The trouble with shock-horror revelations is that they can be made only once before they lose a good deal of their shock-horror quotient. For this reason I was surprised when, browsing in the current issue of The New Republic, I came across a piece by Ruth Franklin promising readers the “nasty truth about a new literary heroine.” Just how new? The hardcover edition of Suite Française, translated by Sandra Smith, was released by Knopf in Spring 2006. It was in Autumn of that year that Tess Lewis, writing in The Hudson Review, delivered most of the dirt piled up in Franklin’s essay on Némirovsky. Here’s Lewis:
By now most readers have heard the dramatic story of Irène Némirovsky’s unfinished epic, Suite Française. Against all odds, the manuscript, a leather-bound notebook, survived World War II hidden in a suitcase the author’s adolescent daughter, Denise Epstein, carried faithfully from one hiding place to another in tiny villages, convents, and cellars throughout occupied France. . . . As an adult, Denise had occasionally tried to decipher her mother’s miniscule handwriting—paper was hard to come by in Vichy France . . .
Here’s Franklin:
The writer: a Jew who had fled to the French countryside seeking refuge from occupied Paris, eventually deported to Auschwitz, where she would die in a typhus epidemic soon after her arrival. The book: scribbled in minuscule letters, so as to conserve paper and ink, in a leather-bound journal that would be carried into hiding by the writer’s eldest daughter. She would survive the war and keep it as a memento of her mother, once a well-known novelist, daring to read its contents only sixty years later.
Lewis:
Yet few readers outside of France are aware of a disturbing side to Irène Némirovsky’s story. The English translation of Suite Française . . . includes a shortened version of the scholar Myriam Anissimov’s preface to the French edition with Anissimov’s detailed account of Némirovsky’s tragedy, but not her discussion of the extent to which Némirovsky’s previous novels were riddled with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Jewish characters in her books are marked, with few exceptions, by hooked noses, flaring nostrils, flaccid hands, sallow complexions, dark, oily curls, hysteria, avarice, unscrupulous business practices, and an atavistic ability to trade in commodities and goods. The list goes on.
Franklin:
The real irony of the Suite Francaise sensation is not that a great work of literature was waiting unread in a notebook for sixty years before finally being brought to light. It is that this accomplished but unexceptional novel, having acquired the dark frame of Auschwitz, posthumously capped the career of a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes.
And so on. Both pieces are well worth reading. There’s no harm in bringing this unpleasant and complicating truth to new readers—I can’t imagine The Hudson Review has half the circulation of The New Republic—but Franklin ought to have acknowledged that Lewis beat her to this earth-shaking discovery by somewhere in the neighborhood of a year and a half.