Irène Némirovsky writing language French
Irène Némirovsky (French: [iʁɛn nemiʁɔfski]; 11 February 1903 – 17 August 1942) was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin who was born in Kyiv, the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France, and wrote in French, but was denied French citizenship. Arrested as a Jew under the racial laws – which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism – she was murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 39. Némirovsky is best known for the posthumously published Suite française.Life and career
Némirovsky was born Irina Lvivna Nemirovska (Russian: Ирина Львовна Немировская) in 1903 in Kyiv, then Russian Empire, the daughter of a wealthy banker, Léon (Lev) Némirovsky. Her volatile and unhappy relationship with her mother became the heart of many of her novels.Her family fled the Russian Empire at the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917, spending a year in Finland in 1918 and then settling in Paris, where Némirovsky attended the Sorbonne and began writing when she was 18 years old.
In 1926, Némirovsky married Michel Epstein, a banker, and had two daughters: Denise, born in 1929; and Élisabeth, in 1937.
In 1929, she published David Golder, the story of a Jewish banker unable to please his troubled daughter, which was an immediate success, and was adapted to the big screen by Julien Duvivier in 1930, with Harry Baur as David Golder. In 1930, her novel Le Bal, the story of a mistreated daughter and the revenge of a teenager, became a play and a movie.
The David Golder manuscript was sent by post to the Grasset publisher with a poste restante address and signed Epstein. H. Muller, a reader for Grasset immediately tried to find the author but couldn't get hold of him/her. Grasset put an ad in the newspapers hoping to find the author, but the author was busy: she was having her first child, Denise. When Némirovsky finally showed up as the author of David Golder, the unverified story is that the publisher was surprised that such a young woman was able to write such a powerful book.
Although she was widely recognized as a major author – even by some anti-Semitic writers like Robert Brasillach – French citizenship was denied to the Némirovskys in 1938.
Némirovsky was of Russian-Jewish origin, but was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in 1939 and wrote in Candide and Gringoire, two magazines with ultra-nationalist tendencies. After the war started, Gringoire was the only magazine that continued to publish her work, thus "guarantee[ing] Némirovsky's family some desperately needed income".
By 1940, Némirovsky's husband was unable to continue working at the bank, and Némirovsky's books could no longer be published, because of her Jewish ancestry. Upon the Nazis' approach to Paris, they fled with their two daughters to the village of Issy-l'Evêque (the Némirovskys initially sent them to live with their nanny's family in Burgundy, while staying on in Paris themselves; they had already lost their Russian home and refused to lose their home in France), where Némirovsky was required to wear the Yellow star.
On 13 July 1942, Némirovsky (then 39) was arrested as a "stateless person of Jewish descent" by policemen employed by Vichy France. As she was being taken away, she told her daughters, "I am going on a journey now." She was brought to a convoy assembly camp at Pithiviers, and on 17 July 1942, together with 928 other Jewish deportees, transported to the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, in Poland. Upon her arrival there two days later, her forearm was marked with an identification number. She died a month later of typhus. On 6 November 1942, her husband, Michel Epstein, was sent to Auschwitz and immediately murdered in the gas chambers.
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