Némirovsky - The Counter-Explanation

I dealt with Irene Némirovsky previously, the French Jewish novelist - (in 2006, in 2007, and in 2008) - and trying to be thorough and fair, here's a counter-presentation:

I take offence at Naomi Price’s recent attack on this author and her outrageous claim that The Dogs and the Wolves would have been welcomed by a Nazi publishing house (October 30). In this novel, Némirovsky illustrates the lengths to which immigrants went in order to escape poverty and be assimilated. She criticizes rich Jews for displaying the same prejudices against their poor brothers as certain sections of French society did – hardly a pro-Nazi sentiment. By the end of the novel, it is clear that assimilation is not possible, a lesson that Némirovsky would learn herself, in the most tragic way.

While Price emphasizes the Jewish stereotypes in the novel, she omits to mention the four-page anti-Semitic, xenophobic diatribe by the Catholic banker, Delarcher, which is meant to fill us with revulsion...This novel examines various types of prejudice – Catholics towards Jews, the rich towards the poor, the French towards foreigners. The crux of Némirovsky’s dilemma as a novelist was the fact that anti-Semitism in France during the 1930s was so rife that Jewish immigrants were stereotyped and rejected. The only way to be accepted was to assimilate, and the easiest way to assimilate was to be wealthy...

...Price goes on to mention the family’s conversion to Catholicism; this has been raised many times with Denise Epstein, Irène Némirovsky’s surviving daughter. Her reply is always the same: it was September 1939. The family believed that converting would protect them. Sadly, they were wrong. Denise Epstein remains adamant that while living a secular lifestyle her family identified as Jewish and were proud of their heritage, a sentiment Némirovsky expressed in an interview in 1930 when she stated that she was Jewish and proud of it. Denise Epstein never recalls “practising” Catholicism as a family. However, when they lived in Issy-l’Évêque in Burgundy, they were required to wear the yellow star, and did so...

SANDRA SMITH
Robinson College, Cambridge.