Our June Author: Irène Némirovsky

This month we are reading Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky who was living in Nazi-occupied France when she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where she died. Her last, unfinished novel, Suite Francaise, was discovered and published only recently.

We have a few online resources on our author to supplement discussion of the novel. The Museum of Jewish Heritage offers an online exhibition Woman of Letters: Irene Nemirovsky & Suite Francaise where you can 'open her valise' and examine a few Némirovsky artifacts, review an interactive timeline, and even page through a mock up of the manuscript of the novel.  Here's an introduction to the author produced by the museum:

Irene Nemirovsky from Sarah Josephson on Vimeo.

You can also watch a video introduction to the exhibit and the museum also provides this short video excerpt of a talk by Némirovsky's daughter Denise Epstein with translator Sandra Smith. A longer interview with Epstein and Smith (with better audio quality) is available from WAMU. Another book talk with some good background and insights can be found in this presentation by Sandra Smith and a French lit professor.

Some critics (see here, for example) have raised questions about the lack of Jewish characters in Suite Francaise and the negative depiction of Jewish characters in some of Némirovsky's other writing. The New York Times and The Guardian detail the controversy. Harvard professor Susan Rubin Suleiman takes on the question in a lecture, “Irène Némirovsky and the “Jewish Question” in Interwar France” available from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website (scroll down for the audio player-- the lecture is also available for download via iTunes).


Many readers of Suite Francaise find Irène Némirovsky's life as interesting as her novel and want to know more. You may want to check out the recent biograpy The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903-1942 referenced in the above mentioned NYT article.  There's also a thorough review at Three Percent.

Sarah's Key Film Festival

It seems our book for this month, Sarah's Key, is being made into a movie.  For a film that's already in post-production, there is surprisingly little information available about it.  Perhaps one reason is that  another film about the Vel' d'Hiv Round-up has just been released in France, La Rafle:



A longer trailer (French only) is available here.  Click here for the film's website.  There is no US release date yet.  From the Guardian, a bit of reflection on the import of the film here.

If you don't want to wait (or if like me, you'll pass on Sarah's Key), I recommend the far more subtle and challenging, Mr. Klein,

Mr. Klein is undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of the postwar French cinema; Losey's vaunted visual style is here fused with a brilliantly original scenario by Franco Solinas which captures in chilling detail the complicity of the French citizenry in the anti-Semitism of the Nazi occupiers. Of the few films which even tangentially touch on this topic, ...  none has so clearly and effectively articulated the casual acceptance of anti-Semitism in Western Europe. Losey's achievement is magnified by the sophistication of the narrative exposition, which places the theme within the framework of an unconventional psychological detective thriller. 

For April: Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

For April we have selected Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay:

Paris, July 1942: Sarah, a ten year-old girl, is brutally arrested with her family by the French police in the Vel’ d’Hiv’ roundup, but not before she locks her younger brother in a cupboard in the family's apartment, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

Paris, May 2002: On Vel’ d’Hiv’s 60th anniversary, journalist Julia Jarmond is asked to write an article about this black day in France's past. Through her contemporary investigation, she stumbles onto a trail of long-hidden family secrets that connect her to Sarah. Julia finds herself compelled to retrace the girl's ordeal, from that terrible term in the Vel d'Hiv', to the camps, and beyond. As she probes into Sarah's past, she begins to question her own place in France, and to reevaluate her marriage and her life.

Tatiana de Rosnay offers us a brilliantly subtle, compelling portrait of France under occupation and reveals the taboos and silence that surround this painful episode.