After the capitulation of French forces in mid-1940 they had an opportunity to relocate from Paris to Hendaye, a stone’s throw from the Spanish border. Instead they chose the village of Issy-l’Évêque in Burgundy, inside the German-administered zone. In Issy, as anti-Jewish measures began to bite (bank accounts of Jews were frozen, Jews were forbidden to publish, Jews had to wear the yellow star), the truth may have begun to dawn on them, though not the full truth (it was only in the winter of 1941–2 that word began to filter down to the administrators of the conquered territories that the solution of the so-called Jewish Question was to take the form of genocidal extermination). As late as the end of 1941, Némirovsky seems to have believed that whatever might befall the Jew in the street would not befall her. In a letter addressed to Marshal Pétain, head of the Vichy puppet government, she pleads that as an honorable (respectable) foreigner she deserves to be left in peace.4
There are two broad reasons why Irène Némirovsky should have considered herself a special case. The first is that for most of her life it had been her heart’s desire to be French; and, in a country with a long history of harbouring political refugees but notably unreceptive to notions of cultural pluralism, being fully French meant being neither a Russian émigré who wrote in French nor a French-speaking Jew. At its most juvenile (see her partly autobiographical novel Le Vin de solitude), her wish took the form of a fantasy of being reborn as a ‘real’ Frenchwoman with a name like Jeanne Fournier. (Némirovsky’s youthful heroines are typically spurned by their mothers but cherished by more-than-motherly French governesses.)
The problem for Némirovsky as a budding writer in the 1920s was that, aside from her facility in the French language, the capital she commanded on the French literary market consisted in a body of experience that branded her as foreign: daily life in old Russia, pogroms and Cossack raids, the revolution and the civil war, plus to a lesser extent the shady world of international finance. In the course of her career she would thus alternate, according to her sense of the temper of the times, between two authorial selves, one pur sang French – ‘Jeanne Fournier’ – the other exotic. As a French authoress she would compose books about ‘real’ French families expressing an irreproachably French sensibility, books with no whiff of foreignness about them. After 1940 this French self took over entirely, as publishers became more and more nervous about the presence of Jewish writers on their lists.
As for the exotic self, exploiting it required a careful balancing act. To avoid being labelled a Russian who wrote in French, she would keep her distance from Russian émigré society. To avoid being cast as a Jew, she would be ready to mock and caricature Jews. On the other hand, unlike such Russian-born contemporaries as Nathalie Sarraute (née Cherniak) and Henri Troyat (né Tarassov), she published under her Russian name in its French form, until the wartime ban on Jewish writers led her to resort to a pseudonym.
The second broad reason why Némirovsky should have thought she would escape the fate of the Jews is that she had cultivated influential friends on the right, even the far right. In the months between her arrest and his own, these friends were the first people her husband contacted with pleas to intercede. To bolster her case he even scoured her books for useable anti-Semitic quotes. All of these friends let her down, mainly because they were powerless. They were powerless because, as it began to become clear, when the Nazis said all Jews they meant all Jews with no exceptions.
For her compromises with the anti-Semites – who, as the Dreyfus affair had made plain a half-century before, were fully as influential in France, at all levels of society, as in Germany – Némirovsky has had to undergo the most searching interrogation, notably by Jonathan Weiss in his biography of her.5 I do not propose to extend that interrogation here. Némirovsky made some serious mistakes and did not live long enough to correct them. Misreading the signs, she believed, until it was too late, that she could evade the express train of history bearing down on her. Of the large body of work she left behind, some can safely be forgotten, but a surprising amount is still of interest, not only for what it tells us about the evolution of a writer now in the process of being absorbed into the French canon but as the record of an engagement with the France of her day that is never less than intelligent and is sometimes damning.
Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. Her father was a banker with government connections. An only child, she had French governesses and spent summer vacations on the Côte d’Azur. When the Bolsheviks took power the Némirovskys transferred their base to Paris, where Irène enrolled at the Sorbonne and dawdled for five years over a degree in literature, preferring partying to studying. In her free time she wrote stories. Interestingly, though Paris was the hub of international modernism, the magazines to which she sent her work were conservative in their literary and political outlook. In 1926 she married Epstein, a man from the same milieu (Russian Jewry, banking) as herself.
For her first foray into the novel form Némirovsky drew heavily on her family background. David Golder is a financier and speculator with a special interest in Russian oil. He owns an apartment in Paris and a villa in Biarritz. He is growing old, he has a heart problem, he would like to begin winding down. Behind him, however, flogging him on like a galley slave, are two women: a wife who despises him and flaunts her infidelity, and a daughter with expensive tastes in cars and men. When he has his first heart attack, his wife bribes the doctor to tell him it is not serious; when swings in the market bankrupt him, his daughter uses sexual wiles to get him to stagger out one last time to do battle in the boardrooms.
David Golder (1929) is a novel of stock characters and extravagant emotions, with a heavy debt to Balzac’s Le Père Goriot. Golder himself is a stereotypically unscrupulous man of business. His wife is obsessed with her looks; his daughter is so locked into her round of pleasures that she barely sees her parents as human. But these crude materials undergo some development and modulation. Between Golder’s wife and her lover of many years – a parasitic minor aristocrat who may well be the daughter’s natural father – there are moments of near domestic affection. The daughter is allowed a chapter of lyrical sex and gastronomy in Spain to persuade us of her claim that pleasure is a good in itself. And beneath the lineaments of the titan financier we get to see first the mortal man frightened of death, then the little boy from the shtetl.
The last pages of the book are as affecting as anything Némirovsky wrote. Sick and dying, Golder boards a tramp steamer at a Black Sea port. In his last hours he is tended by a young Jew with his own dreams of getting to America and making his fortune. In his company, Golder drops the masks of the French and Russian languages and returns to the Yiddish of his childhood; in his last vision he hears a voice calling him home.
There is plenty of anti-Semitic caricature in David Golder. Even the ending can be accommodated to the world view of the anti-Semite: beneath a veneer of cosmopolitanism Golder’s deepest loyalties turn out after all to be Jewish. In an interview given in 1935 Némirovsky conceded that if Hitler had been in power when she was writing the book she would have ‘written it differently’. Yet considering its sympathy for the lonely and unloved Golder, battling on three fronts with ruthless competitors, predatory women, and a failing body, it is hard to see the book as at core anti-Semitic. Némirovsky seems to have felt so too: in the interview she goes on to say that to have purged the text at the time – that is, without an adequate political motive – would have been wrong, ‘a weakness unworthy of a true writer’.6
On the back of the success of David Golder in its various incarnations Némirovsky built a prosperous career as woman of letters. At her peak she was bringing in considerably more money than her husband, who was a bank executive. The couple kept a spacious apartment in Paris with domestic staff (maid, cook, governess); they took vacations at fashionable resorts. Their lifestyle would become unsustainable once measures against Jews participating in the economy came into effect. By the time they were deported in 1942, the N�
�mirovskys were in dire financial straits.
Le Bal (1930) is a slighter affair. M. and Mme Alfred Kampf, petit-bourgeois arrivistes who have made a fortune on the stock market, plan a grand ball to mark their coming out in Paris high society. To their unloved daughter Antoinette falls the task of mailing invitations to the selected two hundred fashionable guests. Full of resentment against her mother, Antoinette secretly destroys the invitations. The great night comes and no guests arrive. With grim pleasure Antoinette watches as her parents, humiliated in front of the servants, go to pieces. In the last scene she pretends to console her weeping mother, while inwardly revelling in her victory.
The inimical mother-daughter couple recurs often in Némirovsky’s fiction, the mother determined to repress the daughter who, by emerging into womanhood, threatens to overshadow and supersede her, the daughter fighting back with whatever weapons are at her disposal. It is perhaps Némirovsky’s most telling weakness as a writer that she is unable to do anything with this material beyond reproducing it again and again.
Les Mouches d’automne (1931), translated into English as Snow in Autumn and not to be confused with the later novel Les Feux de l’automne, follows the declining years of Tatiana, faithful nanny to the Karines, exiles who, on the basis of the considerable fortune they have smuggled out of Russia, have adapted with ease to life in France. It is Tatiana, yearning for the country estate where she grew up and unable to make sense of her new environment, who emerges as the principal victim of the revolution. Neglected by the Karines, her mind wandering, she leaves the apartment one foggy morning and is drowned, or drowns herself, in the Seine.
The novella owes a general debt to Chekhov and a specific debt to ‘Un Coeur simple’, Flaubert’s coolly factual story of a similarly faithful retainer. Aside from the arbitrary ending – Némirovsky’s endings tend to be cursory, perhaps a consequence of her habit of starting a new project before the old one was properly finished – it is an accomplished piece of work, opposing old-fashioned fidelities to the new, casual sexual mores that the younger Karines find so attractive.
L’Affaire Courilof (1933) assumes the form of a memoir written by a member of a terrorist cell, telling of how, shortly before the failed 1905 revolution, he infiltrated the staff of Count Courilof, the Tsar’s Minister of Education, with the object of carrying out a spectacular assassination. Posing as a Swiss doctor, he becomes the intimate observer of Courilof’s dual struggle with cancer and political rivals who are using his marriage to a woman with a dubious past to engineer his downfall.
Slowly the would-be assassin begins to appreciate the better qualities of his victim: his stoicism, his refusal to distance himself from the wife he loves. When the time comes to hurl the bomb, he cannot do it: a comrade has to take his place. Arrested and sentenced to death, he escapes across the border, returning later to enjoy a career in the Soviet secret police during which he tortures and executes enemies of the state without compunction, before being purged and exiled to France, where he pens his memoir.
Redolent of the Conrad of Under Western Eyes, The Courilof Affair is Némirovsky’s most overtly political novel. (Conrad, the anglicized Pole, impressed Némirovsky as a model of successful acculturation.) The central plot device – a foreigner with fake medical papers becomes the confidant of one of the most powerful men in Russia – may be implausible, but it pays off handsomely. The gradual humanization of an assassin brought up in the most blinkered of revolutionary circles is masterfully done: Némirovsky allows herself all the space she needs to trace his erratic moral evolution. Courilof emerges as something like a hero, a complex man, severe but incorruptible, touchingly vain, devoted to the service of a sovereign whom he personally despises. For all his weaknesses, he stands for values that this ultimately elegiac book endorses: a cautious liberalism, the culture of the West.
Of Némirovsky’s novels of the period 1939–41, when she was trying to prove herself an unambiguously French author, the most notable are Les Biens de ce monde (published posthumously in 1947), which follows the fortunes of a family of paper manufacturers in the years before and after the First World War, and Les Feux de l’automne (published 1957), which has at its centre a woman coping with a wayward husband in the Paris of the interwar years. In both cases the milieu is impeccably French: no foreigners, no Jews.
Both novels offer a diagnosis of the state of France. They blame the nation’s decline, culminating in the defeat of 1940, on political corruption, lax morals, and slavish imitation of American business practices. The rot set in, they suggest, when servicemen coming home from the trenches in 1919, instead of being entrusted with the task of reconstructing the nation, were fobbed off with easy sex and the lure of speculative riches. The virtues the books endorse are much the same as those promoted by the Vichy government: patriotism, fidelity, hard work, piety.
As works of art the novels are unremarkable – part of Némirovsky’s aim in writing them was to show how well she could operate in the staid genre of the family-fortunes saga as practised by Roger Martin du Gard and Georges Duhamel. Their strengths lie elsewhere. They reveal how intimately Némirovsky knew ordinary petit-bourgeois Parisians – their domestic arrangements, their amusements, their little economies and extravagances, above all their placid satisfaction with the bonheur of their lives. Némirovsky was remote from the experiments in the novel form going on around her: of her American contemporaries, those she seems to appreciate most are Pearl Buck, James S. Cain, and Louis Bromfield, whose Monsoon she took as a model for the first part of Suite Française.
As chronicles of the impact of wider forces on individual destinies, these most ‘French’ of Némirovsky’s novels tend to be rather dutifully naturalistic. The writing comes most to life when her interest in the psychology of moral compromise is engaged, as when the heroine of Les Feux de l’automne begins to have doubts about the celibate path she has been following. Are her women friends right after all? Is chastity démodé? Is she going to be left on the shelf?
In these two novels Némirovsky shows herself ready to take on traditionally masculine forms like battle narratives, where she acquits herself more than adequately. She also composes lengthy set pieces about the evacuation of cities – clogged roads, cars piled high with household goods, etc. – that in effect rehearse the powerful chapters opening Suite Française, in which defeated soldiers and panic-stricken city-dwellers flee the German advance. About the selfishness and cowardice of the civilian population in the face of danger she is scathing.
Both novels extend chronologically into the present of the Second World War and thus into the territory of Suite Française. Némirovsky clearly saw a role for herself as chronicler and commentator on unfolding events, even without knowing how the war would turn out. If we can extrapolate to the author from her characters, she would seem to stand behind Agnès, the most rock-solid figure in Les Biens de ce monde: ‘We will rebuild. We will fix things. We will live’.7 Wars come and go but France endures. Vis-à-vis the German occupiers her approach is, understandably, ultra-cautious: they barely figure on her pages. Released after a year in a prisoner-of-war camp, a French serviceman breathes not a word against his captors.
The notebooks of Némirovsky’s last year disclose a far less sanguine view of the Germans, together with a hardening of her attitude toward the French. We may conclude that the manuscript of the Suite that has come down to us embodies a degree of prudent self-censorship. The diaries also reveal a foreboding that she will be read only posthumously.
Constructing herself as an unhyphenated French novelist was only half of Némirovsky’s life-project. While she was shoring up her French credentials she was also delving into her Russian Jewish past. Published in 1940, just before restrictions on Jewish authors came into effect, Les Chiens et les loups has as its heroine Ada Stiller, a Jewish girl who grows up in the Ukraine but moves to Paris, where she lives from hand to mouth painting scenes of the world she has left behind, scenes too ‘Dostoevskian’ in tone fo
r French tastes.8 Complicated plotting involving wealthy relatives and financial skulduggery results in Ada being deported from France; the book ends with her facing a precarious future as an unwed mother somewhere in the Balkans.
At the heart of Les Chiens is the question of assimilation. Ada is torn between two men: Harry, the scion of a wealthy Russian-Jewish family, married to a French Gentile but drawn mystically to Ada; and Ben, a macher from the same shtetl as Ada, who believes she and he inherit a strain of ‘madness’ that sets them apart from the ‘Cartesian’ French.9 Which of them should she follow? To which side does her heart incline: to the side of dogs like Harry, tame, assimilated, or of wolves like Ben?
Sexual desire plays no part in Ada’s decision-making. The inner voice that will tell her which future to choose, as dog or as wolf, will be the voice of her ancestors, the same voice heard by the dying David Golder. It will warn her that people like Harry, caught between two races (sic), Jewish and French, have no future. (Similarly, at a climactic moment in Suite Française, Lucile will feel ‘secret movements of [the] blood’ that will tell her she cannot belong to a German.)10 Despite himself, Harry must concur: his assimilated self is not real but a mask. Yet he cannot rid himself of the mask without tearing his flesh.
We should bear in mind how matters stood in France at the time when Némirovsky was composing Les Chiens, among her novels the one most directly concerned with the nature of Jewish identity. On the eve of the war France’s Jewish population numbered some 330,000, most of them recent arrivals, foreign-born. At first they had been welcomed – France had suffered huge losses of manpower in the First World War – but after 1930, with the economy in decline and unemployment high, that welcome began to sour. The influx of a half-million refugees after Franco’s victory in Spain only hardened anti-immigrant sentiment.
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