Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works par Jonathan Weiss (review)

WEISS, JONATHAN. Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8047-5481-1. Pp. xiii + 200. $24.95. Irène Némirovsky’s tragic death at Auschwitz in 1942 often colors critical accounts of her writing, but this study redirects our attention to the quality of her considerable literary production. In the process of fleshing out the historical and social contexts in which Némirovsky lived and wrote, Jonathan Weiss examines allegations of anti-Semitism in her work and casts light on her efforts to reconcile her Russian and Jewish heritage with her self-perceived identity as a French author . Because many personal documents have been lost due to the circumstances of Némirovsky’s death, Weiss draws on published interviews, memories of friends and family, the writer’s notebooks, and her fiction itself to fill in details of her life, especially her childhood and adolescence. In addition, the history and culture of early twentieth-century France and Russia that Weiss provides, including an overview of the situation of Jews in these countries, serves to contextualize her support for and from the far right, and it helps to explain the large number of protagonists in her fiction who act out against their social milieus. One of Némirovsky’s best known characters, the eponymous David Golder, provokes an extensive discussion of the 1929 novel about this French businessman of RussianJewish descent, leading Weiss to examine accusations of anti-Semitism levied against the author after its publication. He suggests that the conflicts between Némirovsky’s Russian-Jewish origins and her attachment to certain “eternally French” (61) values may have given birth to Jewish stereotypes in her work and motivated her to recast herself as a French, rather than a Jewish or a Russian, writer. As the war approached, Némirovsky’s negative attitudes toward Judaism softened, marking a new phase in her literary work exemplified by “Fraternité” (1937), the story of an assimilated French Jew who rediscovers his Jewish identity , and Les chiens et les loups (1940), the account of a young woman who flees to Paris to escape pogroms in Ukraine and discovers artistic inspiration within her Jewish heritage. In the latter, which Weiss calls “an astonishing book” (100), Némirovsky’s subtle use of style indirect libre acts as a clever attack on antiSemitism . After this novel, Némirovsky no longer included Jewish characters in her works—perhaps “to create for herself a purely French identity” (139)— although she seemed determined to “take up the Jewish theme” (106) at the end of the war. In the final sections of this biography, Weiss profiles Némirovsky’s life between 1940 and 1942 during the writing of Suite française, among other works. In Issy-l’Évêque, the setting for part of this last novel, she thought she and her family could survive the Occupation due to their ties to the far right, their conversion to Christianity in 1939, and the French cultural identity that they espoused despite having been denied French citizenship. Although her notes to Suite française underscore her strong sense of betrayal by France’s government, her lack of a French passport made her situation dramatically different from that of French Jewish writers. In Némirovsky’s search to reconcile national, religious, and cultural identities , Weiss recognizes the struggle of many immigrants in France today. For this reason, more general readers may enjoy this biography as much for the fresh perspectives it brings to questions of national and cultural identity currently under debate in the Francophone world as for the insights it brings to Némirovsky’s life and literature. Scholars will value the complete bibliography of her published and unpublished works, Weiss’s attention to the present controversy regarding Némirovsky’s anti-Semitism, and his sensitive and well informed readings of her Reviews 185 work, including Suite française. This critical volume provides solid evidence that Némirovsky should be included among the most important writers of twentiethcentury French fiction. Brandeis University (MA) Hollie Markland Harder Film edited by Michèle Bissière AUDIARD, JACQUES, réal. Un prophète. Int. Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup...