Posted on July 10, 2008 by Steve Pollak
Two weekends ago, I walked into my local library and saw a copy of Irène Némirovsky’s Fire in the Blood on the new fiction shelf.
I initially went looking for something else to read but I came back to Némirovsky’s book because I felt compelled to discover more about this writer whom many critics have branded as a self-hating Jew who died at the age of 39 in Auschwitz despite her conversion to Roman Catholicism.
As I’ve discussed on this blog before, 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 She died in Auschwitz in 1942 but left behind several unpublished works that were not discovered until recently when her daughter came across them in an old suitcase.
The author’s first posthumously published work, Suite Française, came out in 2004 and described life in Nazi-occupied Paris. The book became a surprise bestseller in France. The other recently discovered book, Fire in the Blood, was published in September by Knopf. Last January, Everyman's Library published four of her early novellas in a single volume: David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, and The Courilof Affair.
Some articles about Fire In The Blood refer to the novelist as “the Jewish, Russian-born Némirovsky.” Another one I read summed 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 learn from reading those reviews is that Némirovsky converted to Roman Catholicism in 1939 and wrote for Candide and Gringoire, two anti-Semitic magazines.
Indeed, it appears that to a certain extent Némirovsky fostered a reputation as someone who readily embraces anti-Semitic thoughts and ideas. Last January, Ruth Franklin wrote a scathing piece for The New Republic in which she discussed Némirovsky and the spin surrounding her fate as a Holocaust victim. Franklin drew heavily on Jonathan Weiss’ 2006 biography, Irene Nemirovsky: Her Life And Works, and put forth the facts surrounding the career of “a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes,” and came to the conclusion that Némirovsky was “the very definition of a self-hating Jew.”
As I read Fire in the Blood, I couldn't help thinking about what type of reception the book would have gotten had it not been for the Holocaust back story. The novel is well-written but it did not live up to the hype I heard last year upon its publication. The story revolves around the lives of French villagers and, according to her Wikipedia entry, it is based on the Burgundy village where Némirovsky and her family hid from the Nazis during the war years. The narrator, Silvio, tells us about three scandalous love affairs that cause discord and conflict in the otherwise serene French countryside. Némirovsky displays a certain skill for peeling away the layers of a story as she lets us in on the secret love lives of her characters. But, at a certain point, you begin to wonder how many times she can pull the rug out from under the plot. You end up viewing the villagers' revelations as a plot device rather than the natural progression of the story. I can't help but think that Némirovsky would have wanted more time to work on the book before it was published.
But, of course, that's not what happened. I wonder whether Némirovsky had any other regrets as she was sent to Auschwitz.
Fire in the Blood is published by Knopf (160 pages).
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