Némirovsky’s love letter to the France that spurned her and killed her

By 1940 Irène Némirovsky, who had arrived in France at the age of 16 as a refugee from Kiev, had become a prominent and successful novelist. In March of that year she celebrated what was to be her final publication day. She was Jewish, and for French publishers under Nazi occupation she had ceased to exist as an author when the German army entered Paris. But she continued to write. She moved with her children to a village in Burgundy, hoping to protect her family from the Vichy government’s manhunt, and she started work on her masterpiece, Suite Française, which would lie undiscovered until 2004.

She also started three other novels, two of which she finished. Both were published in France after the war. By then their author was dead. Némirovsky had been arrested by two local gendarmes on 15 July 1942 and sent to the nearby holding camp at Pithiviers. From there, two days later, she was selected to make up the numbers on Prison Convoy No. 6 and deported to Auschwitz, where she survived for less than a month. The fourth of her posthumous works, The Fires of Autumn, was eventually published in Paris in 1957 and it is the last of her wartime novels to be translated into English.

Described as a ‘prequel’ to Suite Française, it does bear some resemblance to that remarkable work in both its theme and its structure. Suite Française — which amounts to two parts of a planned trilogy — describes the state of France following the defeat of 1940. This translation of The Fires of Autumn is based on a re-edited text and is now presented as a completed
work, although there is evidence that it was unfinished, and in my view it is better read as a draft — in three parts — of what might have become an even more ambitious trilogy.