Susan Rubin Suleiman

discusses

The Némirovsky Question:
The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France

This event includes a book signing

Date

Dec
2
Friday
December 2, 2016
4:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store welcomes author SUSAN RUBIN SULEIMAN—Harvard's C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and research professor of comparative literature—for a discussion of her latest book, The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France.

About The Némirovsky Question

Irène Némirovsky succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a novelist in the 1930s, only to have her life cut short: a “foreign Jew” in France, she was deported in 1942 and died in Auschwitz. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they brought their mother back to life. In 2004, Suite française, Némirovsky’s posthumous novel, became an international best seller; some critics, however, condemned her as a “self-hating Jew” whose earlier works were rife with anti-Semitic stereotypes. Informed by personal interviews with Némirovsky’s descendants and others, as well as by extensive archival research, this wide-ranging intellectual biography situates Némirovsky in the literary and political climate of interwar France and recounts, for the first time, the postwar lives of her daughters. Némirovsky's Jewish works, Suleiman argues, should be read as explorations of the conflicted identities that shaped the lives of secular Jews in twentieth-century Europe and beyond.

Praise

"An intimate, perceptive portrait of a complex woman and her times. A useful biographical portrait of an intriguing writer." —Kirkus Reviews

Susan Suleiman
Susan Suleiman

Susan Suleiman

Susan Suleiman is the C. Douglas Dillon Research Professor of the Civilization of France and research professor of comparative literature at Harvard. She lives in Belmont, MA. Her many books include Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature, and the memoir Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook.

Photo credit: Allen Reiner

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