A World, Interrupted: Suite FrancÁaise

By Bruce Collier November 30, 2006 Issue

Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite FrancÁaise is a posthumously published, incomplete novel covering roughly the first year of Nazi Germany’s conquest and occupation of France. The book was translated into English by Sandra Smith, from the original French. The story is told in two parts, Storm in June, and Dolce. The first chronicles the exodus of individuals and families from Paris in the summer of 1940, fleeing what they fear is the impending annihilation of their city by the German army. The second is the story of a small village occupied by a German regiment, and the interaction of the soldiers with the citizens, and the citizens with each other, under the new order.

Suite Francaise also includes about 55 additional pages, called Appendices I and II, and a preface to the original French edition of the book, which was published in 2004. If you skip the appendices and preface, you will miss a great deal. Most appendices offer scholarly sidelights or explanations of footnotes. These include Nemirovsky’s notes on the first two parts, and tantalizing glimpses at the parts that did not get written. Her notes indicate that she was planning three other parts, modeled after a musical composition, five “movements” in all. Stories begun or hinted at are concluded, characters developed, and an attempt made to “predict” the outcome of the occupation and war. Nemirovsky never learned the outcome. In July of 1942, she was arrested and transported to Auschwitz, where she died only a month after arriving.

Also in the appendices is a chronological correspondence, between Nemirovsky, her husband, publisher, and others. The pathetic ironies begin to accumulate when we learn her wealthy banking family had fled to France from Russia to escape the Bolshevik revolution, and, though Jews, she and her husband Michael Epstein had both converted to Roman Catholicism. They were also raising their two daughters in that faith. Nevertheless, among the reasons for her deportation was that, being Russian, she was assumed to have pro-Communist sympathies.

Though only 37, Nemirovsky had already established herself in Paris as a writer of note, with five novels and a biography of Anton Chekhov to her credit. Some of her writings had even been published in a notoriously anti-Semitic, anti-Communist journal. It was all for naught, Nazi racial laws being inflexible about “non-Aryan” bloodlines.

After his wife’s arrest, Epstein wrote an increasingly desperate series of letters and telegrams to persons of influence. Unaware of his wife’s location and fate, Epstein frantically ticks off all the non-Jewish, anti-Communist elements of his wife’s background and work. He continued his efforts even after her death. Epstein was himself carried off to Auschwitz in September of 1942 and gassed upon arrival. Tragically, there is no indication he ever learned of his wife’s fate, or of the fact that the Nazis had actually reunited them, if only at the place of their extermination.

Suite Francaise is as much a historical document as a novel, and must be read in its entirety to be fully appreciated. Since Nemirovsky never had the chance to finish or edit the manuscript, it contains some discrepancies of description and inaccuracies. Characters and storylines are begun but not fully realized. Handwritten in a small village in central France, with Nemirovsky keeping one eye out for the Nazis, the manuscript was rescued by her daughters and carefully preserved in their many hiding places. Though both escaped the Nazis, neither reportedly could bear to look at the work, and thus it remained unexamined until one daughter, an editor, decided to type it out. She realized that it was more than just a journal, and the result is what the French preface calls a “vivid snapshot” of the fall of France.

As for the novel itself, Suite Francaise is not a carefully plotted and crafted story in the style of War and Peace, a book much on Nemirovsky’s mind in her notes. It is episodic, especially Storm in June. Groups of people flee Paris, including a wealthy family, a famous author, a middle class couple, and others. Some return, some do not.

In Dolce, some villagers find the Germans abhorrent; others get along just fine with them. Interestingly, the German soldiers, unseen in the first part, are portrayed fairly sympathetically in the second. With a few exceptions, Nemirovsky paints the French mainly as fearful complainers, callous, greedy, and far more mistrustful of each other than of the Germans. As a refugee, both from her country and her family’s faith, she may have been writing from first-hand experience. As with millions of other lives and stories interrupted by World War II and the Holocaust, we’ll never know.

Suite Francaise, 395 pages, Knopf. Available at bookstores, libraries, and online booksellers.

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