A Writer’s Contradictions

The disturbing views, and tragic fate, of the ‘Suite Française’ author

If there are no second acts in American literature, as the cliché has it, there are often at least two acts in the lives of writers elsewhere, not least those caught up in the turbulent cultural milieu of Europe between the wars. The literary lives of the French writer Irène Némirovsky (1903-42) include a posthumous one: In 2004, more than six decades after her death at Auschwitz, the manuscript of a novel that she had left behind in her adopted homeland of France was published to an acclaim even greater than her work had garnered in the prewar days. The book also complicated her reputation in ways that no one who knew her earlier work could have expected.

“Suite Française” consisted of two novellas: “Tempête,” which caustically captured the hurly-burly of Paris as the Nazis occupied it in 1940; and “Dolce,” which pictured the strangely normal French life that managed to persist in a nearby village. Readers of “Suite Française,” even if unaware of Némirovsky’s fate in the Holocaust, cannot fail to be held by the strength of her vivid portraiture and her measured, limpid prose. As if out of nowhere, Némirovsky gave 21st-century readers an almost palpable sense of what it was like to be alive on the verge of one of the 20th century’s major cataclysms. The reasons for the delay in the book’s publication were at once mundane and moving: Thinking that the manuscript was a diary kept by their mother, Némirovsky’s two daughters—who survived the war, shielded by a nursemaid— had simply been unable to bring themselves to look at it.

The world-wide success of “Suite Française” is a kind of bookend to Némirovsky’s success in the 1930s, when she made a name for herself in France by writing a work very different in tone and intention. “David Golder,” the best-selling novel with which she burst onto the French literary scene in 1932, was a powerful but exceedingly harsh portrait of avarice and hard-heartedness. Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, in “The Life of Irène Némirovsky,” link the novel to a tradition going back at least three decades. They adduce Octave Mirbeau, whose play “Les affaires sont les affaires” (1903) also put at its center a ruthless money-dealer. But what made “David Golder” especially striking, even in its own time, was the fact that its unlikable main characters were Jewish, and pointedly so.

As Messrs. Philipponnat and Lienhardt carefully show, Némirovsky—despite being a Jew by birth and, as it would turn out, by death as well—was an ardent participant in a rightist, ultra-nationalist and often anti-Semitic intellectual culture. This was the age of the Stavisky scandal (over a businessman’s fraud), which would roil French political life and unleash a torrent of anti-Semitic reaction not seen since the Dreyfus Affair a generation earlier. A convert to Roman Catholicism, Némirovsky was all too receptive to the anti-Jewishness of the Catholic right, which was itself in active opposition to the French left’s anti-clerical views. As is so often the case with converts to a faith or ideology, there was a sense of Némirovsky’s being “plus royaliste que le roi.” The right-leaning French literary world of the 1930s was hardly a “fringe” phenomenon: It included such writers as François Mauriac and Paul Claudel (who served as France’s ambassador to the U.S.).

Némirovsky contributed short stories to such journals as “Gringoire,” whose editors, strongly anticommunist, routinely asserted an identity between Jews and Bolshevism. When Némirovsky, living in Paris, was rounded up by the Nazis in 1942, her husband— also Jewish and a Catholic convert, himself to be rounded up soon after—wrote desperately to the Nazi ambassador to France: “In none of [Irene's] books . . . will you find a single word against Germany and even though my wife is of Jewish descent, she does not speak of the Jews with any affection. . . . The newspaper she contributed to as a novelist, Gringoire, has certainly never been well-disposed towards either the Jews or the Communists.”

All true, even if it did Némirovsky no good with the Germans. Messrs. Philipponnat and Lienhardt, though, are eager to make a literary case for Némirovsky that stands apart from her cultural opinions. They emphasize, for example, the protean aspects of “David Golder.” Yes, they concede, it was in some sense an anti-Semitic novel, but it also possessed the close observation and amoral neutrality of social realism. They liken Némirovsky to Henry Bernstein, a prolific French playwright whose play “Israël” 20 years earlier had engendered a controversy similar to the one that surrounded “David Golder.” Bernstein, as it happened, was an opponent of the French right. He fled Paris in 1940 and spent the war in America, an angry critic of the collaborationist Vichy regime.

The biography inevitably focuses on Némirovsky’s life in France, but it also gives a portrait of her early life in Russia, where she was born in 1903, the daughter of a banker in Kiev. She came to Paris with her family as a teenager, part of the wave of refugees fleeing the Russian Revolution.

As Messrs. Philipponnat and Lienhardt note, her later cultural outlook may have had something to do with the brutality she witnessed in the new Soviet Union. But the authors ascribe her convictions mostly to her family background—in particular to her hatred of her mother, whom Némirovsky regarded as selfish, unkind and grasping. Némirovsky’s embrace of Catholicism was both a flight from her Jewishness and the expression of a desire to belong to a different segment of French society, a “higher” one, in her view. Officially, she was never able to obtain French citizenship, which left her (and her husband, also Russian) stateless when the Nazis occupied France and went about deporting anyone of Jewish descent.

Messrs. Philipponnat and Lienhardt begin “The Life of Irène Némirovsky” by describing her end—at Auschwitz, located roughly midway between her birthplace in the Ukraine and her adopted spiritual home in France. The authors believe that she died of typhus, as the Nazi records have it, rather than in a gas chamber.

Her ultimate fate was so tragic that it softens whatever harsh feelings one might have about her earlier, rebarbative views. It is possible, as some have done, to see her victimization at the hands of the Nazis as an ironically just fate, given those views—a kind of cosmic justice. But of course her fate was shared by millions—and there was no justice to any of it. In any case, the Nazis denied everything most precious to Némirovsky and her fiercely wrought identity: her Catholicism, her artistry, her Frenchness, her individuality, her humanity.

One is reminded of W.H. Auden’s verse on the occasion of Yeats’s death in 1939: “Time that is intolerant / Of the brave and innocent . . . / Worships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives / . . . And will pardon Paul Claudel / Pardon him for writing well.” Irène Némirovsky wrote well, too, and time will forgive her, if it has not done so already.

Mr. Rubin is a writer in Pasadena, Calif.

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See also:

‘The Life of Irene Nemirovsky’

Chapter 1

The Most Beautiful Country in the World

(1903–1911)

But those were legendary times, those distant times when the gardens of the most beautiful city in our Homeland were the preserve of a young, carefree generation.

Then, yes, then the conviction took root in the hearts of this generation that their entire lives would be spent in purity, serenity and calm; the dawns, the sunsets, the Dnieper, the Kreschatik, the sunny summer streets and, in winter, snow that did not bring with it cold weather or a harsh climate, a snow that was thick and gentle . . . And it was the very opposite that happened.

—Mikhail Bulgakov, “The City of Kiev,”

Nakanune (On the Eve) newspaper, 6th July 1923

In Kiev, in about 1910, a florist at the sign of La Flore de Nice was selling hydrangeas and Christmas roses. Was the business prosperous? In the Ukrainian capital, “there were so many lime trees [along the streets] that in springtime, you walked beneath an archway of blossom and on a carpet of flowers.” Once winter was over, hyacinths and dandelions defied the last gusts of snow. In a few days’ time, the lime trees in the old Revny park would take on a fresh pale plumage and the Marinsky park, poised upon the red clay cliffs that crumble down into the river, would be filled with copses of mauve. After that came an explosion of pollens, that covered the Kreschatik, the principal thoroughfare of the city, in a carpet of pale yellow.

There is no writer who has not been struck by the mass of vegetation that every year floods the Pechersk district, perched high in the heart of Kiev. When he went back there in 1923, to find it ravaged by four consecutive years of onslaughts and pillaging, Mikhail Bulgakov, who was born there thirty years earlier, had not forgotten the joyful eruption of spring: “The gardens were white with flowers, the Garden of the Tsars was covered in green, the sun pierced all the windows, setting them ablaze.” And Irène Némirovsky: “How beautiful it is in springtime, in this land! The streets lined with gardens and the air giving off the scent of lime trees, lilacs, sweet moisture rising from the lawns; these trees, in clusters, release their sugary perfume into the night.” So what need was there for a florist from Nice in the city of Kiev, which was so saturated with perfumes that every evening, before the open-air concert in the Kupechesky park, they had first to spray the beds of stocks and tobacco flowers in order to reduce the fragrance and ward off coughing fits?

The Smell of the Plains

It was in this vast botanical garden, traversed by wide avenues, and adorned with bandstands and balconies with striped awnings, that a little girl, given the name Irma for the synagogue, and Irina, after the Tsar’s niece, was born on 11th February 1903. Of the countless bastions of greenery maintained in the heart of the city, this little girl, who became a novelist, listed four: “Nicholas Square, the Botanical Gardens, and, up on the hills, the Tsar’s Garden and the Merchants’ Square.” The second of these, vast and gullied, with its own pond, and criss-crossed with pathways lined with hundred-year-old lime trees, made the strongest impression on her, possibly because it was the closest to Pushkin Street where her parents lived when she was seven years old. “It was a rather isolated, overgrown spot. Some sleepy animals lived in iron cages: an eagle from the Caucasus crawling with vermin, some wolves, a bear panting with thirst.” And there was Nicholas I Square, the centenary park of Lycée No. 1, as well as the verdant terraces perched above the Dnieper, the Dvortsovy and the Kupechesky, which afforded a view over the lower town of Podol. Not forgetting the bridges lined with numbered trees, or those areas of open ground preserved in the heart of the city, as if out of nostalgia for the steppe from which a smell of honey blew in on gusts of wind.

But Irotchka, as her family called her, was asthmatic, a hereditary condition. Her attacks were frequent and violent. A bunch of flowers was enough to affect her. At home there would only ever be a single tulip in a vase or some sweet peas on the balcony. In Paris, she was obliged to import inhalers from Switzerland. And her sensory memories of her native city would be those of a child capable of analysing instinctively “the unique aroma of the air,” an acuity that would make her so receptive to Proustian distillation. Thus the narrator of The Wine of Solitude (Le Vin de Solitude), “a poorly disguised autobiography” written in 1933, recalls that in Kiev “the air misty with dust smelled of dung and roses.”

Despite the rococo cupolas of St. Andrew and the Marie Palace, which the younger Rastrelli had designed in 1762, the profusion of theatres, the trolleybus lines, which were inaugurated in 1892, it was impossible to forget that Kiev was the capital of an immensely vast field of buckwheat and rye. In the evenings, at harvest time, the dust from the straw in the ploughed fields stuck in one’s throat. “A cloudy red light drifted down from the sky; the wind carried the smell of the Ukrainian plains to the city, a mild but bitter scent of smoke and the coolness of the water and rushes that grew along the riverbanks.” The Dnieper, pausing over this landscape, flowed through it in huge meandering bends. The breaking ice drove back the opposite bank far beyond the horizon. From the hilltop where the statue of Prince Vladimir held aloft his cross, studded with light-bulbs, to guide the boatmen, stretched a sea on which the sun never shone. The journalist Bernard Lecache, who in 1926 had come to record the testimonies of Jews who had survived the 1,300 pogroms of the civil war, could not help contemplating for a moment the splendour of Kiev, “full of trees, and undulating, like a woman’s body, as beautiful as a city can be.”

For the little girl who was short of breath, this botanical paradise would for ever be a stifling greenhouse, an olfactory variation on the well-known Russian excess. “The hot summer days, the bells of the ice cream seller, the flowers crushed under foot, crumpled in people’s hands, too many plants, too many flowers; a perfume that was overly sweet, that troubles and lulls the spirit; too much light, a savage glare, the songs of birds in the sky: this was her land.”

The Ukraine. In Kiev, its capital, the Russia of the Tsars was born. Even Andréi Bely, a Muscovite by birth, but a St. Petersburger at heart, for whom other Russian cities were nothing but “a miserable heap of wood,” acknowledged this unreservedly: “The mother of Russian cities is Kiev.” Prince Oleg, at the conclusion of a victorious siege, established the first rus dynasty there in 882. Converted to the Orthodox faith a century later, under the reign of Vladimir, who had all his people baptised through immersion in the Dnieper, Kiev experienced wars and pillaging, but never neglect: a natural waterway from the Baltic to Constantinople, the river had never stopped replenishing the city with men and maintaining commerce there. And thus its status as the cradle of Russia, albeit the ancient and backward Russia, has never been contested.

To See Paris Again

Was this really her cradle? In October, the departure of the ships for their winter dry docks heralded the frosts. The Némirovskys then packed their bags for a distant land. Vichy, Plombières, Vittel, Divonne . . . The spa towns, where their little daughter could be treated for her asthma, offered Irina’s parents, Anna and Leonid, the supreme benefits of the casino. But they themselves preferred one of those communities in Nice among which Paul Bourget had just set his novel Le Piège, and had no qualms about travelling on to the Côte d’Azur, leaving the child in the care of a governess. Irène Némirovsky remembered that when they all returned to Kiev her wheeler-dealer of a father “played and juggled or became engrossed in an old roulette wheel, brought back from Monte Carlo,” a symbol of his gambler’s personality. As for her mother, a photograph of her in a satin dress, with a tight-fitting waist, her arms and her hair strewn with black pearls, and an aigrette on her forehead, suggests the desire for approval that she sought in the palaces and gambling rooms: she wished other people to gaze at her apart from her husband, who sparkled with intelligence and determination rather than lust. A satisfied smile betrays her desires. It is this same portrait that her daughter would describe in 1928: “Little mother, all dressed up for the ball, her shoulders bare, with a naïve, triumphant smile that seemed to say: ‘Just look at me! Aren’t I beautiful? And if you only knew how much pleasure that gives me!’ ” All in all, an “exquisite doll.”

Sometimes these French “winters” lasted four seasons. They began in Paris where Irina, their only child, alighted from the train with her parents and the servants. “From the age of four, up until the war, I went there regularly every year. The first time, I stayed there for a year. I was in the care of a French teacher, and I always spoke French with my mother.” And one cannot help smiling when Henri de Régnier, upon closing The Wine of Solitude (Le Vin de Solitude) in 1935, felt able to say that “Némirovsky writes Russian in French.” For she was a French writer whom fate had caused to be born in Kiev, and her Russian, less innate than bookish, would remain imperfect. For Irène Némirovsky (“a Russian name, very difficult to pronounce”), Russian would always be that uncivilised “wild, sweet language” of the East, where she was born. By comparison with the excitement of Paris, the non-stop theatre of the Riviera, and the variety of the French landscape, the Ukraine, whose very name conjures up boundaries, appeared to her as a desert of ploughed fields or snow glimpsed through a car window, “a very flat land, where one’s gaze is not immediately blocked, as in France, by some hill or the rooftops in a village.” You could swear that Chekhov was thinking of the Némirovskys when he wrote: “for them, Paris is the capital, the home, whereas the rest of Europe is merely a boring, incoherent provincial world you can only look at through the lowered blinds of Grand Hotels.” In France, on the other hand, it was eternal springtime. And so the first known words written by her, scribbled on the back of a badly faded postcard at Vichy railway station, on 12th or 13th August 1912 or 1913, are in French: “I am sending you the Chomel spring where I go to drink each morning. Maman thanks you for your letter but I think we are going to Biarritz. See you soon. Irène Némirovsky.”

In Kiev, there was the memory of sensations; in Paris, nostalgia of the soul. For “Kiev was a small provincial town then, peaceful and dismal,” whereas Irène “felt her heart melt with tenderness at the memory of Paris, the Tuileries Gardens, the yellow moon that rose slowly above the column in the Place Vendôme.” In Kiev there lay vague, mysterious, even worrying memories: “The shouts of the chouroum-bouroum, the carpet seller . . . The little red-headed children, the acrobats who came to perform outside the windows in winter . . . And the crazy old man who had sung at the Opera and thought he was still a singer, draping himself with faded fine clothing, a crown of dried leaves on his head, making grand gestures and imagining that he was singing, though not a sound escaped his lips . . .” Of the Paris of her childhood, in 1934 Irène Némirovsky retained a no less misty memory “of the monkeys in the Jardin des Plantes and their scarlet genitals”; but above all, it was there, at the Tuileries or the Champs- Élysées, that she had played with little French children. “Maman, it’s not possible,” her daughter Denise would object in 1936. “You could not have experienced that in the old days, because you were a foreigner . . .” And so her life, “like everyone’s life, had its haven of light. Every year, she returned to France, with her mother and Mlle Rose . . . How happy she was to see Paris again! . . . She loved it so much!”

Zézelle

Mademoiselle Rose? In giving her this delicate name, Irène Némirovsky pointed out in 1936 that she had wanted to draw “as faithful a portrait as possible” of her former governess. “I say ‘as faithful as possible,’ because this character drawn from reality has caused me much more sadness than if I had invented her.” Not that the memory had to be coaxed out, but she was afraid of sullying the memory of her poor French governess, whom she had fallen out with ultimately. How she would come to regret her ingratitude! “Deliberately, and for many long years, I did not utter her name. My clumsy lips refused to speak it. . . . I no longer want to call her Zézelle, it’s too sacrosanct. I shall see. Mademoiselle Rose is good, too . . .”

Perhaps Zézelle had a brother. Perhaps she had grown up in the Ursuline convent. Perhaps her skin was soft: if, in The Wine of Solitude, invention comes to the aid of memory, it does not betray it. Of southern origin, “she was tidy, precise, meticulous, a Frenchwoman through and through, a little ‘aloof,’ somewhat scornful. Never a fuss. Rarely kissed anyone.” She was so tiny that by the age of twelve Irotchka had almost caught up with her. Anna Némirovsky, as was the fashion at the time, had engaged this fragile upright woman from the French Home in Kiev, an agency that provided the Kiev middle classes with young French nannies.

Marie—to give her her real name—taught the rudiments of her own language to the child who was entrusted to her. “She sang in a quiet voice, but so clearly and so tunefully. She taught me: ‘La tour, prends garde,’ ‘Marlbrough’ and ‘Les bas noirs, les bas noirs . . .’ and also ‘Nous n’irons plus au bois,’ ‘Valsez, fillettes, valsez coquettes, marionnettes du gai Paris.’ ” But also French sayings: “Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera [God helps those who help themselves].” A crumpled photograph shows her dressed in black, a Paris newspaper on her knees, although her hands were rarely idle. We cannot see her gold watch and chain on her breast, but her waist, “whose measurements were those of an earlier age” is of the kind that Irène Némirovsky—whom we can see behind the governess’s right shoulder, wearing an apologetic smile, and with two ribbons in her hair—would try to describe twenty years later:

Nearly always wearing a little blouse with small tucks, fine linen and broderie anglaise, and sometimes a black sateen apron, her delicate feet clad in black boots with buttons. A velvet ribbon around her neck . . . A face that must have once had the graceful, delicate beauty of a grisette, with “a youthful glow” that passes quickly, but which still retained her extremely pretty, cheerful, kindly, heart- shaped mouth. Small teeth like those of a mouse. The rest of her features were fine and irregular, and, at the age of fifty, revealed small, delicate “lines,” dark, tired eyes, and hair that in spite of her age was a light, deep-chestnut colour, dark with bluish reflections, assembled in smoky ringlets, in the old-fashioned way, over her uncovered head.

The face of France, virtuous and reserved.

Excerpted from The Life of Irene Nemirovsky by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt.

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