Metro Views: 'Woman of Letters'

A powerful exhibition on an acclaimed but controversial Jewish novelist who wrote in occupied France.

By MARILYN HENRY
Irene Nemirovsky 88 (photo credit: )
Irene Nemirovsky 88
(photo credit: )
Reading Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française is like falling in love on the first date. A dramatic story, it was written by the daughter of a Russian Jewish banker whose family had been exiled in France after the Russian Revolution. Later a celebrated French author, Némirovsky was exiled again by the Nazi occupation and forced by circumstances to worry about her two daughters, her work and her legacy. What a story - what stories! Némirovsky's writings and the dramatic tale of how Suite Française was written, under what terrible conditions: in the Burgundy village of Issy-l'Évêque, amid German soldiers, with her ink, paper and money running out. And then there was the author's fate. She ran out of time. Arrested by French gendarmes on July 16, 1942, she was registered at the Pithiviers internment camp as "Epstein Irène Némirovski, woman of letters." She arrived at Auschwitz on July 19 and died a month later, on August 19, of typhus. She was 39. Her husband, Michel Epstein, a banker, was deported in October. Suite Française is both a story and history - of the German occupation, of French collaboration, of Némirovsky's desperate efforts to record events in a meaningful way. On June 2, 1942, only weeks before she was deported, she wrote in her journal: "Never forget that the war will be over and that the entire historical side will fade away. Try to create as much as possible: things, debates... that will interest people in 1952 or 2052." BUT THE writer was no prophet. The "entire historical side" did not fade away, and her work and her life are now part of it, salvaged by her daughter Denise, who - beginning at age 13 - carted a valise with her mother's leather notebook and family photos through two years of hiding with her sister, Elisabeth, who was five when Némirovsky was deported. Artifacts including the valise, Némirovsky's notebook crammed with script in blue ink, photos and video interviews are part of a powerful exhibition, "Woman of Letters," at New York's Museum of Jewish Heritage, co-produced with France's Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine, which is the repository for Némirovsky's papers. It is on view in Lower Manhattan until March 22, and is supplemented by a series of programs on French and Jewish history. Although she had protected it, Denise Epstein did not examine the valise for years. "I hoped that the owner of the suitcase would come back," she said at a program last month at the museum. "I was waiting for her to open it." Eventually, she opened the valise and the notebook. What she thought was her mother's diary was, in fact, two novellas, Suite Française, with her mother's notes on character development, plot structure, personal anxieties, written in such a tiny scrawl that it required Denise to use a magnifying glass and to devote years to transcribing it. There was something akin to rapture over the discovery and survival of Suite Française. The acclaim was astonishing. Published in French in 2004, it won France's prestigious literary award, the Renaudot Prize - the first time the prize honored a writer for a posthumous work. In 2006, it was published in the US. It has since been translated into nearly three dozen languages. 'FOR ME, the greatest joy is knowing that the book is being read," says Epstein. "And it's an extraordinary feeling to have brought my mother back to life. It shows that the Nazis didn't truly succeed in killing her." But it was hard to retain her image. The success of Suite Française led to the reissue of Némirovsky's other writings, from the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, and raised questions about her personal sentiments and attitudes. Epstein, for instance, says she was unaware she was Jewish until she was compelled to wear a yellow star. Némirovsky had converted to Catholicism in 1939 and had her daughters baptized in an effort to save them. After the war, Epstein considered herself Jewish, saying, "Catholic was just a label." It is odd to hear complaints from Jewish quarters in the US and France that Némirovsky faced her Judaism only because of the persecution she suffered; this was true of many during the Nazi era. And in this age of rampant assimilation, rabbis and communal leaders in both countries can attest to the fact that Judaism today in the US and France is often less a religion than a reaction to anti-Semitism. Perhaps Jewish museums in the US and France, as well as Yad Vashem, should emulate the New York museum and use Némirovsky's life and stories to teach both Jewish cultural and Holocaust history - how important writers and artists were so easily reduced to stateless helplessness. Némirovsky's novel David Golder - replete with racist stereotypes - raised the specter of the author's anti-Semitism. It is the inevitable question her daughter confronts. "I believe we read - and I include myself - David Golder with the perspective of someone reading after the Shoah," said Epstein, speaking through a translator. "It is not anti-Semitism; it is social criticism of a milieu she knew extremely well." Her mother could have a "cruel perspective" and this was, said Epstein, "the same way she looked at the French bourgeoisie." As more becomes known about this woman of letters, for many, the enchantment of the first date recedes. If it is painful to read David Golder, it is because we recognize him and because Némirovsky has drawn him so sharply. We are uneasy because her charm is tinged with vicious caricature. This is a woman who has been brutally uprooted twice in her short life and spares few from the ruthless razor that is her pen. Who are we, the Jewish generations born in the West after the Shoah, to judge Némirovsky? Our privileged world was not hers. Those, in the US and in France, who castigate her as "a self-hating Jew" might want to purge their bookshelves. Jewish literature, like Jewish history and Jewish life, is filled with unsavory and unsympathetic characters - some merely thoughtless or neurotic, others heartless or evil - and we write and read about them all.