The Némirovsky Question : The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France / Susan Rubin Suleiman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Suleiman, Susan Rubin, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Némirovsky, Irène, 1903-1942.

Némirovsky, Irène.

Némirovsky, Irène, 1903-1942--Criticism and interpretation.

Jewish women--France--Biography.

Jewish women.

Jews--France--Biography.

Jews.

Novelists, French--20th century--Biography.

Novelists, French.

France.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (380 pages)

Place of Publication:

New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

A fascinating look into the life and work of controversial French novelist Irène Némirovsky Irène Némirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a "foreign Jew" in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they brought their mother back to life. In 2004, Suite française, Némirovsky's posthumous novel, became an international best seller; some critics, however, condemned her as a "self-hating Jew" whose earlier works were rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Informed by personal interviews with Némirovsky's descendants and others, as well as by extensive archival research, this wide-ranging intellectual biography situates Némirovsky in the literary and political climate of interwar France and recounts, for the first time, the postwar lives of her daughters. Némirovsky's Jewish works, Suleiman argues, should be read as explorations of the conflicted identities that shaped the lives of secular Jews in twentieth-century Europe and beyond.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Note on Translations and Citations

Introduction: A Writer Reborn...and Debated

Part I. Irène

1. The "Jewish Question"

2. Némirovsky's Choices, 1920-1939

3. Choices and Choicelessness, 1939-1942

Part II. Fictions

4. Foreigners and Strangers: Némirovsky's Jewish Protagonists

5. Portraits of the Artist as a Young Jewish Woman

Part III. Denise and Elisabeth

6. Orphans of the Holocaust: Two Lives

7. Gifts of Life: A Mother and Her Daughters

Notes

Bibliography and Sources

Acknowledgments

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 29. Feb 2020)

OCLC:

961457406