J.M. Coetzee had an excellent article in the New York Review of Books, which is undoubtedly the one I’ve read on the subject, on Irène Némirovsky. Coetzee shows that it is possible to criticize the phenomenon, which she has become without being unfair and despicable by making definite assertions, which can be neither proven nor unproven and by questioning both the value and the popularity of her writings. Sugary excerpt:
As late as the end of 1941, Némirovsky seems to have believed that whatever might befall the Jew in the street would not befall her. In a letter addressed to Marshal Pétain, head of the Vichy puppet government, she pleads that as a "respectable" ( honorable ) foreigner—as distinct from an "undesirable"—she deserves to be left in peace.
There are two broad reasons why Irène Némirovsky should have considered herself a special case. The first is that for most of her life it had been her heart's desire to be French; and to be fully French, in a country with a long history of harboring political refugees but notably unreceptive to notions of cultural pluralism, meant being neither a Russian émigré who wrote in French nor a French-speaking Jew. […] The problem for Némirovsky as a budding writer in the 1920s was that aside from her facility in the French language, the capital she commanded on the French literary market consisted in a corpus of experience that branded her as foreign: daily life in pre-revolutionary Russia, pogroms and Cossack raids, the Revolution and the Civil War, plus to a lesser extent the shady world of international finance. In the course of her career she would thus alternate, according to her sense of the temper of the times, between two authorial selves, one pur sang French, one exotic. As a French authoress she would compose books about "real" French families written with an irreproachably French sensibility, books with no whiff of foreignness about them. The French self took over entirely after 1940, as publishers became more and more nervous about the presence of Jewish writers on their lists.
As for the exotic self, exploiting it required a careful balancing act. To avoid being labeled a Russian who wrote in French, she would keep her distance from Russian émigré society. To avoid being cast as a Jew, she would be ready to mock and caricature Jews. On the other hand, unlike such Russian-born contemporaries as Nathalie Sarraute (née Cherniak) and Henri Troyat (né Tarasov), she published under her Russian name, in its French form, until the wartime ban on Jewish writers led her to resort to a pseudonym.
The second reason why Némirovsky should have thought she would escape the fate of the Jews is that she had cultivated influential friends on the right, even the far right. In the months between her arrest and his own, these friends were the first people her husband contacted with pleas to intercede. To bolster her case he even scoured her books for anti-Semitic quotes. All of these friends let her down, mainly because they were powerless. They were powerless because, as it began to become clear, when the Nazis said All Jews with no exceptions they meant all Jews with no exceptions.
For her compromises with the anti-Semites—who, as the Dreyfus affair had made plain a half-century before, were fully as influential in France, at all levels of society, as in Germany—Némirovsky has recently had to undergo the most searching interrogation, notably by Jonathan Weiss in his biography of her.I do not propose to extend that interrogation here. Némirovsky made some serious mistakes and did not live long enough to correct them. Misreading the signs, she believed, until it was too late, that she could evade the express train of history bearing down on her. Of the large body of work she left behind, some can safely be forgotten, but a surprising amount is still of interest, not only for what it tells us about the evolution of a writer now in the process of being absorbed into the French canon but as the record of an engagement with the France of her day that is never less than intelligent and is sometimes damning.
It’s always easier to look back at the pre-second world word and the Shoah period and to argue viciously and arrogantly that it was impossible not to be one of the justes and that all of those who didn’t act sinned and should be stoned. It’s impossible to read Némirovsky’s writings without thinking of Anouilh’s Antigone and without realizing that Camus was right to focus his work on the human propensity to escape both the burden and the responsibilities of choice by focusing on traditions, societal rules, and guilt through denial, alienation, and a ruining desire for normalcy. Némirovsky can be blamed not for being a self-hating Jewas so many people have written, but for ceding to the temptations and the complacency of an unexamined, but comfortable and sheltered existence. She was so focused on retaining her life as a writer and on protecting her family that she became blissfully and probably willingly unaware of what was happening around her to ban reflection and thus, unquestionably, actions. Her moral compass, got shattered by her desire to survive and to be une française à part entière, a respected and respectable French writer. Those regrettable facts don’t make Némirovsky special, but alas just unflatteringly too human and too ordinary because that she acted as almost everybody else did in spite of her indisputable literary gifts. What is monstrous about the period within which Némirovsky lived and its crimes is the fact that they aren’t accidents of history, which happened in spite of the opposition of the majority that tried to resist the folly of the few. What is monstrous is the fact that during that time, the majority didn’t stand up and thus acquiesced to barbarity without realizing that one can get dirty hands as much by not acting than by acting. I think that Coetzee is able to get Némirovsky because he understands that it is impossible to separate her from her time and from her past by solely focusing on what she has become in the Twenty-First century.
I recently read your post about Irène Némirovsky and wanted to let you know about an exciting new exhibition about her life, work, and legacy that opened on September 24, 2008 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage —A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in New York City. Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Française, which will run through the middle of March, will include powerful rare artifacts — the actual handwritten manuscript for Suite Française, the valise in which it was found, and many personal papers and family photos. The majority of these documents and artifacts have never been outside of France. For fans of her work, this exhibition is an opportunity to really “get to know” Irene. And for those who can’t visit, there will be a special website that will live on the Museum’s site www.mjhnyc.org.
The Museum will host several public programs over the course of the exhibition’s run that will put Némirovsky’s work and life into historical and literary context. Book clubs and groups are invited to the Museum for tours and discussions in the exhibition’s adjacent Salon (by appointment). It is the Museum’s hope that the exhibit will engage visitors and promote dialogue about this extraordinary writer and the complex time in which she lived and died. To book a group tour, please contact Tracy Bradshaw at 646.437.4304 or tbradshaw@mjhnyc.org. Please visit our website at www.mjhnyc.org for up-to-date information about upcoming public programs or to join our e-bulletin list.
Thanks for sharing this info with your readers. If you need any more, please do not hesitate to contact me at hfurst@mjhnyc.org
Posted by: Hannah | Tuesday, 25 November 2008 at 09:53 AM