Ирен Немировская: Жизнь и судьба французской писательницы

French novelist

Irène Némirovsky (iʁɛn nemiʁɔfski; 11 February 1903 – 17 August 1942) was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin who was born in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France and wrote in French, but was denied French nationality. Arrested as a Jew under the racial lawswhich did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicismshe was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 39. Némirovsky is best known for the posthumously published Suite française.

Némirovsky was born Irina Lvivna Nemirovska (Ирина Львовна Немировская, Ірина Львівна Немировська) in 1903 in Kiev, then Russian Empire, the daughter of a wealthy banker, Léon (Lev) Borisovich Némirovsky. Her volatile and unhappy relationship with her mother Fanni Yonovna Margolis Nemirovsky became the heart of many of her novels. On 6 November 1942, her husband, Michel Epstein, was sent to Auschwitz and immediately murdered in the gas chambers.

Némirovsky is now best known as the author of the unfinished Suite Française (Denoël, France, 2004, ; translation by Sandra Smith, Knopf, 2006, ), two novellas portraying life in France between 4 June 1940 and 1 July 1941, the period during which the Nazis occupied most of France. These works are considered remarkable because they were written during the actual period itself and yet are the product of considered reflection, rather than just a journal of events, as might be expected considering the personal turmoil experienced by the author at the time. Némirovsky's older daughter, Denise, kept the notebook containing the manuscript for Suite Française for fifty years without reading it, thinking it was a journal or diary of her mother's, which would be too painful to read. In the late 1990s, however, she made arrangements to donate her mother's papers to a French archive and decided to examine the notebook first. Upon discovering what it contained, she instead had it published in France, where it became a bestseller in 2004. It sold 2.5 million copies by 2008 and has been translated into 38 languages. The original manuscript has been given to the Institut mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC), and the novel has won the Prix Renaudotthe first time the prize has been awarded posthumously. Némirovsky's surviving notes sketch a general outline of a story arc that was intended to include the two existing novellas, as well as three more to take place later during the war and at its end. She wrote that the rest of the work was "in limbo, and what limbo! It's really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens." In a January 2006 interview with the BBC, her daughter Denise said, "For me, the greatest joy is knowing that the book is being read. It is an extraordinary feeling to have brought my mother back to life. It shows that the Nazis did not truly succeed in killing her. It is not vengeance, but it is a victory."

Several reviewers and commentators have raised questions regarding Némirovsky's conversion to Catholicism, her generally negative depiction of Jews in her writing and her use of ultra nationalist publications to provide for her family. Myriam Anissimov's introduction to the French edition of Suite Française describes Némirovsky as a "self hating Jew," due to the fact that Némirovsky's own situation as a Jew in France is not at all seen in the work. The paragraph was omitted from the English edition. A long article in The Jewish Quarterly argued that there had been an "abdication of critical responsibility in exchange for the more sensational copy to be had from Némirovsky’s biography" by most reviewers in the British press.

In 2007, another novel by Némirovsky was published, after a complete manuscript was found in her archives by two French biographers. Chaleur du sangtranslated to English by Sandra Smith as Fire in the Bloodis a tale of country folk in a Burgundy village, based on Issy l'Évêque where Némirovsky and her family found temporary refuge while hiding from the Nazis.

Le Bal / Snow in Autumn, trans. Sandra Smith (2007)
David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair, trans. Sandra Smith (2008)

An opera made from the 1930 novel Le Bal was first performed in 2010 at the Hamburg Opera House, Germany (composed by Oscar Strasnoy, adapted by Matthew Jocelyn.) A dramatization of the 1930 novel Le malentendu was broadcast by BBC Radio as The Misunderstanding in January 2019.

A biography of Némirovsky, Irene Nemirovsky: Her Life And Works, written by Jonathan Weiss, was published in 2006.