The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France

380 Pages·2016·6.4 MB·English

by  Susan Rubin Suleiman

t h e n é m i r o v s k y q u e s t i o n
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THE
NÉMIROVSKY
QUESTION
The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer
in Twentieth-Century France
S U S A N R U B I N S U L E I M A N
New Haven and London
Copyright © 2016 by Susan Rubin Suleiman.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including
illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections
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Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for
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please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected]
(U.K. office).
Excerpts from Irène Némirovsky, Le vin de solitude, are quoted with
the permission of Albin Michel Publisher, Paris.
An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared in Yale French Studies,
no. 121 (2012).
Set in Janson Text type by Integrated Publishing Solutions.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016941798
ISBN 978-0-300-17196-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Emma, Pablo, Alexander, and Nessa
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To ask oneself about Jewish identity is already to have lost it.
But it is to hold on to it still, for otherwise one would not be
asking. Between that already and that still is located the limit,
stretched like a tightrope on which the Judaism of Western
Jews ventures forth and takes its risks.
—emmanuel levinas
What have I in common with the Jews? I don’t even have
anything in common with myself.
—franz kafka
Admittedly, every man is other than himself, and in fact
being human consists in that possibility of being outside
and beyond one’s self. . . . But the Jew is doubly absent from
himself, and in that sense one could say that he is the human
being par excellence.
—vladimir jankélévitch
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Contents
Note on Translations and Citations xi
Introduction: A Writer Reborn . . . and Debated 1
part i irène
1. The “Jewish Question” 19
2. Némirovsky’s Choices, 1920–1939 45
3. Choices and Choicelessness, 1939–1942 93
part ii fictions
4. Foreigners and Strangers:
Némirovsky’s Jewish Protagonists 133
5. Portraits of the Artist as a Young Jewish Woman 173
part iii denise and elisabeth
6. Orphans of the Holocaust: Two Lives 209
7. Gifts of Life: A Mother and Her Daughters 252
Notes 293
Bibliography and Sources 331
Acknowledgments 345
Index 349
Photographs follow page 130