ABSTRACT
So wrote Simone de Beauvoir in La Force de l’âge (1960), the second volume of her autobiography. This quotation encapsulates some of the challenges posed by the question of Jewishness in Némirovsky’s work. Whilst various methodologies might be employed to approach this aspect of her œuvre, the avoidance of essentialism is, as de Beauvoir claims, absolutely crucial. Here, describing an intellectual dilemma she was facing in 1934, de Beauvoir gives an account of her own search for an anti-essentialist methodology which would also avoid the abstraction of French universalism. Her answer was, of course, the existentialist notion of ‘situation’, which Jean-Paul Sartre would employ in order to approach the ‘Jewish question’ in his Réfl exions sur la question juive, in the aftermath of the Second World War.3 De Beauvoir’s remarks demonstrate Némirovky’s interpretive vulnerability. She was, and is, constantly at risk of being subsumed into precisely the essentialised categories de Beauvoir cites as examples: the Slav soul; the Jewish character; the eternal feminine. There is no doubt that some aspects of Némirovsky’s fi ction invite such reductive readings, as we saw in Chapter 3. However, as the various manifestations of the ‘Russian soul’ in her work demonstrate, she was able to manipulate such discourses of identity without falling into a naïve reproduction of essentialised categories. This is important because, as de Beauvoir says, essentialism leads to abuses which are very real.
