ABSTRACT
In the fall of 2004, the jury of the Renaudot Prize surprised the French literary world by giving its award, not to a contemporary novel, but rather to Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française, a book written in 1942 yet published by Denoël only in 2004. Honoring a manuscript that had just been unearthed was completely unorthodox. During the years 1941–1942, as the net was closing in on the family (as on countless other French and foreign Jews in similar situations), Némirovsky frenetically finished a biography of Chekhov and a novel entitled Les Feux de l’automne. The atrocious tragedy continued inexorably. Némirovsky’s husband was arrested two months later, then deported to Auschwitz on November 6th, where he was immediately sent to the gas chamber. This story of the Epstein-Némirovsky family would alone suffice for sparking interest in Irène Némirovsky’s last manuscript.
