HAIFA, Israel — Johann Sebastian Bach composed six French Suites that began to be performed decades after the death of their author. In 2004, the non-musical French Suite, a novel about World War II, was published by the publishing house Denoel, translated into 38 languages. The book won France’s second most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Renaudo. Suite Franҫaise (French Suite) was the book of the year, selling nearly three million copies since its publication. According to the statutes of the foundation, only a living writer could receive the prize. The author of French Suite, Irène Némirovsky, died in August 1942 — 62 years before the publication of her best work.
Irène Némirovsky became a famous French novelist during her lifetime, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She was compared to Balzac. In 1930, the American magazine The New Yorker called her the heiress of Dostoyevsky. The author of French Suite and her husband, Michel Epstein, also a native of Russia, were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942.
French Suite is a book about the Nazi takeover and conquest of France, a novel about the moral downfall of a great nation, about the victory of the brutal over the human. At the time the novel was written, the writer was living in the “village” of Issy-l’Evêque. Némirovsky described the psychology of the people who, soon after the events depicted in the novel, did not hesitate to send her to the gas chamber. Irène Némirovsky passed judgment on a selfish and indifferent, fallen and morally decayed France. Perhaps in response to the writer’s accusations, France sentenced her to death. Irène Némirovsky was murdered while writing her major book with the truth about France, which rejected the writer and bent to the Nazis. For the first time in the history of world literature, a writer was executed while writing her book.
Irène Némirovsky was born on February 11, 1903 in Kiev in a very wealthy Jewish family. Her father was a banker and the family lived after Kiev in St. Petersburg. After the October Revolution of 1917, the Némirovskys fled to Finland, then to Sweden and in 1919 to France. From childhood, Irène knew French. From birth until she was fourteen, she was taught by a French governess, after whose death in 1917 she began to write her first compositions in French. Némirovsky graduated from the Sorbonne Department of Philology with a Licentiate Diploma with Distinction. She published her first work at the age of 18. In her pre-war writings she created many highly negative images of Jews intoxicated by lust for money and power.
Némirovsky described the large Jewish bourgeoisie from life, the circles in which her banker father had revolved in Russia and in France after her immigration there. In 1929 the novel David Golder, which made her famous, was published. In it Némirovsky described the social elevation and enrichment of Jews in terms used by antisemites. Miriam Anisimov collected the expressions in which the writer describes her Jewish heroes: “curly hair, hunched nose, moist hands, hooked fingers and nails, swarthy, yellowish or olive skin, close-set black buttery eyes, a skinny body; they reveal a passion for profit, unscrupulousness, the ability to cheat and make a lot of money, not always in an honest way, the ability to sell substandard goods, to speculate in currency, to be successful salesmen and intermediaries in the trade of counterfeit lace or contraband.”
In David Golder, Némirovsky describes one of her characters, Fischl: “This little red-haired, rosy-cheeked Jew looked comical, repulsive and miserable at the same time. His eyes behind the glass of his thin gold-rimmed glasses glistened, he had a round belly, short skinny crooked legs and murderous hands.” In her novel, Dogs and Wolves, she writes: “As a Jew, he reacted more painfully and more vividly than a Christian to the inherent characteristics of Jews. His unbridled energy, his brutal thirst to get what he wanted, his utter disregard for the opinions of others, were all deposited in his mind under the label “Jewish impudence” […] That’s what they are; that’s how my family is.”
Irène’s dislike of Jews began as a child with her alienation from her parents. Her mother did not love the daughter, never cared for her, and was only concerned with her appearance and had numerous love affairs. She passed the care of her daughter on to servants and private teachers. Némirovsky hated her mother, her empty, selfish life in which her daughter played no part. The writer captured her daughter’s hatred of her mother in several of her works. In the novel Guilt of Solitude she wrote of her heroine: “In her heart she harbored a strange hatred of her mother, and this hatred grew with her […] She never said ‘mother.’”
Fanny Némirovsky lived 102 years. She died in 1989 in Paris, having outlived her daughter by 47 years. She was totally indifferent to Denise and Elisabeth, her granddaughters who had lost their parents in the Nazi death camps: she would not let them into her large Parisian apartment and shouted that since their parents were dead, let them go to an orphanage. Irène also disliked her father’s entourage ̶ wealthy Jewish businessmen who were engaged only in business and spent their lives in boisterous entertainment. Her father paid little attention to Irène, and she hated the concentration on financial transactions, the passion for accumulation, and the desire to multiply capital, which was the main occupation of her father and other relatives and friends of the Jewish family. She found this passion for enrichment disgusting, shameful, and corrupting. Her hatred of her mother and contempt for her father’s occupation and circle turned into hatred and contempt for her own nation. Irène’s pain and disappointment in her father and her dislike of her mother transferred to rich Jews and then to all Jews.
Miriam Anisimov called Némirovsky “a Jewess who hated herself.” The phenomenon of Jewish self-loathing was first described by Theodor Lessing, a professor at the Hanover University of Technology and a German philosopher and publicist of Jewish origin. In 1930, he published his book Jewish Self-Hate. Lessing hardly had time to read David Golder, which could enrich his book with interesting material. It is unlikely that Némirovsky read Lessing’s book. She was not interested in literature that described the psychology of Jews like her. She was busy exposing Jewish faults. Her attempts at self-purification of the Jewish continued until the Nazi occupation of France.
Kurt Lewin, a German psychologist of Jewish origin who fled from the Nazis to the United States in 1933, wrote in 1939: “A person who does not identify with Jewry but is Jewish in the eyes of others dislikes everything about Jewry, even to the point of self-disdain, since Jewish traits prevent him from reuniting with the happy majority. Self-hatred stems from a sense of inferiority, following from the fact that the Jew looks at himself through the eyes of the non-Jewish majority.”
The term “Jewish self-loathing,” invented by Lessing, became especially popular after the publication in 1986 of a book of the same name by American historian Sander Gilman. He writes about Jews “hating themselves,” ashamed of their Jewishness and repulsed by it: “Jews see how the titular nation perceives them, and by means of cleavage they project their concerns onto other Jews for self-soothing”. This projection is the creation of a dichotomy: “self-hating” Jews strive to make themselves “good” and in this sense outliers, Jews who are different from the stereotypical “bad” Jews. Gilman is referring to splitting, that is, to the division of objects in life into “good” and “bad.” This projection creates a dichotomy: self-hating Jews strive to turn themselves into “good” Jews, into exceptional Jews, different from the “bad” typical Jews. A Jew’s self-hatred is a copying of the attitude of antisemites toward his people. The self-hating Jew is convinced of the inferiority of his nation’s culture and seeks to borrow someone else’s language, someone else’s art, someone else’s traditions. A great writer, a man with a rich inner world, is highly susceptible to split consciousness and is under the psychological pressure of self-exile from the people and belonging to it.
Irène Némirovsky wanted to be French but could not obtain French citizenship. From 1935 to 1938 she tried unsuccessfully to obtain citizenship. She decided to become French by composing in French. One way of becoming French meant, by her choice, being Judophobic. Immediately after the publication of her first novel, David Golder, her reputation as an antisemitic writer was cemented. She deliberately used antisemitic rhetoric, which she perceived as an ingredient of the French spirit that she so desired to be a full-fledged carrier of. Némirovsky’s works are alien to the manifestation of Jewish solidarity. She rejected accusations of anti-Semitism and insisted that she had never sought to conceal her own origins. She repeated the same argument: “If I have managed to portray a Jewish soul, […] it’s because I myself am Jewish. From an early age I knew the milieu of financiers very well, and it seemed to me that I could find an entertaining plot there.”
The writer refused to restrain herself in her descriptions of Jews, considering her own understanding of freedom and artistic truth more important than the danger her material posed in the hands of antisemites. It was only after Hitler came to power in Germany that Némirovsky saw a problem for which she found an ambivalent answer: “Certainly, if Hitler had already been in power, I would have softened David Golder considerably and written it differently. And yet I would have been wrong; it would have been a weakness unworthy of a true writer!”
Irène saw no manifestation of French antisemitism, not only among right-wingers and conservatives, but also in left-wing circles. The writer and diplomat Jean Giraudoux, who resigned from public service to protest the elevation of Marshal Pétain in 1940, wrote: “[Foreign Jews] bring to where they appear clandestine activity, bribery, corruption, and become a constant threat to the spirit of clarity, purity, perfection that is characteristic of French craftsmen. They are a horde, eager to be deprived of national rights and not to reckon with any exile. Their physical constitution, weak and abnormal, leads them by the thousands to hospitals overflowing with them.” These sentiments were not given importance by Irène and her husband, representatives of the “horde.”
For a long time, they lived their French illusions and did not feel the size of the danger. She wrote: “We are happy to live in France, where, since the Revolution, Jews can have everything they want to achieve, everything they aspire to, including assimilation. My husband feels no more Jewish than I do, even though we were married in a synagogue. […] We feel an obligation to show that we are French before we are Jews. We belong to Jewishness as a result of a dark intimacy that will soon disappear in the mists of time. We wonder at the anxiety that has gripped some of our friends ever since people began to talk incessantly about the Nazi movement in Germany, which is really antisemitic; it all seems to us a wild exaggeration.”
Desperate for French citizenship, a year before the Nazi intervention, in 1939, Irène Némirovsky, Michel, and both their daughters converted to Catholicism. In June 1941 Irène and Michel, parents of two French women and Catholics, were registered as Jews and foreigners and wore yellow stars. According to the law of June 2, 1941, they were to be deported to a concentration camp. Irène Némirovsky had loved France since childhood, lived French culture, and adored the country that had given her asylum after fleeing Russia, but asylum proved to be a death trap. From June 1941, French publishers refused to publish “non-Aryan” authors because of the “ban on intellectual professions for Jews,” which the Vichy government had announced in a decree of October 3, 1940. Irène was arrested at Issy-l’Evêque on July 13, 1942 under the “Jewish Citizenship Law” and was sent to Auschwitz-Auschwitz. Her baptismal certificate did not help. She died on August 17, 1942.
In her diary, at the end of 1941, while waiting for the police, she writes: “My God! What is this country plotting against me? It pushes me out, examine it in cold blood, look at it-it loses its honor and its life.” One can get an idea of her thoughts about her people from reading her plans for continuing to write the book. In the third unfinished part of her book, In Captivity, Némirovsky was probably going to touch on the Jewish problem. On April 24, 1942, she wrote: “By [part] of In Captivity, in the concentration camp [there are] blasphemous speeches of baptized Jews: ‘God, forgive us our sins as we forgive Him!’ ̶ it is clear that the martyrs do not speak thus.”
In the last weeks of her life, Irène realized that her fate was the same as that of the Jews in the concentration camps. She develops the point of view of a person alien to France. She becomes an outsider, a person pushed outward, out of society. She is alienated by Jewry and rejected by the country that revoked the asylum granted her some twenty years earlier after fleeing Soviet Russia.
Némirovsky’s writings reflect the conflict of her personality. She could not fully belong to French culture, carried the burden of her Jewish background, and experienced a burdensome duality. She was not fully French, fully Jewish, fully Russian. Némirovsky failed to become French even after she became a famous French writer. She wanted to be Catholic, though she was far from the Christian religion. She was baptized, but she did not approach the Catholic faith. She did not want to be Jewish, but she died as a Jew. In French Suite she described the tragedy of the nation to which she wanted to belong but was defeated in her desire to be part of the French people she loved and an element of their tragedy. She did not want to belong to the Jewish people, but having been born among the Jews, she died among them, and her fate became an integral part of their tragedy. Her involvement with the Jewish people and their tragedy became evident at the curtain of her life. A Kiev Jewess, French writer Irène Némirovsky was one of the 6 million who perished in the Holocaust.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and the Technion in Haifa (Doctor of Science, 1984). He immigrated to Israel in 1979. He is a Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. He is the author of eight books and about 500 articles in print and online, and has been published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, and German.