Posted on January 28, 2008 by Steve Pollak
Hats off to The New Republic's Ruth Franklin for taking me up on my plea for book reviewers to tell the full story of author Irène Némirovsky.
Actually, I doubt Ms. Franklin read my previous blog posting on the subject but we're obviously on the same wavelength. Maybe it's because we're both natives of Baltimore. I don't know.
In any event, the New Republic's senior editor wrote a rather scathing essay about Némirovsky and the spin surrounding her legacy as a victim of the Holocaust.
The Jewish-born Némirovsky had been an accomplished writer in pre-World War II Europe. She died in Auschwitz in 1942 but left behind several unpublished works that were not discovered until recently when her daughter came across them in an old suitcase.
That's the nutshell version of her story, one that many reviewers have been repeating over and over without doing their homework. Franklin gives an expanded nutshell version:
The writer: a Jew who had fled to the French countryside seeking refuge from occupied Paris, eventually deported to Auschwitz, where she would die in a typhus epidemic soon after her arrival. The book: scribbled in minuscule letters, so as to conserve paper and ink, in a leather-bound journal that would be carried into hiding by the writer's eldest daughter. She would survive the war and keep it as a memento of her mother, once a well-known novelist, daring to read its contents only sixty years later. As we all now know, she discovered it to be a novel, or rather the first two linked novellas of an unfinished project, portraying life in occupied France almost in real time. With a history like this, how could Irène Némirovsky's Suite Francaise not have been the sleeper hit of the decade?
Indeed, Némirovsky's first posthumously published work, “Suite Francaise,” became a surprise bestseller in France when it came out in 2004. Another recently discovered book, “Fire in the Blood,” was published in September by Knopf. And now, Everyman's Library is publishing four of her early novellas in a single volume: David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, and The Courilof Affair.
When “Fire in the Blood” first hit the bookstore shelves, some articles, like this one by Carol Memmott in USA Today, simply referred to the novelist as “the Jewish, Russian-born Némirovsky.” Similarly, a review I found on the Charlotte Observer’s Web site summed up Némirovsky’s life this way: “The French Jewish writer, a native of Russia, died at age 39 in 1942 after she was arrested by French police and taken to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus.”
What you would never know from reading either of those reviews is that Némirovsky converted to Catholicism in 1939 and wrote for Candide and Gringoire, two anti-Semitic magazines.
It's perhaps even more puzzling that this review of “Fire in the Blood,” in the (London) Jewish Chronicle left out those important facts.
That didn't happen with Ruth Franklin. Drawing heavily on Jonathan Weiss' 2006 biography, "Irene Nemirovsky: Her Life And Works," Franklin lays out the facts and comes to a strong conclusion:
The real irony of the Suite Francaise sensation is not that a great work of literature was waiting unread in a notebook for sixty years before finally being brought to light. It is that this accomplished but unexceptional novel, having acquired the dark frame of Auschwitz, posthumously capped the career of a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes. As Weiss's important and prodigiously researched biography makes clear, Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew. Does that sound too strong? Well, here is a Jewish writer who owed her success in France entre deux guerres in no small measure to her ability to pander to the forces of reaction, to the fascist right. Némirovsky's stories of corrupt Jews — some of them even have hooked noses, no less! — appeared in right-wing periodicals and won her the friendship of her editors, many of whom held positions of power in extreme-right political circles. When the racial laws in 1940 and 1941 cut off her ability to publish, she turned to those connections to seek special favors for herself, and even went so far as to write a personal plea to Marshal Pétain. And after her arrest her husband, Michel Epstein, pleaded with the German ambassador for her release, arguing that "it seems ... unjust and illogical to me that the Germans would imprison a woman who, though originally Jewish, has no sympathy, and all her books show this ... for Judaism." About her books he was correct. But what seems even more unjust and illogical is that such a person should now be lionized as a significant writer of the Holocaust.
Like I said, it's a strong conclusion (calling someone "the very definition of a self-hating Jew") and Franklin's piece has elicited about 25 comments when I last checked on Sunday. Many of them question the anti-Semitic label but I'm not prepared to argue that point right now (I have not yet read any of Némirovsky's books nor Weiss' biography.)
For the moment, I wanted to praise Franklin for putting the rest of the story out there. It was just plain rediculous to see how much spin had been put on Némirovsky's history. A simple check of her Wikipedia entry would have told those reviewers that there's more to her story.
So, I have to ask: Jewish Chronicle, what's your excuse?