Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky’s powerful novel Suite Française is an insightful and frightening first-hand account of the German occupation of France beginning in 1940. Though many compelling novels have been written retrospectively about the German occupation (The Lost Girls of Paris, The Flight Portfolio, The Paris Library, Sarah’s Key, While Paris Slept, The Paris Architect, All The Light We Cannot See, The Nightingale, Those Who Save Us, The Book Thief,) Némirovsky’s wrote the draft of this novel as the terrifying events of WWII unfolded. on scraps of paper. Vivid descriptions of her characters and their plight makes the story feels like a journalist posting dispatches from a war zone. However, Némirovsky was not a reporter; she was an acclaimed writer with several novels to her credit before the Nazis prohibited her publisher from printing her work. Though she and her husband converted to Catholicism and baptized their two girls, Némirovsky and her husband were born Jewish and were subject to the cruel Nazi edits that constrained the economic, social, and religious activities of all Jewish citizens including the wearing of yellow stars.

Némirovsky intended the book to contain five parts, like five symphonic movements, but she only lived to complete the first two parts: “Storm in June,” which describes the chaos and fear that erupted when the Germans marched into Paris, and “Dolce,” which describes life in a French province where she lived after the Germans took over their region. She states in her notes about the book, “My God what is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly let us watch as it loses its honour and its life.” Némirovsky provides astute observations about the dynamics between the occupying German soldiers and the French villagers. Her characters capture the complex and wide range of responses to the seizure of their homes and businesses by the Germans. Some resisted. Some collaborated. Some sought economic gain. Some hated the Germans. A few learned to love them.

The origins of this book give the novel another rich dimension. Némirovsky was arrested and taken to Auschwitz, where she died of typhoid in August of 1942. Her husband, Michael, was taken to the Auschwitz gas chambers two months later. Before the Nazis arrested him, Michael gave his two daughters and their nanny a suitcase filled with Némirovsky diaries and draft of this book. For 64 years, her daughters feared opening the suitcase. They eventually did and found the draft of Suite Français which was published in France in 2004 and translated into English by Sandra Smith two years later.

Through her characters, Némirovsky’s provides political, historical, religious and sociological theories on the behavior of the French people during these horrific events. This novel reminds us how war creates chaos as laws evaporate and every person is affected. The Nazis murdered 6 million innocent Jews of which 75,000 were French citizens. And now, eighty years after the needless death and destruction, Hitler’s effort to control the world seems silly and absurd. As Némirovsky states in the last sentence of her novel, “All that remained of the German regiment was a little cloud of dust.” Suite Française shows us the fullness of humanity amid unfathomable tragedy. 4/5