Irène Némirovsky was born in Kyiv, Ukraine (part of the Russian Empire at the time) on February 24, 1903, into a wealthy and assimilated Jewish family. Her father Leon, a self-made man of modest social background, had become a successful businessman and financier; her mother Fanny prided herself on speaking only French at home, and Irène grew up with frequent trips to France and a French governess. Despite this apparent life of privilege, Némirovsky did not consider her childhood a happy one. In her autobiographical novel Le Vin de solitude [The Wine of Solitude, 1935], she portrays a family where the parents lack respect for each other and live in a ménage à trois with the wife’s lover. Their only daughter feels alienated from both of them, especially from her mother, a cold and self-absorbed woman. Fraught relations between mothers and daughters, bordering on mutual hatred, run throughout Némirovky’s work.

Némirovsky obtained a licence de lettres (equivalent to a BA) in Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne in 1926, a year that also saw the publication of her first novel, Le Malentendu [The Misunderstanding], about an unhappy adulterous love affair between a wealthy young bourgeoise and a brooding World War I veteran. That same year, she married Michel Epstein, a fellow Russian Jewish emigré from a banking family. They had two daughters: Denise, born in 1929, and Elisabeth in 1937. 

It was while pregnant with Denise that Némirovsky wrote the novel that made her famous, David Golder, whose unhappy protagonist sacrifices himself for his daughter’s wellbeing. Published by the prestigious firm Bernard Grasset, David Golder received immediate recognition. Critics praised its author for “writing like a man,” the highest accolade in their view for a woman writer.  Stage and screen adaptations soon followed; the film version (1931) was the first sound film by the well-known director Julien Duvivier. In 1930 Grasset published Némirovsky’s novella Le Bal (it had appeared earlier in a magazine), which remains one of her best known works. In this cruel story, a young girl takes revenge on her cold, social-climbing mother by sabotaging the party that was to seal the family’s entry into Parisian society. Le Bal was adapted to the screen in 1931, starring Danielle Darrieux in her film debut as the unloved adolescent.   Several of Némirovsky’s most important works focus on Jewish characters, often foreigners in France, who are conflicted about their Jewishness in a society that does not welcome Jews. The title character of David Golder looks down on another Jewish businessman who speaks Yiddish but feels nostalgic when he visits a kosher restaurant on the rue des Rosiers, where poor Jewish immigrants live. The short story “Fraternité” (1937) features a protagonist named Christian Rabinowitz, whose divided name says it all. Even though Christian is not aware of how deeply conflicted he is about his Jewishness, Némirovsky makes sure that the reader knows it. Her most complex portrayal of Jews, showing the range of choices that faced them in French society, from total assimilation to proud assertion of difference, appears in Les Chiens et les loups [The Dogs and the Wolves], published in 1940 on the eve of the German occupation. Here as elsewhere, Némirovsky did not spare her characters, whether Jews or non-Jews. In a 1933 interview, she stated that her aim as a novelist was to “unmask the profound truth” beneath appearances (Philipponnat and Lienhardt, p. 432), which often meant probing painful feelings. In her writing journal for Les Chiens et les loups, she allied herself with proud “wolves” rather than domesticated “dogs.” 

Némirovsky’s often cruelly perceptive portraits of Jews led some Jewish readers—both in her own time and in the years after the publication of Suite Française brought her back into public view—to accuse her of antisemitism and of being a “self-hating Jew.” Many other Jewish readers see her as a particularly astute analyst of Jewish dilemmas of identity in the modern world. It is  significant  that David Golder was translated into Yiddish and feted in Warsaw as soon as it appeared and that the stage version became a staple of Yiddish theater, performed all over eastern Europe and even in Argentina throughout the 1930s (Suleiman, “David Golder en Yiddish”). But Némirovsky did continue to contribute stories to a popular weekly, Gringoire, that became increasingly antisemitic as the pre-war decade wore on. This choice is difficult for a contemporary reader to accept, even knowing that Gringoire paid handsomely and that Némirovsky was often short on funds.

In February 1939, Irène and Michel, were baptized into the Catholic Church, along with their daughters. Their chief motive may have been to protect the family in the face of rising antisemitism, but they also, apparently, genuinely desired to become Christians. Conversion was no protection against persecution, however. After France declared war on Germany in September 1939, Némirovsky sent the girls to safety in the village of Issy-l’Évêque in central France, where their nanny’s mother lived. 

When Germany conquered France in June 1940, Michel lost his job at a bank and Némirovsky became the family’s sole breadwinner. She and Michel joined the girls in the village, which had become part of Occupied France. Némirovsky never sought to cross over into the Unoccupied Zone because she felt she had to stay in touch with her publisher, Albin Michel, in Paris, and communication between the Zones was extremely limited. While Jewish authors—including those who had converted—were forbidden to publish and their bank accounts were frozen, her publisher sent her money through a proxy. Her longtime editor, André Sabatier, journeyed from Paris to visit her in July 1942; she entrusted to him many of her journals and manuscripts, which were discovered in the publisher’s archives only in 2005. While many of Némirovsky’s Parisian literary friends abandoned her, Albin Michel behaved honorably, even providing support for her daughters after the war. 

In Issy-l’Évêque, in a situation of enormous uncertainty and vulnerability, Némirovsky began to write her epic novel about wartime France, inspired by Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Unlike Tolstoy, who wrote about events that had taken place 50 years earlier, she wrote about her present moment. Suite Francaise starts in June 1940 and ends with the departure of German troops from an occupied French village (modeled on Issy) in June 1941, after Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Némirovsky outlined five parts for the novel, noting in her diary that she had to wait to see how things turned out for the later sections. She had completed only the first two parts when she was deported, but Suite Française as it now stands makes a coherent whole. Part One, “Storm in June,” recounts the flight of Parisians toward the south in the great “exode” of June 1940, with a broad focus on a diverse cast of characters. (They include no Jews, a choice that has caused much discussion among critics). Part Two, “Dolce,” zooms in on the inhabitants of a single occupied village, focusing on the impossible love story between an unhappily married young woman whose philandering husband is a prisoner of war in Germany and a German officer, a refined musician and composer who is billeted in her house. 

In July 1942, very soon after finishing ”Dolce,” Némirovsky was arrested at her home in Issy-l’Évêque and almost immediately deported to Auschwitz. Distraught, her husband Michel tried over the following weeks to mobilize her publisher and others who might help secure her release, to no avail. He was himself arrested in October and gassed upon arrival in Auschwitz a month later. Twelve-year old Denise and five-year old Elisabeth were left in the care of Némirovsky’s faithful assistant, Julie Dumot, who had been living with the family in Issy since June 1941.  Dumot came from a Catholic family in Bordeaux and had many relatives in the region, some of whom were in the Resistance. She took the girls there and placed them (under the name Dumot) in a convent school, where only two nuns knew of their real identity. The Vichy police was still hunting down Jews, however, and a year or so later Julie was warned that there would be a raid at the school. She took the girls out; for the next seven months they went from one hiding place to another, terrified, but they survived.  

When survivors of the Nazi camps began to arrive back in Paris in the spring of 1945, Julie and the girls traveled to the city, hoping to find Irène or Michel. That hope was not realized, but they did find the girls’ grandmother Fanny, who had survived the war with false papers in Nice and was living once again in her apartment in the posh 16^tharrondissement. When they knocked on her door, she refused to let them in. It was the final act in the bitter story between Irène and her mother. 

Before Michel Epstein was taken away by French gendarmes in October 1942, he gave a small suitcase to Julie Dumot, which she deposited with a notary as soon as she reached Bordeaux. It remained there until Dumot’s death in 1956, by which time Denise was married and a mother and Elisabeth was a student at the Sorbonne. The suitcase contained, in addition to photographs and letters, several unpublished manuscripts by Némirovsky, including that of Suite Française. 

According to a legend that is repeated by journalists and others even today, Denise and Elisabeth did not open the suitcase for many years and did not read Suite Française for even longer, because it was written in a notebook that they thought contained their mother’s diary. One day, the legend goes, Denise finally opened the notebook and saw that it contained a novel; she transcribed it, showed it to a writer who showed it to her publisher, and the rest is literary history. 

Like many legends, this one has a kernel of truth in it, but the reality is more complicated. In fact, Denise and Elisabeth read the contents of the notebook right away, and in 1957 Denise even sent the manuscript to a journalist in Switzerland who was writing an article about Némirovsky.  She returned it to Denise with the comment that it was “altogether remarkable” but unfortunately unfinished, and hence not publishable. The journalist mentioned the unfinished manuscript, citing its title, Suite Française, in her published article (Suleiman, The Némirovsly Question, pp. 255-257).

By 1957, Némirovsky’s name was forgotten by almost everyone in the French literary world.   Two of her books, a novel (Les Biens de ce monde [All Our Worldly Goods]) and a biography of Chekhov, had appeared soon after the war, receiving polite but scarce reviews. Another novel, Les Feux de l’automne [The Fires of Autumn], whose manuscript was also in the suitcase, appeared in 1957 and fell into instant oblivion. Literary taste had moved on. Now it was writers like Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, and other “new novelists” who dominated the literary world, along with the still influential existentialists: Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de  Beauvoir. Public interest in the Vichy years was at a low ebb, and the enormous outpouring of writing about Jewish persecution and the Holocaust that we are familiar with today lay in the future. Had Suite Française been published then, it would very likely have received little attention. 

Némirovsky’s return to public attention was in large part due to her daughters’ efforts. While David Golder and Le Bal had never gone out of print, only after the publication of her younger daughter Elisabeth Gille’s book about her mother, Le Mirador, in 1992, did the public became aware of Némirovsky once more. Gille was by then a successful editor and translator in Paris, but Le Mirador was her first book. Subtitled “mémoires rêvées,” or dreamed memories, Le Mirador is an innovative work that imagines Némirovsky as the narrator of her own life story, ending in July 1942, just before her arrest; short interspersed chapters refer to the wartime experiences of “the child,” Elisabeth herself. Le Mirador was admiringly reviewed in the French press and even featured in a long article in the International Herald Tribune. Gille gave numerous interviews on radio and television, telling the story of her mother and her tragic death at age 39. By that time, the Holocaust and the persecution of Jews in Vichy France had become a subject of enormous public interest. 

Gille wrote two more books before her untimely death of cancer in 1996. Her autobiographical novel, Un paysage de cendres [Shadows of a childhood], about a young girl whose parents are deported and who survives the war in hiding but never completely recovers from the trauma of her early years, is now part of the canon of literary works by child survivors of the Holocaust.  She received the first copy on her deathbed. 

After Némirovsky had come to renewed attention, her older daughter, Denise Epstein- Dauplé, transcribed the manuscript of Suite Française and published it in 2004. The novel won the prestigious Prix Renaudot (a first for a posthumous author) and was translated into more than twenty languages.  It was partially adapted to the screen in 2014. 

Denise Epstein (she dropped Dauplé in public) became a celebrity in her own right after the worldwide success of Suite Française. She traveled far and wide, attending exhibits devoted to Némirovsky and giving interviews about her mother. In 2000, she published her own memoir, Vivre et Survivre [Living and Surviving] in the form of an extended conversation with the writer Clémence Boulouque. After hiding her Jewish identity for many years, Denise became a frequent speaker in classrooms, telling the story of her family and of her own wartime experiences. She also continued her work as a promoter of her mother’s work. The preface she wrote in 2004 to a volume of Némirovsky’s stories is a touching tribute both to Némirovsky and to her own efforts: “Every book of my mother’s that is published brings her back into the world of the living” (Preface to Destinées et autres Nouvelles). 

Denise Epstein-Dauplé and Elisabeth Gille are buried under a single tombstone in the Jewish section of the Belleville cemetery in Paris,  The tombstone also carries the names of Irène Némirovsky and Michel Epstein, with the notation: “Morts à Auschwitz” (“Died in Auschwitz”).   

Le Bal. Grasset, 1930; OC I, 353-400. The Ball In David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn, The Courilof Affair. Trans. Sandra Smith. With an Introduction by Claire Messud. New York: Knopf, Everyman’s Library, 2008.

Les Biens de ce monde. Albin Michel, 1947; OC II, 901-1088.  All Our Worldly Goods. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Chatto and Windus, 2008.

Les Chiens et les loups. Albin Michel, 1940; OC II, 509-700. The Dogs and the Wolves. Trans.  Sandra Smith. London: Chatto and Windus, 2009. 

David Golder. Grasset, 1929; OC I, 401-550. For English, see above, Le Bal

Destinées et autres nouvelles. Preface by Denise Epstein. Pin-Balma: Sables, 2004.

Les Feux de l’automne. Albin Michel, 1957; OC II, 1177-1374.

“Fraternité.” Gringoire, February 5, 1937; OC I, 1623-34. In Dimanche and other stories. Trans. Bridget Patterson. New York: Random House, 2010.

Le Malentendu. In Les Oeuvres Libres, February 1926; OC I, 89-206. The Misunderstanding. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Chatto and Windus, 2012.

Œuvres Complètes. 2 vols., ed. Olivier Philipponnat. Librairie Générale Française (Pochothèque), 2009.

Suite Française. Preface by Myriam Anissimov. Paris: Denoël, 2004; OC II, 1455-1840. Suite Française. Trans. Sandra Smith. New York: Knopf, 2006.

La Vie de Tchekhov. Preface by Jean-Jacques Bernard. Albin Michel, 1946; OC II, 701-855.

Le Vin de solitude. Albin Michel, 1935; OC I, 1169-1368. The Wine of Solitude. Trans. Sandra Smith. New York: Knopf, 2006.