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.
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