A New York Review Books Original. When Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française was first published, the world discovered a new great writer. Even in France, however, Némirovsky had been more or less forgotten for years, until her youngest daughter Élisabeth Gille, only five years old when her mother died in Auschwitz, wrote a book to bring her back to life. In 1992 Gille published this fictionalized autobiography of the acclaimed novelist, who had led a sparkling life in Paris as one of the most successful and prolific European writers of the 1930s before being arrested as a Jew and led to her death in 1942.
In the first section of the book, Irène looks back from 1929, the year of her first triumph with David Golder, to her privileged upbringing in Kiev and Saint Petersburg, the precocious only child of a warm, generous father and a vicious, preening, and distant mother. The family escapes Revolutionary Russia to arrive in France, a country of "moderation, freedom, and generosity" that Irène will embrace as her own. In the book's second half, the writer and her husband and two children have fled Paris for a small provincial town in Burgundy, where they must wear the yellow Star of David, come to some accommodation with the occupying German troops, and plead in vain with Irène's illustrious fair-weather champions to intercede on the assimilated family's behalf. She now sees her earlier self as vain and credulous, blinded by her success to the horribly changing political situation, but it is too late.
As fully and deeply imagined as Irène Némirovsky's novels, Gille's mémoires rêvées will also prove indispensable to devotees of the nearly forgotten author for the fascinating new light it sheds on her life and work.
Gille's two "deamed memories" combine to create a tender, moving portrait of the mother she had to find through her own imagination. - Sunday Times
Gille captures her mother's contradictions in prose worthy of her.
- Scottish Sunday Herald
Her [Gille's] crystalline prose resembles Nemirovsky's work to a startling degree, though there is a harshness, even cruelty, about Nemirovsky's work that is absent here. And something else: Gille was a talented writer and her tender, melancholy book stands on its own merits. But her mother was a genius. - Sunday Telegraph
This is a wonderful book, dignified and intelligent; eloquent if restrained, it showshow history happens and how, at its most extreme, it shapes an individual's fate. - Irish Times
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