Irène Némirovsky didn’t like his childhood.
Her mother despises her. Her father is away on business. She has only the affection of her French governess and the comfort of books. Born in 1903, she is fifteen when the revolutionary disturbances chases her out of Russia with her family. It was in Paris, at the age of eighteen, that she published her first tales. She danced, laughed, studied, then married and, in 1929, gives birth to a daughter. One month later, an unrelenting novel, immediately translated worldwide and brought to the screen, makes its 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 make his home live 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 Exodus and Occupation, but also expression of a reluctance to “living, thinking, loving with others, according to a State, a country, a party”.
Reluctant to anything «Community Destiny», Irène Némirovsky has never denied that she was Jewish; but she does not boast of it, does not bestow “bitter and cursed blood” from his mother and receives baptism in 1939 in the absence of French nationality. Du Bal (1929) to Dogs and the Wolves(1940) , she does not cease to invite in her work these characters of undesirable foreigners, without pity but not without tenderness, and presents to France of the years of crisis the unpleasant mirror of xenophobia. At the risk of being misinterpreted: David Golder, the novel that made her both famous and suspicious.
The artist’s pride, the talent of the satirist, the rejection of heredity, the contempt for politics, mixed with the mimetic desire to become French, were able to blind 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 pseudonym, she is arrested on 13 July 1942 by the police, then deported to Auschwitz while she was developing the third part of her novel-river, entitled Captivity.
