"My mom never hid the fact she was Jewish. If converted to Catholicism was to be saved, "says the daughter of Pesach Chag Sameach Nemirovsky INEXHAUSTIBLE
The Legend of Irène Némirovsky, author of Jewish origin, grows. His people and their host country turned their backs. He died in Auschwitz. He had an early success, then forgetting and recovery with his work posthumously French Suite. now edit dogs and wolves , his last novel published during his lifetime, and is preparing an exhibition and a film.
The living room of the house of Denise Epstein, on the ninth floor of a modern building in a poor district of Toulouse, is a kind of shrine to her mother, Irène Némirovsky (Kiev, 1903-Auschwitz, 1942) . As in every shrine, there are fresh flowers, a bouquet of yellow daisies, facing the altar particular secular deity dedicated to domestic : a shelf full of issues of his works in all languages, and lots of pictures of him clinging to the walls. Némirovsky in the twenties, with a hat pulled down over his eyebrows, with her husband, the banker Michel Epstein, and their daughters, Denise, the eldest, and Elizabeth, seven years longer small, dying of cancer in 1996.
Denise, 81, is the only survivor of a family destroyed by the Nazi delirium (deportation to Auschwitz of Irène followed that of her husband, who died in the gas chambers in the same year), by pain and disease. "This is a picture that I prefer the last one we did together," he says, pointing to a picture of the couple's two daughters, all smiling, taken the summer of 1939, in Hendaye, where they used to go every year.
Denise Epstein, short hair, brown shirt, black pants, and a disarmingly jovial, has been a documentary and created their own family (he has two sons, a daughter, Irene, and several grandchildren), but the key driver his life has always been his mother. Ie retrieve the fragments of his life, to reconstruct a coherent memory of the woman and the writer he so admired, and which was separated abruptly the morning of July 13, 1942. This explains why almost obsessive dedication for decades keep the manuscript of the last work of his mother. The unfinished Suite Francaise , Denoël editions published in 2004.
A written work, as the author said, "in the hot lava." A real-time history of the war and its effects on European bourgeois community. Némirovsky depicts with unerring cruelty of the French people's reaction to the German occupation. Obsessed with food and objects while the world crumbles around him. The posthumous applause was general. Since then, life still revolves Epstein a little more about her mother, now a bestselling author, translated into 35 languages. Denise
blonde lights up a cigarette and looking on the shelves the first edition of dogs and wolves . "Here it is. Look. It is one of the books I prefer mom. I like the people who speak a little Bohemian that reflect the French bourgeoisie." dogs and wolves , now published by Salamandra Editorial, and The Magrana in Catalan, is, as usual in novels by Némirovsky, a sharp social portrait. The work, which oozes disappointment, tells the story of Ada, Ben and Harry, three Jews, distant relatives, and placed at the ends of the social scale. Ada's feelings towards Harry feeding time and overcome social barriers to bring them together in a love that goes beyond individual experience, because both are recognized in the common memory of a people shelved, rejected, and for that reason, divided faithful dogs and wild wolves.
The characters of dogs and wolves are almost exclusively Jews from Eastern Europe, and installed in Paris, as the author's own family. Némirovsky's vision is not kind. "But I know it's true", he wrote in a note to the thread of the work published in 1940. They were difficult years But Némirovsky could not imagine that was one step from the end of his life and art. Because deportation and death in August 1942 in the Polish concentration camp, would follow a long, deep silence editorial.
"When we started to publish Suite Francaise, an author was completely forgotten," says Olivier Rubinstein, its discoverer, and currently responsible for the editorial Denoël in his spacious office in the headquarters in Paris, which opens onto a patio interior full of flowering trees. "He was an early writer, a kind of Françoise Sagan of his time, he published his first book in a literary magazine in 1926, 23 years, and won the absolute celebrity at age 29 with his novel David Golder . true that two of his most famous books, the latter and Dance, published by Grasset, are still sold, but rights author who received the author's daughters were a few hundred euros.
Rubinstein Némirovsky knew and read the text with interest, but without the slightest suspicion that was holding one of the biggest publishing successes Denoël. French Suite was a total blockbuster, not only in France, or Spain, where he won the Prix Booksellers Madrid, and had an exceptional host. The English language edition surpassed a million copies in sales and served as Rubinstein says, to discover "not only an exceptional work but a very important author." One author who has not yet reap finished wins. Next year will start shooting a movie blockbuster French Suite, and there are plans to open in Madrid a major exhibition on the human journey of the writer, which closed in Paris last March. The sample came from New York, where the motto Women of letters. Irène Némirovsky and Suite Francaise, presented the history of the writer, who had already moved to the American public when it disclosed the details of the discovery of his posthumous novel. There was his manuscript, a paper notebook with scribbled onion fine print of a special blue, there was the small trunk (28.5 inches high by 49 centimeters wide and 42 inches deep), where he was kept with letters, photographs, small family memories, until the nineties, when her daughters decided to deposit it in a public archive, but not before each type and reserve a copy. And there were the images of Némirovsky. Photo of a teenage sad a local youth, lived in the luxurious surroundings of the White Russians in exile. Irène, surrounded by faces with eyes elusive that identifies them as descendants of a long line of victims of pogroms, persecutions, deportation. "Deportation is a Russian word as" exclaims Denise Epstein. But also working to rebuild fortunes and earn a place in society for adoption. The
Némirovsky, who fled the Bolshevik revolution, would be installed in Paris in 1919, after a period in Finland and a brief stint in Sweden. Paris was the center of the world and the very young Irène, educated in French by her governess, find there eventually place in the world. And his country, in the French language, as he said his biographer, Olivier Philipponnat.
The French nation, that we always aspired to, brutally rejected, but also its people, the Jewish intellectual community, had difficulty accepting the politically incorrect view of the Hebrew. Némirovsky, hailed as an exceptional author, owner of a style that blends classical elements to Balzac, Tolstoy or so, and elements of a surprisingly modern for its scathing view of the world, represents the epitome of perfect in the eyes of Jewish Museum History of Judaism, of Paris, which rejected the exhibition. It will, finally, the Holocaust Memorial, also based in Paris, which hosts the shows. And the same people who applauded French Suite furiously resumed the controversy over anti-Semitism of the author.
"The controversy does not start that work, but Jews who trace characters in other works, such as in David Golder [story of an ambitious banker Hebrew], that give life to anti-Semitic clichés, which were already controversial his time and be returned to later in America and England, when you publish Suite Francaise, "says Denoël responsible. It refers to physical descriptions of Jews where Némirovsky abused "hooked noses," "olive skin, slim bodies and battered. Also many references to the violent greed of the Jews, the tenacity to achieve goals. "I think so because he saw and wrote the Jewish bourgeois milieu he knew well. Like his mother, whom he detested. They used that knowledge so deep in the Jewish circles to criticize them. A bit like François Mauriac is served their mastery of the Catholic society of Bordeaux to attack so harsh. But we well know now that the Shoah. In the thirties was different. Read it now, all we know, it is clear we do not produce a pleasant sensation.
Myriam Anissimov, who wrote the foreword to the French and English editions French Suite, the person who contacted the publisher with Denise Epstein, has not bitten his tongue when to denounce anti-Semitism Némirovsky. The accused, even to hate herself, probably as a Jew. Denise Epstein is outraged when he brings up the subject. "My mother never concealed that it was Jewish. If converted to Catholicism at the end was because I thought it would save her and us. So we baptized. It is difficult to understand the fear we felt. But that fear has led me to me to baptize my own children in the fifties, "he recalls.
The Epstein-Némirovsky had converted to Catholicism in 1939. An act of self that paid off in a German-occupied France, indifferent and selfish. Many of the editors, writers, artists and intellectuals of the time they surrendered to the enemy. Some welcomed the new masters to the true saviors of Europe from Bolsheviks and Jews. was the case of Robert Brasillach, which Némirovsky frequented in the thirties, and that of Louis Ferdinand Céline One of the most translated French writers of the twentieth century after Marcel Proust.
Denoël
The publisher will publish precisely what at that time some of the most controversial and anti-Semitic writer. Is not it funny that two of the most outstanding authors Denoël catalog, both winners of the prestigious Renaudot (Némirovsky posthumously), are the controversial anti-Semitic and Jewish Céline and killed in Auschwitz?
"There is nothing special," says Rubinstein. "The publisher has moved. The founder, Robert Denoël, a Belgian was very close to the extreme right, and was killed in the area of \u200b\u200bInvalides, just after the war. But in addition to edit published works by authors Céline the likes of Nathalie Sarraute and Tristan Tzara. It is true that during the war was very collaborator, like many French publishers. After all, the resistance was a matter of a few tens of thousands of people. "Sarraute's case, one of the leading names of the nouveau roman , Russian-born Némirovsky and Jewish and living in Paris, offered a bitter contrast with the writer of Kiev. Sarraute, born Natacha Tcherniak in Ivanovo, near Moscow, in 1900, escaped deportation to live hidden under a false name, and in 1944 returned safely to his apartment in Paris.
Némirovsky also took refuge with her husband and two daughters in a village, Ivry-L'Evêque, but probably victim of a betrayal, was arrested there by the gendarmes, on 13 July 1942. Pithiviers field was taken to Auschwitz, four days later, the convoy 6. He never returned. Apparently died of typhus a month later, but Rubinstein does not. "After the war, when people asked for a death certificate saying that all prisoners had died of typhus, when, evidently, had been gassed, it is clear that prisoners who could not work were removed immediately. Of course no witnesses. In any case the difference is small. " To the editor is clear that all he did his own Némirovsky, publish their works in magazines such as anti-Semitic or Gringoire Candide, rubbing shoulders with writers coming to the right, without successful claim French nationality in 1939, asking for help to friends and editors at the risk of humiliation, but not conjugates and understandable in the same verb: to survive.
true that some French writers of the time they joined the Communist Party, as Louis Aragon, or personally fought against Nazi-fascism, as André Malraux. But many others took shelter as best they could under the German wing, as Némirovsky determined to survive. Unfortunately, she failed. While his hated mother, Anna, lived regally in Nice, Latvian refugee disguise while fleeing Nathalie Sarraute, like many other Jews located in France, Némirovsky was determined to stay in a "homeland" decidedly elusive if not traitorous.
"We've had a lot of anger stage of my sister and me," says Denise Epstein staring. "Why do not flee? Do they want to write at all costs French Suite ? Perhaps, having lived as an exile made him more reluctant to leave again. Perhaps the brutal abandonment he suffered caused him fatigue exhaustion, lack of hope in relation to humans, which could take the win to flee. Also, I think I should have financial problems. Accounts were blocked, only paid him a publisher, Albin Michel. But it is true that the town where we took refuge was close to Lyon, we could have easily come to Switzerland.
Did Irène Némirovsky experiment until the end of the war and occupation, this "hot lava" that speaks in a of his last letters? aware that extreme situations can only know the man, did you rush to finish this cup? Did he write his War and Peace on living matter of a war that had not yet shown its worst face? Suite Francaise was designed as a work in five parts. Only survived Storm in June and Dolce , the first two. Captivity the third, was barely sketched. But in the notes on it, Irène refers to the concentration camps, almost as a certainty. I knew I could not finish
Source: elpais.com
Then something happened that neither the Israelis nor the French had. The Six Day War, with the brilliant Jewish victory over its Arab enemies. Paris left to see the Israelis as a young idealists, especially after the lightning operation that special forces conducted against Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut airport. De Gaulle believed that Lebanon, though independent, was still a wholly owned fiefdom and did not like the Jews uncontrollable paseasen there doing what they felt like it without even asking permission. 
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