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Common Knowledge

Canonical name: Némirovsky, Irène
Legal name: Némirovsky, Irène Lvovna
Other names: Epstein-Némirovsky, Irène
Nemirovskaya, Irina Lvovna
Birthdate: 1903-02-11
Date of death: 1942-08-17
Burial location: Auschwitz, Poland
Gender: female
Nationality: Russian Empire (birth)
France
Country (for map): Ukraine
Birthplace: Kiev, Ukraine (formerly Russian Empire)
Place of death: Auschwitz, Poland
Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Poland
Cause of death: typhus
Places of residence: Saint Petersburg, Russia
Finland
Paris, France
Burgundy, France
Issy-l'Evêque, France
Auschwitz, Poland
Education: Sorbonne
Occupations: novelist
biographer
writer
Relationships: Epstein, Denise (daughter)
Gille, Élisabeth (daughter)
Short biography: Irène Némirovsky was brought up in St. Petersburg, Russia by a French governess, becoming completely fluent in the French language. She also learned to speak Yiddish, Finnish, Polish, and English. Following the Russian Revolution, the family lived for a year in Finland and then moved to Paris. Irène attended the Sorbonne and started writing fiction at about age 18. In 1926, she married Michel Epstein, a banker, with whom she had two daughters: Denise, born in 1929; and Élisabeth, born in 1937. In 1929, Irène published David Golder, her first novel, which was an immediate success and was adapted into a film in 1930. That same year, her novel Le Bal was published and became a play and a movie.
Today Irène Némirovsky is best-remembered for her unfinished book entitled Suite Française, two novellas written during the start of the German Occupation of France in World War II as it was happening. Despite having converted to Catholicism, Irène Némirovsky was arrested and deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz, where she died of typhus at 39 years of age. Her husband died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Their daughter Denise was able to keep the notebook containing the manuscript for Suite Française, but did not read it for 50 years, thinking it was her mother's private journal. However, in the late 1990s, she made arrangements to donate her mother's papers to a French archive and decided to examine the notebook. Upon discovering what it contained, she had it published in France, where it became a bestseller in 2004.

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Discussions

WP:List of posthumous publications of Holocaust victims in Collaborative work (April 2012)

MAY Group Read: Suite Française (General Discussion) in The 11 in 11 Category Challenge (May 2011)

Reviews

El baile by Irène Némirovsky

55000

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FILBO | Apr 23, 2024 |

Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky

Emily St John Mandel likes it. I didn't finish it because I hated all the characters too much.

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RaynaPolsky | 343 other reviews | Apr 23, 2024 |

The Misunderstanding by Irène Némirovsky

The best I can find to say about this book is that it's short and easily whizzed through. I've enjoyed other Nemirovsky works that I've read, and as this is her first, written when she was only 21, I'm prepared to let her off this dull little book. It concerns a young man who through no fault of his own no longer has a family fortune and is obliged to work. He meets and falls in love with a young married woman of his own class. Their differing expectations of life and his experience of war means their affair is doomed from the outset. This book charts its unhappy progress. I can't really find anything else to say about it.… (more)

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Margaret09 | 13 other reviews | Apr 15, 2024 |

Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky

Bonjour Tristesse

This unfinished work contain two of a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin who converted to Catholicism before WWII.

Unfinished because of Némirovsky was murdered by then Nazis in Auschwitz in 1942. Her daughter typed up the two novels from handwritten manuscripts and notes. It has since been translated into English and other languages.Obviously unfinished, Némirovsky’s light stil shines through.

This is a gem of a book. The first novel, “Storm in June” describes the flight of Parisians when Germany invaded in 1940. Scenes are reminiscent of the refugees in Prophet Song in that the refugees are white Europeans. However the imagery here is lighter, understated, concentrating on groups of people, and highlighting to class differences in the fleeing Parisians.

Some were wealthy, with family connections outside Paris. These had planned ahead, or felt comfortable enough to just show up at the châteaus of wealthy family or friends. Others had few possessions and had no destination, no means of transport as trains had stopped running and petrol/gas supplies , if they were lucky enough to have a car, were limited. The most terrifying part is not from the invaders, but from out-of-control poor French adolescents who murder a humble priest who has been caring for them. Here is an example Némirovsky showing her consciousness of class in French society. The humble priest is from a wealthy family, the boys who kill him are under-nourished san culottes

The second novel,”Dolce” has only tenuous connection with “Storm”. It’s obvious from writings in notebooks that these ties would be worked on and continued in the next three novels. Some of the notes were written in English. Possibly sixty years later by the daughter?

However I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the two novellas that survive. The style is consistent throughout.

“Storm” describes the German occupation of the French village of Bussy, a farming community in an idyllic setting. Here the Germans and French have ambiguous relationships with one another. Some French residents will not speak to the German soldiers they are forced to billet. Others have flings or affaires. Mostly the German troops are tolerated.

The two main characters are the German commander Bruno, and Lucile, a young French woman whose husband is a POW in Germany. The two have an almost affaire. Here the novel explores the deep and unbridgeable differences between the military Germans and the invaded French. For a fleeting time, four months, the two groups live in a fragile harmony with human decency ensuring a peaceful coexistence for most of the story.

Again Némirovsky shows the class differences that permeate French society. The rich exploit and despise the poor farmers who are the livelihood of the village. Two upper middle-class women joke about how they could eat crow soup but would despise the poor who would stoop so low as to devour it. The village mayor and his wife are without conscience when they fraternize with the Germans, whitest the poor do so of necessity or love.

With Bruno and Lucile, the would-be lovers, and an “‘incident” involving a local and the Germans, we move into page-turner territory. And it is here an alliance of sorts is made between the French rich and poor. Being French can after all, when push comes to shove, trump wealth.

I didn’t want this book to finish, and in the closing passages I was in tears when, knowing of the author’s fate, I read her parting words of hope for the future of the people she had created in these short works.

Highly recommended.… (more)

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kjuliff | 343 other reviews | Jan 23, 2024 |

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