After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française

Abstract

Nathan Bracher. After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irene Nemirovsky's Suite francaise. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010. Pp.268. There is a legend about Irene Nemirovsky's Suite francaise. The manuscript, the legend goes, was in a suitcase that Nemirovksy's daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, carried around with them after the war. Denise did not open the manuscript--again according to the legend--until 2004; she then realized that it was her mother's grande oeuvre and she brought it to the attention of Olivier Rubenstein at Denoel. The rest is history. This is the legend that Nathan Bracher perpetuates in his After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irene Nemirovsky's Suite francaise, and it has little basis in reality. Denise Epstein had already spent two years deciphering the tiny handwriting and typing out Tempete en juin when I read the manuscript in 1996 at the Institut Memoire de l'Edition Contemporaine, located at that time in Paris. Dolce, which I also saw, had not yet been completely deciphered. More important, there were two manuscripts of Tempete en juin. One of them had been typed by Michel Epstein, Nemirovsky's husband, and corrected and modified by Nemirovsky herself. This manuscript contains significant changes from the first, handwritten one, and I argue in my book (1) that these changes are significant and point in the direction Nemirovsky's spiritual development was heading. The point is that Suite francaise never was, and is not now, a finished work. It is a work in progress, and Denise Epstein (and others) were opposed to its being published because, as Denise would say, her mother did not have the chance to edit a final version. It was Miriam Anissimov who convinced Denise to publish the manuscript and to use the earlier rather than the revised version of Tempete en juin. Any analysis of Suite francaise should take these facts into account and temper its judgment of the work with the knowledge that had Nemirovsky lived beyond July 1942, she may well have produced a significantly modified work. Nathan Bracher's book takes Suite francaise to be a completed chef d'oeuvre and in 260 pages of ponderous, pedantic prose, walks us through the novel from start to finish. He makes scant reference to other works by Nemirovsky or to her life in Issy L'Eveque at the time she was writing Suite francaise. He defends his methodology in the introduction: Instead of using biographical details to 'explain' Nemirovsky's narrative [...] I argue that Suite francaise makes distinctive and important contributions to our intelligence of several often neglected facets of the war (xv). Putting aside the fact that a novel informed by the author's life and a novel that reveals important historical truths are not mutually exclusive, Bracher concentrates Nemirovsky's descriptions of characters and her use of indirect free (89) to reveal the characters' innermost thoughts. He argues that Nemirovsky's narrative, through the use of irony in some cases and sympathy in others, subverts the defeatist, petainiste discourse of 1940 and takes sides with those who resist the German occupation. Bracher's own style is often hyperbolic (referring, for example, to Nemirovsky's Olympian overview of events [67]) and sometimes argumentative. Among those whose judgments he disagrees with (including Philipponat and Lienhardt, or Rene de Cecatty), Bracher chooses to direct most of his ire at me. An example: Jonathan Weiss summons Nemirovsky to his tribunal and indicts her a battery of charges, including cultural apostasy [...], social heresy [...] and political dereliction (xiv). It is difficult to see how anyone could interpret the conclusion to my book (to which Bracher refers) as putting Nemirovsky on trial; the contrary, I am simply referring to the profound ambiguities that Nemirovsky's life presents. Another example, just as egregious: Jonathan Weiss mockingly characterizes Nemirovsky as 'un ecrivain de nulle part' [. …