ZGram - 11/7/2004 - "the Holocaust Survivor genre" - Story 2

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Sat Nov 6 10:09:52 EST 2004





Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny;  Now more than ever!

November 7, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

After yesterday's literary hoax about yet another Holocaust survivor, 
you will forgive me if I am more than a little skeptical about this 
one as well:

[START]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5045904-110633,00.html

Emigré Jew's wartime book takes France by storm

Sixty-two years after her death in Auschwitz, a novelist's hidden 
works emerge to acclaim

Jon Henley in Paris
Saturday October 23, 2004

The Guardian
Sixty-two years after its author died in the gas chambers of 
Auschwitz, a remarkable and previously unpublished wartime work by an 
emigré Russian Jew in France has taken the world of publishing by 
storm.

Suite francaise, the first two parts of what Irène Némirovsky 
originally intended to be a five-volume epic, has been hailed by 
ecstatic French critics as "a masterpiece" and "probably the 
definitive novel of our nation in the second world war".

Rights to the work, published three weeks ago, have already been sold 
in 18 countries, including Britain and the US, often for sums higher 
than any previously paid for a French novel, and a vigorous campaign 
is underway for Némirovsky to be posthumously awarded France's most 
prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt.

"One of the great 20th century authors ... A gigantic literary and 
historical gift," said the daily La Croix. "A work of exceptional 
force ... remarkable because written not after, but during, the war," 
said L'Express. "A suberb work ... A capital discovery," said the Le 
Point weekly. "A chef-d'oeuvre ... ripped from oblivion," said Le 
Monde.

Overwhelming as the praise has been, the story of Irène Némirovsky is 
as gripping as the 430-page work itself.

Born in February 1903 in Kiev, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish 
banker, Irène fled Russia in 1918 and arrived with her family in 
France the following year. A privileged emigré life of balls, 
banquets and beaux between Paris, Biarritz and the Cote d'Azur gave 
way by the mid-1920s to that of a hugely popular and 
critically-acclaimed writer; David Golder (1929) and Le Bal (1930) 
established Némirovsky as one of the most talented and celebrated 
authors of her day, "the Francoise Sagan of the time".

In 1926 Irène married Michel Epstein, an emigré Russian businessmen, 
and the couple had two daughters; Denise, born in 1929, and 
Elisabeth, in 1937.

Harbouring no illusions about the fate that might await them, Irene 
and Michel dispatched the girls to the small Burgundy village of 
Issy-l'Evêque with their nurse on September 1 1939 as war loomed.

The parents followed their daughters to the country in 1941. By that 
stage, two successive "laws governing the status of Jews" had been 
pronounced by the collaborationist French government; Michel was 
barred from working for his bank, and Irène, the toast of Paris just 
months before, was dropped like a stone by the literary establishment 
and no longer able to publish under her own name. (Only one Paris 
publisher, Albin Michel, remained loyal, sending Ffr2,000 or Ffr3,000 
a month for the daughters' upkeep for the rest of the war after Irène 
and Michel were deported.)

"All the time we were in that village, I just remember mother 
writing, writing, writing," Denise, now 75, told the Guardian. "It 
was as if she knew she was writing against time. Indeed, reading 
between the lines, her notes show she knew full well that if ever her 
final work was published, it would be posthumously."

Irène was arrested by gendarmes on July 13 1942, days after finishing 
the second volume, Dolce.

"She was very dignified," said Denise, 13 at the time. "She just said 
she was going on a journey." Irène survived barely 10 days in 
Auschwitz-Birkenau, dying on August 17. Michel, arrested and deported 
two months later after a desperate campaign to save his wife (many of 
his letters and telegrams are reproduced), died in early November.

Denise and Elisabeth owe their lives to one of the gendarmes who 
arrested her father. He told Denise to run home with her little 
sister, grab what she could, and disappear.

What she grabbed was a small suitcase containing family photographs, 
diaries - and the thick leather binder that had never left her 
mother's side. "I didn't know what it was," she said, "but I knew it 
was precious to mother."

The suitcase, and the binder, followed Denise into hiding, from 
cellar to convent to attic, for the rest of the war. For many years 
afterwards, she could not bring herself to open it. Then in the 
mid-1970s, after it was nearly destroyed when her apartment was 
flooded, she decided with her sister to entrust it to the French 
publishing industry's memorial archives.

Deciphered

"I couldn't do that without making a copy," she said. "I started to 
transcribe it."

The project took a long time. Afraid she might run out of ink, Irène 
had written in minuscule letters of barely a millimetre, on cheap 
wartime paper.

Denise needed a large magnifying glass and a great deal of patience.

As she deciphered, copied and recopied, she began to realise she was 
holding not just a work in progress, but two completed novels. Many 
of the episodes she remembered.

The first novel, Tempête en Juin (Storm in June), is a series of 
vital, vivid and often cruel tableaux of families and individuals 
during the panic stricken exodus of June 1940 that saw half of France 
take to the road to flee the Germans.

The second, Dolce, is a more studied and literary portrait of a small 
village, Bussy, at the very beginning of the occupation, and of the 
first tentative complicities of collaboration.

"She settled her accounts with the France that caved in, the 
publishers, the bankers, the bourgeoisie," said Denise. "She was 
hard, but very true. My mother was a woman of extreme lucidity and 
realism, and at the same time a writer with an enormous capacity to 
evoke human emotion."

It was not until April this year that Denise was finally confident 
that she would not be betraying her mother by having the work 
published.

"I had always rejected her victimisation, disliked the fact that what 
remained of her was emotion at her fate. What pleases me, after all 
this time, is that that is now outweighed by emotion at her talent."

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