Stuart Jeffries investigates in the Guardian the charge that Irène Némirovsky, the author of Suite Française, a book, which I think is one of the best French books of the past 10 years, was anti-Semitic or a self-hating Jew in spite of the fact that she is Jewish and that she died in a concentration camp. This controversy has been created by a book, which she wrote before her death in Auschwitz and some of the things that she did to avoid being sent to a concentration camp. Jeffries concludes that the evidence is mixed and that there is no clear evidence that she was anti-Semitic even though it is clear that she has some issues with her Jewish identity as she did with Catholicism, a religion, which she chose for herself:
[…] Némirovsky excoriated Catholics even more than Jews or mothers. Smith finds a passage in Suite Française depicting wealthy Madame Péricand fleeing Paris from the Nazis and preventing her children giving away chocolates and sweets to starving folk they find on their way. Némirovsky writes: "Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilisation, fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her children. Nothing else mattered any more."
But maybe this is no proof of anti-Catholicism, just as David Golder offers no conclusive proof of its author's anti-semitism. Instead, what interested Némirovsky most in these two portraits is the specific and sometimes shabby ways people behave in extremis. Hers was a novelist's eye, not a bigot's.
That said, what accommodations she made with anti-semites in France is another story and what she felt about doing so something that she took to her grave. We will never know if she hated herself for what she did. "She certainly mixed with people who were anti-semites, but she ignored it. She certainly made a lot of mistakes, but given her times and her circumstances, they might well be excusable," says Callil. "Who are we to judge?".
I agree with Jeffries. Who are we to judge her? After all, she isn't here to defend herself against those who are accusing her of being anti-Semitic even though she died in a concentration precisely because she was Jewish. Was Irène Némirovsky a saint? Of course, she wasn't and I'm sure that she was an individual like the rest of us with many faults and contradictions. However, isn't that the point of Némirovsky’s story and what we should learn from her story and from the Holocaust? That more than 60 years ago more than six millions people who were just people like us died in the most horrific ways precisely because too many people denied their humanity.