THEOn July 13, 1942, two Vichy police gendarmes enter the country house where Irène némirovsky He is having breakfast with his girls and take her away without explanations. Her daughters, who will no longer see her, will remember her as “a mother who would always have thirty -nine”. It is an announced tragedy: any participation in public functions has been prohibited from Jewsto the press, to the show, to teaching; they have to bring a yellow star, their current accounts are frozen. Her husband by Irène, Michel, He was fired from the prestigious bank where he worked and she deposited a testament from the notary in which in case of death he designates the trusted housekeeper as the guardian of his daughters.
Transferred on July 15th In Pithiviers’ transit field and recorded as “Irène Epstein Nimierovski, woman of letters”she manages the next day to write a ticket in pencil: «My beloved, little love of my adored, I think we will start today. Courage and hope. I keep you in my heart, my dear. That God help us ». He no longer has the fountain with the fountain with the blue ink of the south who used to write his masterpieces recognized throughout France. It is loaded on the convoy n.6 which starts from Pithiviers on July 17th and arrives in Auschwitz-Birkenau after two and a half days of pure hell. The death train transports nineteenth -century men and one hundred and thirty -nine women.
Irène Némirovsky. The writer who lived twice
«In 1945, of those twentiethrovotto prisoners only eighteen were still alive»Writes Cinzia Bigliosi in her beautiful essay Irène némirovsky-the writer who lived twice (Ares editions). Irène will not be among the very few survivors: he dies in the concentration camp a month after the arrest of “influence”, that is, of cheering. “He had not saved her baptism celebrated on February 2, 1939 in the Sainte-Marie Abbey with a ceremony officiated by Monsignor Ghika, of the Romanian royal family” writes Bigliosi. It was a question of breed, not of religion. But who was therefore that elegant and refined lady that the employee in charge of the “Woman of Letters” qualifying records and that will not return from Auschwitz?
Born in Kiev on 11 February 1903 to Russian parents, Irène (at the Registry Irina, for the Synagogue Irma, in the Irocka house) Némirovsky grows with the beloved French nanny Marie called Zézelle. He will tell him: «I spoke the Frenchman before speaking Russian. Indeed, I think and dream in French ». His father, Leonid, is a skilled unscrupulous businessman and closes an eye on his wife Fanny’s escapades, capricious, spoiled and bored by his absences. The maternal sense also lacks her a lot: luckily there is Zézelle.
Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942). (Getty Images)
He never forgiven his mother from the heart of ice
«The Némirovsky, after the summer months on the beaches of the Black Sea, have moved to France from October. Theirs is a very wealthy life, between St. Petersburg and the French Riviera. It was there that the little Irocka, cared for by the dear French housekeeper, could take care of asthma and parents abandoning himself to a lively worldliness ». Until the mother, distracted but authoritarian, does not jealously jeopardize himself with the beautiful relationship between the girl and the nanny and fire zézelle in trunk after a blatant dispute. «Mademoiselle Marie was too French, too alone, too delicate to survive, with the perspective, moreover that I could no longer be next to Irocka in that” barbaric country “and would have chosen to kill himself in the waters of Mojka ».
Irène will never forgive that mother with an ice heart. In January 1918 the Bolshevik revolution forced the family to escape with the jewels sewn in the edges of clothes, first in a village in Finland, then in Stockholm and finally in Paris, in 1919. For Irène, France is a friend’s land, the most beautiful country in the world. In the Ville Lumière he attends jazz clubs, he goes to hear Joséphine Baker, lets himself be courted. Drink Champagne, and then stay in the best thermal centers to treat asthma. He enrolled in Sorbonne and publishes his first stories, appreciated by Colette himself.
After graduating in Russian literature, In 1926 he married Michel Epstein, son of a Russian banker who is also in exile. In search of the “Mr.” Epstein literary success comes with David Goldera novel published by Bernard Grasset, who had Colette, Proust, Radiguet in Scuderia. Legend has it that the publisher read it in one night, he tried to get in touch immediately with the “Mr. Epstein” who had sent him the manuscript and who remained of salt discovering who the writer was. When “saw an elegant twenty -six -year -old who showed off a lively smile and a strongly short -sighted look, Grasset broke up that that young womanhappily paying for recent motherhood, could be the author of a story from cynicism so ruthless and narrated through a powerfully virile writing ».
The cover of the book by Cinzia Bigliosi “Irène Némirovsky-the writer who lived twice”. (Ares editions)
David Golder It is a hard story in which Irène reconstructs In an autobiographical key, a world of shady Jewish bankers and women of questionable costumes and is destined to arouse very lively disputes in the Jewish press. Irène, Jewish, will have to defend himself from accusations of anti -Semitism. He has so much success that he immediately became a film, one of the first sounds of French cinema. The press courts the young mother, almost surprised by her success, who continues to work and publish, but in his own way: «I don’t want to write to write. Writing is for me such a rare quality pleasure that I don’t see myself doing it for duty or because I decided it ».
After the first exploit, Irène goes on to publish many stories and many novels, including the famous Dogs and wolves, who divides people between “dogs”that is, whoever awaits the fulfillment of their destiny passive, and the “wolves” who face it or even cause it. Despite the high -high friendships, literary fame and repeated official requests, Neither Michel nor Irène will ever obtain French nationality and history. The one who affects Irène to tell only by seeing it reflected in the newspaper of his characters, knocks on the door. The Epstein leave Paris where the air for the Jews has become heavy.
The legendary escape of the two daughters
Cinzia Bigliosi’s pen traces in a few lines and by points the plot of a tragedy: «The arrest after the writer had abandoned Paris together with the family to take refuge in the village of ISSY-ERVêque, in the Morvan; The legendary escape of the two daughters (Moved by Pietà for Denise’s similarity with his little daughter, instead of arresting them, a Nazi officer granted twenty -four hours of time to escape to the girls); The self -denounced of her husband, Michel Epstein, Convinced that he saves his wife immolating himself in his place ».
And then there is the manuscript. Because Irène in 1940 has the idea of transforming the defeat of the French in disarray in his personal war and peace. By now it can only publish under pseudonym and pay the money to the housekeeper’s current account. “If I could tell the débâcle as I want …”. And he does it, with his blue writing. It includes about a thousand pages, but it does not have time to finish it. The unfinished ends in a trunk that is given to the girls.
«In 2004, with the bookstores invaded by the Da Vinci code of Dan Brown and Harry Potter, publishing all over the world was surprised by a strange story. Denise Epstein, the eldest daughter of a famous French writer of the 1930s that nobody remembered anymore, He had decided to open a worn suitcase that he had dragged for all of France during the Second World War. It contained their inheritance: some fur and a folder with the latest writings and the first two parts of the incomplete French suite novel ». Which immediately becomes a film, he is published in thirty languages: after more than sixty years from his deportation the name of Irène returns to everyone’s lips. An authentic second life.
After all, she had written it, right in the incomplete: «The future is in the hands of the gods. And the gods can have fun making a hundred or one thousand interval ».
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