Irene Nemirovsky: Her Life and Works

“This short critical biography by Weiss, an expert on contemporary French literature, is a fine introduction to her work.”—Publishers Weekly
"...A brief, but intensely thought-provoking biography by Jonathan Weiss..."
—The San Francisco Chronicle

Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works, the first English-language biography of the author of the internationally acclaimed novel, Suite Française, is an intimate portrait of a woman who bore witness to the tragedies that befell France in the early days of the occupation, and who herself became a victim of the Nazi regime. The result of close textual analysis of her work and primary documents passed on from Némirovsky herself, this fascinating book explores a literary work that revisits in a unique way Jewish identity, exile, betrayal, and the solidarity of a persecuted people.

Publishers Weekly

Ir ne N mirovsky's brilliant 1940 novel Suite Fran aise was a surprise bestseller earlier this year. N mirovsky published more than a dozen novels and several biographies in her short lifetime, achieving acclaim in her adopted country of France. But information about the life and career of the Russian-born Jewish novelist, who died in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 39, has been scarce. This short critical biography by Weiss, an expert on contemporary French literature, is a fine introduction to her work. N mirovsky attained literary stature in France in 1930 with the publication of David Golder, a satiric portrait of the Parisian Jewish business community. Weiss's analysis of the Jewish press's negative response to David Golder (they "reeled, as if struck by a bomb") is excellent. N mirovsky continued to have a fruitful literary career until her deportation to Auschwitz. Weiss offers a discussion of N mirovsky's 1939 conversion to Catholicism, which appears to have been sincere although at the same time she was exploring the personal meaning of Judaism in her life. At times Weiss relies too heavily on autobiographical readings of N mirovsky's novels, but such a tack is understandable given that we are in the early stages of scholarly work to be done, of which this is a fascinating and important beginning. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Jonathan Weiss is Professor of French Language and Literature at Colby College. In 1996, he met Irène Némirovsky's two daughters. With their help, he was able to consult all the documents that their mother had passed on to them. This biography is the result of that research and of close textual analysis of Némirovsky's literary work.