David Golder

Bankrupted by inflation, Soifer had played the money markets and won everything back again. In spite of that, he had retained a mistrust of money, and the way revolutions and wars could transform it overnight into nothing but worthless bits of paper. It was a mistrust that seemed to grow as the years passed, and little by little, Soifer had invested his fortune in jewellery. He kept everything in a safe in London: diamonds, pearls, emeralds – all so beautiful that even Gloria had never owned any that could compare. Despite all this, his meanness bordered on madness. He lived in a sordid little furnished room, in a dingy street near Passy, and would never take taxis, even when a friend offered to pay. ‘I do not wish,’ he would say, ‘to indult in luxuries that I can’t afford myself.’ Instead, he would wait for the bus in the rain, in winter, for hours at a time, letting them go by one after the other if there was no room left in second class. All his life, he had walked on tiptoe so his shoes would last longer. For several years now, since he had lost all his teeth, he ate cereal and pureeed vegetables to avoid having to buy dentures….It was only his gaping, spluttering mouth…that inspired a feeling of revulsion and fear.’

In David Golder, an appalling book by any standard, Némirovsky spins an entire novel from that stereotype. The title character is an oil magnate who has sacrificed his life to his business and has nothing to show for it but money—money that his wife and daughter are constantly bleeding from him. His wife, Gloria, openly cuckolds him while expecting him to support her extravagant lifestyle. (When he enters the room, she hides her checkbook "as if it were a packet of love letters.") Their eighteen-year-old daughter, Joyce, forces him to gamble until he collapses to win her money for a new car. "It's just that I have to have everything on earth, otherwise I'd rather die!" she tells him. Golder, for his part, is alternately cruel and pathetic. In the novel's first scene, he mercilessly refuses to cut his own partner a break on the sale of some oil shares, showing no pity and offering no explanation: "'Business,' was all he murmured, as if he were naming some terrifying god."

In the hands of Edith Wharton or Ford Madox Ford, these characters might have acquired some complexity—perhaps a redeeming quality, or just a kind word at some point to someone. But Némirovsky's portrayals are relentlessly one-sided. The women come off particularly poorly. After the partner's suicide, Golder overhears his wife, wearing an enormous pearl necklace, negotiating with the undertaker to downgrade the quality of his coffin. Gloria, too, will pursue a bargain at any cost: she haggles with a woman trying to sell a fur coat to help her boyfriend pay off his debts, but while she is waiting for the woman to agree to a better price, the boyfriend kills himself. (Gloria sees herself as the loser here, because now "of course she'll keep the coat.")

David Golder appeared in 1929. Would it be too much to say that such a book published in such a year was complicit, as many similar books were complicit, in the moral degradation of culture that became one of the causes of the imminent genocide? It has been painful to watch Némirovsky's contemporary defenders tying themselves into knots to explain this racist travesty of a novel. In his introduction to the British edition of David Golder, Patrick Marnham sets the context with his first sentence—"Irene Némirovsky died in Auschwitz in 1942"—and argues that "Men like Golder existed, and no doubt still exist. They had come a very long way, just how long we discover in the novel's devastating climax." He makes the book sound like merely a Continental version of William Dean Howells. And what does it mean to say that David Golder is true to life? To which part of life, exactly—the harshness of the arriviste's lot, or the Jew's love of money? "Golder is Jewish because Némirovsky was Jewish," Marnham writes, persisting in his argument that the book's ugliness is nothing but realism, "but her choice of an unsympathetic Jewish character did not make Némirovsky an anti-Semite any more than Robert Louis Stevenson was anti-Scottish because he created the diabolical figure of Ebenezer in Kidnapped." This lets Némirovsky off too easy. For Golder's Jewishness is not simply one of his many traits; it is his defining trait, the very essence of his being, the root from which his character and his corruption grows. And he is hardly an isolated case: all the novel's primary characters are Jewish, and all are despicable.