Understanding Irène Némirovsky

By Margaret Scanlan

A sympathetic, nuanced exploration of the fiction and turbulent life of this best-selling author

A best-selling novelist in the 1930s, Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942) was rediscovered in 2004, when her Suite Française, set during the fall of France and the first year of German occupation, became a popular and critical success both in France and in the United States. Surviving in manuscript for sixty years after the author's deportation to Auschwitz, the work drew respectful attention as the voice of an early Holocaust victim. However, as remaining portions of Némirovsky's oeuvre returned to print, many twenty-first-century readers were appalled. Works such as David Golder and The Ball were condemned as crudely anti-Semitic, and when biographical details such as her 1938 conversion to Catholicism became known, hostility toward this "self-hating" Jew deepened.

Countering such criticisms, Understanding Irène Némirovsky offers a sympathetic, nuanced reading of Némirovsky's fiction. Margaret Scanlan begins with an overview of the writer's life—her upper-class Russian childhood, her family's immigration to France, her troubled relationship with her neglectful mother—and then traces how such experiences informed her novels and stories, including works set in revolutionary Russia, among the nouveau riche on the Riviera, and in struggling French families and failing businesses during the Depression. Scanlan examines the Suite Française and other works that address the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism. Viewing Némirovsky as a major talent with a distinctive style and voice, Scanlan argues for Némirovsky's keen awareness of the unsettled times in which she lived and examines the ways in which even her novels of manners analyze larger social issues.

Scanlan shows how Némirovsky identified with France as the center of culture and Enlightenment values, a nation where a thoughtful artist could choose her own identity. The Russian Revolution had convinced Némirovsky that violent liberations led to further violence and repression, that interior freedom required political stability. In 1940, when French democracy had collapsed and many seemed reconciled to the Vichy state, Némirovsky's idea of private freedom faltered—a recognition that her last work, Suite Française, for all its seeming reticence, makes poignantly clear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Jun 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781611178692

Margaret Scanlan

Margaret Scanlan, emerita professor of English at Indiana University South Bend, is the author of Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction, Plotting Terror: Novelists and Terrorists in Contemporary Fiction, and Customs and Culture of Ireland

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Introduction

Published in 2004, Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française became one of the best-selling novels of the decade. The original French edition won the prestigious Renaudot prize, selling over 640,000 copies ("Suite Smell of Success). Sandra Smith’s English translation won the French-American and Florence Gould Translation Prize for 2006 and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2007. By January 2014 over 2 million copies of this translation had been sold, and on March 15, 2015, a film adaptation directed by Saul Dibbs was released (Marle; Fall Festival Preview"). What drew so many people to these stories set in the early 1940s, during the German invasion and occupation of France? Riveting events, surely, including the mass exodus of Parisians who flood the roads in June 1940, blocking the progress of their own army as they run out of gas and food and dodge German bombers. The author’s spot-on characterizations, her flashes of sarcastic wit directed at a cast of characters ranging from famous writers and rich industrialists to pious clergy and factory workers, jostling against each other as they seek shelter in the same ditch, surely played a part. And so did a vivid love story featuring a Nazi officer and the wife of a French POW, which is thwarted when the young woman experiences an uncharacteristic surge of patriotism and ends when Hitler orders the Wehrmacht to invade Russia.

The additional knowledge that the author, whose story is briefly recounted in the preface, had been murdered at Auschwitz in 1942 added its own note of poignancy. Every copy of the novel, either in English or French, includes this information, which will seem to some like essential background. On the other hand, one of Némirovsky’s harshest critics has accused the publishers of a cynical marketing ploy intended to increase sales, either by creating sympathy for its author or by framing the book, which has no Jewish characters and never strays outside the fictional French village of its setting, as a Holocaust novel.¹ But the history of the Suite Française’s manuscript carries its own drama, too. Irène Némirovsky left the manuscript at home when she was arrested; her husband, who was arrested some three months later, packed it in a small suitcase with instructions to his older daughter, Denise Epstein, to preserve it at all costs. She did so but made no effort to find a publisher for it until 2002. For years she believed that the manuscript, written in almost illegibly small handwriting, was a personal journal; when she first opened it in 1975, she found reading it too painful. Years later, a flood prompted her to safeguard the manuscript; transcribing it with the aid of a magnifying glass, she discovered that it was a novel. Because the manuscript was unfinished, Epstein hesitated to publish it, thinking that to do so might be a betrayal of her mother. By the time the editor at Denoël recognized its importance both as a historical document and a literary masterpiece, the once best-selling author had been forgotten by all except her family members and a handful of specialists (Denise Epstein).²

And the question readers immediately asked—Who was Irène Némirovsky?—proved to be much more elusive than anyone picking up a copy of Suite Française in 2006 could have imagined. Indeed, it will take a whole book to answer this question. Approaching Irène Némirovsky requires us to ask questions about French history and about the identity crises emigration and the experience of bigotry provoke. Certainly it leads us into the problematic process by which fictions filter and shape realities, whether historical or psychological. And we might as well concede at the outset that our answers will never satisfy everyone.

So to begin with the simple facts: Irène Némirovsky was born into a financially successful Jewish family in 1903 in Kiev. When she was two years old, a family maid put a Christian cross around her neck to protect her from a raging pogrom. The family soon moved to St. Petersburg, a city beyond the Pale, to which Jews were traditionally confined in czarist Russia.³ As readers of Tolstoy know, upper-class Russian families often spoke French at home; and as a French governess was hired early on, Irène grew up speaking fluent French. Then, too, her family frequently vacationed in Paris or the South of France; France was a living culture with which she could engage directly, not just a place to read about in books.

The Russian Revolution erupted in St. Petersburg when Irène was fourteen years old; her father moved his family to Moscow for safety. But, of course, Moscow was no refuge for a Jewish financier after the Communists won, and in January 1918 the family moved again, this time to Finland. Russia, however, had ruled Finland for over a century (1809–1917), and the revolution was in full swing there as well; some of the worst violence the author saw occurred in Finland. The family moved from the small town of Mustamäki to Helsinki and from there to Stockholm. Shortly after the end of World War I, the Némirovskys resettled in France, where they intended to remain. The news coming from the Russian Civil War, in which at least fifty thousand Jewish people died in pogroms for which Communist Reds as well as czarist Whites were responsible, was enough to discourage any thought of returning home.⁴

So childhood established a pattern that would persist: Irène Némirovsky lived out a mostly privileged, upper-middle-class existence against a background of violent politics. The pogrom from which the Christian maid protected Irène as a small child was one of 657 in Russia during the period October 1905 to January 1906 (Budnitskii 38). When she was ten, Menahem Mendel Beilis, a Jewish resident of Kiev, was indicted for the ritual murder of a thirteen-year-old Christian boy. Though Beilis was acquitted, the prosecution’s claims shocked many Europeans; clearly, in twentieth-century Russia the old blood libel, the medieval claim that innocent Christian blood is a key ingredient in Passover matzos, was still widely credited (Budnitskii 31).

Anti-Semitism also reached virulent levels in France when in 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army captain, was falsely accused of spying for Germany and sent to Devil’s Island. The anti-Semitic Action Française movement, which had helped whip up public hysteria, appeared defeated when Dreyfus was acquitted in 1906. But it remained a force in French politics, reviving from time to time—in 1934, for example, when the Jewish financier Alexandre Stavisky committed suicide just as the police arrived to arrest him for fraud. As Hitler tightened his grip on Germany, Jewish refugees flowed into France, and their numbers, coupled with the continuing economic depression, made the native French more susceptible to Action Française’s views. By the time the Germans invaded in 1940, homegrown anti-Semitism was already thriving, promoted in popular daily newspapers and even in influential literary journals.

Family Dynamics

Of equal importance to understanding Irène Némirovsky is her family history. Unlike many Russian émigrés, her father, Léon, quickly recovered his fortune in France. His wife, Fanny, beautiful, fashionable, and luxurious, vacationed for weeks with her lovers on the French Riviera; nothing about her was maternal. Irène, an only child, was largely left to the care of a governess, though occasionally subject to her mother’s tirades. One of Fanny’s chief concerns was concealing any signs of her own aging; thus she insisted on dressing Irène as a child well into adolescence, discouraged her marriage, and advised abortion on learning that the young couple were expecting their first baby. Openly unfaithful in her youth, the older Fanny took to hiring gigolos, decorating her bedroom as if it were a bordello, and indulging in the tastes of the Hollywood elite of her era. Yes, the narrator of Élisabeth Gille’s Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by her Daughter would admit to a friend, the stories about her mother bathing in donkey’s milk were true (133).

This unhappy family, so crucial to Némirovsky’s development, offered nothing of the celebrated warmth of the Jewish home. Irène not only had no religious education, but she was never introduced to the rich cultural legacy of the shtetl or to Jewish spirituality, as evoked in Isaac Peretz’s Prince of the Ghetto stories, in so many mid-twentieth-century American accounts of Jewish immigrant life on New York’s East Side, and even, in musical-theater homage, by Fiddler on the Roof.

Léon Némirovsky was a much warmer human being than his wife. But he was a workaholic whose business affairs often required travel, and as he grew older, he also developed a passion for gambling. At both work and play, he took enormous risks with money; the brilliant successes that marked his early career were followed by major losses before his death in 1932. Irène clearly loved him, but he did not oversee her day-to-day life. That role was played by Zézelle, Irène’s gentle French governess, whom I loved as a mother (PL 58). One can never entirely separate Irène’s love of the French language and culture, her idealization of French civilization as the guarantor of human rights and the guardian of high culture, from this primary attachment of her childhood. Sadly, Zézelle committed suicide in 1917, perhaps because Fanny had dismissed her; the war at home and the unsettled atmosphere of St. Petersburg must have contributed to her despair.

It would be difficult to find someone else who hated her mother with the intensity that Irène demonstrated in her letters, her notebooks, and, repeatedly, her published fiction. This is a nearly pathological emotion, at odds with the well-mannered and charming young women her contemporaries described; it does not jibe easily with her measured writing style, her preference for irony and observation over sensational incident, or even with the many smiling pictures of the author with her two daughters, Denise and Élisabeth. Perhaps as a mother she modeled herself on Zézelle. But something uncharacteristically lurid and disturbing creeps in whenever Fanny Némirovsky emerges in her daughter’s comments or when we read about one of her fictional avatars, variously labeled the enemy, the monster, or Jezebel. Irène Némirovsky spoke elegant French and was at home in polite society, but a sense of ruthless drives and violence lurking beneath polished surfaces is never far away.

After the Némirovskys settled in Paris, Irène enrolled at the Sorbonne, where she received degrees in comparative literature and Russian. Before and during her university years, Irène led an active social life, both in Paris and on the Riviera, where the family vacationed. The many scenes in her novels set among the idle rich as they dance, gamble, or drink in seaside resorts reflect her own experience, as well as her observations of her parents. At age twenty-three, in 1926, she married Michel Epstein, the son of another Russian Jewish family that had immigrated to Paris. Michel worked for a bank, but he was not the successful, risk-taking financier her father had been. A respected manager, he used his fluent German in a French and foreign affairs department that was created to prevent another war (PL 123). His salary was often lower than his wife’s income from her writing.

Early Fame

Irène had been writing poems and stories since mid-adolescence, publishing her first magazine story under a pseudonym in 1921; her first short novel, Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding), appeared in a literary review in 1924 and was published as a book two years later. As a young married woman, she set aside daily periods for writing. Shortly before her daughter Denise was born on November 29, 1929, she completed the manuscript of her first best-seller, David Golder, and dispatched it to Bernard Grasset, the publisher of Marcel Proust, among others. She sent the manuscript under the name Epstein, in care of General Delivery, Paris-Lourdes. The story is that the enthusiastic first reader passed the manuscript on to Grasset, who stayed up all night reading it and dispatched a letter to M. Epstein, inviting him to his office to sign a contract.

David Golder has many autobiographical elements, but what struck its readers initially was its insider’s look at the world of finance, of speculation on oil markets, and the sordid machinations of outsiders scheming to accumulate wealth. It was a man’s world, and the publisher, or so the legend goes, was astonished to discover that its author, when she turned up in his office, was a young woman apologizing for keeping him waiting three weeks: I’ve just had a baby (PL 151). By December 5 the book was in print, promoted by the astute publisher as "a fictional creation of great merit … which recalls Père Goriot (PL 152). As it turned out, Némirovsky had not yet read Balzac’s famous masterpiece about a father ruined by his daughters’ greed, but the comparison seemed apt to many reviewers. Appearing so soon after Black Friday and the Wall Street crash of 1929, the book had the added merit of being topical. It was adapted into a play that opened in December 1930, with only limited success, and then into one of the new talking films," premiering on the Champs-Élysées on March 6, 1931. The film, like the translations in languages ranging from English and German to Hungarian and Japanese, was a success. Throughout the 1930s, Némirovsky was a well-known figure on the Parisian literary scene, the subject of admiring reviews from such diverse figures as the Jewish novelist André Maurois and Robert Brasillach, the fascist literary journalist who would be executed in 1946 for his collaboration with the Nazis.

Jewish Readers in the 1930s and the Question of Anti-Semitism

The near-universal acclaim for David Golder was not echoed in the Jewish press. Golder is a Russian Jew who has schemed and scraped his way to wealth in France; his first act in the novel is to drive his business partner and old friend to suicide. His equally avaricious wife, Gloria, is an aging social climber with a series of lovers. In other words, the characters and even some of the novel’s language draw on stereotypes; one does not easily overlook a description of a character whose nose is enormous and hooked, like the nose of an old Jewish moneylender (58). One might counter that David Golder evolves far beyond those initial stereotypes or that the hooked nose observation is attributed to Gloria, a character intended to repel. But one cannot erase a history that includes Shylock or a phrase that might have been at home in Der Stürmer.

We will explore David Golder later, at more length. But let us at least say that the novel introduces a subject that Némirovsky explores almost obsessively, the evolution of ambition in a person born into poverty and exclusion. Némirovsky was fascinated with the question of how people manage to rise in the world, what qualities they need to succeed, and how the single-minded pursuit of money and success damages an individual or society consumed with it. She understood that an economy driven by unregulated ambition will have political and cultural repercussions, and was convinced that her knowledge of the private lives of successful bankers and speculators offered sociological and political insight.

But she was also increasingly distressed that outsiders associated sharp financial practices with Jewish people, as if they sprang from some genetic abnormality rather than from the social conditions she understood so well. So she retold the story of a man ruined by his ambition, in two cases making sure to avoid labeling him as Jewish. In La Proie (The Prey, 1938) the predator, Jean-Luc Daguerne, is a middle-class Frenchman fallen on hard times, who rises first through a conventionally opportune marriage and then through his association with a minister in the French government. In Le Maître des âmes (Master of Souls, 1939), the desperate outsider is a society doctor who gets rich playing on the susceptibilities of wealthy neurotics.⁵ Dario Asfar is not Jewish but Mediterranean or Levantine, words that unfortunately were often taken as euphemisms for Jewish. And so close to the old stereotypes does the hero’s characterization remain that even Susan Suleiman, Némirovsky’s most ardent defender against charges of anti-Semitism, has observed that although he is not explicitly identified as a Jew, he is clearly portrayed as one (Suleiman, Jewish Question 23).

But turning economic ambition into a universal failing or attributing it to Christians because they were not stereotyped as pushy or scheming did not satisfy Némirovsky. As anti-Semitism grew more politically powerful, she seemed driven to explore Jewish characters, to show how their historical experiences had damaged them, shaped them into survivors who might, whatever their repellant features, be fully understood. In her last novel published during her lifetime, The Dogs and the Wolves, which appeared just as the Germans were invading France, she takes the reader back to Ukraine, describing the terror of two Jewish children who survive a pogrom by hiding in an attic. The novel takes us forward into an unspecified future in which one of these children is a Jewish refugee living in central Europe with her newborn son.

In her lifetime, the book received only one review and had limited sales. Vichy newspapers did not review Jewish novelists, and the Vichy regime soon saw to it that they did not publish. Although lacking booming sales, The Dogs and the Wolves, like Suite Française, was fated to be read outside its own time. Here it will be read attentively to see how this last novel with Jewish characters portrays the persecution of Jews in czarist times but also to see how the expulsion of two of its protagonists from France reflected the politics of the 1930s, as well as the hostility to foreign Jews that preceded the German invasion. Also important are the conflicting responses of present-day readers, some of whom insist on seeing this novel, too, as anti-Semitic, while others see it as offering a new vision of a Jewish future, freed from the compulsive cycle of persecution and revenge.

From Manners to History

Throughout her career, Némirovsky wrote both novels and stories in a genre often referred to as domestic fiction or the novel of manners. In both France and England, its earliest examples appear in the eighteenth century, when the home was a woman’s sphere; most were written by women; and they were usually marketed to women. They take place in the private home and center on personal relationships: marriage and courtship, yes, but also domestic crises arising from a sudden loss of income, a serious illness, a death in the family. Even in the late 1930s, when she was well known, Némirovsky occasionally published in Marie-Claire, the still-popular French women’s magazine. Many of us grew up reading novels set on whaling ships, or in the trenches, or on a bear hunt, stories about men in mostly all-male settings, and were taught to read them for universal truths. In the same era, the adjectives domestic, women’s, or, worse, sentimental marked limitation and carried more than a whiff of condescension. Books set in the home, dealing with marriage and children and domestic economic pressures, were about the private lives of women and had no implications for the public worlds of commerce and politics. They were not universal.

Today let us hope that we have more generous ideas about women and their experiences; certainly poststructural theory has urged us to be suspicious of people claiming that their experiences are universal. Feminist critics such as Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert have instructed us that the madwoman in the attic has her own history: the first Mrs. Rochester, raving in the night, occasionally breaking out to set fires, is a Creole. That is, she is a product of British colonialism, of slavery and deceit about racial intermarriage. Thus Jane Eyre, although certainly a love story and domestic, has a political dimension, and once we have opened that attic door, we are free to see orphanages that starve little girls and even the marriage customs of Victorian England as politically and historically conditioned. As Matthew Arnold so aptly pronounced, this children’s classic is in fact full of hunger, rebellion, and rage.

Given Irène Némirovsky’s highly troubled relationship with her mother, we should not find it astonishing that her fiction, when set in the private home among mothers and daughters, is anything but serene. But we do well to remember that angry mothers, like the first Mrs. Rochester, have their own history. When Némirovsky tells us a story about a little girl who is scalded to death after her mother, intent on an assignation with her lover, leaves her alone in a kitchen where a huge pot of water is boiling, we will think, as we are probably intended to, of all those myths and fairy tales where mothers disguised as evil stepmothers abuse their daughters cruelly. But we also need to remember that we are living in a historical world, where many upper-class children were left almost exclusively in the care of servants, where women were encouraged to value themselves for their appearance, dress, and appeal to men, rather than to develop their intelligence and see their possibilities as full actors in a social and political world. This world, taken for granted by most of its inhabitants in 1910, fell victim to a cataclysmic revolution eight years later. The connection we sense between, on the one hand, a mother’s emotional violence and a child’s agonizing death and, on the other, the seething anger of Russian revolutionaries faced with savage czarist repression is fully historical and political.

Yet unfortunately some of the stereotypes about domestic fiction persist in the claim, rather frequently made, that Irène Némirovsky was not a political or historical novelist. Nathan Bracher, in an otherwise insightful discussion of the ethical dimension of Suite Française, nonetheless concludes that Némirovsky does not seem capable of understanding the war and the Occupation in terms of intellectual or political history as does [Jean] Guéhenno, author of the Journal of the Dark Years, 1940–1944 (258). Guéhenno was a professor of literature who lived through the war in Paris, where his frank espousal of free thought, anchored in the tradition of Montaigne and Voltaire, whom he taught enthusiastically, annoyed the authorities. But while Némirovsky’s fiction lacks Guéhenno’s systematic discursiveness, it embodies a historical consciousness every bit as politically and intellectually sophisticated as his.

To read Némirovsky well, we need to think about how historical consciousness can be embodied in a novel that never reads like a history textbook or a newspaper editorial. Perhaps the first step is broadening our idea of how history is written. All of us are familiar with history as a narrative of Great Men and Famous Battles and Important Legislation; this is the version we studied in high school, and we would be lost without it. But even in Némirovsky’s lifetime, her contemporaries in history departments were interested in reshaping and rewriting this traditional practice. France was home to the Annales, an influential journal whose historians rejected both l’histoire événementielle, the chronicle of military and political events, and a history of ideas focused on a few brilliant thinkers. Those drawn to what was later dubbed the history of mentalities wished to explore the collective, automatic, and repetitive elements that shape a particular view of the world that people of an era share. Jacques Le Goff called it what Caesar shared with his soldiers … and Columbus with his sailors, the unconscious assumptions that we do not even recognize because our world takes them for granted (Chartier 56).

Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) provides a useful example of a history of mentalities. Relying on court records and notarial contracts to supplement two long-forgotten texts published in 1561, Davis tells the story of an imposter who appeared in a Languedoc village in 1556, claiming to be the Martin Guerre who disappeared several years earlier. Martin’s wife Bertrande welcomed him back, bore him two children, and fiercely defended him when Martin’s uncle had him tried for fraud. Only when the real Martin Guerre turned up and his sister had verified his identity did Bertrande admit that she had been deceived. The imposter was hanged, and Bertrande and the real Martin resumed their life together. Two popular accounts of the case were published in 1561, and Montaigne speculated about the judge’s boldness in sentencing the imposter to death. The story fascinated Davis, not because either of the Martins was important in his own right, but because of what it tells us about implicit views of identity shared by sixteenth-century peasants and the better-educated classes responsible for adjudicating their debates. Moreover, Davis, who used novelistic devices of suspense to develop her courtroom drama, also emphasized ambivalence, uncertainty, and complexity as conditions that afflict contemporary historians. As Davis later pointed out, the question of where reconstruction ends and invention begins in a historical text is central to her book, an analogy on the uncertain border between self-fashioning and lying built into my narrative (On the Lam 572).

A similar impulse can be found developing in England and