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Irene Nemirovsky was an Ukrainian-born Jew whose family fled Kiev during the Russian Revolution; she moved to Paris in her teens, and converted to Catholicism. Her first novel, David Golder, was a success, and the first two sections--novellas--of a planned five volume work, Suite Francaise, were published more than fifty years after her death (in 2004) after her daughter was donating her papers to an archive and the two novellas was found there among her papers, packaged as one (incomplete) novel.

Nemirovsky was denied French citizenship in 1938, and died in Auschwitz in 1939. I looked up information about her because I knew there had been some controversies surrounding her life and writing--was she a “self-hating Jew�? David Golder featured an unflattering portrait of a Jewish main character, based in part on a relative, I think, and Suite Francaise, while seen in many ways as auto-fiction, based in many ways on her own life as it happened to her during The Occupation, written as she was experiencing it, depicts no characters who are identified as Jewish. Some people think of the novel as somehow anti-French, but let me respond to that below.

Though I knew none of this specifically--only a little of it vaguely, based on my sketchy memory--when I read with fascination the story of what it might have/must have been like as disbelieving Parisians slowly acknowledged the Nazi advance on their beloved City of Light, and escaped, as refugees, to the country.

I am not sure if it is my earliest image of the sad invasion of Paris by the Nazis, this defiling of the City of Light, but this is my strongest early image: The singing, in the bar, of La Marseilles, of the French citizens/emigres in the film Casablanca. The image is thrilling, tears-inducing, what the war was all about, The Resistance:



But of course I knew that the German invasion was not only responded to with resistance in France. In recent years I’ve read works by Nobel-Prize-winning Patrick Modiano where he explores the role his own father played in collaboration with the occupying Nazis. In Suite Francaise there is, among refugee Parisians fleeing the chaos of the Nazi invasion, some people scrambling to protect their own interests, naturally. In the first section or novella, Storm in June, we see hordes of people heading out of the city to rural areas not at all equipped to handle the hundreds of thousands of people arriving into their towns.

Food and lodging and other necessities are suddenly scarce. Naivete and bewilderment and denial and anger and fear seem to reign as many simply can’t seem to accept that the city is vulnerable, even as the blitzkrieg steadily advances. The rich in particular act greedily, bribing their way to advantage, no surprise. Can we assume there is a kind of solidarity? No, not much, in Nemirovsky’s experience or rendering. As with any crisis, as in the recent pandemic, there is hoarding/price-gouging, misinformation, class divisions, and so on. In one episode I read she had marked for possible revision (thinking it may have been too melodramatic), a priest taking several boys in his charge faces a sudden “Lord of the Flies�-type experience, horrible. As with any opening volume, we meet several people in various places fighting for survival in the panicked situation. It's cinematic, explosive. And the view we get of beautiful Paris as the action transpires is loving, lyrical, sad.

In the second volume, Dolce, we focus our attention more "telephotically" on a small rural town, which the Nazis now occupy. It is quiet there, most of the people are not particularly political, and the Nazi occupiers are mainly seen as what they surely were: Young boys and men, stuck in a town for months, often living in rooms once occupied by sons or husbands now serving in the French army, or in camps for the defeated army. One woman, Lucile, gets to know a Nazi lieutenant, Bruno, living in their house, and she develops a very close relationship to him. They have intense talks, he plays the piano for her, some of the soldiers become somewhat humanized for them and us, at least temporarily, until a drunken teenager, told to go home after curfew, takes a swing at a Nazi.

The young men are mostly gone from these towns, and some of the girls develop some flirting (or maybe more) connections with the Nazi men (though he author never calls them Nazis, she only calls them Germans, for some reason, maybe political, as she is writing her work in hiding). If the first novella/section has is fast paced, depicting the chaos in sort of wide angle lens, this second volume slows down, and we see some of the hoarding, collaboration, and more focused and complicated emotional relationships in one location.

This second novella reminded me of other stories I know of friendships/love across enemy lines, such as a YA novel, The Summer of my German Soldier, and All Quiet at the Western Front, among others. Soldiers from all sides of a conflict are seen as human beings, with families at home. Soldiers are mostly children, after all. Just boys. . . but they were all conscripted to invade a country and murder locals. But in the end the Nazi soldiers are called to go to the Russian front, and the town is left in a kind of bizarre emotional state, mostly relief, of course. Maybe this is a kind of spoiler: At one point a French local had killed a Nazi, and was being hidden in the town. Lucile has to make a choice between her personal and political commitments.

I thought this was beautifully written, completely engaging, and maybe especially so since Nemirovsky was writing this on the run, first draft. I think it is a powerful picture of human frailty in war, and yes, some solidarity, and endurance, a great and tragically unfinished war story, probably one of the first Occupation novels. And then think of Nemirovsky, whose family were refugees from Ukraine, then from Paris to rural areas, and now we see Ukrainian refugees, yet again.