Review: The Life of Irene Nemirovsky - The Jewish Chronicle

By Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt (Trans: Euan Cameron)
Chatto and Windus, £25.

By 1942, French Jews were so restricted, they were even forbidden to ride a bicycle. Yet, as the corrupt, collaborationist Paris government issued one vicious, petty edict after another, the celebrated novelist Irène Némirovsky sat in a village only a few miles from the border where the Nazi writ had yet to run.

Why didn't she escape with her family to America when relatives appealed to her to leave? This biography asks the question but, throughout its absorbing detail, we still want to shout, like a pantomime audience, to her, : "Get out of there!"

Némirovsky's brilliant novel fragment Suite Francaise burst upon the literary world in 2005, the manuscript discovered in a suitcase her daughter had treasured, unopened, for 60 years believing it to contain her mother's handwritten diary. Entrusted to her the day her mother was arrested by the zealous French police in 1942, the 12-year-old Denise kept the suitcase safe during her years of flight from Gestapo persecution. Its quasi-miraculous appearance saw Némirovsky, murdered in Auschwitz aged 39, storm to the top of the international bestseller list.

She was born in Kiev in 1903. Her father Leonid was a hugely successful entrepreneur, a boy from the ghetto determined to give his only child the education and ease he never had.

When Némirovsky was 14, Leonid, no longer able to do business with the increasingly fanatical Bolshevik regime, led his wife and child in a desperate dash to the Finnish border then, after a year of privation in the snowy wastes of Finland, to Sweden and eventually to Paris, where he re-established his business empire and sent his beloved daughter to the Sorbonne.

Irène clashed with her beautiful mother, Anna, the "Enemy" of her first published work. Hatred of her mother is at the heart of her work. Anna is present in one heartless, immoral, vain and grasping character after another.

Strangely, this passionate malice towards her mother, is largely unexamined by Philipponnat and Lienhardt, who treat Irène's venom simply as an objective appraisal of Anna's character.

When the successful novel David Golder appeared, an admiring French public marvelled that such a young woman could show intimate knowledge of the mechanics and the motives of bankers and businessmen - and they were shocked at the cynical depravity of Golder's wife, Gloria. Némirovsky explained: "they are Mama and Papa".

Few writers have cast such a merciless gaze on their fellow-Jews. Her entire output, until Suite Francaise, is a hard-headed analysis of those around her. She conveys dramatically the pursuit of wealth in order to be accepted - and stay safe. The ultimate irony is that, even as she turned her coruscating pen on her parents, she herself was neither.

Despite a welter of anecdotes the biography is a hard read, written as it is in a high baroque style, replete with dramatic purple prose. On Némirovsky's conversion to Catholicism (which of course failed to save her or her husband), for example, the authors declaim: "Was it such a paradox that she was setting out on the Road to Emmaus at the very moment that The Dogs and the Wolves was asserting the ineluctable resurgence of the Jewish character…"