Benita Eisler has a good article on Irène Némirovsky, who wrote one of the best books published this decade Suite Française and who died in Auschwitz. Eisler attempts to show to answer the question who is Irène Némirovsky. However, in my opinion, she fails to answer that question for after reading her article, the reader is left with more questions than answers. Eisler’s portrait left with a sour taste in my mouth, which only increased with the discomfort that I felt a soft indictment against someone who cannot defend herself. Eisler’s portrait of Némirovsky is purposely one-dimensional and focuses on Némirovsky’s ethnicity and her attitude toward it to explain her condemnable actions before and during the Second World War. Sugary excerpt:
In September 1940, Némirovsky tried to distance herself from other émigrés. Writing to Pétain, she underlined the distinction between "honorable" foreigners such as herself, and "undesirable" troublemakers. Pétain's reply could be described as statutory: Two weeks later, there was a census of all Jews in France — native and foreign-born, naturalized, and stateless. That same year, her novel about the Jewish Diaspora of the Ukraine was published. " Les Chiens et les Loups" ( Albin Michel, 334 pages, 17.50 euros, translated as "Dogs and Wolves") follows the teenaged Ada Sinner, as she flees a pogrom in the Kiev ghetto to become a painter in Paris. Once there she finds she belongs nowhere, neither among rich nor poor Jews, artists or philistines. Rejecting the two men who love her, Ada, pregnant and proudly alone, washes up in an unnamed Levantine port roiled by revolutionary upheaval, to deliver her child among strangers. It was the last novel to appear under Némirovsky's own name in her lifetime. The following year, the third in a series of " Otto Lists" made it a crime to publish or sell works by Jewish writers.
Before Vichy would have ended his employ, Michel Epstein resigned from the bank for reasons of health. His wife's writing became the family's only source of income. This fact is crucial to the questions that loom over the darkest phase of Némirovsky's career. She regularly contributed to the most infamously anti-Semitic publication of the period, Gringoire, becoming a close friend of its editor, the notorious collaborator, Horace de Carbuccia. Jonathan Weiss claims that financial need compelled the novelist to "overlook" the paper's editorial stance, along with the writings of her fellow contributors. Gringoire enjoyed a circulation of 600,000 and paid accordingly. This is a feeble defense. Other writers survived — those who would have been unwilling to appear in Gringoire's pages, whose anti-Semitic graphics were harder to "overlook" than its prose.
How, then, to explain the company she kept — her friends and professional associates, almost all of whom turned out to be collaborators? Neither survival nor anti-Semitism yields plausible answers. Rather, the key to Némirovsky's willed blindness can be found in her terror of communism — indeed, of leftist politics in any form. Well into the Occupation, she denounced the Resistance, whose members "want to take everything from those who own the riches of this country."
What never comes across is how much Némirovsky was attached to France and how much it must have scared her to realize that she could be forced to leave her adoptive country and to die because of her ethnicity. As Eisler points out Némirovsky came from a intellectual and well to do family, which means that the situation in which she found herself must have been not only very difficult, but must have put her in a place, where she never expected to find herself given her education and statured, the one of the menacing Jew. There is so much that we don’t know, so much that we will never know about Némirovsky. However, the one thing that we can know for sure is that Némirovsky and her family found herself in the cruelest and most inhumane of situation and one in which I or for that matter all of the people are trying to reopen her grave in vain and pompous attempts to see the color of her soul. Sometimes, it is easier to accept to get dirty hands when you cannot accept to sacrifice your family for morality or for an idea. That's the Galileo principle. Was Némirovsky an angel? Of course, she wasn’t. She was a great writer and a twisted who fitted perfected with the darkness of Pétain’s France and of her time.
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