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Irène Némirovsky

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Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky (French: [iʁɛn nemiʁɔfski]; born Irina Lvovna Nemirovskaya; 11 February 1903 – 17 August 1942) was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin who was born in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France and wrote in French, but was denied French nationality. Arrested as a Jew under the racial laws – which did not take into account her conversion to Roman Catholicism – she died in Auschwitz at the age of 39. Némirovsky is best known for the posthumously published Suite française.

Irina Lvovna Nemirovskaya was born in 1903 in Kiev, then Russian Empire, the daughter of a wealthy banker, Lev (later Léon) Borisovich Nemirovsky. Her volatile and unhappy relationship with her mother Fanni Yonovna Margolis Nemirovskya became the heart of many of her novels.

Her family fled the Russian Empire at the start of the Russian Revolution in 1917, spent 1918 in Finland, and then settled in Paris, where Némirovsky attended the Sorbonne and began writing when she was 18 years old.

In 1926, Némirovsky married Michel Epstein, a banker, and had two daughters: Denise, born in 1929; and Élisabeth, in 1937.

In 1929, she published David Golder, the story of a Jewish banker unable to please his troubled daughter. It was an immediate success, and was adapted to the big screen by Julien Duvivier in 1930, with Harry Baur as David Golder. In 1930, her novel Le Bal, the story of a mistreated daughter and the revenge of a teenager, became a play and a movie.

The David Golder manuscript was sent by post to the publishing company Éditions Grasset with a poste restante address and signed Epstein. H. Muller, a reader for Grasset, immediately tried to find the author but failed, so Grasset advertised in newspapers for the author's identity. However, she was busy bearing her first child, Denise. When Némirovsky finally appeared as the author of David Golder, the unverified story is that the publisher was surprised that such a young woman was able to write such a powerful book.

Although she was widely recognized as a major author – even by some anti-Semitic writers like Robert Brasillach – French nationality was denied to the Némirovskys in 1938.

Némirovsky was of Russian-Jewish origin, but was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church in 1939 and wrote in Candide and Gringoire, two magazines with ultra-nationalist tendencies. After the war started, Gringoire was the only magazine that continued to publish her work, thus "guarantee[ing] Némirovsky's family some desperately needed income".

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