The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France by Susan Rubin Suleiman (review)

Suleiman has been interested in Némirovsky since 2000, after the republication of some of her works. Quite simply, Suleiman found her "attachante." Suleiman intimates more deeply that she was drawn to Némirovsky because her story and writings encapsulate the existential crisis many assimilated Jews face, most recently since the 9 Jan. 2015 attacks on Hyper Cacher in Paris, the context for the book's last section. So for well over a decade Suleiman has been considering the difficult questions these works raise: How might one situate Némirovsky within twentieth-century French and, more generally, Western literature? What was the nature of Némirovsky's relationship to Jewishness, both as an individual and a group identity? Was she a self-hating Jew, as her fiercest critics assert? Or is it possible to study her in relation to other Jewish authors, thus furthering inquiry into the Jewish Question as an existentialist reflection? In response, Suleiman traces a line to a number of familiar Jewish authors and draws comparisons to minority literature in general. Finally, the book delves into the experiences of Némirovsky's descendants and asks how they shed light on the experience of French Jews in and with the French Republic for over more than a century—implicitly seeking to know whether a parallel can be drawn between today and between-the-wars France, it seems. Almost in the manner of a conversationalist, Suleiman draws upon the breadth of her literary knowledge and extensive research, including archived primary sources, letters, and interviews, and tells Némirovsky's story with an eye to her legacy and specifically her place in French history. Organized in three parts, The Némirovsky Question is at once an intellectual biography and a narrative analysis, followed by a postlude that begins with the aftermath of her arrest. It is a sympathetic account of the author in view of her exceptional writing career in the 1920s and 30s when only Colette rose to professional ranks indicative of recognition by male peers. Nevertheless, Suleiman does not dodge the more troubling written passages and interviews, which she analyzes in tandem with Némirovsky's professional choices and life circumstances. As right-wing antisemitism became more virulent in 1930s France, Némirovsky's Russian nationality and Jewish heritage became liabilities. Under Pétain's regime, assimilation no longer provided any protection to "honorable foreigners." Similarly, Suleiman detects individual vulnerability in Némirovsky's 1936 work "Fraternité" and increasingly so in Les chiens et les loups (1940). Though a Russian Jewish émigré-turned-celebrity among the Parisian literati, Némirovsky's "double self" did not make her self-hating, Suleiman holds. She argues rather, using Némirovsky's letters and her daughter Denise's accounts as evidence, that Némirovsky, as a Jewish writer, maintained an ironic distance from the French and an unblinking eye to her social climbing Jewish subject's precarious position. The apolitical "between position" Némirovsky sought to occupy could not ultimately prevent her from seeing the horror that awaited foreign Jews—a lesson not lost on her daughters and grandchildren.