Sixty-two years after its author died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, a remarkable and previously unpublished wartime work by a Russian Jewish immigrant in France has taken the world of publishing by storm.
Suite Francaise, the first two parts of what Irene Nemirovsky originally intended to be a five-volume epic, has been hailed by ecstatic French critics as "a masterpiece" and "probably the definitive novel of our nation in the second world war."
Rights to the work, published three weeks ago, have already been sold in 18 countries often for sums higher than any previously paid for a French novel, and a vigorous campaign is underway for Nemirovsky to be posthumously awarded France's most prestigious literary prize, the Goncourt.
"One of the great 20th century authors ... A gigantic literary and historical gift," said the daily La Croix. "A work of exceptional force ... remarkable because written not after, but during, the war," said L'Express.
"A superb work ... A capital discovery," said the Le Point weekly. "A chef-d'oeuvre ... ripped from oblivion," said Le Monde.
Overwhelming as the praise has been, the story of Irene Nemirovsky is as gripping as the 430-page work itself.
Born in February 1903 in Kiev, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker, Irene fled Russia in 1918 and arrived with her family in France the following year. A privileged life of balls, banquets and beaux between Paris, Biarritz and the Cote d'Azur gave way by the mid-1920s to that of a hugely popular and critically-acclaimed writer; David Golder (1929) and Le Bal (1930) established Nemirovsky as one of the most talented and celebrated authors of her day, "the Francoise Sagan of the time."
In 1926 Irene married Michel Epstein, an immigrant Russian businessmen and the couple had two daughters; Denise, born in 1929, and Elisabeth, in 1937.
Harboring no illusions about the fate that might await them, Irene and Michel dispatched the girls to the small Burgundy village of Issy-l'Eveque with their nurse on Sept. 1 1939 as war loomed.
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