At the cinema in Hyères, in the south of France, there were just nine souls present for Suite Française, Saul Dibb's new film based on the remarkable but uncompleted novel of Irène Némirovsky, incomplete because she was dispatched to Auschwitz by France's Nazi occupiers and died there a month after her arrival.
The screening room holds 120, but I understand the low turnout since it was an afternoon showing.
I suppressed the thought that anyone who voted Front National in recent elections - and rather a lot did in this part of France - should be made to see the film. I did not suppress the thought that anyone who votes FN because he or she admires its creator and honorary president, Jean-Marie Le Pen, should be made to watch it over and again (I saw it as his daughter, Marine, was crying "not me!" after dad's repetition of his party piece that the gas chambers are a mere detail of Second World War history ... the whole wretched family is now in a state of warfare).
In fact, though a note at the end of the film implies otherwise and is supported by popular belief, Némirovsky was not gassed. Or, at least, not according to Jonathan Weiss, an American academic I interviewed in 2004 after first meeting Némirovsky's daughter, Denise (of whom more below), in Paris.
Weiss, whose study of of Némirovsky (Irène Némirovsky: biographie) sits on my desk as I write, says she was among more than 200 inmates who died from an outbreak of typhus. The note before the film credits says she was "killed" at Auschwitz and, although it will be read and - I am sure - is intended to be read in another way, I happen to agree with the use of the verb. I remember feeling abject shame when Nazi sympathisers seized with odious glee on my reference to the actual cause of death. on August 19 1942, in my article for The Daily Telegraph 11 years ago.
Denise, sadly, died in 2013. I think she would have commended the film-makers, as I do, for making what they could of her mother's work - written, of course, without the hindsight we all possess, and therefore without an ending - and I also think she would have shared my feeling that the movie presents horrible events in sanitised form. It reminded me very much of a French TV series, Un Village Français, about a community under occupation, which is also highly sanitised but fascinating and impressive in its own way.
There are film critics who have written disparagingly about Suite Française and I fully understand their criticisms. One friend, a respected academic with great knowledge of France and the period described in the book, argues that Némirovsky was not a particularly good novelist. Others found her something of an enigma, a Ukrainian-born Jew who ran with the anti-Semitic hounds of 1930s Paris. I am probably more inclined to enjoy her work and also to recognise the pressures under which, in wretched times, she lived and died. How I wish she had been able to write about that awful period of French history having survived it.
Back in 2004, I wanted to write much more about my meeting with Denise than the Telegraph foreign desk thought the story merited. One comment that has always stuck in my mind, though it did not survive into the published article, was her willingness to forgive Nazi soldiers, who were at least at war, but not the French gendarmes and officials who aided and abetted their crimes against her mother and against humanity.
This is how the article appeared:
A hidden literary treasure of wartime France is taking the book world by storm, while reviving uncomfortable memories of French collaboration with the Nazis, more than 60 years after its author was sent to her death in Auschwitz.
Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, transcribed and edited by her elder daughter, who clung to the manuscript as a keepsake of her mother, has been sold to publishers in 17 countries in an extraordinary bidding war.
The book combines two novels, one dealing with the flight of Jews from Paris during the great exodus of 1940 and the second with the early period of Nazi occupation.
It has won acclaim from French critics, with calls for a posthumous award when the Goncourt prize, the country's premier book award, is announced next month.
Suite Française - the completed half of what Némirovsky planned as the four-volume "work of my life" [some dispute here: it may have been five] - is regarded by some commentators as the most important descriptive wartime writing since Anne Frank's Diaries.
From the appearance of her first novel, David Golder, in 1929, when she was 26, Némirovsky was feted as the darling of Parisian literary society. But she was also a Jew, born in Kiev to a prosperous banker's family. When the Germans invaded France, Némirovsky was deserted by almost all those who had previously sought her company and admired her work.
Despite appeals to the German ambassador to Paris and Marshal Pétain the leader of the puppet Vichy regime, she was arrested by gendarmes and deported to Auschwitz in July 1942, dying of typhus a month later at the age of 39.
Her conversion to Roman Catholicism as war broke out, and her family's move from Paris to Burgundy, failed to save her. Her husband, Michel Epstein, was detained later along with his two brothers and sister. They, too, perished, almost certainly in the Auschwitz gas chambers.
Némirovsky's daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, were spared, apparently because they reminded a German officer of his own child. For the rest of the war, they were cared for by a Catholic woman who moved them from one safe house to another. In a suitcase carried on each of a dozen moves, Denise Epstein kept the leather-bound notebooks containing her mother's last writings.
"I never opened it until 1954," said Miss Epstein, now 75. "It made me angry to read it. Seeing my mother's wonderful lucidity just gave me a tremendous sensation of abandonment."
Not until the 1970s did she open the book "properly", after her Paris home was flooded and she decided to move it to the safety of a shelf.
The first novel, Storm in June, was typed. The second, Dolce, written as paper became scarce, was in minute handwriting.
Over the next 20 years. Miss Epstein painstakingly read and transcribed, over and over again, her mother's text.
"She could look inside the human soul and make music with her words. But it is only now that I can look at it as a reader rather than as my mother's daughter," she said.
The success of Suite Française is encouraging news for an American academic who researched his own biography of Némirovsky only to be told it was not marketable.
Prof Jon Weiss, who lectures in French and 20th century French literature at Colby College, Maine, described Némirovsky as "an enigma and an absolutely fantastic novelist of the 1930s".
* Use the Salut! Amazon link to acquire your copies of the Weiss book or works by Némirovsky herself: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/2866455991/salusund-21
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