“My god! What is the country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.” Jewish writer Irène Némirovsky’s handwritten notes give us a glimpse of the situation in France during the Nazi occupation in 1940 and after. A highly successful author, Nemirovsky had just begun work on a five-part novel, Suite Française , even as she witnessed the world disintegrate around her.
In 1942, she was arrested by the French police and handed over to the Germans. She was deported to Auschwitz where she died, aged 39. Remarkably, the manuscript of the unfinished Française survived, thanks to her daughter Denise who held on to her mother’s leather-bound notebook.
With pity
When she read it years later, Denise realised that it was not a diary but a novel-in-progress. Her mother had finished the first two sections, but couldn’t revise them. It was published to critical acclaim in 2004, 60-odd years after its author’s death. Having re-read Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (as her notes suggest) and following in the footsteps of Anton Chekhov, Némirovsky records history as it was being made through the eyes of her characters, “without anger and without disgust, but with the pity it deserved.”
‘Storm in June’ begins with an air raid, the “wailing” that filled the sky, and Parisians fleeing. The rich Madame Charlotte Péricand gathers her children, father-in-law — the husband, a museum official, has to stay behind — and as much of their belongings to leave Paris. Némirovsky narrates the stories of men and women thrown together in circumstances beyond their control. For example, a rich writer, Gabriel Corte, can’t accept the “fall” of Paris, telling his mistress, “Oh, the ugliness, the vulgarity, the horrible crudeness of these people.”
In the name of love
The Michauds, on the other hand, who have little in life and expect even less, never complain. Maurice Michaud doesn’t “consider himself that important,” and is only worried for his solider son Jean-Marie. What the Michauds don’t know is that their son is wounded and recovering in a remote village.
In ‘Dolce’, Némirovsky depicts a village occupied by German soldiers and how the locals must learn to coexist with the enemy. Lucile Angellier, whose husband is a prisoner of war, falls in love with Lieutenant Valk, a German soldier. Némirovsky appears to confront the crisis of war in romantic terms. As J.M. Coetzee asks in his essay on her, “Can she and he, nominal enemies, not transcend their political and national differences, and, in the name of love, make a separate peace; or must she, in the name of patriotism, deny herself to him?”
The writer looks back at one classic each fortnight.
