In 2004 Denise Epstein finally had the emotional courage to offer for publication Suite Française , her mother, Irene Nemirovsky’s masterpiece about occupied France finished in 1942 before she was shipped to Auchwitz and extermination.

Davd Coward writing in the Times Literary Supplement described it as having “ great delicacy of feeling, marvelously varied humour and a lyrical appreciation of nature-low-key and human in scale with the kind of intimacy found in the diary of Anne Frank.”

Prize-winning French author Pierre Assouiline introduces his novel “Hotel Lutetia” with a description of Denise and her sister appearing daily to find out if anyone had any knowledge of their mother; the Lutetia having been abwehr (intelligence) headquarters during the war and the center for returning Jewish survivors in the immediate post-war.

A thoroughly assimilated Jew Nemirovsky struggles with her Jewishness in these newly re-published works, especially in David Golder, a powerful businessman with a strong resemblance to her own father.

A powerful debate has been raging over what many have characterized as anti-semitic depictions in her early work but no one is arguing about the high quality of the writing.
 
 “The Courilof Affair is narrated by Léon M., a dying Russian revolutionary: he recounts his relationship with Valerian Courilof, the minister of education in imperial Russia. Léon grew to like the decrepit, politically ruined Courilof, even as he was ordered to kill him.

The Ball is a psychologically acute account of the relationship between a narcissistic French mother—married to her former boss, a
rich German Jew—and their enraged adolescent daughter, Antoinette; the similarly brief Snow in Autumn is a tender portrait of an old, devoted Russian nanny who cannot adjust to life as an émigré in Paris.

“These short early novels reveal her
clear-eyed view into the deeply compromised human heart.”
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