Suite Française has been hailed as an example of ‘Holocaust literature’, which is to impose a new form of political distortion on what is simply a very fine novel. Although the author was arrested, deported and sent to Auschwitz on racial grounds, the Jews of France are entirely absent from her book. (They appear only once, in a humorous context, when the banker’s mistress makes a bitter little crack about her successful and now ‘quite useless’ pre-war seduction of an influential Jewish banker.) This is the more extraordinary when one remembers that the author was herself a fugitive in hiding throughout the events she describes. But it is a sign of her greatness as a novelist that she should have left such an unforgettable portrait not of the persecution of the French Jews but of the way in which some of her fellow countrymen by their conduct made the deportations and consequent genocide a possibility.

The exceptional biographical context of Suite Française is thoroughly explained in the appendix. ‘My God!’, Némirovsky wrote in her diary, as the net closed on her and her husband, ‘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.’ And that, my God, is exactly what she did.

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