Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
Irene Nemirovsky was Jewish. Her family escaped anti-semitic persecution from the Russian government during the 1917 revolution. She relocated to France, and after being arrested in 1942 died in the concentration camp Auschwitz at the age of thirty-nine.
Suite Francaise is in two parts. Nemirovsky’s intention was to write a five part novel, covering the entire duration of World War II, but was arrested before completing the last three segments. The novel does cover the Nazi invasion of France in 1940 and through the eyes of a variety of characters, the reader gets to experience exactly what that was like. It’s an understatement to say it was not pleasant. While the men were off fighting – suffering as prisoners of war – or already deceased, the women, children, and old men were under seige struggling to survive.
The local villages surrounding Paris were overrun with German soldiers. Despite food shortages – the German soldiers confiscated all the “bread, the flour, the potatoes… they had taken the petrol and the cars, and now they were taking the horses…… so there are prisoners, widows, misery, hunger, the occupation.” Most households had to accommodate at least one German boarder – relinquish their power over their own home to the very men who had possibly killed their sons, brothers, husbands and fathers.
And yet, Irene Nemirovsky writes with an unbiased non-judgmental viewpoint. War is bad. That is the message. And within the context of the story she makes a philosophical effort to understand the “struggle between personal destiny and collective destiny.”
One interesting point Nemirovky points out is it is easy to be a nice person with principles, kindness, and integrity when life is going well. It’s another story when confronted with catastrophe – like war. “It’s a truism that people are complicated, multifaceted, contradictory, surprising, but it takes the advent of war or other momentous events to be able to see it. It is the most fascinating and the most dreadful of spectacles…. the most dreadful because it is real; you can never pride yourself on truly knowing the sea unless you’ve seen it both calm and in a storm. Only the person who has observed men and women at times like this…. can be said to know them. And to know themselves.”
This is not a novel about the French Jewish population. It is about the French aristocracy that still owned large tracts of land, the local farmers, the ordinary country folk. If there were Jewish residents among them, it was not yet an issue within the time frame of the first two parts of Suite Francaise. You can see the selfish “every man for himself” mentality begin to emerge as times became more difficult. However, the French were much more compassionate towards the Jews than other European nations. Of the 340,000 Jews in France at the time the German’s invaded France, 75 percent did survive the war. It is a tragedy that even one had to die, and that Irene Nemirovsky didn’t live to finish this novel.
I can’t vouch for the paper back, kindle, and later editions – but the 1st edition printed in English in 2006 has 2 lengthy Appendices (48 pages) of notes from Irene Nemirovsky’s private journal about the situation in France during the occupation and her ideas for the entire novel. Also included are correspondence amongst her family members after her arrest and the Preface to the French Edition – details about her arrest and how the manuscript for the book came to be in a publisher’s hands.
Rated 5 Stars. December 5, 2016
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