Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works

Thomas Nolden

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Volume

27, Number 1, Fall 2008, pp. 163-165 (Review)

Published by Purdue University Press

For additional information about this article

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 Book Reviews ♦ 163

To be sure, additional complications derive from an incongruity in Gol-

san’s choice of authors: whereas the first three chapters offer succinct portray-
als of fiction writers collaborating with Nazi Germany and Vichy France dur-
ing World War II, the last three chapters reconstruct the ideological strategies
three intellectuals thinkers (a philosopher, a medialogist, and a historian) de-
vised to give credence to the anti-democratic and xenophobic regimes in East
Europe or to Holocaust denial. Here, many readers may expect a discussion
that not only recognizes commonalities in some of the underlying motives,
hopes, and beliefs that led these six men to walk down a wrong path of history,
but that also recognizes the differences between the intrinsically ambiguous
power of figurative language which a fiction writer may use and the cogent
evidence-based and critically reviewed argument which a trained historian or
philosopher must espouse.
And yet, it must be stressed that despite all of these caveats, Golsan’s book
presents a challenge in which French (or, for that matter, European) cultural
studies needs to engage—not despite all the difficulties involved in the proj-
ect, but because of them. Golsan’s case studies should be praised: they are
well researched and well argued, his analytic language capable of teasing out
subtleties in the demagogical rhetoric employed by his subjects while captur-
ing in general terms the historical and political contexts in which Finkielkraut,
Debray, or Courtois have made their erroneous, misleading points.
Even more praiseworthy is the very trajectory of Golsan’s underlying ar-
gument as its opens up the discussion of the use and misuse of “the memory
of Vichy and Nazism as a hermeneutic device and moral compass in the intel-
lectual discourse of 1990s France” (p. 164).
Thomas Nolden
Program of Comparative Literature
Wellesley College
♦♦♦
Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works, by Jonathan Weiss. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2007. 200 pp. $24.95.
“Irène Némirovsky was virtually unknown in the English-speaking world un-
til the spring of 2006, when her posthumous novel Suite française appeared
in an English version” (p. ix)—this opening statement of Jonathan Weiss’s
biography of the prolific French Jewish writer Némirovsky explains why his
own account of Némirovsky’s life appeared in an English translation only af-
ter having been published first in France. We can be glad that Weiss’s book,
originally written in French with a French audience in mind, thus found its

Vol. 27, No. 1 ♦ 2008

164 ♦ Book Reviews

way to English-speaking readers, for whom Weiss has added a helpful preface
to his book.
Némirovsky is a fascinating but not necessarily easy subject to write
about. Her literary creativity and novelistic productivity is enormous but of
rather uneven quality—a feature which pertains even to her magnum opus,
Suite française. Her attitude towards her ethnic and national origins and cul-
tural affiliations is at times contradictory and could be elucidated fully only
when discussed within the complex tensions that governed the relationship
between Western and Eastern Europe, between Jews and gentile French cul-
ture, between antifascist resistance and Vichy collaboration.
Weiss does not present his readers with a map of the multi-layered cul-
tural and political landscape of France before and during World War II in
which a non-French born, Jewish woman author from Russia was pressed by
the conventions of the Parisian literary marketplace and later by the political
events of the French nation at large to make some very hard decisions. Rather,
he focuses on Némirovsky’s work itself, which he reads against the backdrop
of biographical information, much of which he had to put together himself
without being able to rely on much help from other scholars. Némirovsky’s
daughter Elisabeth Gille authored a fictitious rendition of her mother’s life
(with the subtitle Mémoires rêvés) which is hardly reliable as a biographical
document but very telling as an attempt by the offspring to understand the
predicaments of their parents who, like Némirovsky, were killed by the Nazis.
The only other scholarly biography of Némirovsky, La vie d’Irène Némirovsky
by Patrick Lienhardt and Olivier Philipponnat, was published in France in
2007, and one will be intrigued to learn how this volume will complement
Weiss’s book. In the absence of Lienhardt’s and Philipponnat’s biography—
which may yield new insights gained from extensive research in Némirovsky’s
home country—Weiss offers a succinct and yet most valuable presentation of
the critical moments that shaped her life.
Weiss’s straightforward way of introducing Némirovsky’s literary oeuvre,
of elegantly scanning her main aesthetic objectives, and of discussing the many
intersections between the turns of her life and her literary production leaves
it to the reader to come to terms with some of the difficult questions which
Weiss poses more or less in passing.
One of the most important of them undoubtedly concerns Némirovsky’s
attitude towards her Jewishness—a topic which indeed can hardly be dealt
with properly without reconstructing the confluences of national and class
politics (Némirovsky “led the glamorous life of the wealthy-upper-middle
class,” as the French-Jewish novelist Myriam Anissimov writes in her preface
to the French edition to Suite française), the desires and pressures associated

Shofar ♦ An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies

 Book Reviews ♦ 165

with the command of acculturation, the threat of antisemitism and, last but
not least, the curious contract established between French readers and writers,
signed already by Marcel Proust, that strangely rendered the author’s Jewish-
ness almost illegible. Or it reproduced, as in the case of Némirovsky’s David
Golder, highly problematic portrayals of Jewish life which turned the author
into one of the darlings “of a significant portion of the extreme right-wing
press” (p. 56).
But again, it clearly would have gone beyond the framework of a biogra-
phy to address the very context in which Némirovsky’s “deep ambiguity” (p.
56) could unfold in this way. Similarly, references and comparisons to some of
Némirovsky’s contemporaries who found themselves in similar circumstances
writing as Jewish immigrants in France remain sparse, although they might
have helped to elucidate the spectrum of attitudes prominent then or a gen-
eration later. After all, there were a number of intriguing Jewish authors from
France’s neighbors to the East writing in French in the thirties and forties,
and some of them arguably greater writers than Némirovsky herself (one may
think of Anna Langfus, who in 1962 won the prix Goncourt). To be sure, none
of them achieved the kind of success which Némirovsky could celebrate early
in her career or posthumously with Suite française, which was rediscovered
in manuscript form by Némirovsky’s daughter Denise Epstein: published in
France in 2004, the book soon sold over 600,000 copies and was translated
into more than 30 languages. A success story indeed, but one in which the
situation of the Jews of Europe during the so-called années noires remained
obfuscated after all: Suite française presents a huge tableau of French society
under German occupation in which, however, Jewish Frenchmen remain un-
cannily invisible. Weiss does not suggest a connection between the prominence
of the novel and the absence of Jewish voices within it.
Thomas Nolden
Program of Comparative Literature
Wellesley College
♦♦♦
A Tranquil Star (Unpublished Stories), by Primo Levi, translated by Ann
Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007. 167 pp.
$21.95.
Twenty years ago, the Italian chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor Primo
Levi fell to his death from the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin.
Within hours, a debate exploded as to whether his death was an accident or a
suicide and, if the latter, how this might force us to reinterpret his legacy as a
writer and Holocaust “survivor.” Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and
Vol. 27, No. 1 ♦ 2008