Published after years in the hands of Némirovsky's daughter who refused to look at the leather-bound book of notes for decades, afraid to re-open the wounds formed in her from her mother's and father's 1942 death at Auschwitz. Suitte Francais was written in occupied France during the war and was interrupted by her abduction by the Nazi machine in July 1942. The book contains two of five planned novels detailing life in war-time, occupied France. It's a devastating work, particularly for the factual appendices, which contain her notes for the planned book series, her impressions of what felt like (and was) impending doom, and the letters surrounding her and her husband's ratcheting trouble from having Jewish ancestors in Nazi-occupied France.
Some random quotes:
Appendix, Némirovsky's handwritten notes:
My God! what is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life. And the other countries? What are they to me? Empires are dying. Nothing matters. Whether you look at it from a mystical or a personal point of view, it's just the same. Let us keep a cool head. Let us harden our heart. Let us wait. (Appendix 1, 373)
1942:
The French grew tired of the Republic as if she were an old wife. For them, the dictatorship was a brief affair, adultery. But they intended to cheat on their wife, not to kill her. Now they realise she's dead, their Republic, their freedom. They're mourning her.
For years, everything done in France within a certain social class had had only one motive: fear. This social class caused the war, the defeat and the current peace. The Frenchmen of this caste hate no one; they feel neither jealousy nor disappointed ambition, nor any real desire for revenge. They're scared. Who will harm them the least (not in the future, not in the abstract, but right now and in the form of kicks in the arse or slaps in the face)? The Germans? The English? The Russians? The Germans won but the beating has been forgotten and the Germans can protect them. That's why they're "for the Germans." At school, the weakest student would rather be bullied than be free; the tyrant bullies him but won't allow anyone else to steal his marbles, beat him up. If he runs away from the bully, he is alone, abondoned in the free-for-all. [Analogous to America, psychologically, economically, now? The country is a lot weaker, more ridden with fear, fragile, in that devastating place of powerful illusion before the disillusion, than anyone wants to acknowledge (look in your heart, and it's clearly there). Look at our (the policy-makers, big-time journalism) judgements in the world - they're clouded by a destructive self-interest. We have to have self-interest, obviously, but "our way of life" is clouding all reasonable, common-sense, logical, sustainable decision-making. It's immensely sad - the karma that started with the response to the World Trade Center bombing and our vow to "root out evil," is coming home to roost.] (377)
They're trying to make us believe we live in the age of the "community," when the individual must perish so that society may live, and we don't want to see that it is society that is dying so the tyrants can live (378).
[To herself, about Suitte Francais] Have no illusions: this is not for now. So mustn't hold back, must strike with a vengeance wherever I want (379).
Inimitable descriptions but not historical (383). [Of her approach to writing a novel, capturing the spirit, not constricted by documenting inane facts.]
[About Suitte Francais] Keep it simple. Tell what's happening to people and that's all (380).
I think that what gives War and Peace the expansion Forster talks about (Forster: Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over we feel that the notes and tunes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. Cannot the novel be like that? Is not there something of it in War and Peace?), is quite simply the fact ... (386-387). [She was thinking very carefully, intelligently how to tell this devastating story.
What lives on [in the midst of tyranny: life, art, and God (page 388)]:
1 Our humble day-to-day lives
2 Art
3 God
The Holocaust is absolutely mind-boggling. So must all genocides. Think of Rwanda. But something feels so much closer to home about the Holocaust, maybe because of the stronger, more immediate cultural ties (as a nation).
I grew up Jewish, and I must say I'm tired of seeing films, etc. come out about the Holocaust. Can we somehow funnel Hollywood Jewish money differently? I understand, never forget ...
Having just read Suitte Francais, the poignancy and unbelievability of the event is mind-crushingly nuts. Némirovsky wrote the novel/notes during the World War II in occupied France and didn't finish it because, as a Russian Jew (though she was a practicing Catholic; to Naziland, three Jewish grandparents = a Jew, no matter the later manifestation of life - some curious twist on a biblical generational curse), she died in Auschwitz in 1942. The absolutely nuts part about the book and its circumstance is (the book ends with a sequence of her letters and husband's, etc.) is that she knew (as attested in the letters) she was going to die and could do nothing about it. The Jewish round-up slowly constricted life, and she (and many others about themselves) knew it. One day she was taken, and her husband's progressively frantic letters about finding/retrieving her are devastating. As the program intensified, he met her same fate, later, in Auschwitz. What the hell was going on? And France was occupied, but what the hell were its citizens thinking letting this happen? I know the psychology of a slowly ratcheting pain/change, but damn. Slowly boil, instead of flash-fire. Neighbors just watched it happen, but also, as described in the novel, the French soul had rolled over for the Germans (including the country's daughters), so they were basically lifeless/heartless/backboneless, but still. It is absolutely amazing.
Appendix II includes Némirovsky and her husband's, et al., letters.
Michel Epstein [Irène's husband] to Andre Sabatier [publisher] (19 September 1942) [unknown to Epstein, who would be taken to Auschwitz on November 6, 1942, and immediately sent to the gas chamber, Irène had been dead for just over a month by the letter's date]:
Our letters have crossed. I thank you for giving me some news, no matter how depressing it may be. Could you please find out if it would be possible for me to be exchanged for my wife - I would perhaps be more useful in her place and she would be better off here. If this is impossible, maybe I could be taken to her - we would be better off together. Obviously, it would be necessary to speak to you about all this in person.
The blaring question is Why?
For some context, some snippets from Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under the Nazi Occupation (2010):
Poorly prepared, the French Army was soundly defeated in less than six weeks [less than six weeks!] by the German offensive in the West, which was launched on May 10, 1940 (30).
The armistice of June 22, 1940 divided France into two zones, separated by a demarcation line: to the north, territory under the administration of the German Military Commander in Franche (Militarbefehlshaber im Frankreich); to the south -- until the German invasion of November 1942 -- territory under the authority of the Vichy regime. (64).
Collaboration with the Nazi Occupier was the official policy of Vichy France (132).
A timeline:
1: July 22, 1940, outlaw of recent foreign nationals.
2: October 3, 1940, (first ("Statute on Jews") proclamation: defined Jews (three jewish grandparents or two jewish grandparents and a jewish spouse); quit working life and go into exile.
3: June 2, 1941, (second "Statute on Jews"); further employment restrictions, new definition (two jewish grandparents = Jewish).
4: January 20, 1942, the Wannsee Conference, Nazis planned the "Final Solution of the Jewish question." WTF!
5: March 27, 1942, first convoy to Auschwitz, all Jews required to wear yellow Star of David. The mighty king.
6: June 16, 17, Spring Breeze [Némirovsky among this one]; round up, with help of French police, of registered Jews (28,000) and then sent to Drancy and then off.
Summer 1942 to end of July 1944, 76,000 Jews deported from France. Only 2,500 survived.
See Paul Gray's amazing review of Suite Francais in a 2006 long, Sunday New York Times book review here.
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