Suite Française

The first two tales from a masterpiece that was originally believed to be lost, written by a best-selling novelist before World War II who was sent to Auschwitz and died before her work could be finished.

Irène Némirovsky, a Ukrainian-born writer, was already a very accomplished Parisian writer by the early 1940s when she started work on what would become Suite Française, the first two sections of a planned five-part book. However, she was a Jew as well, and in 1942 she was taken into custody and sent to Auschwitz, where she died a month later at the age of 39. She had started her work two years before, while she was still living in a little commune in central France, where she, her husband, and their two young girls had fled in a fruitless bid to avoid the Nazis. Her novel was a brilliant depiction of a human drama in which she would also become a victim. Her handwritten manuscripts for the two sections of the epic she had finished before being incarcerated were stashed away in a suitcase that her children would finally carry into concealment and freedom. It is now possible for us to read Némirovsky's literary masterwork 64 years later.

The first section, "A Storm in June," begins amid the turmoil of the great migration from Paris in 1940, just before the Nazi invasion, when a number of families and people are thrust together due to uncontrollable circumstances. All they have in common is the struggle to survive; some are trying to live privileged lives, while others are just trying to make ends meet. But soon, they will all have to deal with the terrible realities of being uprooted both physically and psychologically, as well as the destruction of the world they know. The second section, "Dolce," immerses us in the progressively intricate existence of a provincial community under German occupation. The townspeople, who range in class from nobles to shopkeepers to peasants, coexist uncomfortably with the troops stationed among them and make do with what they can. The lives of these men and women show nothing less than the very essence of humanity as their community is altered by their choices of resistance and participation.

The beautiful, very emotional piece of art Suite Française is a particularly penetrating portrayal of life and death in occupied France. It is both nuanced and harsh, immensely empathetic, and furiously sardonic.