by Susan Rubin Suleiman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016
A useful biographical portrait of an intriguing writer.
A literature scholar investigates the Jewish identity of novelist Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942).
Drawing on biographical and historical evidence, Suleiman (Civilization of France, Comparative Literature/Harvard Univ.; Crises of Memory and the Second World War, 2006, etc.) homes in on a question that has disturbed some critics and readers: whether Némirovsky was a self-hating Jew. In responding to that question, Suleiman creates a nuanced portrait of a secular, assimilated Jew, a woman who identified most strongly as a member of the French intelligentsia. Born into a Ukrainian Jewish family, Némirovsky immigrated with them to France in 1919. Ten years later, married and a mother, she published her first novel, David Golder, to exuberant acclaim. The book became a bestseller and, writes Suleiman, “made her, virtually overnight, into a famous writer as well as a highly respected one.” Two novels quickly followed, and David Golder was made into a play and a film. Némirovsky’s prominence fueled her ambitions to join France’s literary establishment, and she coveted the prestigious Prix Goncourt. That honor, however, could be awarded only to a French citizen, but for reasons Suleiman cannot explain, Némirovsky and her husband put off applying for citizenship. As foreign Jews, the couple became increasingly aware of their perilous state, which likely impelled them, in 1939, to convert to Catholicism and have their daughters baptized. Both daughters later said that security was their parents’ primary reason for conversion. Critics who question Némirovsky’s connection to Judaism cite her creation of some stereotypical Jewish characters and, more damning, her continued publication in a journal that spewed anti-Semitism. Suleiman maintains, however, that the journal’s political views were separate from their literary selections; furthermore, at the time, Némirovsky desperately needed money, especially after her husband was fired from his job because he was Jewish. Besides research in published and archival sources and close readings of the writer’s works, Suleiman draws on interviews with Némirovsky’s surviving family members to offer an intimate, perceptive portrait of a complex woman and her times.
A useful biographical portrait of an intriguing writer.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-17196-9
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
Share your opinion of this book
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
Awards & Accolades
Likes
19
Our Verdict
GET IT
Google Rating
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
Share your opinion of this book
More by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
BOOK REVIEW
by Jon Krakauer
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.