• Resources >
• Book Group Activities >
• Books for Adults - Suite Francaise

Books for Adults - Suite Francaise

About the Author
Irene Nemirovsky was the daughter of a Jewish banker from the Ukraine, Leon Nemirovsky. The Nemirovskys lived in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where she was brought up by a French gouvernante, almost making French her native tongue. Irene also spoke Yiddish, Basque, Finnish, Polish, and English.

The Nemirovsky family lived for a year in Finland in 1918 following the Russian Revolution, and then, in 1919, moved to Paris, France, where Irene attended the Sorbonne and started writing when she was only 18 years old.

In 1926, Irene Nemirovsky married Michel Epstein, a banker, and had two daughters: Denise, born in 1929; and Elisabeth, in 1937.

In 1929 she published David Golder, the story of a Jewish banker unable to please his troubled daughter, which was an immediate success, and was adapted to the big screen by Julien Duvivier in 1930, with Harry Baur as David Golder. In 1930 her novel Le Bal, the story of a mistreated daughter and the revenge of a teenager, became a play and a movie.
Irene Nemirovsky was Jewish, but converted to Catholicism in 1939 and wrote in Candide and Gringoire, two anti-Semitic magazines – perhaps partly to hide the family’s Jewish origins and thereby protect their children from growing anti-Semitic persecution.

By 1940, Nemirovsky’s husband was unable to continue working at the bank – and Irene’s books could no longer be published – because of their Jewish ancestry. Upon the Nazis’ approach to Paris, they fled with their two daughters to the village of Issy-l’Eveque (the Nemirovskys initially sent them to live with their nanny’s family in Burgundy while staying on in Paris themselves; they had already lost their Russian home and refused to lose their home in France), where Nemirovsky was required to wear the Yellow badge.

On July 13, 1942, Irene Nemirovsky (then 39) was arrested as a “stateless person of Jewish descent” by French police under the regulations of the German occupation. As she was being taken away, she told her daughters, “I am going on a journey now.” She was transported on July 17 along with 928 other Jewish deportees to Auschwitz. According to official papers, she died a month later of typhus. Her husband was sent to Auschwitz shortly after, and was immediately put to death in a gas chamber.

About the Novel
Suite Francaise consists of the first two sections an uncompleted five-part novel examining life after the German occupation of France in 1940. The novel was written as the events portrayed were actually unfolding and reflects the experiences of Irene Nemirovsky and her family.

The first section “A Storm In June” follows the lives of several disparate families and individuals in the immediate aftermath of the German invasion. We share their experiences as they struggle to find a safe refuge with varying degrees of success – we also meet the people who offer that refuge and their opinions of the influx into their homes.

The second section “Dolce” focuses on the lives of those who live in an occupied village including local aristocracy, farmers, shopkeepers and the Germans who now live among them. The local residents are left with the choice of resisting or collaborating but no choice about their feelings for their occupiers.

• Suite_Francaise (pdf)