Némirovsky was equally adept at large canvases and miniatures. While the former novel offers an astute portrait of an entire age on a grand scale, the latter details an intimate and complex relation between a mother and daughter. A thriving young family and a highly active public life did not hamper her creative energy, and during the 1930s Nemirovsky produced two best-selling novels that quickly became feature films: David Golder in 1929 (starring Harry Baur in Julien Duvivier’s first sound film about an unhappy Jewish patriarch and businessman) and Le Bal in 1930 (adapted to film in 1931, starring Danielle Darrieux in her screen debut as a sensitive young woman who despises the greed of the nouveaux riches). That same year she married Michel Epstein, a Russian emigré and banker they had two daughters, Denise, born in 1929 and Elisabeth, in 1937. Némirovsky had earned a licence de lettres at the Sorbonne in 1926 (she became fluent in French and maintained her prolific career in that language), a year that also saw the publication of her first novel, Le Malentendu (although she had been publishing short stories and novellas since 1923). In 1942, soon after she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz (on Convoy Number 6, July 17, one of the first convoys out of France immediately after the Vel d’Hiv roundup), Nemirovsky died of typhus at the age of thirty-nine, leaving behind two little girls and a literary legacy whose astonishing breadth and sensitivity suggest comparisons with Balzac and Tolstoy. Sixty-two years after it was written, Némirovsky’s epic of France in the first years of the German Occupation, Suite Française (French Suite), received the prestigious Prix Renaudot (previously given only to living authors and second in importance to the Prix Goncourt), turning the spotlight back onto this extraordinarily talented novelist and the tragedy of a career cut short by the Holocaust.
The story of Irène Némirovsky’s life is as complex, captivating, and heartbreaking as any of her numerous novels, yet this story would have remained hidden from history if not for a controversial and unprecedented panel decision that rocked the French literary establishment in November 2004.
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