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  • After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky's "Suite française"
  • Mary Anne Garnett (bio)
Nathan Bracher , After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky's "Suite française."Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010. xxiii + 268 pp. $64.95 (cloth).

The publication of Irène Némirovsky's Suite française in 2004, nearly sixty years after her deportation and death at Auschwitz, caused a media sensation in France where the novel received the prestigious Renaudot prize, the first time one had ever been granted posthumously to an author. The novel's success in France and internationally has since led to the rediscovery and republication of Némirovsky's other novels, notably David Golder (1929), and collections of her short stories and novellas. Two biographies—Jonathan Weiss's Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works (2006) and an English translation (2010) of Olivier Philipponat and Patrick Leinhardt's La Vie d'Irène Némirovsky (2007)—as well as an exhibition—"Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky & Suite française"—at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York (September 2008-August 2009) have increased interest among the English-speaking public in her oeuvre. With renewed fame, however, has come criticism of Némirovsky focusing on her presumed ambiguity in regard to her Jewish identity, based upon depictions of stereotypical Jewish characters in her fiction; her collaboration with right-wing journals such as Gringoire and Candide; and her late conversion to Catholicism. The tendency has also been to cast moral judgments on Suite française, both positive (Némirovsky as a "guardian of memory") and negative (the novel as an apolitical work that doesn't address the real evils of Nazism) (xii). As Nathan Bracher indicates in his introduction, critical assessment of Suite française has often been "confused and contradictory" (x) because it filters the novel through post-Holocaust concerns with identity and the duty to remember rather than approaching the work as "an eminently literary text whose richly composed, multifaceted narrative must first and foremost be analyzed in relation to the literary and ideological contexts of its time" (xi). In his own close reading of the novel, Bracher attempts to avoid, to the extent possible, "the two most common pitfalls of our time: historical anachronism and ideological instrumentalization" (xiii).

Bracher devotes the first four chapters of his book to "Tempête en juin" (Tempest in June), Némirovsky's devastating portrayal of the fall of France [End Page 169] in May-June 1940 that focuses on the historically long-neglected flight of civilian refugees from the German onslaught. While noting that the factual accuracy of her depiction has been confirmed by recent scholarship, such as Hanna Diamond's Fleeing Hitler (2007), Bracher stresses that Némirovsky's intention was not to provide a "documentary" account but instead to construct a novel that mediates events through "a number of contrasting and sometimes contradictory perspectives" of characters from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds (26).

Rather than quoting from Sandra Smith's translation of Suite française (Knopf, 2006), Bracher provides his own translations of passages from the novel, leading in one case to a significant difference in interpretation. "Mon Dieu, que me fait ce pays?" the oft-quoted first line from Némirovsky's notebooks, written in 1942 and included as appendices to both the French and English editions, is translated by Smith as "My God! What is this country doing to me?" This self interrogation, Bracher observes, has been interpreted by Weiss as Némirovsky's "long overdue awakening to the reality of injustice and anti-Semitism" (7). Bracher convincingly argues that a better translation is "My God! What does this country matter to me?" (7). Considering this citation in the context of her other journal entries, Bracher asserts that Némirovsky is instead questioning what attitude to adopt in face of the historical events in which she is enmeshed, ultimately coming down on the side of "a certain authorial detachment" (9).

Bracher defends Némirovsky against those who would accuse her of political and ideological indifference, arguing that, in fact...

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