The Story of Suite Française . . .
And a soul-searching question for every writer
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If you had no hope, would you keep writing?
This is the story of one woman’s choice.
The Suitcase
In 1941, Irène Némirovsky began work on an epic five-part novel, in which she planned to trace the unfolding war in Europe from a French perspective. Paper was scarce, so she wrote in amazingly tiny script, filling each page of her notebook from corner to corner.
Although she had lived most of her life in France, Némirovsky was Ukrainian by birth — and she was Jewish. So after Nazi Germany occupied France, the 39-year-old writer was declared a “foreign Jew,” arrested, and deported.
Within a month of being sent to Auschwitz, she was dead.
Némirovsky’s husband was deported separately, and he too died at Auschwitz. But their daughters, thirteen-year-old Denise and five-year-old Elisabeth, were cared for by a French family and survived the war. Denise managed to save a suitcase full of papers and photographs, including her mother’s thick, leather-bound notebook.
In it were the two novellas — Tempête en juin (Storm in June) and Dolce (Sweet) — which Némirovsky had been able to complete before her arrest. They were intended as the first parts of her planned epic.
But for a long time, Denise and Elisabeth thought the notebook must be a personal journal, and they didn’t want to relive painful memories. So Némirovsky’s final work remained hidden.
What happened then has been told in several ways, and I’m not sure if it’s possible to figure out which version is most true. For now, it only matters that the nature of the papers was eventually recognized, and in 2004, Némirovsky’s two novellas were published under the title Suite Française.
The Question
I first encountered Suite Française when I was assigned to write an essay on the novellas for one of Gale’s topical volumes, The Literature of War. So unlike many readers, I began with the work, and then learned the author’s story.
Tempête en juin and Dolce are well worth reading as they are — but Némirovsky had planned to do further work on them. From a literary perspective, it’s sad to think we will never know how she might have refined these stories, or what she would have accomplished in the rest of her epic. That writing project was unique in its goal to capture the human experience of historic events, as they were actually happening.
But the great good fortune for writers today is that we have in Suite Française both a fascinating study of the creative process, and a compelling personal story that invites self-reflection. Through the journal entries and correspondence included along with the two novellas, we can follow the author’s thoughts about her work, which are laid out with great care — in part because Némirovsky realized she would never complete her literary vision.
Because of her Jewish identity, Némirovsky’s work could not be published in German-occupied France. She knew, therefore, that nothing she wrote during this period of her life would reach readers in the near term, or perhaps ever. Yet she was still writing feverishly, as she explained in a letter, with the hope that her final work might at least be published posthumously.
So I ask myself: What would I do in similar circumstances?
I think I would keep writing, because (basically) I wouldn’t know what else to do. And writing is my second nature — more than a habit, it’s a reflex.
I’m not sure what I’d write, or write about, but I think I’d try to leave behind something that would survive my own existence. Perhaps even something worth taking out of a suitcase fifty years later.
The Problem
Suite Française was an international bestseller, and won France’s most coveted literary prize. But it also sparked a firestorm of controversy.
The problem? Before the German occupation, Némirovsky had been one of France’s most popular writers — and her fiction had often portrayed Jewish characters in a very negative light.
Nemirovsky’s career launched in 1929 with David Golder, the story of a stereotypically greedy, amoral Jew. An instant success, the novel was soon made into a film, as was her semi-autobiographical novella, Le Bal (The Ball).
Over the course of a decade, Némirovsky consistently wrote for right-wing publications and socialized with the ultra-conservative intelligentsia of France. Though she never concealed her Jewishness, and denied accusations of anti-Semitism — there can be no doubt that her treatment of Jewish characters was consistently demeaning.
Some commentators believe that Némirovsky was a “self-hating Jew,” while others contend that she was merely reflecting the literary approach expected in France at the time. And still others see her attitude as a matter of class rather than race, reflecting her affluent upbringing.
In a late letter, she wrote that France should differentiate between “undesirable” and “desirable” foreigners, seeming to imply that while there were many undesirable Jews, some (including herself) were of a higher cultural caliber, and therefore had value to the nation.
Was she just a terrible snob, or was she desperately seeking a way to separate herself from impending doom? Perhaps both.
The Unknown
In 1939, as political circumstances became increasingly dire in France, Némirovsky converted to Catholicism, and had her daughters baptized. That was almost certainly a strategic move, meant to demonstrate how completely she had rejected Judaism.
But the strategy proved unsuccessful.
By 1940 it was obvious that Némirovsky and her Russian-born husband were in the same danger as other Jews, so they attempted to evade attention by moving with their daughters to a small French town. Even there, they had to wear the yellow Star of David whenever they went out in public.
The experience of that drastic relocation, along with her observations of the German occupation in rural France, shaped the stories told in Tempête en juin and Dolce. Yet there is no mention in either work of Jews or anti-Semitism.
She cannot have been oblivious to what was happening in Nazi-dominated Europe — so we have to wonder why she chose in her writing to ignore the escalating reality of anti-Jewish violence. But if I look at the question from a writer’s point of view, I can imagine that her creative attention was tightly focused on capturing exactly what she could see around her.
In notes she left behind, Némirovsky explained that because the fourth and fifth parts of her projected work would depend on what actually happened in the war, she couldn’t yet envision those stories. But she did see far enough to know that part three would focus on the emergence of a French resistance.
So she began a detailed outline, imagining a story she would not live to write, set in a reality she would not live to see. That was purely an act of faith — and though we may not understand all her choices, we do know Irène Némirovsky never lost her belief in the power and importance of writing.
If you would like to know more about Némirovsky and Suite Française, here are some starting points:
- Sandra Smith’s excellent English translation
- An illustrated overview of Némirovsky’s biography in the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter
- Susan R. Suleiman‘s fascinating study, The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France (2016)
- Woman of Letters , an expanded catalog of the exhibition presented in 2008 by the Museum of Jewish Heritage
© Cynthia Giles 2019