A Violence Within

...The villagers may be lucky enough to live in a time of peace, but they are as much victims of a violent force as are the Parisians whose tidy lives are turned upside down by the enemy...

...The poorest are simply brutal, for good or ill...

...The author’s favorites are a modest, heroic middle-class couple totally lacking in glamour...

...In F i r e in the Blood the source of pain may be a different one—one that is perhaps less compelling for the reader—but the twoworks make fascinating companions...

...One can’t help thinking that if the Nazis had read Némirovsky’s work, they might have granted her a little mercy, as she did them...

...Surrounded by violence and saturated with fear, her characters reveal their deepest flaws in the course of their flight...

...As I walked through the wood, the trees were already casting shadows on the ground, making it night in there...

...How is this fire lit in us...

...With a perspective at once unforgiving and evenhanded, Némirovsky recounts the frantic, disorganized exodus of a number of very different Parisians upon the announcement of Adolf Hitler’s approach...

...Before the occupation she had published four other acclaimed novels, plus several more not so well received...

...Also set in a village evoking the one she lived in under the Nazi occupation, Fire in the Blood takes place during the earlier interwar period...

...The sun was setting...

...But Némirovsky allows the reader a first glimpse of his neighbors as they might look to a romantically inclined stranger...

...Someone sensitive, considerate, easily dominated, almost feminine...

...That is not to say the apparent peacefulness of her comfortable rural families is more than superficial...

...author, “The Fact Checker’s Bible” Ire` Ne Némirovsky’s Suite Française, first published in France in 2004, almost instantly won international acclaim...

...To him the strictures of village life seem confining and hypocritical...

...From Némirovsky’s notes for the unfinished novel we know she planned a dreadful, if valiant, death for Jean-Marie...

...What was he doing writing these stupid stories, letting himself be pampered by the farmer’s wife, while his friends were in prison, his despairing parents thought he was dead, when the future was so uncertain, the past so bleak...

...In reality it was neither of us, it was the face of the stranger, like us but different from us, the stranger who disappeared so very long ago...

...Now Knopf is publishing a novella, Fire in the Blood, that Némirovsky seems to have worked on alongside Suite Française...

...Silvio asks bitterly, “Who would bother sowing his fields if he knew what the harvest would be like in advance...

...As the novel progresses, Hélène and Colette are shown to be “nothing like that” either...

...The inhabitants of the house might be secretive and troubled, but the loveliness of their homes is still to be valued...

...Indeed, Silvio remarks, that mother and daughter “have sought out the same type of man to marry...

...He wanted to write a story about these charming little horses, a story that would evoke this July...

...The Germans in Suite Française seem, along with the French, to be victims of circumstance rather than innately malevolent...

...The man, she writes, “was not really unhappy...

...By writing . . . he gave life to something he wished to be born...

...The author finds a lyrical delight in the landscape too...

...Jewish by birth, she married a fellow Ukrainian, Michel Epstein, in Paris when she was 23...

...In Fire in the Blood she relishes the well kept, burnished beauty of the farmhouses: “Everything sparkled...

...But while he was thinking these thoughts, he saw one of the foals run joyously toward him, then roll around in the grass, kicking its hooves in the air and looking at him with mischievous and tender eyes...

...Like the faun he resembles, Silvio is at one with the animal and natural world...

...The rich come off worst...

...The second section of the novel chronicles life in a French village occupied by a German regiment, particularly the tensions arising between the German off icers and the French families with whom they are billeted...

...Némirovsky sees the urge to secrecy felt by her villagers as both futile and dangerous...

...Yo u see Némirovsky’s own sensibility in this portrayal, torn between the exceptional experience of joy in creation and the knowledge of inevitable human suffering...

...Its characters have been profoundly affected by the Great War, yet Némirovsky depicts a village free of overt conflict...

...Then suddenly, he would become discouraged, feel disheartened, weary...

...Silvio describes a small wood, where he witnesses an act of infidelity: “You could see its young, delicate trees from the road...

...The mirror image is typical of Némirovsky’s skill...

...But this was not the case...

...their instinct for self-preservation and sense of entitlement easily trumps their humanity...

...Hélène may appear calm and happy, but at one time she was a lonely young woman, married to a dying old man, madly kissing another man around the corner from her husband’s sickbed...

...Her daughter Colette knows nothing about her mother’s past, and Hélène believes strongly that it is best for parents to keep their histories private...

...Némirovsky was a writer of a far higher literary rank, a carefully educated, professional novelist from a wealthy Ukrainian émigré family that fled the Russian Revolution...

...Only their daughters survived the War...

...It devours ever ything and then, in a few years, a few months, a few hours even, it burns itself out...

...in his own eyes, he was not that rare and irreplaceable creature most people imagine when they think about themselves...

...Remarkably, Suite Française is also highly fashioned and meticulously planned—as Némirovsky’s notes, presented in the novel’s Appendix, attest...

...This is no Francophone Balkan Trilogy, Olivia Manning’s thinly disguised memoir of lesser known aspects of the War readers find endlessly fascinating...

...Wrapped in old cashmere shawls, the matronly Hélène and her daughter Colette, who is about to be married, seem the images of calm, sensible womanhood, lucky souls who have succeeded in finding happiness in thoroughly domesticated love...

...Like Némirovsky’s fictional subjects, the Epsteins quit Paris and found brief refuge in a rural village...

...But of himself Silvio confesses, “Good Lord, I was nothing like that...

...Whether it was caused by the pressure of being a Jew in occupied France, or an innate characteristic of her personality, Némirovsky shows herself to be profoundly fatalistic...

...In Suite Française, Némirovsky used the extreme conditions of war to reveal human nature...

...The lake he passes “shimmered, giving off a pale light, like a mirror in a dark room...

...In Colette’s case, ignorance of her mother’s true nature leads her to expect that she will be able to model her own marriage on that of her parents and live happily every after...

...Are we not all somewhat like these branches burning in my f ireplace, buckling beneath the power of the flames...

...Hidden by a family friend, they saved a suitcase of Némirovsky’s papers...

...Not until Élisabeth died in 1996, though, did Denise begin to transcribe her mother’s astonishing manuscript, written in minute cursive in a series of notebooks...

...All seems harmonious when Silvio entertains his cousin Hélène Erard and her husband and children at his chilly “rat hole” of a country house— which is f alling to pieces, cold and drafty, as if the elements are exercising some inevitable dominance over domesticity...

...This despite the fact that she was able to complete only two parts of a projected fivepart epic before being sent to Auschwitz, where she died in July 1942...

...Fi re in the Blood is an excellent reminder that Némirovsky’s novelistic talent was not restricted, nor should be defined, by the conflict of which she was a victim...

...He had a unique way of thinking: He didn’t consider himself that important...

...Then you see how much damage has been done...

...The writing is immediate and as detailed as reportage—perhaps not surprisingly, since she describes the flight and occupation nearly contemporaneously...

...He was mad...

...ALTHOUGH Némirovsky may be remembered for the scenes of the flight from Paris, some of her best writing involves the pleasures she chronicles alongside the hopelessness of it all...

...The narrator of this moral—or more accurately, amoral—fable is Silvio, a reclusive older man who, having traveled widely and lived exotically, has blown through his inheritance, sold most of his land, and views his friends and extended family from a clear-eyed distance...

...here she sets the same process in effect through the uncontrollable force of passion...

...And Némirovsky replies, “But everyone would, Silvio, that’s what life is all about, joy and tears...

...everything gave off the feeling of respectability and calm: the oak furniture, the gleaming parquet floors, the plates decorated with flowers...

...In one of the most moving passages of Suite Française, Jean-Marie, a recovering French soldier hidden from the occupying Germans, grows in strength as he relishes the love between a mare and her foals...

...Even in such a lovely setting the human element cannot be left entirely behind, it tells us—and, in fact, the water is implicated in later violence...

...In 1939, the Epsteins converted to Catholicism (almost certainly to protect themselves and their two daughters, Élisabeth and Denise...

...At age 39 she was sent to her death in Auschwitz, and three months later her husband was deported and gassed there...

...He felt pity toward his fellow sufferers, but his pity was lucid and detached...

...The shadow she and her lover cast is a new self, “the shadow that was you and me...

...For Némirovsky the natural world can offer only momentary refuge, a temporary view of the innocence of a nonhuman world...

...By 2006, when it appeared in the United States, it had been translated into 30 languages and sold 1.5 million copies...

...The result is tragic...

...Silvio reflects: “When I was 20, how I burned...