Irène Némirovsky didn’t like his childhood.
Her mother disdains her. Her father is on a business trip. She only has the affection of her French governess and the comfort of books. Born in 1903, she is fifteen years old when the revolutionary disorders chased her away from Russia with hers. It was in Paris, at eighteen years old, that she published her first tales. She dances, laughs, studies, then gets married and, in 1929, gives birth to a girl. A month later, an implacable novel, immediately translated worldwide and brought to the screen, makes his fame: 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 by 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 a reluctance to 'live, think, love with others, depending on a state, a country, a party'.
Reluctant to anything 'community destiny', Irène Némirovsky never denied that she was Jewish; but she does not take pride in it, abdicates nothing at the "bitter and cursed blood" from his mother and receives baptism in 1939, in the absence of French nationality. From the Ball (1929) to the Dogs and the Wolves(1940) , she nevertheless continues to invite in her work these characters of undesirable foreigners, without mercy but not without tenderness, and presents to France during the years of crisis the unpleasant mirror of xenophobia. At the risk, sometimes, of being misinterpreted: thus David Golder, the novel that made her both famous and suspicious.
The pride of the artist, the talent of satirist, 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 of Morvan, mother of two daughters, stateless under the law, forced to publish under a straw, she is arrested on July 13, 1942 by the police, then deported to Auschwitz while she was developing the third part of her novel-river, entitled Captivity.
