrés, who created a gilded ghetto of their own in mansions on the fashionable avenues of the Right Bank, like the ones they had left behind on Kiev's heights. Their children skied in Switzerland and flirted on the Riviera, and, if all went well, married one another. Such appeared to be the predictable fate of Irène, who, at 23, wed Michel Epstein. Frail in health, with no head for money, Michel would remain where he began, a mid-level bank manager. For the bride, there were few regrets at leaving home. Pathologically obsessed with losing her looks, Fanny Némirovsky could not tolerate the proof of age imposed by a marriageable daughter. Her husband had long abandoned the family for business abroad and compulsive gambling in the company of a series of mistresses.

"David Golder" (Vintage Canada, 176 pages, $11.95) published in 1929 and the second of Némirovsky's novels, was her only best seller, inspiring two movies (one starring Harry Baur) as well as a play, and propelling the 26-year-old writer to literary celebrity. The story of a rapacious Jew from the Kiev ghetto, a speculator in oil development for the tsars, reborn richer in Paris; his angry grasping wife, and greedy, promiscuous daughter, the world of "David Golder" is a jungle. With his opening bark, "No" — Golder's response to his old partner's plea to save him from ruin — we are witness to the last throes of a dying animal. On the brink of bankruptcy himself, barely recovered from a heart attack, Golder returns to Russia in an attempt to recoup his fortunes with a final deal; his only wish is to leave his daughter rich enough to keep her expensive hustlers. He succeeds, in time to die, unloved and alone, in the squalid cabin of the boat, which was to return him — not to any real home — but to an empty Paris apartment.

Némirovsky's wandering Jew has been compared to Lear, Shylock, and Père Goriot, but Golder's love for his icy gold-digging daughter is a case study in sadomasochism: Her cruelty alone satisfies his sexual desire. Coarsely written and powerful, Némirovsky's slashing dialogue conveys the characters' unmediated violence toward one another. Sandra Smith, who rendered the classical restraint of "Suite Française" into fluent mid-Atlantic English, seems stymied by the primal savageries of "David Golder" and confused by its layerings of class, nationalities, and period. When Golder's daughter, Joy, addresses her father as "Dad" we are in the world of "East Enders," not the 1920s Biarritz of casinos and sex for cash. "Daddy," as in "My heart belongs to," would have told us all we needed to know. In the strange ways of history, the novel has acquired an eerie timeliness: Give David Golder a "life coach" and art adviser, and he could be one of the fugitive Russian oil oligarchs, living it up in London now.

As soon as the novel was published, Jewish groups quietly voiced their distress. Here was an anti-Semitic caricature — a hooked-nosed Fagin — created by one of their own. But in fact, the work consists entirely of caricatures: Golder; his wife, Gloria; Hoyos, her penniless South American lover (and the biological father of their daughter), along with the girl's homosexual gigolo boyfriend — "an Imperial prince." Driven less by "Jewish self-hatred," as some have claimed, than by rage and revenge, "David Golder" was a young writer's ritual slaying of the parents who had abandoned her as they destroyed each other.

In a later interview, Némirovsky noted evasively that she would have "written the book differently had she been aware of Hitler's rise to power." But she could scarcely have been unaware of the increasing boldness of his French sympathizers on the right, lying in wait since their post-Dreyfus defeat.

Where French anti-Semitism was concerned, there was something for everyone. Jews led an international conspiracy of profiteers and swindlers; at the same time, there was hardly a communist or anarchist who wasn't a Jew, behind every plot to undermine the social order. For France's increasingly secularized urban Catholic circles, the accusation of "Christ Killers" would have already been an embarrassment, strictly for peasants. A pastoral mystique had replaced the biblical curse: As rootless inhabitants of cities, Jews had no stake in the land — that inherited community that bound the French to one another, but also to their ancestors who had tilled the same soil. (If you think this one has gone the way of the horse-drawn plow, you haven't heard the stump speeches of Jean-Marie Le Pen). More immediately, pacifists on the left and right united in accusing Jewish "warmongers" of fomenting hostilities with Hitler's Germany.

Following the fall of France in June 1940 and the installation of Maréchal Pétain as president one month later, the Vichy government lost no time in adopting the Nuremberg laws whose objective was clear: The war against the Jews was based on race — neither politics, religion, nor in the end, nationality would matter. "Foreign" Jews were merely the first to be targeted. This was a reality Némirovsky continued to deny. Two years earlier, after 20 years' residence in France, the writer and her husband had applied for naturalization. It was too late. Their application received no reply, leaving them in triple jeopardy as Jews, Russians, and stateless persons. In 1939, they had their two Frenchborn daughters baptized and they themselves converted to Roman Catholicism.

In September 1940, Némirovsky tried to distance herself from other émigrés. Writing to Pétain, she underlined the distinction between "honorable" foreigners such as herself, and "undesirable" troublemakers. Pétain's reply could be described as statutory: Two weeks later, there was a census of all Jews in France — native and foreign-born, naturalized, and stateless. That same year, her novel about the Jewish Diaspora of the Ukraine was published. "Les Chiens et les Loups" (Albin Michel, 334 pages, 17.50 euros, translated as "Dogs and Wolves") follows the teenaged Ada Sinner, as she flees a pogrom in the Kiev ghetto to become a painter in Paris. Once there she finds she belongs nowhere, neither among rich nor poor Jews, artists or philistines. Rejecting the two men who love her, Ada, pregnant and proudly alone, washes up in an unnamed Levantine port roiled by revolutionary upheaval, to deliver her child among strangers. It was the last novel to appear under Némirovsky's own name in her lifetime. The following year, the third in a series of "Otto Lists" made it a crime to publish or sell works by Jewish writers.

Before Vichy would have ended his employ, Michel Epstein resigned from the bank for reasons of health. His wife's writing became the family's only source of income. This fact is crucial to the questions that loom over the darkest phase of Némirovsky's career. She regularly contributed to the most infamously anti-Semitic publication of the period, Gringoire, becoming a close friend of its editor, the notorious collaborator, Horace de Carbuccia. Jonathan Weiss claims that financial need compelled the novelist to "overlook" the paper's editorial stance, along with the writings of her fellow contributors. Gringoire enjoyed a circulation of 600,000 and paid accordingly. This is a feeble defense. Other writers survived — those who would have been unwilling to appear in Gringoire's pages, whose anti-Semitic graphics were harder to "overlook" than its prose.

How, then, to explain the company she kept — her friends and professional associates, almost all of whom turned out to be collaborators? Neither survival nor anti-Semitism yields plausible answers. Rather, the key to Némirovsky's willed blindness can be found in her terror of communism — indeed, of leftist politics in any form. Well into the Occupation, she denounced the Resistance, whose members "want to take everything from those who own the riches of this country."

From the beginning, the writer's conservative politics isolated her socially from those contemporaries — artists and intellectuals — almost all of whom were on the left. Aesthetically, it cut her off from the modernism she might otherwise have explored. In both style and subject matter (thwarted sexual desire, unhappy wives, and loveless marriages) her early novels — with the exception of "David Golder" — could have been written before 1900. Rejecting both the parvenu Jews of her parents' world and the politics of her better-known contemporaries, she chose the salons of the cultural and political right.

Mr. Weiss's life of Némirovsky is biography as parable. (This may explain why the work lacks the benefit of editing, proofreading, or an index). A professor of French at Colby College, his narrative traces a strange pilgrim's progress: The frivolous rich girl who, vacationing on the Riviera at age 18 (!) thinks only of boys and parties, became a critically-acclaimed and best-selling writer, but also a harsh judge of the milieu into which she was born. Then, upon her conversion to Catholicism, she experienced the grace of forgiveness and humanity, in time for salvation through martyrdom.

Unless one shared Némirovsky's fear of the Red menace, it was a strange time to turn to the Vicars of Christ in France. With heroic exceptions, most churchmen in positions of responsibility, as the late historian Eugen Weber has noted, would have agreed with Alfred Cardinal Baudrillart who found in Hitler "our only sheet anchor against Bolsheviks and Communists."

This was an anchor that Némirovsky and her husband believed offered them a safe harbor as well. In a letter to Otto Abetz, the German ambassador to Vichy France, written just after Némirovsky's arrest in July 1942, Michel Epstein pleads that his wife was Catholic, anti-communist and "although of Jewish descent, she does not speak of the Jews with any affection whatsoever." There was no reply. Three months later, Michel was arrested and deported to Auschwitz where he was gassed on arrival.

By early 1940, with France's defeat and surrender inevitable, stateless Jews had taken refuge abroad or in the Free Zone; Némirovsky's mother settled in Nice, allegedly taking her daughter's inheritance with her. Instead, the Epsteins chose a remote village in the Morvan, in Burgundy, Issy-l'Eveque, where the family of the girls' nanny lived. Here, in the Hotel des Voyageurs, she wrote the surviving chapters of "Suite Française," including the section called "Dolce." Set recognizably in Issy-l'Eveque, the narrative evokes the grim household of an unhappy wife, imprisoned with her hostile mother-in-law while her husband is at war. When a young German officer is billeted with them, the pair discovers a clandestine refuge and wordless love through their shared passion for music. With the worst that history can inflict upon us, we are all more simply human than otherwise. It was the writer's last message of hope.

Picking over Némirovsky's literary leavings, her editors recently found another previously unknown short fiction, written at the same time as "Suite Française" and with the same village setting. Far from revealing a new Christian forgiveness, "Chaleur du Sang" (Denoël, 155 pages, 15 euros; translated as "Fire in the Blood") exposes the lies, hypocrisy, and coverups of crimes that lie under the ancestral soil mythologized by the French right: twisted passion, festering jealousies, disposal of unwanted bastard children — and murder. In Issy-l'Eveque, Némirovsky was arrested and sent to her death — not by Gestapo thugs in jackboots, but by local French police in their jaunty kepis.

However disabused, "Chaleur du Sang" is only the prelude to the collective portrait of the haute bourgeoisie in flight found in the first section of "Suite Française," titled "Storm in June." With the Pericand family, Némirovsky proves herself a master satirist and moralist in the great French tradition. In alternating scenes, we meet the smug father, a museum curator, his self-righteous wife, their oldest son, Pierre, a young priest possessed of neither charity nor love, four younger children, along with a fleet of put-upon servants — the whole machine controlled by rich grandpa from his wheelchair.

As their two cars wend toward Tours — clean laundry and family cat packed in their designated baskets — this rogue's gallery of entitlement, egoism, and indifference is joined by others of their class: A famous writer schemes for a better hotel room; an elderly aesthete wins the trust of a young couple in order to steal the filled gasoline tanks from their car; a bank president leaves two employees, a couple, stranded in Paris to make room in the car for his mistress and her dog, then fires the loyal pair for failing to arrive in Tours on time to help open the new branch. And in their haste to escape the crowded hotel, the Pericands forget grandpa, who is left to die in the local charity hospital. Only the young priest pays for his sins. Remaining behind in Paris to supervise the evacuation of a home for delinquent boys — the family's pet cause — Pierre cannot hide the "cold repugnance" he feels toward his wretched charges. Replying in kind, they first trash the abandoned country house in which they have all found shelter, and then take turns beating, stoning, and, finally, drowning their pastor.

"In the Penal Colony," Franz Kafka's vision of justice under a mad dictator, the prisoner is sentenced to have his "crime" incised in his flesh — over and over — until, at the moment of death, he is "enlightened" as to his guilt.

Child of political upheaval, revolution, and exile, of family discord and fracture, Némirovsky's crime was to choose the France of established order, its politics, friends, and enemies. In the process, this "whitest" of Russians embraced that most delusional role: the anti-Semite's "white" Jew. During the last months of her life before she was sent to Auschwitz, "abandoned" she said, by everyone, she learned where the allegiance to this class led. "Suite Française" is the gift of her enlightenment.

Benita Eisler is a biographer and former translator from the French. Her life of George Sand, "Naked in the Marketplace," will be published in paperback this fall by Counterpoint.