Nemirovsky Was No "Jewish Holocaust Author"

I had a letter published in last week's Jerusalem Post Friday Magazine but it hasn't made it to their Internet site:-

Marilyn Henry ("'Woman of Letters'", Oct. 10) takes up the cause of Irene Nemirovsky who has been termed a "self-hating Jew". She asks "who are we...to judge Nemirovsky?" following up the literary affair surrounding the post-Holocaust fame the authoress has gained. For Nemirovsky denied her Judaism. But how did she do that?

Born in 1903, she married a Jew at age 23 but three years later published her first novel with negative Jewish stereotype: the Jewish banker. Denied French citizenship in 1938, she converted to Catholicism the next year and published stories in two anti-Semitic magazines, most probably to hide her family's Jewish origins. As Ruth Franklin pointed out in The New Republic in its January 30, 2008 issue, quite a politically liberal forum, Nemirovsky pandered "to the forces of reaction, to the fascist right [with] stories of corrupt Jews" and even saw herself as so un-Jewish that she considered it proper to write a personal plea to Marshal Pétain to avoid deportation.

The conclusion, as Henry suggests, of purging of our bookshelves is ridiculous. All one needs to do is to ignore Nemirovsky's Jewishness quotient and simply read her posthomous works as literature, her Jewish origin notwhithstanding.

I have also previously related to her "Jewish quotient" here.

And now TLS adds this:-

...The anti-Semitic laws of October 3, 1940 caused the newspaper to renege on Némirovsky’s contract. She then appealed to the Société des Gens de Lettres, who upheld her rights, only to be met by the editor’s [refusal]...In her desperation to be published, to earn much-needed money and sustain herself as a creative writer, Némirovsky turned to the collaborator Horace de Carbuccia, who published her work in his weekly newspaper Gringoire, alongside anti-Semitic diatribes and propaganda cartoons. Les Biens de ce monde, appeared in instalments from April 1941 until June and was attributed simply to “a young woman”.

And now, there are those who wish to identify this "young woman" as a Jewish heroine of the Holocaust. And her biographers, Philipponnat and Lienhardt, call her “a lacemaker among savages”.

As I wrote in my letter, one need not read Nemirovsky's novels as "Jewish" literature to appreciate them. Her personal tragedy melded with that of the Jewish cdollective. Nevertheless, a posthumous crowning of her as a Jewish Holocaust author is not only wrong factually but unnecessary. Those who champion her in this role are in error and are contributing to a watering down of the true courage of Jews who went to the aktions in tallit and tefillin. For they were proud Jews. Unlike Nemirovsky.

Dying as a Jew

Yonatan Eldar הי"ד died as a Jew.

Bent over his Gemara, he was shot almost point-blank in the chest. The blood-soaked pages of the Talmudic tome were buried with him.

And then, I read this:-

There are few sadder or more frantic pieces of literary exegesis than the surviving draft of a letter written by Michel Epstein to the German ambassador in occupied France on July 27, 1942 — two weeks after the arrest of Epstein’s 39-year-old wife, the novelist Irène Némirovsky. Desperate for her return, Epstein points out to the ambassador that the Russian-born Némirovsky had lived in France for 20 years and that while her grandparents may have been Jewish, she herself is a Roman Catholic. Epstein does not mention that he and Némirovsky had converted to Catholicism only three years earlier, hoping to gain some security against the threat posed by Hitler.

He does, however, grasp at a literary straw, informing the ambassador that Némirovsky’s books contain not “a single word against Germany” and that in them his wife “does not speak of the Jews with any affection whatsoever.” A day after drafting his letter, Epstein recalls another bit of his wife’s exculpatory prose and rushes to draw it to the attention of her publisher : “I think that in ‘David Golder,’ the chapter where David does a deal with the Bolsheviks to buy oil rights cannot be seen as very kindly towards them.”

Nothing Epstein tried had a prayer of working. Némirovsky would die at Auschwitz in a matter of weeks, and he himself would be murdered there before the year was out.

It takes all kinds.