Assistant in 1934 to a representation of the antifascist play The Races, Irène Némirovsky warns: "Let those with ears hear!" Two years later, one of her stories is rejected for 'anti-Semitism': she intended to remind the best integrated Jews of their kinship with recent immigrants. Reflection of an anguish? Despite prestigious support, his naturalization is constantly delayed.
The rise of xenophobic propaganda and the mediocre success of her latest novels bring her, despite her fears, back to her favorite subject: that of Jewish-Russian immigration. In 1939, prudence or superstition, she receives Catholic baptism, as well as her husband and daughters, and works with passion at the Charlatan, myth of Faust transposed into immigration, while Dogs and Wolves presents a fantasised vision of Jewish emigration, as much as of a certain French hypocrisy. Published in May 1940, at the time of the German offensive, the novel goes unnoticed...
