ABSTRACT
The appearance of Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française in 2004 was a major publishing success which introduced twenty-fi rst century readers to the work of a writer who had fi rst become a media sensation in 1929. With the novel’s publication in English translation in 2006, the Némirovsky phenomenon became international. Much of the media interest in the novel in France and abroad was provoked by the almost unbelievable story of the manuscript’s survival. Némirovsky wrote the book as a stateless Russian Jewish immigrant during the Second World War in Nazi-occupied France. In 1940 she left Paris, where she had been living since 1919, to take refuge in the village of Issy L’Evêque, which lay just inside the demarcation line, in the occupied zone. Arrested on 13 July 1942, Némirovsky was taken to the Pithiviers transit camp, from where she was deported to Auschwitz on 17 July. She died there on 17 August. Her husband, Michael Epstein, was deported in November 1942 and also perished. Their two daughters, Denise Epstein and Elisabeth Gille, survived the Holocaust and conserved, amongst their mother’s papers, a large notebook which turned out to be a complete draft of the fi rst two parts of a projected fi ve-part novel based on the contemporary events of occupied France. Despite the impression given by some of the rather sensationalised media coverage, the manuscript’s existence had been known long before 2004. Némirovsky’s papers, including the manuscript, have been conserved in the IMEC archive (Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine) since 1995, and her daughters were aware of the manuscript’s existence in the 1970s. Suite française was not published sooner because Elisabeth Gille did not wish to publish an incomplete novel, and Denise Epstein did not wish the novel to be published at the same time as Le Mirador (1992), her sister’s fi ctional biography of Némirovsky.1 When Suite française fi nally appeared in 2004, it attracted the attention of critics as one of a very few works of fi ction about the Occupation period written contemporaneously with the events described. The award of the 2004 Renaudot prize for Suite française caused further media discussion because this was the fi rst time the prize had been awarded posthumously. The success of Suite française has led to the appearance of previously unpublished works of fi ction by Némirovsky: ‘Les Echelles du levant’, which had fi rst appeared in the journal Gringoire in 1939, appeared in book form under the title Le Maître des âmes in 2005; two short stories were published under the title Ida in 2006; Chaleur du
sang, reconstructed from archival sources, appeared in 2007 and a further collection of stories, Les Vierges et autres nouvelles was published in 2009.2 Most of Némirovsky’s inter-war novels are now in print in French, and several have been translated into English by Sandra Smith.3 Two biographies of Némirovsky have been published since 2004: Jonathan Weiss’s Irène Némirovsky in 2005 and Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt’s La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky in 2007.4 In 2008, Denise Epstein published her own collection of reminiscences in the form of interviews with the French journalist Clémence Boulouque, entitled Survivre et vivre. Some academic work on Némirovsky is also beginning to appear, mostly in the form of articles.5 In 2008, the University of Oxford’s annual Zaharoff Lecture was delivered by Susan Suleiman, who discussed Némirovsky and Samuel Beckett as ‘translingual’ writers producing fi ction in a language other than their mother tongue.6 At the time of my writing this book, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York was hosting an exhibition on ‘Irène Némirovsky: Woman of Letters’. In the United Kingdom, Némirovsky has received high profi le media coverage in the broadsheets and on Radio 4, featuring on programmes such as Front Row, Book at Bedtime, and Woman’s Hour. Némirovsky, whose fi ction had been completely neglected in post-war France, is an astonishing case of a literary rediscovery.
