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Showing posts from February, 2011

Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française

Irène Némirovsky - photo source: obit-mag.com I recently finished reading Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky. The novel offers a glimpse of what it was like to live through the arrival of the Nazis and the early days of the occupation. However, its true beauty lies in its stark and brutally honest look into the psyche of the French during the early years of Nazi occupation. Némirovsky’s Story No one knew better than Irène Némirovsky the dangers of living in Nazi occupied France. Némirovsky was born in Russia in 1903 to a wealthy Jewish banker. She learned French at an early age, which came in handy in 1919 when she and her family settled in Paris, France after they were forced to flee Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. She studied at the Sorbonne and in 1924 met a dashing fellow Russian-Jew, Michel Epstein. They fell in love and were married two years later. Their first daughter was born in 1929 and that same year, Némirovsky’s first book, David Golder, was pu