BIOGRAPHY: The Life of Irene Némirovsky,By Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt Translation by Euan Cameron Chatto&Windus, 466pp, £25
ANY CONTEMPLATION of Irène Némirovsky inevitably begins and ends with the horror of her death in Auschwitz in the summer of 1942, when she was 39. And it's one of the sad ironies of the literary life that if it weren't for this fate she would now almost certainly be forgotten – as she was until the discovery of her most famous, though unfinished, novel, Suite Française, a few years ago. The importance of Suite Françaiseand the terrible poignancy of her final days restored her to our consciousness and led to the re-issue of some of her other novels after more than 60 years of obscurity.
She died of course because she was Jewish – Jewish at least in the sense defined by the “Jewish Statutes” of the French collaborationists. This is another sad irony: the people whose tragic destiny she was forced to share had often regarded her uneasily as not one of them, as a writer who seemed to exhibit anti-Jewish prejudices and misrepresentations. After the publication of her first novel, David Golder, she was even accused of anti-Semitism. This was a charge she vehemently – and correctly – denied. “It is true and sincere,” she would say in her defence, “it’s the way I saw it.”
David Golder was published in 1929 when Nemirovsky was a precocious, spirited, spoilt young woman of 26. The only child of rich Russian émigrés – her father was a banker – she had passed an unsettled childhood between swish hotels on the Riviera and smart houses in Kiev and St Petersburg, where she had observed the Revolution with more excitement than fear. Then there was the escape to Paris from Finland, her father’s money still intact, and the new delights of a modish flapper lifestyle before she settled down to marriage – also to a banker, though of a modest kind – and the life of a professional if well-off writer. David Golder was a literary sensation. It was translated into several languages and the film a year or two later was one of the first big talkies to be made in France.
Its luminous, intense brilliance was recognised. But it was particularly a sensation because of the author’s piercing – some thought “hard” and “pitiless” – depiction of her characters who were Jewish. There were those who liked it for this reason alone; while many Jews were anguished by what seemed an exposure of Jewish vices rather than their virtues. Why did Némirovsky have to seem to add fuel to the fire that was beginning to flame with increasing ferocity around them?
David Golder is certainly an example of one of the perils of writing – that her truth was interpreted as a general truth, individual faults seized on as a portrayal of racial faults. But Irène Némirovsky wasn't really interested in portraying Jewishness per se. Until Suite Française, her inspiration was autobiographical. What she was interested in writing about was her "wretched" childhood and youth. The lonely life of a little rich-but-unmothered girl was hers. The tender but money-obsessed father, ridden by historical woes and the terror of poverty – the ultimately sympathetic character of David Golder is a compassionate portrait of Leon Némirovsky. Above all the hated mother. However this was a family and a milieu that happened to be Jewish and so they became in the eyes of opportunists, archetypal Jews.
Until Suite Française, when Némirovsky resolved to broaden her canvas – without limiting that piercing gaze – and omit Jews from the narrative completely, all her novels, as her biographers point out, can be read as one long, obsessive, continuous novel exploring the primary themes of David Golder: the atavistic terrors of the homeless and stateless and the damage visited on a child by a pathologically unloving mother.
Anna Némirovsky, Irène’s mother, was monstrous. If there can be any doubt about Irène’s experience of her as preposterously vain, shamelessly materialistic, contemptuous of her daughter and faithless to her husband, she would display it appallingly in her behaviour towards her grand-daughters, Némirovsky’s two children. After the war, they were orphaned – Irène’s husband died at Auschwitz in his turn – and penniless, and their guardian, a family friend, appealed to her for help. Now a 70-year-old wealthy solitary, their grandmother sent her away with a token pittance and the statement “I have no grandchildren”.
Incidentally, Anna, in another irony, preferred to recognise as little as possible her Jewish ancestry. She forbade the speaking of Yiddish, banned Jewish dishes from the table and insisted on being called the English-sounding Fanny. Irène grew up knowing nothing about Jewish religious practices. “Fanny” survived the war on the Côte d’Azur and lived to be 97.
Despite her fears about the sins of the mother, Irène Némirovsky escaped them. She was able to be a typical loving mother. But she couldn’t escape the sins of her time.
Her biographers are painfully revealing on the French equability about the “purge” from la belle France of Jews and other stateless, known as meteques – effectively about a pogrom. As ugly, implacable and hate-filled edicts against Jews that would lead to the deportations emanated from Vichy, she couldn’t believe that “the most beautiful country in the world”, civilized France, could bring her to harm. She sought citizenship again and again, and failed. She had the family baptised, probably seeking safety as much as spiritual succour. She sought help from her well-placed friends but they could, or would, do nothing.
France did fail her. This biography, though it has its faults - it’s oddly ordered and the authors have a disconcerting tendency to make unjustified statements - makes some amends.
Anne Haverty is a writer. Her most recent book is a novel, The Free And Easy (Vintage)
