Irène Némirovsky didn’t like his childhood.
Her mother disdains her. Her father is on a business trip. She has only the affection of her French governess and the comfort of books. Born in 1903, she is fifteen when the revolutionary disturbances chased her away from Russia with hers. It was in Paris, at eighteen years old, that she published her first tales. She danced, laughed, studied, then got married and, in 1929, gives birth to a girl. A month later, an implacable novel, immediately translated worldwide and brought to the screen, makes its reputation: David Golder. A dozen novels and many short stories will follow, dictated by the family heritage, the memory of being Russian, the strangeness of being Jewish, the desire to be French, then the need to support one’s home at the time of the first anti-Jewish laws.
Impossible to reduce the novelist to the posthumous and universal success of French suite,cruel and funny chronicle of the Exodus and the Occupation, but also an expression of reluctance to 'to live, think, love with others, according to a State, a country, a party'.
Resistant to everything "community destiny", Irène Némirovsky has never denied that she is Jewish; but she does not boast about it, and does not abdicate anything to "bitter and cursed blood" from his mother and receives baptism in 1939, in the absence of French nationality. Du Bal (1929) to the Dogs and the Wolves(1940) , yet she never ceases to invite in her work these characters of unwanted strangers, mercilessly but not without tenderness, and presents France with years of crisis as an unpleasant mirror of xenophobia. At the risk, sometimes, of being misinterpreted: thus David Golder, the novel that made her both famous and suspicious.
The artist’s pride, the satirist’s talent, the rejection of heredity, the disdain for politics, combined with the mimetic desire to become French, could have blinded this woman whose work is so lucid. Refugee in 1940 in a village in the Morvan, mother of two daughters, stateless under the law, forced to publish under a straw man, she is arrested on July 13, 1942 by the police, then deported to Auschwitz while she was developing the third part of her novel-fleuve, entitled Captivity.
