International Women’s Day: A Storm In June

Here is the problem I have learned that your government has decided to take measures against
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stateless persons. I am greatly distressed by the fate that awaits us.
My husband and I were born in Russia and our parents immigrated during the revolution.
Our two children are French. We have been living in France for 20 years and
we have never left the country. I cannot believe, sir, that no distinction is made
between the undesirable and the honorable foreigners, those who have done everything
possible to deserve the royal welcome France has given them. I therefore ask
for your kindness in including me and my family in the latter category of people so that
we can reside freely in France and so that I may continue to exercise my profession
as a novelist. In this episode
of Death in Numbers, part of a series on international women’s history, we talk about author
of Random Robiskie who wrote this letter in 1942 to Marshall Payton,
the head of the Vichy government. She attempted to present herself as an honorable French woman
in order to save herself and her family. This was not
the first time nemirovsky family had been targeted in 1917. Her upper class
banking family fled Russia, terrified they would be targeted by the communist revolutionaries
exiled in France. nemirovsky thrived. By the 1930s, she was a well-established
author in the country, capable of living by her pen. She had assimilated into Parisian
society and surrounded herself with the literary elite. Although she never received citizenship,
she considered herself French and chose to write in the language of her adopted country.
By June 14th, 1940, that all changed. As Nazis
marched into Paris, the French government relocated to a quaint southern spa town
known as Vichy. For the next four years, the Vichy government would collaborate with their
Nazi occupiers to systematically remove all Jews from their country. Beginning
with the foreign Jews. And this is why a random Barofsky was concerned
for what she neglects to mention in her letter to Marshall Peyton is that in addition to being a
Russian immigrant, nemirovsky and her husband, Michael EPSTEIN, were Jews.
Furthermore, the two were no longer solvent. All Jewish bank accounts in France had
been seized by the Vichy government, and the auto list of July 1942
banned nemirovsky from publishing within France. Essentially, the family had neither access
to money nor the means to earn it. Unfortunately, there
is no simple explanation as to why nemirovsky neglected to mention her Jewish status and her letter
to Marshall Payton. Perhaps it is because she did not consider herself particularly religious.
She never practiced Judaism and sought to suppress any connection she had to the Jewish community.
When she moved to Paris. Or maybe because she had converted to Catholicism in 1939,
believing the conversion would protect her children from religious persecution. While her
relationship with her Jewish identity is bewildering, nemirovsky was determined to be identified
as a member of the Parisian literary elite. To best understand nemirovsky,
perhaps we should turn to her novels. Her success stemmed from several factors.
She had a critical view of the world, both in the public and private sphere. Her style,
frankly, confronted the world around her, attracting many admirers, but also many critics.
David Golder was her first novel published in 1928. It follows the titular
character, a Russian Jew born on the Black Sea. As he gains his wealth through a career of speculation,
Golder is described as greedy and cruel with a hooked nose, a stereotypical portrait
of the contemporary Jewish man. The novel’s prose is ruthless. Her writing
coldly presents this cross-section of European society, fueled by self-interest.
This novel, as well as later writings and anti-Semetic magazines, led to nemirovsky
being labeled a self-hating Jew. In 2008, the Museum of Jewish Art and History
in Paris even refused to host an exhibition of her writing. The director of
the museum justified her decision by accusing nemirovsky of self-hatred.
nemirovsky is relationship with the Jewish community is complicated, but there is evidence that she may
have had some remorse for the depiction of Jews in her earlier works as a result of the political
shifts in Jews civil statuses in the 1930s. When interviewed in 1935
about David Golder, which had been published seven years earlier, nemirovsky said
It is absolutely certain that had there been Hitler, I would have greatly softened David
Golder, and I would not have written it in the same way. And yet I would have been wrong.
It would have been a weakness unworthy of a real writer. As demonstrated
by this interview, her allegiance was to the literary community. She was not interested in recanting
the portraits in the novel. Despite their political incorrectness, nor was she interested
in what John Paul Sartre famously described as engaged literature. She explained the
decision to distance herself from politicized literature, saying, I have lived at least half
my life under the threat of revolutionary disturbances, threats which have frequently become reality.
In any case, you never know what tomorrow will bring. The good thing about work is that it makes you forget
for nemirovsky. Literature was an escape from politics, even the politics of her identity.
And yet not even her writing could distance her from persecution for her Jewishness.
Within the period of two years, nemirovsky went from an independent, self-sufficient and
acclaimed author to attract refugees in her adopted country, exiled from all
that she considered home. nemirovsky focused her efforts on documenting the society that had morphed
in a few short years from one of strength and liberty to one of chaos and fear.
In her manuscript for a new novel that is until July 13th, 1942,
when there was a knock on the door. She knew why the police had come. But
there were no tears, Denise recalled. She just told me to look after my father.
She said farewell to us. But I had no idea it was the final farewell. The last
time I would see my mother. Betrayed by her neighbors to local police,
a random Borowski was arrested and deported to the pit fear concentration camp on the charge
of being a foreign Jew. Eventually, the Nazis transported her to Auschwitz, where she died
of typhus shortly after her husband was deported and killed. They
left behind two daughters, deniece and Elisabet. By 1944,
an estimated seventy seven thousand French Jewish residents had been deported to Nazi concentration
and extermination camps. Few survived the Holocaust with the aid of others
and pure chance. Both of nemirovsky daughter survived. Before Michael
EPSTEIN was arrested, he left his daughters a suitcase filled with a notebook in
their mother’s handwriting. Fearing the anguish she would bring them to read their dead mother’s
diary, the suitcase remained in the care of a notary for half a century.
That is, until the early 1990s, deniece began reading and discovered the notebook
was more than just a diary. It was the contents of a novel, Sweetcorn says.
Now too fragile for display. The leather bound notebook has a simple embossed border
and the initials i.e. Iran EPSTEIN, her married name and the upper left
hand corner as both paper and ink were scarce. nemirovsky handwriting is cramped.
There are 201 pages to the manuscript, which typed amount to an over 500
page novel. It alternates between black and blue ink and keeps the minimal space necessary
between lines only indenting for new chapters and to indicate speech. Nearly
half of each page is crossed out. Denise took the unfinished manuscript and set
it to type the completed chapters Storm in June and Dolce
were part of an intended five chapter volume. The last three chapters were drafted as
captivity, war and peace. Paris had
its sweetest smell, the smell of chestnut trees in bloom and of petrol with a few grains
of dust to crack under your teeth like pepper in the darkness. The danger seemed to grow.
You could smell the suffering in the air, in the silence. Everyone looked at their house and thought.
Tomorrow it will be in ruins. Tomorrow I’ll have nothing left.
Despite its incomplete status, Sweet Fun says is a harrowingly intimate portrait of the effects
of Nazi occupation on French residents. A well preserved time capsule providing
a glimpse into the period through an emphasis on the quotidian. It reveals that the panoply
of reactions to the occupation was the result not only of socioeconomic status,
but also of human nature. Demonstrating how fear and the desire for self-preservation
predominated. A desire to resist oppression for the greater good.
Published in 2004. Sweet Front says became a bestseller claiming the prestigious
literary prize, The Pre Hundo. And it was translated into over 30 languages.
Spending two years atop the New York Times bestseller list. While the niece
poured two years into the publication of her mother’s final novel, her sister Elisabet
decided to work through her grief by writing. As a member of what Susan Sooliman
describes as the 1.5 generation child survivors of the Holocaust,
too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them. But old enough to have been there
during the Nazi persecution of Jews. Elisabet is trapped between generations of experience.
At the time of her parents deportation, she was five years old, old enough to remember,
but too young to understand. In the early 1990s, Elisabet
wrote the novel The Watchtower Dreamed Memories and what she began to work through these
recollections by taking on the voice of her deceased mother. Marketed as a memoir,
The Watchtower is divided into two parts. The first is titled Eran nemirovsky
November 1929 and the second Eran nemirovsky June
the voice of her mother as if it were an autobiography. Interspersed
between chapters of these two parts are flashbacks to Elisabet childhood.
Elisabetta distances herself from her own experiences by writing in a third person,
for the imagined memories be narrated are not only those of her mother, but also
of her younger self. In the process of writing the novel, Elizabeth partakes
in both her mother’s and her own trauma. The novel serves as a form of atonement for her
mother’s self-hating Jewishness, but also a form of catharsis for the trauma of being orphaned
by the Holocaust and having to come to terms with her French Jewish identity. Elizabeth
defends her mother in writing In the Watchtower. She fabricates a scenario of remorse
for her mother’s self-hating Jewishness. She imagines her mother reflecting on David Golder and realizing
that I am seized at times by a kind of vertigo as I repent. Having
written that book, I wonder if by excoriating the social Muryou from which I had
come and which I hated, so I have furnished anti-Semites with ammunition.
I wonder whether I gave proof of a suicidal flight. Yoenis and thoughtlessness
in this one scene, Elisabet insinuates that surely her mother would have felt these sentiments
once she recognized that Jews were being systematically persecuted, while nemirovsky sentiments
about her Jewish identity can only be the subject of speculation. Elisa Betts feelings about
them have been made clear in 1992 while promoting the Watchtower. She criticized
her mother’s literary decisions, writing her blindness was criminal. During the
of poor Jews in the working class areas of Paris. This frustration with her mother
can be understood in the context of Elisabet working through her own French Jewish identity
and the suffering she endured as a result of it. In one of the novel’s flashbacks, dated April
a Jew? She is haunted by her Jewish identity, particularly after reading Sartre’s
Anti Semite and the Jew. While Sartre agrees that a Jew is defined in relation to
others, someone is only a Jew to the extent that society considers them a Jew.
It is a better cannot agree. Instead, she desires a connection with the Jewish people that she
cannot comprehend, especially as she is an atheist. So this is the answer.
Are we only Jewish in the eyes of the other? She wants to understand. But the safty
an explanation cannot explain the powerful sense of belonging she has recently begun to feel.
Despite being an atheist, this powerful sense of pride at belonging to a people who,
despite persecutions and massacres, never cease to procreate. Even in sadness.
A significant portion of her flashbacks is dedicated to moments like these questioning her position
as a Jew in France. As her mother must have done. And working through these questions
about her mother and her Jewish identity, Elizabeth is also reliving the traumatic experience
of being orphaned at five years old. Coupled with the loss of her parents is the rejection
by her maternal grandmother following the war’s end in January nineteen forty five.
Elisabet and Denise were brought out of hiding to the house of Nemeroff Ski’s mother, fanni.
However, the response they receive is not a welcoming one described as a wolf
with a strong Russian accent. The lack of compassion fanni demonstrates for our orphaned grandchildren.
It’s painful to witness, suggesting that the unfortunate duo be placed in an institution
for deaths to children instead of taking them in. When she had the means to do so
haunts Elizabeth’s memories. Instead of being raised by family, the sisters
are abandoned by their last living relative. Elisabet continues to confront
moments such as these in her writing in the entry dated December 1956.
She recalls the child emerges from the cinema, blinded by her tears
on a whim. She had gone alone to see night and fog. This is the first time she has
faltered. Until now, she had stubbornly refused to know.
Just as she had come to terms with her mother’s anti-Semitic writings, she, too, had to come to terms
with the horrors of her parents murders. Understanding was the most painful act for Elisabet
the knowledge of the death camps. Her mother’s perfections. Her grandmother’s rejection.
Each of these brief moments provides a glimpse into the residual effects of her trauma that she attempted to work
through in her writing. The Watchtower ends with an entry dating October nineteen
ninety one with the following quote. Her children,
deniece and Elisabet, who were arrested with their father, were saved.
Acknowledging both the random and haphazard nature of her survival, Elisabet concluded her
transgender narrative determined to be finished with her story and to let history speak
moving forward.
This has been Death in Numbers, a podcast created and produced by the Humanities Media Project
and the College of Liberal Arts at U.T. Austin and Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services,
where Amy Vidar and Caroline Baabda notes for the show, including links and photos can be found on
our Web site. Humanities Media Project, Dawg. Our theme music is enthusiast
by Tourre’s. Thank you for listening.