Truth, Lies and Anti-Semitism

From the Guardian:

When Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française was published in English last year, something was left out. Just a few lines omitted from the introduction to the French edition that had appeared two years previously. Nothing to diminish the remarkable achievement of the writer's novel describing life in a French village under Nazi occupation. Nothing to undermine the ecstatic reviews - Le Monde called the book "a masterpiece ... ripped from oblivion" - and the fact that the novel has become a runaway bestseller.
And nothing to taint the story of the book's extraordinary appearance after 50 years tucked away in a French cellar, or the narrative of Némirovsky's tragic last years - stories that helped make Suite Française a literary sensation. Némirovsky, a Kiev-born Jewish woman, had settled in France with her wealthy family after the Russian revolution; become a literary celebrity on a par with Colette in 1930s Paris; was refused French citizenship shortly before the second world war broke out; and, in 1942, was deported to Auschwitz where she died, a stateless Jew, aged 39. For many years, the manuscript of her masterpiece, written on paper as thin as onion peel, had remained in a suitcase that she handed to her daughter Denise when she was arrested.
What was missing from the British Chatto & Windus edition was a passage in which Miriam Anissimov, a biographer of Primo Levi, suggested that Némirovsky was a self-hating Jew.

Read the whole article here.