Suite Francaise

Suite Française, by French-based Ukrainian writer Irène Némirovsky (born 1903), was published in the original French upon its discovery in 2004. However, Némirovsky started writing Suite in 1941, during the Nazi occupation of France, when those with a Jewish ethnic background like her faced persecution under the contemporary antisemitic regime. She and her husband, Michel Epstein, and their two young daughters, Denise and Élisabeth, had fled Paris for Issy-l’Évêque, a rural village in Burgundy. There, she daily retreated to the forest to write the Suite and completed two out of the five books she originally planned before her arrest and deportation to a concentration camp in Pithiviers on July 13, 1942. These books included Storm in June and Dolce. After Némirovsky was taken to Pithiviers, she was soon moved on to Auschwitz in Poland and died there of typhus a month later.

Although Némirovsky had been a successful novelist in Paris prior to the war, publishing David Golder in 1929 and Le Bal in 1930, alongside 12 other works, her daughter Denise retained the manuscript of Suite Française for more than half a century without reading it because she mistook it for a diary. However, when she was on the verge of delivering the diary to a French archive in the 1990s, she decided to read it and to her surprise found that it contained the two books of the Suite.