Time Unkind
by Julia M. Klein
OCTOBER 28, 2008 TAGS:
Irène Némirovsky experienced her first, heady bout with literary fame at age 26, with the 1929 publication of David Golder. The novel, which provoked critical comparisons to Balzac and Tolstoy, focused on an avaricious Russian Jewish financier victimized by his own wife and daughter. Amid the praise, Némirovsky, herself a Russian Jewish émigré living in Paris, was obliged to defend her writing against charges of anti-Semitism.
David Golder struck a responsive chord in France, immediately inspiring both stage and film adaptations. How much of that clamorous reception was due to its nastily stereotypical images of Jews is hard to say. But, as Hitler consolidated his hold on power, Némirovsky would recoil from her own book. “How could I write such a thing?” she declared in 1939, the same year she converted to Catholicism.
Much of this information is contained in a somber, moving and somewhat surprising exhibition at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Featuring a spare selection of documents and family photographs, complemented by two films, the exhibition is titled, “Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Française,” and is on view through March 22.
The exhibition title is evocative and ultimately chilling. Némirovsky is identified as a “woman of letters” in the deportation order that sent her from a French transit camp to Auschwitz – one of the exhibition artifacts. While her husband mounted increasingly desperate efforts to save her, she died in 1942, at age 39, in a typhus epidemic, becoming one of the six million.
That fate, however, has not sufficed to insulate her from vituperative personal attacks, based on the crude depictions of Jews in her early writings and her status, in the words of her biographer Jonathan Weiss, as “the darling of … the extreme right-wing press.”
Indeed, Némirovsky’s posthumous fame has been strangely double-edged. It began with her older daughter’s decision, after more than half a century, to read a manuscript in a valise packed by her mother before her arrest. “It was frightening, it was painful,” Denise Epstein says in an exhibition film in explaining why she had hesitated for so long. Expecting a diary, she instead found a meticulous realist fiction about French life under German occupation, two volumes of what was intended to be a quintet.
The first volume of Suite Française, “Storm in June,” recounts multiple episodes of Parisians fleeing the capital before advancing German troops -- a panorama of human courage, meanness and folly. Part two, “Dolce,” is a more focused tale of French interaction with German occupiers in a small town closely resembling the Burgundian village of Issy-L’Evêque, where Némirovsky, her husband, Michel Epstein, and their two daughters took refuge during the war. The plot pits individual relationships against nationalistic loyalties.
When it was published in France, in 2004, Suite Française was awarded the prestigious Renaudot prize. Two years later, the book became a bestseller in the United States – a rare feat for a novel in translation, and no doubt due in part to the circumstances of its discovery and its author’s fate. “It’s an extraordinary thing to have brought my mother back to life,” Epstein says on film.
So far, the narrative evokes Sylvia Plath, whose suicide imbued her Ariel poems with special poignancy, and Anne Frank, whose adolescent diary, penned mostly in hiding, expressed faith in human nature on the eve of her own deportation.
But with Némirovsky, the story took an ugly turn. The success of Suite Française – a book with no Jewish characters at all – catalyzed the publication of an Everyman’s Library edition of four of her older works, including, inevitably, David Golder. And, in January, Ruth Franklin, writing in The New Republic, used that occasion to unleash an attack on Némirovsky that was as devastating as it was mean-spirited.
“Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew,” Franklin writes. “From the start, her fiction incorporated the anti-Jewish stereotypes that would become something of a trademark.” David Golder, Franklin declares, is a “racist travesty of a novel” and may even have been “complicit … in the moral degradation of culture that became one of the causes of the imminent genocide.”
Others have risen to Némirovsky’s defense, including her French biographers, Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, who argue that Némirovsky’s true obsessions were with “immigration and xenophobia.”
In this turbulent context, the decision of a Jewish museum to commemorate Némirovsky seems, at the least, unexpected. Timing is part of the explanation. David G. Marwell, the museum’s director, seems not to have realized how inflammatory the subject would become. “I was surprised by the controversy,” he told me in an interview. Marwell says he decided to do the Némirovsky show when he saw the manuscript of Suite Française at the U.S. book launch, well before the Franklin tirade. “This is a remarkable artifact,” he says he thought at the time. Written in almost microscopic blue script – paper was hard to come by the time – the manuscript evokes the penury and anxiety of the occupation.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage teamed with the Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine, a repository of Némirovsky’s papers, and secured the cooperation of Epstein, Némirovsky’s only survivor. Epstein contributed the valise, another powerful artifact, and family photographs – but, says Marwell, did not sign off on exhibition content.
Marwell himself disputes that David Golder is anti-Semitic, and notes that the prolific Némirovsky had “a pretty sharp pen” that she also directed at other targets, including French Catholics and the bourgeoisie. He argues, with some justice, that Franklin’s own treatment of Némirovsky traffics in stereotypes, denying her complexity. “For me,” he says, “the story is much more about memory and legacy and loss and promise.”
But, to the museum’s credit, he and his colleagues decided “to address these issues directly.” While it covers the initial splash made by David Golder, the exhibition concentrates on Suite Française and the tragedy of Némirovsky’s life and literary career cut short. But, next to the show, the museum has set up an inviting “salon,” equipped with computer terminals, comfortable reading chairs, a selection of Némirovsky’s works, and copies of recent articles about her -- including Franklin’s. And, on Dec. 8, Franklin herself is scheduled to participate in a panel discussion at the museum on “Irène Némirovsky and the Jewish Question.”
--
Also by Julia M. Klein
"Certainly Man Will Not Become Immortal"
Reviewing David Boyd Haycock’s Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer.
--
Visit the Web site of the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
David Golder struck a responsive chord in France, immediately inspiring both stage and film adaptations. How much of that clamorous reception was due to its nastily stereotypical images of Jews is hard to say. But, as Hitler consolidated his hold on power, Némirovsky would recoil from her own book. “How could I write such a thing?” she declared in 1939, the same year she converted to Catholicism. Much of this information is contained in a somber, moving and somewhat surprising exhibition at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Featuring a spare selection of documents and family photographs, complemented by two films, the exhibition is titled, “Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Française,” and is on view through March 22.
The exhibition title is evocative and ultimately chilling. Némirovsky is identified as a “woman of letters” in the deportation order that sent her from a French transit camp to Auschwitz – one of the exhibition artifacts. While her husband mounted increasingly desperate efforts to save her, she died in 1942, at age 39, in a typhus epidemic, becoming one of the six million.
That fate, however, has not sufficed to insulate her from vituperative personal attacks, based on the crude depictions of Jews in her early writings and her status, in the words of her biographer Jonathan Weiss, as “the darling of … the extreme right-wing press.”
Indeed, Némirovsky’s posthumous fame has been strangely double-edged. It began with her older daughter’s decision, after more than half a century, to read a manuscript in a valise packed by her mother before her arrest. “It was frightening, it was painful,” Denise Epstein says in an exhibition film in explaining why she had hesitated for so long. Expecting a diary, she instead found a meticulous realist fiction about French life under German occupation, two volumes of what was intended to be a quintet.
The first volume of Suite Française, “Storm in June,” recounts multiple episodes of Parisians fleeing the capital before advancing German troops -- a panorama of human courage, meanness and folly. Part two, “Dolce,” is a more focused tale of French interaction with German occupiers in a small town closely resembling the Burgundian village of Issy-L’Evêque, where Némirovsky, her husband, Michel Epstein, and their two daughters took refuge during the war. The plot pits individual relationships against nationalistic loyalties.
When it was published in France, in 2004, Suite Française was awarded the prestigious Renaudot prize. Two years later, the book became a bestseller in the United States – a rare feat for a novel in translation, and no doubt due in part to the circumstances of its discovery and its author’s fate. “It’s an extraordinary thing to have brought my mother back to life,” Epstein says on film.
So far, the narrative evokes Sylvia Plath, whose suicide imbued her Ariel poems with special poignancy, and Anne Frank, whose adolescent diary, penned mostly in hiding, expressed faith in human nature on the eve of her own deportation.
But with Némirovsky, the story took an ugly turn. The success of Suite Française – a book with no Jewish characters at all – catalyzed the publication of an Everyman’s Library edition of four of her older works, including, inevitably, David Golder. And, in January, Ruth Franklin, writing in The New Republic, used that occasion to unleash an attack on Némirovsky that was as devastating as it was mean-spirited.“Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew,” Franklin writes. “From the start, her fiction incorporated the anti-Jewish stereotypes that would become something of a trademark.” David Golder, Franklin declares, is a “racist travesty of a novel” and may even have been “complicit … in the moral degradation of culture that became one of the causes of the imminent genocide.”
Others have risen to Némirovsky’s defense, including her French biographers, Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, who argue that Némirovsky’s true obsessions were with “immigration and xenophobia.”
In this turbulent context, the decision of a Jewish museum to commemorate Némirovsky seems, at the least, unexpected. Timing is part of the explanation. David G. Marwell, the museum’s director, seems not to have realized how inflammatory the subject would become. “I was surprised by the controversy,” he told me in an interview. Marwell says he decided to do the Némirovsky show when he saw the manuscript of Suite Française at the U.S. book launch, well before the Franklin tirade. “This is a remarkable artifact,” he says he thought at the time. Written in almost microscopic blue script – paper was hard to come by the time – the manuscript evokes the penury and anxiety of the occupation.
The Museum of Jewish Heritage teamed with the Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine, a repository of Némirovsky’s papers, and secured the cooperation of Epstein, Némirovsky’s only survivor. Epstein contributed the valise, another powerful artifact, and family photographs – but, says Marwell, did not sign off on exhibition content.
Marwell himself disputes that David Golder is anti-Semitic, and notes that the prolific Némirovsky had “a pretty sharp pen” that she also directed at other targets, including French Catholics and the bourgeoisie. He argues, with some justice, that Franklin’s own treatment of Némirovsky traffics in stereotypes, denying her complexity. “For me,” he says, “the story is much more about memory and legacy and loss and promise.”
But, to the museum’s credit, he and his colleagues decided “to address these issues directly.” While it covers the initial splash made by David Golder, the exhibition concentrates on Suite Française and the tragedy of Némirovsky’s life and literary career cut short. But, next to the show, the museum has set up an inviting “salon,” equipped with computer terminals, comfortable reading chairs, a selection of Némirovsky’s works, and copies of recent articles about her -- including Franklin’s. And, on Dec. 8, Franklin herself is scheduled to participate in a panel discussion at the museum on “Irène Némirovsky and the Jewish Question.”
--
Also by Julia M. Klein
"Certainly Man Will Not Become Immortal"Reviewing David Boyd Haycock’s Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer.
--
Visit the Web site of the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
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