The Mirador Dreamed Memories of Irene Nemirovsky by her Daughter

A New York Review Books Original When Ir#xE8;ne N#xE9;mirovsky#x19;s Suite Fran#xE7;aise was first published, the world discovered a new great writer. Even in France, however, N#xE9;mirovsky had been more or less forgotten for years, until her youngest daughter #xC9;lisabeth Gille, only five years old when her mother died in Auschwitz, wrote a book to bring her back to life. In 1992 Gille published this fictionalized autobiography of her mother, who had led a sparkling life in Paris as one of the most successful and prolific European 1930s writers before being arrested as a Jew and led to her death in 1942. In the first section of the book, Ir#xE8;ne looks back from 1929, the year of her first triumph with David Golder, to her privileged upbringing in Kiev and Saint Petersburg, the precocious only child of a warm, generous father and a vicious, preening, and distant mother. The family escapes Revolutionary Russia to arrive in France, a country of #x1C;moderation, freedom, and generosity#x1D; that Ir#xE8;ne will embrace as her own. In the book#x19;s second half, the writer, her husband and two children have fled Paris for a small town in Burgundy, where they must wear the yellow Star of David, come to some accommodation with the occupying German troops, and plead in vain with Ir#xE8;ne#x19;s illustrious fair-weather champions to intercede on the family#x19;s behalf. She now sees her earlier self as vain and credulous, blinded by her success to the horribly changing political situation, but it is too late. As fully and deeply imagined as Ir#xE8;ne N#xE9;mirovsky#x19;s novels, Gille#x19;s m#xE9;moires r#xEA;v#xE9;es will also prove indispensable to devotees of the nearly forgotten author for the new light it sheds on her.

Élisabeth Gille (1937–1996) was born in Paris, the daughter of Michel Epstein, a banker, and of the novelist Irène Némirovsky. In 1942, both parents were deported to Auschwitz, where they died, but Gille and her older sister, Denise, lived out the duration of World War II in hiding. Gille worked for many years as an editor and translator, especially of science fiction,
and she was over fifty when her first book, The Mirador, appeared and was immediately recognized as a major achievement. Before her death she also published Le Crabe sur la banquette arrière (The Crab in the Backseat), a mordantly funny examination of people’s responses to her battle with cancer, and a short novel that reflects her and her sister’s life in the years after their parents’ disappearance, Un paysage de cendres, translated into
English as Shadows of a Childhood.

Marina Harss is a translator and dance writer living in New York City. Her recent translations include Mariolina Venezia’s Been Here a Thousand Years, Alberto Moravia’s Conjugal Love, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Stories from the City of God, and Dino Buzzati’s Poem Strip (NYRB Classics).

René de Ceccatty is a French novelist, playwright, and critic. His most recent book is a study of Giacomo Leopardi.