I AM Modern Magazine for Moms

After hearing the title thrown about at the last Modern Mom Book Club discussion, one Mod Mom member picked up Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise and gave it an enthusiastic endorsement.  The book itself has an interesting history.  Publishing her first novel in 1929 at the age of twenty-six, Nemirovsky had written ten successful novels, one of which was turned into a film, when World War II erupted.  She knew, however, that her literary accomplishments would not distract the Germans from the fact that she was foreign-born and a Jew.  Her family’s 1939 conversion to Catholicism was not enough to prevent them from being classified as Jews and race laws, passed by the Nazis in October 1940 and June 1941, further confined them to Paris.  The police came for Nemirovsky on July 13, 1942; by then, she had been working on Suite Francaise for a year.  She was deported to Aushcwitz and died at Birkenau the next month.  Her husband was arrested in October of the same year; he died in Auschwitz the following month.  Their two daughters spent the war years running from convent to convent eluding a similar fate.  Denise, the oldest daughter, had put the manuscript for Suite Francaise in her suitcase as they ran from the Germans.  Paul Gray, in his April 9, 2006 review of the book for The New York Times, wrote, “Not until the late 1990's did Denise examine what her mother had written and discover, instead of a diary or journal, two complete novellas written in a microscopic hand, evidently to save scarce paper. Denise abandoned her plan to give the notebook to a French institute preserving personal documents from the war years and instead sent it to a publisher. ‘Suite Française’ appeared in France in 2004 and became a best seller.”

As if the story of the book’s journey were not enough to induce you to read, the writing is magnificent.  Irene Nemirovsky exhibits the socioeconomic sweep of Tolstoy in her portraits of the French, a gentle intimacy with the daily lives of her characters and the passion and ardor of Keats or Rilke.  It is a remarkable literary achievement.  I’m including the link to The New York Times review which will give you a more detailed look at the characters and the plot.  Happy reading!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/books/review/09gray.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

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