It's author, Irène Némirovsky was born in the Ukraine and had lived in France since 1919. She established herself in her adopted country's literary community having published nine novels and a biography of Chekhov. She composed "Suite Française" in the village of Issy-l'Evêque (located here), where she, her husband and two young daughters had settled after fleeing Paris. On July 13, 1942, French policemen, enforcing the German race laws, arrested Némirovsky as "a stateless person of Jewish descent." She was transported to Auschwitz, where she died in the infirmary on Aug. 17.
The two short novels that comprise this book were rediscovered and now have appeared in English.
What caught my eye was this section of the review:
But Némirovsky had more plans for "Suite Française," as an appendix to this volume makes clear. In her notebook, she sketched the possibility of a work in five parts. "Storm in June" and "Dolce" were to be followed by: "3. Captivity; 4. Battles?; 5. Peace?" The question marks punctuate Némirovsky's peculiar problem; she was trying to write a historical novel while the outcome of that history remained unknown. The fourth and fifth parts of the book "are in limbo," she observed, "and what limbo! It's really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens."
We now know what happened. Némirovsky lost her life in what she foresaw as "Captivity." The improbable survival of her two novellas is a cause for celebration and also for grief at another reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust. She wrote what may be the first work of fiction about what we now call World War II. She also wrote, for all to read at last, some of the greatest, most humane and incisive fiction that conflict has produced.
And I am left with the question just how Jewish, if at all, was the author? Did it make a difference in the end? And her daughter - any Jewish feeling? Was her Jewishness expressed in her fiction? Did the Holocaust destroy all that too?
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