Suite Française

Born into a wealthy Russian Jewish family that settled in Paris after the Bolshevik Revolution, Irène Némirovsky was educated at the Sorbonne and had a successful career as a writer during her lifetime, with several of her novels adapted for stage and screen. Although Némirovsky was unaffiliated and nonobservant, she was deeply affected by her Jewishness and incorporated conventional antisemitic tropes into her debut novel David Golder (1929) as well as others that followed it. In later years, she regretted the harshness with which she had drawn Jewish financiers and their wives in her work. She and her husband, Michael Epstein, and their two young daughters converted to Catholicism during World War II, but neither her new faith nor her ties to right-wing literary figures were able to save her from arrest and deportation in 1942. The discovery and posthumous publication of her masterpiece, Suite Française, in 2004, as well as its subsequent translation into many languages, kindled new interest in her work.