Irène Némirovsky's brilliant 1940 novel Suite Française
was a surprise bestseller earlier this year. Némirovsky published more than a dozen novels and several biographies in her short lifetime, achieving acclaim in her adopted country of France. But information about the life and career of the Russian-born Jewish novelist, who died in Auschwitz in 1942 at the age of 39, has been scarce. This short critical biography by Weiss, an expert on contemporary French literature, is a fine introduction to her work. Némirovsky attained literary stature in France in 1930 with the publication of David Golder
, a satiric portrait of the Parisian Jewish business community. Weiss's analysis of the Jewish press's negative response to David Golder
(they "reeled, as if struck by a bomb") is excellent. Némirovsky continued to have a fruitful literary career until her deportation to Auschwitz. Weiss offers a discussion of Némirovsky's 1939 conversion to Catholicism, which appears to have been sincere although at the same time she was exploring the personal meaning of Judaism in her life. At times Weiss relies too heavily on autobiographical readings of Némirovsky's novels, but such a tack is understandable given that we are in the early stages of scholarly work to be done, of which this is a fascinating and important beginning. (Oct.)
