"Noel" by Irene Nemirovsky (1932, newly translated 2017 by Sandra Smith)

Paris in July - Year Ten -- Hosted by Thyme for Tea


So far as my participation in Paris In July Year Ten I have read


1.  Colette- Two Early Short Stories
2. The Black Notebook by Patrick Modiano
3. "A Duel" by Guy de Maupassant ( A Franco-Prussian War Story)
4. Life, Death, and Betrayal at The Hotel Ritz in Paris by Tilar Mazzeo (non fiction)
5. How the French Invented Love by Marilyn Yolem (literary history)
6. "The Lost Child" by Francois Coppée
7. "The Juggler of Norte Dame" by Anatole France- no post
8. A Very French Christmas- A Collection of the Greatest Holiday Stories of France
9. "The Illustrious Gaudissart" by Honore de Balzac
10. After the Circus by Patrick Modiano
11. "Gaudissart Ii" by Honore de Balzac
12. 6:41 to Paris by Jean-Phillipe Blondel
13. "Noel" by Irene Nemirovsky

Irene Nemirovsky was born in the Ukraine in 1903, with her family, after a stop,in Finland, she immigrated to France to avoid anti-Semitic pograms.  On July 26, 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she died August 17, 1942.  She was a fast writer, producing about a novel a year so as I see it the Germans deprived the world of maybe 30 masterworks. It is very hard for me to read her work without a feeling of sadness, even bitterness.  As I saw the recent boorish behavior of trump

in Paris I wished for world leaders who can appreciate the work of the great writers of Paris.

I first encountered Irene Nemirovsky during Paris in July in 2015 when I read her acknowledged by all master work, Suite Francais.

The back story of the publication of Suite Francaise is very interesting.  Her daughters  kept the manuscript secret for 56 years.  It was published for the first time in 2004 and in translation by Sandra Smith in 2006.  The work we have is the first two parts of a planned five part work.  After the death of the author one of her daughters  found the manuscript and thought it would be diary to painful to read.  When she was preparing her mother's papers for donation, 55 years later, she looked at what is now Suite Francaise and submitted it for publication.

As the novel opens we see Paris in a state of panic brought on by the approaching German army.  The narrative is very intense.   Némirovsky lets us she how a few different households are dealing with the crisis.  Anyone who can plans to flee the city.  The author in just a few paragraphs illuminates decades of family and social history in her portraits of Parisians.  There is just so much to admire in Suite Francaise, so many moments of beauty, truth and brilliance.

As the novel progresses we are in a small town in the country.  There are hilarious biting scenes of social satire as the local aristocrats desperately want to hold on to their status even though many have Germans billeted in their homes.   The residents of the town reluctantly begin to see humanity in the Germans even though they feel they should hate them.  There are exciting dramatic events and the characters are perfectly drawn.

Suite Francaise is a brilliant panorama of French society in 1940.  It is also a world class literary treasure.

After reading Suite Francais I went on to read all of her novels available as in digital format, a few of her short stories, three books about her and numerous webpage posting.



I was really happy to see a never before published in English short story by Nemirovsky in A Very French Christmas- A Collection of the Greatest Holiday Stories of France recently published by New Vessel Press.  The translation is by the Award Winning Sandra Smith.

As "Noel" opens it is a snowy Christmas season day on the affluent streets of Paris, two young girls are being taken for a stroll by their nanny.  We over hear the conversations of passerbys, we look in the lovely shop windows.  When we arrive at the girls home their two older sisters, 20 and 22, are preparing for a ball.  Their father is a successful businessman.  Both he and his wife, mother of the girls, have lovers.  We sit in on the preparations for the party.  Ramon, a wealth young man from Argentina spending the season in Paris will be there.  The older girl is in love with him.

The party is just brilliantly depicted.  The couples are all dancing close together in a Tango, all the rage, until a parent comes in the room and then it is all innocence.

I really don't want to spoil the exciting developments in the story as it would not be fair to other first time readers.  "Noel" is very much classic Nemirovsky, down to the unpleasant mother!  It is a great work of art.


I am very grateful to New Vessal Press for including this wonderful story in their collection of French holiday stories.  New Vessel Press is an independent publisher focusing on literature in translation and quality narrative non-fiction.  (Newvesselpress.com).  Their website is very well done and the books are very interesting and fairly priced.

Mel u
The Reading Life

The Nėmirovsky Question The Lfe, Death and Legacy of a Jewish Woman in20th Century France by Susan Rubin Suleiman, forthcoming 2017

French Literature and History on The Reading Life

My Posts on Iréne Nemirovsky 

Irene Nemirosky was born Febuary 13, 1903,in Kiev, in The Ukraine, then in The Russian Empire 

Her family left Kiev in 1917 at the time of the Russian Revolution.  Her family lived in Finland for a year before settling permanently in Frsnce. She was sent by the Nazis to Auschwitz where she died August 13, 1942.  She wrote some twenty novels, all in French, plus la number of short stories.  Her acknowled by all master work was the posthumously published Suite Francaise.  I fbegan with tgis work in July of 2014 and went on to treat all of her translated available as Kindle works.  I love the work of Irene Nemirosky.  The Nazis in murdering  her just before she turned forty robbed the reading life universe of at least twenty more novels.

"Némirovsky was the very definition of a self-hating Jew. Does that sound too strong? Well, here is a Jewish writer who owed her success in France entre deux guerres in no small measure to her ability to pander to the forces of reaction, to the fascist right. Némirovsky's stories of corrupt Jews – some of them even have hooked noses, no less! – appeared in right-wing periodicals and won her the friendship of her editors, many of whom held positions of power in extreme-right political circles. When the racial laws in 1940 and 1941 cut off her ability to publish, she turned to those connections to seek special favors for herself". From an article by Ruth Franklin in The New Republic - source Wikepedia 

The Nemirosky Question The Life, Death and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th Century France by  Susan Rubin Suleiman is a great work, fit to take a place among the finest literary biographies i have ever read.  I order to derive maximum benefit from this book you do need to have read much of Nemirosky's work, especially her first novel David Golder.  You also will require a basic knowledge of anti-Semiticism in France in the period. Many critics and literary pedagoges have suggested that, as Ruth Franklin put it, Nemirosky was the epitome of a self-hating Jew.  Suleiman's book is designed to prove this claim wrong.  

I first read this claim after reading David Golder upon doing some post read research.  Numerous sources can be found for this contention. My first untutored reaction was that this was an absurd claim based on a very shallow understanding of human nature. David Golder has elements mirroring the life of Nemirosky.  The lead character David Golden is Jewish banker who moved his family to Paris because of the Russian revolution and to escape pograms.  He rebuilt the family fortune through hard work and shrewd business practices.  He is described  as having a large hooked nose, his wife cares about nothing other than making a show of their money and is ashamed of her busband's roots among among Eastern European Jews.   The mother is abusive to the daughter, just as Nemirosky's was to her.   There are numerous other works that Suleiman talks about that depict Jews in a way that any right wing contemporary reader would relish.  Pre Nazi France had powerful elements  of anti-Semetic running through the country, from top to bottom.  Many Ftench citizens welcomed the ideas of the Nazis toward Jews.  (There are numerous histories on this, some reviewed on my blog)   Suleiman goes through the much of the work of Nemirosky showing us the evidence for this theory and explaining the deeper reading of her work.  As Suleiman tells us, a Jewish writer can depict Jewish characters in a negative way without being an anti-Semite just as William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor depicted some Americans from the old south in very  negative ways without the cost of prejudice being placed on them.  The African American writer Zora Houston has horrific characters,mostly men behaving as would fit a racist stereo type in the Pre World War II American South in her stories but this does not make her self hating.  

There are elements in Nemirosky's behavior that superficially seem to give credence to the notion she was a self hating Jew.  She and her husband both converted to Catholicism, Nemirosky published short stories in right wing literary journals.  She never taught her daughters about their birth heritage faith. These publications often contained, next to her story, pure hate based articles on Jews, portrayed as a blight on France.  Some see in her mother's rejection of her the psychological roots of this in which she was made to feel ashamed of her looks.  Nemirosky came to need the income generated by her writings so she had to approach anti-Jewish publishers with kid gloves and some in examination of her life see this as a betrayal of her culture.  

Suleiman's work shows great psychological depth,  she spends a good bit of time talking about how cultural identities  are formed.  I was fascinated by her account of the lives of Nemirosky's daughters.  

She tells the wonderful back story of the posthumous publication of Suite Francaise, nearly sixty years after Nemirosky's murder.  I have heard it before but it was marvelous to hear it again.  

I found Suleiman's refutation of the notion Nemirosky was a self-hating Jew completely convincing.she also goes into much detail about her life and the state of France furing Nemirosky's  time.

I thank Prof. Suleiman  for writing this book, elegant, beautiful and profound.  Nemirosky's work is a world  class cultural treasure. 

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/no-easy-answers-susan-rubin-suleiman-on-the-nemirovsky-question/. Avery good article from The Los Angeles Review of Books (link added Nov.27,2016)

Suleiman was born in Budapest and came to the U.S. with her parents as a child. She is the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France and professor of comparative literature at Harvard, where she has chaired the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures and the Department of Comparative Literature. She is currently Acting Chair of Romance Languages and Literatures. Her books include Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (1983), Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990), Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996), and Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006). She has edited and co-edited several volumes, including Exile and Creativity (1998), Contemporary Jewish Writing in Hungary (2003), and most recently French Global: A New Approach to Literary History (with C. McDonald), 2010. Suleiman has won many honors, including the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement (1990), and a decoration by the French Government as Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques) in 1992. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship, and been an invited Fellow at the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest and at the Center for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo. In 2005-06 she was a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute. During the 2009-2010 academic year, she was the invited Shapiro Senior Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Academic Degrees: Ph.D., A.M., Harvard University; A.B., Barnard College

Research Interests: 20th-Century French Literature and Culture; Avant-Garde Movements and Theories of the Avant-Garde; Feminist Theory; Problems of Narrative; Writers and Politics; Trauma and Memory; Holocaust Literature and Film. From Harvard.edu

I was kindly given a review copy of this book by Yale University Press.

Mel u