Irène Némirovsky’s Jewish Protagonists

Only about a quarter of Némirovsky’s stories and novels feature Jewish protagonists; but they are among her strongest works, and they span virtually her whole career. Starting with her early novellas from the 1920s through the novel that made her famous, David Golder (1929), then two more novels and a short story published between 1935 and 1940, she depicted in ever more detailed and explicit ways the existential choices and dilemmas that Jews faced as they negotiated questions of identity and belonging in relation to the non-Jewish world. To these works we can add Le maître des âmes (The Master of Souls), which was published in book form only recently but had been serialized under a different title in 1939. The protagonist of that novel is an impoverished foreigner in France, a doctor who starts out very poor but succeeds in becoming a psychiatric guru for wealthy neurotics in Nice and Paris. The allusions to his past as a poor boy growing up in a slum in a “city in the East” recall the early lives of David Golder and Ben Sinner (one of the main characters in Les chiens et les loups, [The Dogs and the Wolves]), and designate him implicitly as a Jew, even though he is not named as such.

Indirection is often Némirovsky’s preferred approach to the Jewish theme, even with characters designated as Jewish. The protagonist of David Golder, which remained for many years her best-known work, never asks “What does it mean for me to be a Jew?”, let alone “What does it mean to be a Jew in modern Europe?” But the reader is prompted to do so, and Némirovsky’s cruel or despairing views on that question are one reason why some readers condemn her as a “self-hating Jew” or a “Jewish antisemite.” Similarly, in The Wine of Solitude, her most autobiographical novel, the Jewishness of the Karol family, who flee Russia after the Revolution, is only alluded to or mentioned in passing, rather than openly discussed; but it forms an important subtext, especially since Némirovsky emphasizes social differences within the Jewish family itself. (The father is a “little Jew” who speaks Yiddish, while the mother has higher pretensions and therefore looks down on her husband). The novella Le bal, written around the same time as David Golder, is most often described as a mother-daughter tragicomedy, focusing on the rage of an adolescent girl who feels unloved by her egotistical, social-climbing mother. But the work gains a significant dimension if we give full weight to the fact that the father in this unhappy family is a newly wealthy “little Jew” who made a killing on the financial markets, and whose marriage to a vulgar, uneducated Frenchwoman turns out to be a mismatch of sought-after assimilations: the husband seeking non-Jewish Frenchness (he even converts to Catholicism), and the wife aspiring to (Jewish) wealth.¹ Of all these works, The Dogs and the Wolves offers the most extended and explicit exploration of Jewish identities in Christian France; but significantly, it deals with various members of a family of immigrants from Russia, thus linking the Jewish theme once again to foreignness.

The word for “foreigner” in French, étranger, is also the word for “stranger.” The two meanings overlap but are not synonymous, for one can be a stranger to a community or group without being a foreigner; conversely, some foreigners are not strangers to a particular individual or group—many people have foreign friends. But both words carry connotations of difference, and possibly exclusion, from the majority group or the nation. The foreigner does not have the right passport (if he has a passport at all), or the right accent or way of dressing or behaving, while the stranger does not quite fit in, even if she looks and speaks like others and tries hard to be one of them; occasionally, the stranger will not try to integrate, preferring instead to cultivate his feeling of difference. In all their varieties, foreigners and strangers are outsiders—perceived...