Irene’s Story
A Turbulent Life, A Tragic Ending — With Something Left Behind
Irene Nemirovsky was a celebrated writer in pre-war France, but neither her notoriety, her marriage into a successful Parisian family, nor her conversion to Catholicism could save the Russian-born Jew from the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Irene and her daughter Denise
Born in Kiev in 1903, Nemirovsky grew up in a wealthy family. Her father had made his fortune in matches and started his own bank. They family often spent time abroad and fled the country permanently after the 1918 Russian Revolution, when Bolsheviks seized her father’s bank and they were forced to disguise themselves as peasants . That would be Irene’s first taste of war and its ramifications — and experience that may have helped give her insight and shape her future writing. Her first poems were composed while her family hid in a Finnish village.
After settling in Paris at age 16, she enrolled in the Sorbonne, became a French debutante, began writing and quickly established herself in the French literary community. She enjoyed the life of a wealthy young woman in Paris, “going to jazz clubs, flirtations, joyriding and water cures to soothe her asthma.” In 1926, after a two-year courtship, she married banker Michel Epstein, a fellow Russian exile. Their first child, Denise, was born in 1929 — the same year that Denise’s first novel, David Golder, was published. It was a melodrama loosely based on her parents’ lives in high finance and high society and became a big hit in Europe, being made into a movie. Irene’s second daughter Elisabeth arrived in 1936, as she continued to produce novels, short stories and a biography of Chekhov.
As the war approached, Irene tried to obtain French citizenship and joined the Catholic church in 1939, but neither those actions nor her literary acclaim would keep her free from persecution under the Vichy regime. Her husband was fired from his banking job, and Irene’s publisher reneged on contracts with her under the harsh laws persecuting the Jews. Denise and Elisabeth were sent to the village of Issy-l’Eveque to live with their nanny’s mother, and Irene and Michel eventually followed. While in Issy, Irene continued working on a series of five novellas about life in occupied France, writing in tiny script to save precious paper in a leather-bound notebook. She kept all of her work in a small suitcase.
“My God! What is this country doing to me?” — Entry in Irene Nemirovsky’s journal, 1941
On July 13, 1942, policemen arrested Irene as a “stateless person of Jewish descent” and sent her to Auschwitz, where she died Aug. 17. Michel would share her fate several months later, perishing in the gas chamber. Denise and Elisabeth, left behind, were hidden in schools and convents until after the war’s end. Among the few belongings left by their parents was the suitcase with the leather-bound notebook, which both Denise and Elisabeth feared to read, worrying that their mother’s final words would be too much to bear.
Only in the late 1990s, as she prepared to give her mother’s papers to a French archive, did Denise open what she thought was her mother’s journal and instead find two novellas and notes for three more. At first, Denise didn’t think anyone would be interested in an “old story,” but eventually she sent the notebook to a publisher, and Suite Francaise became a French best seller in 2004.
Its translation into English would reveal yet another chapter to the story — one that would bring two sides of a remarkable family together.
