1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910148636503321

Autore

Suleiman Susan Rubin

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

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

©2016

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (380 pages)

Disciplina

843/.912

B

Soggetti

Jewish women - France

Jews - France

Novelists, French - 20th century

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary

France

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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.