Lost in the crush of history, found in an old suitcase

Irène Némirovsky is best known for an unfinished novel, but this is just one part of her accomplished oeuvre, writes Paul O'Doherty

For 62 years, Irène Némirovsky's story was but a shadow on the vicissitudes of time, until her unfinished novel, Suite Française, which had spent six decades hibernating in a battered suitcase, was rescued from oblivion in 2004. Initialled LN (for Léon Némirovsky, her father), the suitcase carried the DNA of a family on the run: postcards, pictures, bills, letters, notes-to-self, receipts, family papers, the treasured knick-knacks of a lifetime and the items that one grasps in haste when the knock comes on the door to say it's time to flee.

When Némirovsky's family fled revolutionary Kiev in 1917 and set up home in Paris, the suitcase, over time, was bequeathed to Irène, who, in 1940, filled it with the same frantic diligence when her own family was forced to flee a frightened Paris - reminiscent of her parents 23 years previously. Arriving in Issy-l'Evêque in Burgundy, the suitcase was called into action again in 1942 and once more filled, when Némirovsky's daughters Denise (13) and Elizabeth (five) escaped their own aggressors and inherited forever, in that same faithful suitcase, all that remained of their parents. By this time both Irène Némirovsky and her husband were already mortally immersed in the Auschwitz machinery.

For years, Denise recalled later, the temptation to open the suitcase was mitigated by the privacy one affords another's possessions, in the same way that you wouldn't open another's post. There was also the smouldering hope that fate would still return her father and mother. In the 1970s, Denise relented and sneaked a peek. Buried within family mementos she discovered what she thought was her mother's diary. Haunted by her mother's memory and all those troubled moments of unrequited goodbyes, she quickly closed it. While Denise prevaricated, the suitcase lived a life of its own, on one occasion narrowly surviving the mishap of a house flood.

By 2004, the Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine (IMEC) at Caen in Normandy, the French archive for second World War artefacts, was calling for contributions. According to Suite Française's English translator Sandra Smith, who for a number of years has been close to Némirovsky's story and family: "Denise decided to donate her mother's papers. But before she did, she wanted to transcribe them for her own children - Denise herself was once an archivist."

Most who have read Suite Françaisewill remember Némirovsky's tiny blue writing on the inside cover. "Denise first read the manuscript with a magnifying glass and started to transcribe to a computer. She realised it was a novel, not a diary her mother was working on. When publisher Denoël's director Olivier Rubinstein read it he was bowled over. Denise told me, when he phoned to say he wanted to publish it, she agreed on one condition - that not one word would be changed. And so, it was published in French as it appeared in the manuscript," says Smith.

Published in English last year, Suite Françaisehas been likened to Balzac, Flaubert and Dostoevsky, although Némirovsky originally conceived it as her 1,000-page simulacrum of War and Peace. It tells initially of the mass exodus from Paris and other northern French towns in June 1940. Focusing on a coterie of families and characters from different classes that make up the fabric of a Paris on the run, the narrative explores the state of nature that occurs when society implodes and material wealth is no longer an advantage. Later in the novel, Némirovsky intuitively examines the thorny issues of political, military and sexual collaboration. In many ways, it is arguably and ironically an antidote to Theodor Adorno's dictum that it's impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz.

Némirovsky is not without her critics, however, and some, including novelist Paul LaFarge, claim that her work contains traces of anti-Semitism. The publishers of the British edition of the book, Chatto and Windus, perhaps in a pique of sensitivity, have probably done more damage than good. They omitted a paragraph from the book's introduction, in which Miriam Anissimov, a biographer of Primo Levi, suggested that Némirovsky was a self-hating Jew. The charges have provoked a transatlantic literary debate, but Suite Française, and indeed Némirovsky's other works, stand as testament to the suffering wrought by the ravages of the second World War.

The novel was constructed as a symphony with Beethoven's Fifth as a template. Much of what we know about Némirovsky's themes and motives in Suite Françaiseare recorded in two appendices at the back of novel. Included also are the harrowing letters that flowed to and from the authorities, firstly from Némirovsky's husband Michel - Irène was taken first - wondering to which camp she had been taken, protesting her innocence and trying to save her life, and then by Némirovsky's friends and publisher after Michel is arrested. What is particularly distressing is that while the letters and the campaign for her release swirl in concentration-camp bureaucracy, both are already dead.

WITH THE RELEASE of Suite Françaisehas also come the realisation that Irène Némirovsky was popular in the 1930s, publishing more than a dozen novels and a biography of Chekhov. Born in Kiev in 1903, to a banker father and an ambitious mother who saw in Irène the earliest signs of her own ageing, the family left Russia in 1917 and set up home in Paris. Wealthy and well-educated, the young Irène lived flamboyantly until marriage in 1926 to banker Michel Epstein brought down a curtain on her social extravagance.

In 1929, David Golderwas published, critically acclaimed and adapted for film, and her daughter Denise was born. Seventy-eight years later, David Golderhas now been translated. Set in late 1920s France, it tells the story of wealthy Russian émigrés - a banker, his wife and their precocious daughter - who live in a sewer of avarice and indulgence, financially, physically and emotionally beyond their means. While each character is richly endearing, one suspects autobiographical memories resonate from more than a page or two. A slip of a novella compared with Suite Française, if it suffers from anything it's the anticipation of a writer's maturity, a bit like serving Ulyssesas a starter and following it with a main course of Dubliners.

By 1937, Némirovsky had published nine novels. Aware of the coming crisis both in France and Europe, the Epstein-Némirovskys, who were non-practising Jews, converted to Catholicism. Sadly, it wasn't a happy conversion. Still not French citizens, unable to work and stateless because of their Jewish ancestry, when the Germans arrived in Paris they left for their nanny's hometown of Issy-l'Evêque. The nanny's loyalty is posthumously rewarded in Suite Française, where the only family with an unblemished conscience is arguably the Michauds, the same surname as their nanny. By late 1942, both Irène and her husband were dead, and, with the help of a German officer who turned a blind eye to the surviving daughters, the suitcase and offspring went on the run, spending the next two years hiding in houses and convents.

With the success of Suite Française, interest in Némirovsky's back catalogue is high, and, miraculously, a new manuscript by Némirovsky that was never published in French has been found. A BBC 60th anniversary Auschwitz documentary featuring Denise Epstein was seen by relatives in Russia who got in touch. From this contact, further archive papers were discovered by two biographers researching Némirovsky, including a manuscript for Chaleur du Sang- the English title is Fire in the Blood- that was written in Issy-l'Evêque, probably between 1938 and 1942, simultaneously with Suite Françaiseor just before it. Random House will publish it in October, along with, in another volume, Le Baland Les Mouches d'Automne. The translation of L'Affaire Courilofand Les Chiens et les Loupswill follow in 2008.

David Golder by Irène Némirovsky is published by Vintage Original