Nemirovsky controversy, continued: Canadian publisher responds
Knopf Canada executive publisher Louise Dennys has responded to Ruth Franklin’s hostile assessment of Irene Nemirovsky’s life and work in The New Republic (which was mentioned by Quillblog earlier this week). In a message to Q&Q about “the ugly essay by Ruth Franklin,” Dennys writes:
In brief, Ruth Franklin fails to understand the subtlety and power of Némirovsky’s writing, the context of her times, or how Némirovsky as writer and artist both reflected and rose above them; she also relies on a biography of Némirovsky written in the late ‘90s before the translation and release of Suite Française. It was considered sufficiently lacking in accuracy to warrant the new biography, which thoroughly counteracts Ruth Franklin’s simplistic view. Drawing on new research, on newly found and released materials, on personal correspondence and interviews with her family and friends, it vividly evokes, in rounded fashion, Irène Némirovsky’s place in French life, her reputation, her passionate and evolving commitment to being a Jew, and her dazzling talent. It brings a rich clarity to her short, astonishing life.
Némirovsky, like all great artists, looked on the messy complexity of the human condition with clear eyes. As her translator says: “Like Flaubert before her, she hands her readers a mirror to the world. Reflecting what she lived and saw, Némirovsky’s greatness lies in her ability to show us society and to have our responses reveal more about ourselves than anyone else.”
And we should not forget that it was Irène Némirovsky herself who stated, in 1930, with all her customary directness: “I’m a Jew myself and I’ll say it to anyone who will listen!”
Dear Editors:
Ruth Franklin makes some harsh and ugly accusations in her recent piece on Irène Némirovsky (“Scandale Française,” January 30th ). But her piece does nothing to further our understanding of Némirovsky, a writer whose work has now been read by millions of readers around the world.
Who was Irène Némirovsky? She was a stunning writer who penned eighteen books in less than so many years. She was a writer whose first published book under her own name (David Golder) was written at age 23. She was a Russian-born, Jewish convert to Catholicism; a French society member and literary figure who nonetheless married a man with the same background as her own; an elitist who skewered the elite; and an immigrant abandoned by the adopted homeland to which she clung.
Franklin blames our fascination with Némirovsky on the way we, her publisher, spun her story. She has given us too much credit. The fascination with Némirovsky lies within the harshness and elegance of a brilliant writer’s words – a writer who was a masterful observer of society and human nature in one of our darkest times. It is through her portrayals that we can see this troubled era clearly, just as the work of Tolstoy, one of Némirovsky’s literary heroes, gave us insight into his time. That’s precisely what readers responded to in Suite Française.
The only way to understand Némirovsky’s work is to read it. In addition to Suite Française and Fire in the Blood, there are two novels included in the Everyman’s Library collection with David Golder and The Ball that Franklin never even mentions: Snow in Autumn and The Courilof Affair. We will publish four more of Némirovsky’s novels (Dogs and Wolves, Jezabel, The Good of the World and The Wine of Solitude) over the next few years. We will also publish a thoroughly researched and highly acclaimed biography of Némirovsky by two French journalists that contradicts (with facts and interviews) much of what Jonathan Weiss wrote – a biography that Franklin clearly overlooked. I urge readers to push aside these shortsighted and dogmatic accusations of prejudice – and to instead turn to Némirovksy’s own words and story to better understand the life and writing of this fascinating and enigmatic woman.
Lexy Bloom
Editor
Vintage Books
Dear Editors:
As the translator of Irène Némirovsky’s works into English, I took great offense at Ruth Franklin’s recent diatribe against this fine author. As someone who has literally read every word of the works to which Ms. Franklin refers, I simply cannot believe that she can draw the conclusions she does. Clearly, there is a hidden agenda here.
It is true that since the publication of Suite française, many of Irène Némirovsky’s fine works are being reprinted and translated. Along with this high profile came the inevitable accusations: Why did a Russian Jewish immigrant in France portray Jews so true to ‘stereotype’? Why did her entire family convert to Catholicism?
The question of the family’s conversion to Catholicism is one that has been asked many times of Denise Epstein, Irène Némirovsky’s only surviving daughter. Her reply is always the same: It was September, 1939. No reason other than that was ever needed. They believed that converting would protect the family. Sadly, they were wrong. The laws against the Jews of 1940 clearly stated that Jewish descent went back two generations.
However, Denise remains adamant that while living a secular lifestyle – essential for even the most basic integration into French society in the 1930s – her family felt Jewish and were proud of their heritage. Denise never recalls ‘practicing’ Catholicism as a family. However, when they lived in Issy l’Eveque and were required to wear the Yellow Star, they did so – and went to Church every Sunday: an amazingly courageous act that set the choice squarely in the hands of the townspeople: Will you denounce us or will you protect us?
In Suite française, Irène Némirovsky clearly describes this choice:
Lucile remembered something Lieutenant von Falk had told her in confidence: ‘The very first day we arrived,’ he’d said, ‘there was a package of anonymous letters waiting for us at Headquarters. People were accusing each other of spreading English and Gaulliste propaganda, of hoarding supplies, of being spies. If we’d taken them all seriously, everyone in the region would be in prison! I had the whole lot thrown on to the fire. People’s lives aren’t worth much, and defeat arouses the worst in men. In Germany, it was exactly the same.’
Were Irène and her husband denounced? Denise believes so, but no one will ever know for certain.
Némirovsky’s portrayal of the Jews in her writings displays the same acute powers of observation that she applies to all her characters. In David Golder, the novel that shot her to fame in 1929 at the age of 26, Némirovsky introduces her main protagonist and his friend Soifer as fitting the stereotype of the time. Soifer is wealthy but mean: he never takes a taxi, hoards money and jewellery and gets his friend to pay for meals. Yet beyond the stereotype lies a yearning for the past, for their roots, for a release from the pressure of society to conform to the stereotype in order to be accepted:
He half closed his eyes. Now, as night began to fall, the clatter of a handcart with its groaning and creaking drowned out the sound of the cars on the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, and darkness half cloaked the tops of the houses, he felt as if he had been transported back in time to the old country, was seeing once again those familiar faces, but deformed, distorted, as in a dream…
‘Oy’ he said suddenly, in his inimitable tone of voice, plaintive and ironic at the same time, ‘Oy, Lord God!… You don’t think that they’re happier than we are?…
‘Much later, Soifer would die all alone, like a dog, without a friend, without a single wreath on his grave, buried in the cheapest cemetery in Paris by his family who hated him, and whom he had hated, to whom he nevertheless left a fortune of some thirty million francs, thus fulfilling till the end the incomprehensible destiny of every good Jew on this earth.’
In Le Bal, written in 1930, Némirovsky presents Alfred Kampf, a German Jewish immigrant who makes a fortune on the Stock Exchange. (Ms. Franklin takes great exception to the choice of name, but does she realize that ‘Kampf’ actually means ‘struggle’ in German.) Once wealthy, he marries Rosine, a woman with a dubious moral background, and converts to Catholicism for her. She, like Gloria in David Golder, is obsessed with being accepted into the upper classes, with material possessions, status, and especially with making her own family jealous. They have shunned her for marrying a Jew. She decides to give a ball and is desperate for it to be a success. But have the Kampfs really been accepted into Parisian high society? One of their potential guests includes a woman who used to be seen ‘ in a brothel in Marseille’:
… yes, yes, I can assure you… But that was a long time ago, nearly twenty years; her marriage completely transformed her, she now receives very classy people, and she’s extremely particular when it comes to her friends… As a general rule, all women with a past get like that…’
‘My God’, sighed Madame Kampf, ‘it’s so difficult…’
‘We must be methodical, my dear… For the first party, anyone and everyone, as many of the beasts you can stand… It’s only after the second or third one we can be selective… This time, we have to invite everyone in sight…’
In Les Chiens et les Loups, published in 1940, Irène Némirovsky presents a graphic description of the pogroms in Russia she and her family witnessed and were forced to flee to escape. We meet two branches of a Jewish family, one poor and living in the Ghetto, the other wealthy and living in a mansion. The rich relations will have nothing to do with their cousins, and it is only when they all immigrate to Paris that the lives of both sides of the family intertwine. This is Némirovsky at her best, illustrating the lengths to which immigrants were forced to go in order to be assimilated and to escape poverty, renouncing their religion, their heritage, their family just to survive.
And here we have the true crux of Némirovsky’s dilemma: anti-Semitism in France during the 1930s was so rife that Jewish immigrants were immediately stereotyped and rejected. The only way to be accepted was to assimilate, and the only way to assimilate was to be wealthy. How ironic that the Jewish immigrants of that time were forced to conform to their stereotype as ruthless, gold-digging businessmen in order to earn enough money to escape that very stereotype!
Némirovsky’s excellent novel Le Maitre des Ames portrays this dilemma beautifully. We are never expressly told that its hero, Dario Asfar, is Jewish. Asfar is a doctor who is so poor and desperate that he is forced to perform abortions to support his pregnant wife. It takes many years - and a terrifying journey from innocence to corruption - before he becomes accepted, powerful, even revered by the upper classes, who only afford him such honours once he has become as corrupt as they are.
In their insightful Preface to the Denoël edition (2005), Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt explain how the original title, Les Echelles du Levant (The Ports of the Levantine), symbolized an innate xenophobia amongst the French that reignited and fanned the ancient fires of anti-Semitism. There was no need to explicitly say Asfar was Jewish – Irène Némirovsky knew it would be assumed, and by deliberately NOT stating this, she was forcing her readers to examine and acknowledge their own prejudices.
Accusations that Irène Némirovsky was herself anti-Semitic are not only unfair, but reveal a total lack of understanding of her writing and French society before World War II. At that time, anti-Semitism was inextricably linked with the idea of being foreign – an idea Albert Camus would take up in The Outsider. Camus also lived through the Occupation and wrote poignantly of those terrible times. In The Outsider, the ideal of being true to oneself was subjugated to the idea of conformity - Collaboration by another name? – and like Resistance, non-conformity was punishable by death.
Némirovsky is extremely critical of Catholicism in her writing, yet no one has ever accused her of being anti-Catholic. In Le Bal, the Kampfs’ daughter, Antoinette, says her prayers every night before going to bed. But what does she pray for? That her music teacher will die before her next lesson! And in Suite française, the righteous, pious Mme. Péricand quickly sheds any sense of Christian charity:
Madame Péricand …could see Jacqueline and Bernard on the doorstep of the café. Their hands were full of chocolate and sweets that they were giving out to everyone around them. Madame Péricand leaped towards them.
‘Get back inside! What are you doing out here? I forbid you to touch the food. Jacqueline, you will be punished. Bernard, your father will hear about this.’ Grabbing the two stunned culprits firmly by the hand, she dragged them away. Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilization, fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her own children. Nothing else mattered any more.
And how ironic that it is the ‘Penitent Childen’ whose charity was founded by the elder Monsieur Péricand - and to which he leaves millions when he dies - are the very ones who kill Mme. Péricand’s beloved son, Philippe.
Another character in Suite française, the ridiculous Vicomtesse de Montmort, denounces one of the farmers she hates for stealing vegetables from her garden. Although she is always involved in ‘charitable works’, she is secretly pleased that the German soldiers are in the village to keep the lower classes in their place and ‘maintain order’.
In the Appendix to Suite française, some point to the letters Michel Epstein wrote to try to get his wife released from the concentration camp as ‘proof’ of Némirovsky’s own anti-Semitism:
… even though my wife is of Jewish descent, she does not speak of the Jews with any affection whatsoever in her works. My wife’s grandparents, as well as my own, were Jewish; our parents practiced no religion; as for us, we are Catholic and so are our children who were born in Paris and are French.
It is clear from other correspondence that Michel Epstein was being advised what to say in order to free his wife. How heart-rending for this man to have to write such things, knowing full well how untrue they were! How much he must have loved his wife to say anything in order to get her released. He even offered to exchange himself for her, but it was all in vain.
Here are Némirovsky’s own words from her notes to Suite française:
I swear here and now never again to take out my bitterness, no matter how justifiable, on a group of people, whatever their race, religion, convictions, prejudices, errors.
Irène Némirovsky was sympathetic to the Jews she portrayed, just as she was to all her characters – even the ones who did not deserve it. What comes through in all her writing is her extraordinary insight into how people think and feel. Her compassion was universal and her style extremely modern for its time. Like Flaubert before her, she hands her readers a mirror to the world. Reflecting what she lived and saw, Némirovsky’s greatness lies in her ability to show us society and to have our responses reveal more about ourselves than anyone else.
Since the discovery and publication of Suite française, Irène Némirovsky is being hailed as one of the greatest French writers of the 20th century, yet she was never granted French nationality. She died in Auschwitz as a ‘stateless’ person. Her daughter, Denise Epstein, sees this as fitting: ‘My mother’ she said, ‘died a citizen of the world.’
Sandra Smith
Robinson College,
Cambridge 2008
Dear Editors:
Ruth Franklin’s recent tirade accusing Irène Némirovsky of being a “self-hating Jew” leaves those familiar with her works and life breathless with outrage. Ms. Franklin’s “analysis” is based largely on Jonathan Weiss’ flawed biography – a book no one published when he first wrote it in the late 1990s and which has only seen the light of day following the success of Suite Française – rather than on the actual works. It is obvious to any serious student of literature that neither Franklin nor Weiss have fully grasped the nuances of Némirovsky’s works, nor her courage in criticising, from within, the negative aspects of her culture. More to the point, Némirovsky was keenly interested in the question of how immigrants are treated : the mistrust, stereotyping and shunning of foreigners – especially Jews – and the lengths to which such poor souls had to go to be accepted in the French society of the time. Let us examine some facts.
“They say I’m anti-Semitic ? It’s absurd ! I’m a Jew myself and I’ll say it to anyone who will listen!” This was Irène Némirovsky’s reply to Nina Gourfinkel, her Jewish interviewer from La Nouvelle Revue juive, in 1930. How much clearer could Némirovsky be ? Even Gourfinkel had to admit : “Irène Némirovsky is not anti-Semitic, of course.”
You can’t understand anything about Némirovsky if you don’t keep in mind that she was Jewish, at least according to Sartre’s definition: “Someone whom others consider a Jew.” True, she had received no Jewish education, she didn’t speak Yiddish or Hebrew and she wasn’t observant. In this respect, her baptism in 1939 cannot be regarded as a repudiation of her faith. Nevertheless, because she loved her husband and his parents – who were religious – she was married in synagogue.
Némirovsky was, however, obsessed with both immigration and xenophobia, which are the subjects of some her later novels : Les Échelles du Levant (1939), Les Chiens et les Loups (1940). This is why you find Jewish characters or foreigners in those works whose faces reflect the stigma of racism. Rabinovitch, in Nemirovsky’s Fraternité , is also “someone whom others consider a Jew.” His “Jewish features” simply mirror the image reflected by French society of the time. But very few French novels from this period show this so strongly : she had the courage to portray things as they were, and they were ugly, indeed. And risky - because she portrays them as they were seen by others. But how naïve to think that the narrator and the writer are one and the same person! She was a novelist, and only a novelist!
What about her (few) caricatures of Jews with crooked noses ? You find the very same ones in Bashevis Singer, Sholem Aleikhem, Shalom Asch, and even André Schwarz-Bart’s Le Dernier des Justes, a story of the eternal persecution of the Jews, that received the Goncourt Prize in 1959. This is not political commentary: it is a literary cliché, sometimes awkward, sometimes ignoble, sometimes useful. Némirovsky loved using free indirect speech, “a technique that helped me many times.” (1942) This was a technique that required subtlety. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a genuine anti-Semitic writer, preferred to use “I.” Némirovsky never did, for obvious reasons.
At one point, Weiss points out the figure of the “young Jew, rich, elegant, with a long pointed nose in a narrow, pale face,” and this description can’t be denied ; but everyone can see that this depiction is far more naïve than cruel. Besides, one must keep in mind that Némirovsky was only 21 when she wrote this line, and was still treated by her mother as a young girl. The cold view that Irène Némirovsky takes towards her Jewish characters is based on her mother’s views – denying her roots, haunted by the ghetto, more French than Russian, more urbane than Jewish. This is the source of the omnipresent revelatory mirrors in her daughter’s work, and the “hot bloodedness” which always betrays the inner nature of Némirovsky’s characters. What might look like denial, at first glance, is just the visible part of the conflict in her soul – a conflict between the love she bore her father and the hate she felt for her mother. It took no less than five novels to exorcise this stifling complex, firstly under a pseudonym (The Enemy, 1928 ; The Ball, 1929) then under her own name (David Golder, 1930 ; The Wine of Solitude, 1934 ; Jezebel, 1936). And throughout her whole life and in all her works, there is not a trace of ideological engagement of any nature whatsoever.
She was 23 when she wrote the first manuscript of David Golder (something Weiss didn’t address). It is obvious, when you read it, that she wanted to depict the very world in which she was born, a world of bankers, money-makers and nouveaux riches. Oh, yes, they were Jewish: Némirovsky corrected this in her “French novels” (written in the mid 1930’s): Le Pion sur l’échiquier and La Proie, which deal with the same themes of ambition and corruption, without any tenderness, and only in French Catholic circles. In those novels, only the social satire remains; Némirovsky avoided any possibility of misunderstanding. As for David Golder, the plot is quite similar to Stefan Zweig’s Destruction d’un cœur (1928), concluding with the same moral: the hatred of money and a return to the spiritual roots of Judaism. Never forget that the 20’s and 30’s were years of intense speculation, and that David Golder was published in the same year as Black Tuesday !
There are more facts: Némirovsky mixed in right-wing political circles? Wrong. Only in literary circles. Moreover, one of her novels, a short story and at least one review of a Pushkin’s biography (1936) were published in Marianne, a left-wing weekly magazine. And in 1931, David Golder was even serialized in Le Peuple, the magazine of the communist syndicate CGT ! Why? Not because of her opinions, but because she gradually began to need money. Her father had died in 1932 and left her no inheritance. When she began to publish in Gringoire, in 1933, it was undoubtedly a right-wing magazine, but she was not the editor! It was only after 1936 that Gringoire became regularly anti-Semitic; but Némirovsky’s stories never were.
Némirovsky knew Jacques Chardonne? Wrong. She admired the novelist (just like the Socialist President Mitterrand) and his book L’Amour du prochain (1932), which is by no means a “ political tract!” It is true that Chardonne “proclaimed his admiration for Nazi Germany”: but it was in 1940, and by then Némirovsky had no more to do with him.
There are no Jewish characters in Suite Française ? Wrong. Langelet has a “scornful smile” for those Jews who fled from France to Portugal or South America : a few minutes later, Némirovsky throws him under a car !
The biography by Weiss is “prodigiously researched?” Wrong again. He couldn’t find any of her earliest published texts, texts that show her early gifts as a satirist ; he asserted that her grand-father was living as a wealthy banker in Kiev, but the man had died long before, and her father was an orphan at 10. He couldn’t find proof that she got married in synagogue; and how could he explain her baptism, not having unearthed her letters to the Archibishop who baptised her in 1939, in which she says : “I’m not a good recruit for the Church.” He never consulted the prodigious archives of Grasset and Albin Michel publishing houses in Paris, where he could have found Némirovsky’s sketches for Captivity, the third part of Suite Française. In it, she states perfectly clearly her hatred of the “community spirit” – political or religious – instead prefering individualism.
The political regime Némirovsky preferred was the liberal English model. Here we find the deeper meaning of the romance between Lucile and Bruno: Némirovsky’s hatred of ideology based on race. France was the only community or society she ever attempted to enter, but though she attempted naturalization from 1935 to 1940, she never succeeded. Michel Epstein’s letter to German soldiers only shows that he was a prudent man ! He also preferred to deal with German soldiers (the Wehrmacht, who were not necessarily Nazis : what a grotesque inaccuracy!) instead of dealing with the French administration. That’s why, in March 1942, Némirovsky wrote of the French in her journal: “Hatred + despise.” The destiny of both Némirovsky and her husband proves they were both correct in their assessment. It is moreover absurd to think that she could have published in “clandestine newspapers!” Her husband had been fired from his bank in 1940, and she needed to earn money. And how could she have established a link with those newspapers in the first place?
Némirovsky refused to be forced to sympathize with anyone. Some Jews are villains in her novels, but some French politicians are too; so are some Russians who supported the pogroms, as in her very first book, L’Enfant génial, and in her last one before the war, Les Chiens et les Loups. Némirovsky wanted to remain free from any constraints. No doubt this was dangerous - and she is still paying for it.
OP + PL
Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt are the authors of the new biography of Irène Némirovsky published in France in September 2007 by Grasset and Denoël, and forthcoming in Canada from Knopf Canada in Spring 09. It is based on thorough research into Némirovsky’s life and the discovery, in 2005, of many new and important previously undiscovered sources : several rough drafts and intimate diaries (1933-42), memoirs and personal reflections, autobiographical fragments and unedited texts, personal correspondence, and interviews and testimonials from her family and colleagues. Philipponnat and Lienhardt are also the authors of a highly acclaimed biography of Roger Stéphane, the French Jewish member of the Resistance, journalist and writer (1919-1994) published by Grasset (2004).
My full letter (top, above) was shortened by the editors; as a result, it refers rather confusingly to a forthcoming publication of a new biography of Irene Nemirovsky. I thought it might be useful to readers to have a copy of the complete text here as background to the above correspondence. Louise Dennys
Dear Editors,
In yesterday’s Q&Q Omni (January 28), QuillBlog quoted at length (describing it jauntily, with a curious sense of gusto, as a “takedown”) the ugly essay by Ruth Franklin that appears in The New Republic (January 30) vilifying Irène Némirovsky as an anti-Semite and the publication of her work as perpetrating “a fraud”. What appalled me was that Quill offered no editorial commentary that might have placed such harsh, serious accusations in perspective, or even contacted us, as her Canadian publisher, to comment on the stupid allegation of fraud before slinging it our way. Above all, it did not take into account the effect such a bald reprinting might have on the thousands of Canadians who have read Suite Française with care and insight and have been deeply moved by Némirovsky’s ability to illuminate the human heart and the human condition in all its complex and often harsh reality.
This is a matter of human as well as literary importance—the two are of course inextricable. It needs thoughtful consideration, not cavalier mudslinging. Four people – Irène Némirovsky’s award-winning translator, Sandra Smith; her American editor, Lexy Bloom; and Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, the two eminent writers of her new biography which was published in France last September and will be published by Knopf Canada in Spring 09 — have just responded to Ruth Franklin’s article in The New Republic, and, with their permission, I attach them here for Quill to print. Given the huge and passionate response of readers to the literary quality and emotional power of Suite Française — as well as to her wonderful earlier novels, Fire in the Blood, Le Bal and David Golder which we’ve recently published–I trust Quill will see fit to give each of their clarifying rebuttals equal space to Ms Franklin’s.
In brief, Ruth Franklin fails to understand the subtlety and power of Némirovsky’s writing, the context of her times, or how Némirovsky as writer and artist both reflected and rose above them; she also relies on a biography of Némirovsky written in the late ‘90s before the translation and release of Suite Française. It was considered sufficiently lacking in accuracy to warrant the new biography, which thoroughly counteracts Ruth Franklin’s simplistic view. Drawing on new research, on newly found and released materials, on personal correspondence and interviews with her family and friends, it vividly evokes, in rounded fashion, Irène Némirovsky’s place in French life, her reputation, her passionate and evolving commitment to being a Jew, and her dazzling talent. It brings a rich clarity to her short, astonishing life.
Némirovsky, like all great artists, looked on the messy complexity of the human condition with clear eyes. As her translator says: “Like Flaubert before her, she hands her readers a mirror to the world. Reflecting what she lived and saw, Némirovsky’s greatness lies in her ability to show us society and to have our responses reveal more about ourselves than anyone else.”
And we should not forget that it was Irène Némirovsky herself who stated, in 1930, with all her customary directness: “I’m a Jew myself and I’ll say it to anyone who will listen!”
Louise Dennys
Louise Dennys Executive Publisher, Knopf Canada, Random House Canada, Vintage Canada
Hello,
Would you please help me to get in touch with Msrs. Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt regarding their wonderful current book “La vie d’Irene Nemirovsky” ? I have to offer an important proposition.
Thanks in advance,
Julius Gutman, Sweden