Long-lost novel offers a moving portrait of Occupied France
"Suite Française"
by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith
Knopf, 395 pp., $25
Sometimes a book can throw wide open a door that has stood barely ajar for decades. Irène Némirovksy's extraordinary novel, "Suite Française," written just before she died in Auschwitz in 1942, is one such book for me.
Let me explain.
In the summer of 1972, when I was 18, I had a job as a counselor in a traveling language camp for French teenagers, in England where I lived. At the end of the summer I was invited to France, where I would stay in the homes of my students.
One house I visited was less a "house" than a compound, accommodating three generations. Situated in the center of a market town, it had a huge, sunny walled garden out back. One of my language-camp students lived here — but I don't remember him at all. What I do recall is my conversations in French with his mother.
At some point I became aware of an unusual "stagger" in the ages of Madame's children. The boy I'd met was in his teens, but his oldest brother was in his late 30s with his nearest sibling almost a decade younger. Could the age-gap have something to do with the German Occupation?
Madame confirmed that the war was indeed the reason she'd had no children during those years. For the entire Occupation, she'd been alone in the house with her young son — or not alone, exactly.
Several German officers had been billeted with her.
German officers? Right here in the house?
What had that been like?
It was difficult, she said.
But what did her neighbors think of her having Germans staying with her?
This was the largest house in the center of town, she said. They knew that she had no choice. And sometimes she picked up information she could get to the Resistance.
I asked what the strangest thing about it had been.
She replied that her son ... well, he was just too young to understand the danger. There was one young German soldier staying here, only 18 or 19, and her son loved keeping him company. Right there, in the garden (she nodded toward the warm September sunlight), they'd chase each other and play. Maybe the uniform excited the boy, she speculated.
"And you just let them play together, without saying anything?"
She gave me a look that clearly meant: You poor kid, you really don't get it.
What she said was: "Qu'est-ce qu'on va faire? C'était la guerre." ("What could one do? It was wartime.")
Here was a clue, a suggestion that Occupation By The Nazis wasn't the nonstop showdown I'd always imagined it to be. It had, disconcertingly, components of ordinary day-to-day living to it. My ignorance and my inadequate French kept me from grasping all that she was telling me. I was left with an awful lot of questions.
"Suite Française" answers many of those questions.
Written while Paris-based Ukrainian-Jewish author Irène Némirovksy was taking refuge in the French countryside with her husband and two young daughters, it consists of two short novels in a projected quintet that Némirovksy never had the chance to complete. "Storm in June" describes the chaos of Parisians fleeing their city as the Germans approach it in late June 1940. "Dolce" portrays life under the Occupation in a village where everyone knows everyone's business.
The book's very existence is a kind of miracle. Némirovsky's 13-year-old daughter Denise, after both her parents had been arrested and sent to the camps, put the handwritten manuscript in a suitcase that she and her sister hauled from hiding place to hiding place until the war was over. After the war, both daughters found it too painful to look at what they assumed was a diary of their parents' last days.
In the 1990s, the sisters agreed to donate the manuscript to an archive preserving memories of the war. Only then did they realize what they had on their hands: a wry, scathing, hard-eyed fictional account of how France rolled over and succumbed to the German war machine. The book bears eloquent, complex testimony to a time and place that, for those who didn't live through it, defies easy understanding.
Even though Némirovsky and her husband both died in Auschwitz, the fate of Europe's Jews is only fleetingly mentioned in "Suite Française." Instead the focus is on Catholic, class-divided, collaborationist France — France before the Resistance and the Allies made any significant headway against the Germans.
"Storm in June" follows a variety of refugees — a banking executive and his dance-hall mistress, a young Catholic priest and his teenage charges, a loving older couple fearful for the life of their soldier son — as they flee Paris. Soon they're running out of gas and food, being strafed by German bombers, finding themselves thwarted by the shut-down of all transportation and communications. The ensuing chaos brings out both the worst and the best in people. The picture Némirovsky gives of the exodus is photo-sharp.
She also makes visceral people's sheer disbelief at what is happening. World War I is still fresh in the minds of anyone over 25. For one Spanish woman, the whole business verges on personal insult: "Once in a lifetime, all right, it happens ... To have lived through the war in Spain, escaped to France and then end up in this mess, it's too much!"
Where "Storm in June" gives a sweeping, jittery overview of the first panicked reaction to German invasion, "Dolce" — the more affecting novella of the two — goes deep into the logistics of the Occupation and the psychology of defeat. A central irony, here, is that some members of the local social elite believe they have more in common with the "cultured" German officers they're required to host than they do with their own socially inferior neighbors. (These officers, it should be noted, belong to the conventional German army, not the SS or Gestapo who came later.) And it's not just the upper crust that manages to adjust to the new situation.
The town is quiet. The Occupation is a fact. Living arrangements are intimate.
How, in these circumstances, is one supposed to stay aloof? How, in a place where life is slow and relationships predictable, can one help but take an interest in the bizarre strangers who have come to town?
Some women start having affairs with soldiers. In a farm neighborhood where there has been trouble, the big worry is the children: "They play with the Germans, they aren't afraid of them, and they talk, they're too little to understand."
The narrative focuses on a young married woman, Lucile, whose husband is a prisoner of the Germans. Lucile lives with her daunting mother-in-law, whose disapproval of her escalates to something close to hatred when she realizes that Lucile and the German officer living in their house have a tentative liking for each other.
Bruno, an aspiring composer with a skeptical take on German "communal spirit," is a refined, unhappy man — and surely the biggest surprise of "Suite Française." Complex, doubt-filled, all too aware of how his life has been straitjacketed by history, he has genuine sensitivity and integrity.
He's an extraordinary act of generosity on Némirovsky's part — generosity that was abominably repaid.
Némirovsky's account of German invasion and occupation, written almost as they were happening, is uncannily perceptive. Still, she seems not to have fully registered the monstrous nature of the Nazi regime.
A renowned writer in France at the time, she was the first in her family to be arrested. It's a measure of her poor husband's faith in human decency that he sent a "prepaid reply" to the commandant of the camp where she was held, trying to secure her release.
Irène Némirovksy died of typhus in Auschwitz on Aug. 17, 1942. Her husband, thanks in part to his efforts to rescue her, was arrested in October, deported to Auschwitz on Nov. 6, 1942, and sent straight to the gas chamber.
Can the book make up for the loss?
No, but it's an astonishing act of resistance, a nervily cool-headed feat of observation, a message in a suitcase (superbly translated by Sandra Smith) that tells us, 60-odd years after the fact, This is what it was like.
Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com
