The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France
A fascinating look into the life and work of controversial French novelist Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a “foreign Jew” in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they brought their mother back to life. In 2004, Suite française, Némirovsky’s posthumous novel, became an international best seller; some critics, however, condemned her as a “self-hating Jew” whose earlier works were rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Informed by personal interviews with Némirovsky’s descendants and others, as well as by extensive archival research, this wide-ranging intellectual biography situates Némirovsky in the literary and political climate of interwar France and recounts, for the first time, the postwar lives of her daughters. Némirovsky's Jewish works, Suleiman argues, should be read as explorations of the conflicted identities that shaped the lives of secular Jews in twentieth-century Europe and beyond.
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The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France
A fascinating look into the life and work of controversial French novelist Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a “foreign Jew” in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they brought their mother back to life. In 2004, Suite française, Némirovsky’s posthumous novel, became an international best seller; some critics, however, condemned her as a “self-hating Jew” whose earlier works were rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Informed by personal interviews with Némirovsky’s descendants and others, as well as by extensive archival research, this wide-ranging intellectual biography situates Némirovsky in the literary and political climate of interwar France and recounts, for the first time, the postwar lives of her daughters. Némirovsky's Jewish works, Suleiman argues, should be read as explorations of the conflicted identities that shaped the lives of secular Jews in twentieth-century Europe and beyond.
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The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France

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

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

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

by Susan Rubin Suleiman

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Overview

A fascinating look into the life and work of controversial French novelist Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a “foreign Jew” in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they brought their mother back to life. In 2004, Suite française, Némirovsky’s posthumous novel, became an international best seller; some critics, however, condemned her as a “self-hating Jew” whose earlier works were rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Informed by personal interviews with Némirovsky’s descendants and others, as well as by extensive archival research, this wide-ranging intellectual biography situates Némirovsky in the literary and political climate of interwar France and recounts, for the first time, the postwar lives of her daughters. Némirovsky's Jewish works, Suleiman argues, should be read as explorations of the conflicted identities that shaped the lives of secular Jews in twentieth-century Europe and beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780300224542
Publisher: Yale University Press
Publication date: 11/22/2016
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 352
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Susan Rubin Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and research professor of comparative literature at Harvard. Her many books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature, and the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook.

Table of 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

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