The life of irene nemiro.., p.1
The Life of Irene Nemirovsky, page 1
To my dear parents.
To Malika and Kiran.
O.P.
To Christine, Théo and Pierre
P.L.
Like other such lives, like all lives, this is a tragedy; high hopes, noble efforts; under thickening difficulties and impediments, ever-new nobleness of valiant effort;—and the result, death …
—Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling, 1851
I should like this to be used as an epitaph when I die, but it’s a very vain notion. And, anyway, inscriptions on tombs are expensive.
—Irène Némirovsky, 1934
Contents
Note
Translator’s Note
Prologue I Think We Are Leaving Today … (16th/17th July 1942)
PART I A Previous Life (1903–1929)
1 The Most Beautiful Country in the World (1903–1911)
2 A Vague and Murderous Hope (1912–1917)
3 The Upheaval of All Life (1917–1919)
4 Miss Topsy and Mademoiselle Mad (1919–1924)
5 The Demon of Pride (1925–1929)
PART II In the Literary Jungle (1929–1939)
6 One Ounce of Good Luck (1929–1931)
7 Enough Memories to Make a Novel (1932–1935)
Photo Insert
8 How Happy Are the French! (1935–1938)
9 Children of the Night (1938–1939)
PART III Stronger Than the Aversion (1939–1942)
10 French Monsoon (1939–1941)
11 Hatred + Contempt (1941–1942)
12 As on a Shipwrecked Boat (13th July–9th November 1942)
Epilogue A Long Journey (1943–2004)
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Note
IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY often alluded to the fact that prior to writing, she began by filling her notebooks with biographical pointers about the least of her characters; it was what she called the “previous life of the novel.” Then, she reread her notes, criticising and commenting as she went, and at the same time providing some fascinating reflections on her craft as a writer.
In 2004, nothing appeared to survive of these drafts, brimming as they were with personal memories and autobiographical notes, apart from the manuscript of Suite Française, one of the least characteristic of her method of working. She had, however, kept most of them. During the course of 2005, we were fortunate to see draft versions surface of David Golder, of Le Pion sur l’échiquier (The Pawn on the Chessboard), The Wine of Solitude (Le Vin de Solitude), Les Echelles du Levant, or Le Maître des âmes (The Ports of the Levant, or The Master of Souls), The Dogs and the Wolves (Les Chiens et les Loups), as well as the first sketches for Captivité, the third part of Suite Française. Among them were an unpublished novel, Fire in the Blood (Chaleur du sang), at that point in fragments, a number of short stories, some writings from her youth and some separate pages.
Yet, she herself was not the least among the real-life people on whom she based her characters. Thus a number of the pages in the working notebook for The Wine of Solitude contain memories of conversations, of asides overheard twenty years previously, reconstructed through an occasionally painful feat of memory, which we reproduce faithfully in the first part of this book. In this way, the “previous life” of Irène Némirovsky in imperial and revolutionary Russia, that of her parents and grandparents, her exile in Finland and later in Sweden, which until now were only known about because of a few administrative documents and some interviews given to the press in the 1930s, have sprung from oblivion with a wealth of astonishing detail, sometimes corroborated by new archival information and unpublished family testimony.
In this biography, we indicate the source of all quotations taken from the published work of Irène Némirovsky. In certain cases—mostly autobiographical—where the source is not given—they have come from these manuscripts, diaries and working notebooks, all of which are kept at the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC), at Ardenne Abbey in Normandy.
Translator’s Note
WHEN REFERRING to Irène Némirovsky’s published work, I have used the English title where the translation is already available or about to be translated; elsewhere, I have used the French title. All the extracts from Irène Némirovsky’s novels and short stories included in this biography have been translated by Sandra Smith, the gifted translator of Suite Française and other fictional works by Irène Némirovsky published in English. I should like to record my gratitude to Sandra for her advice and collaboration. I should also like to thank Olivier Philipponnat for diligent elucidation and help on certain aspects of his and his co-author Patrick Lienhardt’s text, and Dominique Enright for her meticulous and sensitive editing of my manuscript. Others who have kindly come to my aid include Anthea Bell, Robert Chandler, Geraldine D’Amico, Michel Déon, the late Miles Huddleston, Raphaëlle Liebaert, Koukla MacLehose and Nelly Munthe.
E.C.
Prologue
I Think We Are Leaving Today …
(16th/17th July 1942)
That children, women, men, mothers and fathers should be treated like lowly cattle, that members of the same family should be separated from one another and taken off to an unknown destination; it was to be the fate of our age to witness this sad spectacle.
—Monseigneur Jules Saliège, Archbishop of Toulouse, Pastoral letter Et clamor Jerusalem ascendit, 23 August 1942
IT IS A WAGON fitted with a sliding door, used for transporting cattle. Straw has been thrown in and a bucket of water placed inside. The small, high air vents have been covered in barbed wire, so that it is impossible to escape once the sliding door has been closed. A prison on wheels, attached to another, which pulls a third, and so on. On 17th July 1942, this convoy is the sixth to leave France. Its nine hundred and twenty-eight passengers have not asked to leave, they have no tickets, they have only a suitcase and a few belongings. They do not know their destination and their loved ones do not know where they are going.
Some of these travellers have been misleadingly “convened” during the round-up of the Jews in Paris, on 14th May 1941, for “verification of status.” Since then, they have been stagnating in a very basic camp, from which it would have been so easy to escape had they not been terrified of exposing their families to reprisals. Over the past few weeks, women and children have also been arrested. It was a task made all the simpler since all or nearly all of them declared themselves to the authorities: what did they risk, in France, by conforming to the law? Others, like her, were taken from their homes only a few days previously. They were not surprised at their arrest: ever since October 1940, the police have been authorised to intern Jews in “special camps,” at the discretion of the préfets, the local chief commissioners.
For they are all Jews, all foreigners: tantamount to an offence in occupied France. They have walked through Pithiviers in single file, suitcase in hand, past the windows of the local inhabitants. They passed the sugar refinery, stepped over the railway lines, and walked through the wooden gate guarded by a policeman. Once registered, they were led into some large military sheds where bedsteads covered in straw could accommodate about one hundred adults. “Needless to say, the Loiret region could have done without this gift,” L’Écho de Pithiviers regretted on 24th May 1941. “Nevertheless, carefully supervised, the foreign Jews will not be too dangerous. And it is far preferable, all things considered, to know that they are behind barbed wire fences instead of running our town halls and our important services … The purging of France has thus begun in earnest. Let us admit that it was very necessary and that it has not come a moment too soon.”1
The French police put in charge of guarding the camp are not bad men. Just disciplinarians. Some of them helped with the visits and the receiving of parcels, and they posed for souvenir photographs with the prisoners. But since the summer of 1941, the rules have been tightened. Refusing to do forced labour in the neighbouring farms, several hundred prisoners eventually absconded. As a retaliatory measure, no further leaves were permitted and visits were cancelled. It became pointless to try to evade the guards, who were stationed in watchtowers and behind the railings. Once they were recaptured, those who had escaped were locked up for a few days in a small prison made of corrugated iron, open to the full sunlight. The German authorities decided to convert this collection of sheds and those at Beaune-la-Rolande, built in 1940 to house potential prisoners of war, into transit camps for the concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland. Over there, all these Jews can be herded in their tens of thousands, far from prying eyes, and when the time came—sometimes immediately—murdered in the gas chambers, which have been in operation since earlier in 1942.
On 25th and 28th June 1942, two initial convoys of a thousand people left the camp for an unknown destination. And it is to maintain the full complement that the round-ups and arrests, bureaucratically known as “regroupment operations,” have been increased in the German-occupied zone of France. Between the arrivals and departures, the Pithiviers camp in this early summer looks like a railway station concourse. In the letter she writes to her husband upon her arrival, on Wednesday, 15th July, she does not fail to mention this hustle and bustle:
My dearest love
Don’t worry about me. I have arrived safely. For the time being, there is disarray, but the food is very good. I was even astonished … A parcel and a letter may be sent once a month.
Above all, don’t be anxious. Things wi
Irène
She is not registered until the following morning, 16th July, by Lieutenant Le Vagueresse “temporary commandant Pithiviers,” who cannot be bothered with accuracy and writes in his register: “Epstein Irène Nimierovski, writer.” This is a list of the one hundred and nineteen women who in a few hours will climb aboard convoy no. 6 for Auschwitz. Furthermore, who is there to appeal to? Nobody knows anything about this destination, but the fact that they will leave at night has not been concealed. Jukiel Obarzanek, a Polish hosier worker, who joined up as a volunteer in 1939, wrote to his family: “I am writing to tell you that I am leaving this evening. I think we are going away to work … There are women among us too, about a hundred of them and they are very brave.”2 One of the women is “Irma Irène Epstein, writer,” as indicated on her ration card, confiscated after her arrest. She, too, writes a quick note to her family, the last they will receive:
Thursday morning
My dearest, my beloved little ones
I think we are leaving today. Courage and hope. You are all in my heart, my dears. May God protect us all.
Departure is in fact scheduled for the following morning, 17th July, at 6:15 a.m., under the command of Lieutenant Schneider of the gendarmerie. Everything is more discreet at dawn. Irène Némirovsky has been less than two days at Pithiviers. Room has to be made, and quickly, for the thousands of Jews arrested the previous day and on that same day in Paris, who are temporarily packed into the Vélodrome d’Hiver.
Those deported, “delivered to the Occupation authorities,” are squeezed in eighty to the wagon, sometimes more. The women probably fill only a single wagon. “We didn’t know where we were going, but we knew we were being deported,” Samuel Chymisz, one of the survivors, recounts. “There was a joke being spread around that we were going to work. Except that they had crammed one hundred and ten of us into each wagon. And very soon the idea occurred to us and went around the wagon: ‘If we are going to work in Germany, why have they packed us in, one hundred and ten to the wagon? We’ll arrive in shreds!’ And they didn’t give us any water at all. In July, in enclosed wagons!”3 This time, they begin to understand. Letters of farewell drop from the window vents. Some of them will reach their destination.
Samuel Chymisz remembers that the first stop was the station of Chalon-sur-Saône, sixty kilometres as the crow flies from Issy-l’Évêque, the small town in the Saône-et-Loire département where Irène Némirovsky lived during the first two years of the Occupation, and where she wrote her last novels. At this very moment, Michel Epstein, who is confined at home by the laws of the Vichy regime, is there redoubling his appeals, his telegrams and letters soliciting aid for his wife through all possible channels. All he receives are worrying replies, such as this telegram from an intermediary of the Red Cross, an ironmonger in Pithiviers, on that same 17th July: “Pointless sending package as haven’t seen your wife.”
Convoy no. 6 will take three days and two nights to reach Auschwitz-Birkenau. Samuel Chymisz: “We stretched out our hands through the vents, there were some French people on the platforms … ‘A little water, please, a little water!’ Not one French person moved to go and get us a little water. Not one. They were either frightened or they couldn’t be bothered, I don’t know.”4 And not once are they given anything to eat, even though the last wagon, curiously, is loaded with food. Across the frontier, in the German stations, civilians laugh when they notice hands and faces through the vents. Some of them spit.
Not everyone is alive when they arrive at the Judenrampe (the unloading ramp for Jews) at Auschwitz-Birkenau on 19th July at about 7:00 p.m. Those who suffocated, or have been trampled, or dehydrated, have been unloaded along the way. Others have been killed by SS bullets fired at the wagons to stop the groaning. The survivors, battered from having had to stand, from lack of sleep, the heat, the overcrowding, the inevitable quarrels and the foul stench, can hardly walk. Yet they are obliged to cover the distance to the camp beneath a volley of beatings, lashes from whips, and orders that are barked out. “We wanted to take our luggage. Keine Bagage nicht! We had to leave it on the train. As we got out, we saw what resembled corpses, dressed in striped uniforms, with ridiculous little hats on their heads, who climbed up on to the trains and threw our luggage down to the ground. Then we were immediately put into rows. Links, rechts5 [left, right]!”
The women are separated from the men. Their jewellery and rings are confiscated. They are searched, made to take a shower, shaved and dressed in a coarse, striped material, and tattooed with the numbers 9550 to 9668. The men have the numbers 48880 to 49688. Almost two hundred of them belong to the district of Dijon, but the majority are Parisian artisans: tailors, shoemakers, shopkeepers, tanners, a jeweller, a dry cleaner, a heating engineer, a cabinet maker, a butcher, a riveter, a furrier, a hairdresser, a male nurse, a second-hand dealer, a scrap merchant … Really nothing in common with the “all-powerful” Jews denounced by propaganda as having “wormed their way into the best jobs.”6
Among these men there is a composer, Simon Laks, to whom the SS will entrust the camp’s band. And among these women, a novelist, Irène Némirovsky, who has never for a moment imagined she would leave France, “the most beautiful country in the world,”7 because she was the family’s wage-earner and she has dreamed in French for a very long time. She will not survive a month in this new Sakhaline.* No Chekhov here to bear witness to her wretchedness, to “this seed of madness, cruelty, hatred and death” scattered in fistfuls, and that has reaped “such terrible harvests.”8 On 19th August at 3:20 p.m., according to the Auschwitz certificate, Irène Némirovsky falls victim to “flu.” In concentration-camp language, an epidemic of typhus. She is thirty-nine years old and an asthmatic.
“And so,” she thinks, “I regret nothing. I have been happy. I have been loved. I am still loved, I know that’s true, in spite of the distance between us, in spite of the separation.”9 She leaves behind a husband and two dearly beloved little girls. As well as an unfinished novel, Suite Française, of which the third part was to have been called Captivité.
* The island gulag which Chekhov visited and wrote about. [Tr.]
PART I
A Previous Life
(1903–1929)
1
The Most Beautiful Country in the World
(1903–1911)
But those were legendary times, those distant times when the gardens of the most beautiful city in our Homeland were the preserve of a young, carefree generation.
Then, yes, then the conviction took root in the hearts of this generation that their entire lives would be spent in purity, serenity and calm; the dawns, the sunsets, the Dnieper, the Kreschatik, the sunny summer streets and, in winter, snow that did not bring with it cold weather or a harsh climate, a snow that was thick and gentle … And it was the very opposite that happened.
—Mikhail Bulgakov, “The City of Kiev,” Nakanune (On the Eve) newspaper, 6th July 1923
IN KIEV, in about 1910, a florist at the sign of La Flore de Nice was selling hydrangeas and Christmas roses. Was the business prosperous? In the Ukrainian capital, “there were so many lime trees [along the streets] that in springtime, you walked beneath an archway of blossom and on a carpet of flowers.”1 Once winter was over, hyacinths and dandelions defied the last gusts of snow. In a few days’ time, the lime trees in the old Revny park would take on a fresh pale plumage and the Marinsky park, poised upon the red clay cliffs that crumble down into the river, would be filled with copses of mauve. After that came an explosion of pollens, that covered the Kreschatik, the principal thoroughfare of the city, in a carpet of pale yellow.
There is no writer who has not been struck by the mass of vegetation that every year floods the Pechersk district, perched high in the heart of Kiev. When he went back there in 1923, to find it ravaged by four consecutive years of onslaughts and pillaging, Mikhail Bulgakov, who was born there thirty years earlier, had not forgotten the joyful eruption of spring: “The gardens were white with flowers, the Garden of the Tsars was covered in green, the sun pierced all the windows, setting them ablaze.”2 And Irène Némirovsky: “How beautiful it is in springtime, in this land! The streets lined with gardens and the air giving off the scent of lime trees, lilacs, sweet moisture rising from the lawns; these trees, in clusters, release their sugary perfume into the night.”3 So what need was there for a florist from Nice in the city of Kiev, which was so saturated with perfumes that every evening, before the open-air concert in the Kupechesky park, they had first to spray the beds of stocks and tobacco flowers in order to reduce the fragrance and ward off coughing fits?
