A Devastating Account of Irene Nemirovsky

I have never before come upon a book at once as loving and as devastating as The Mirador by Ã?lisabeth Gille, the daughter of Irène Némirovsky. Némirovsky, it will be remembered, is the popular French-Jewish society novelist of the interwar era who came to attention in the United States and elsewhere after the discovery of Suite Française, her unfinished epic about the war years in France. Published more than sixty years after her death at Auschwitz, Suite Françaiseâ??scribbled in minuscule letters in a journal that Némirovskyâ??s elder daughter had taken with her into hidingâ??earned Némirovsky critical accolades as a forgotten writer of the Holocaust and comparisons to Elie Wiesel and Anne Frank. But some of the earlier novels that were unearthed and republished in the wake of her great posthumous success revealed a less sympathetic Némirovskyâ??particularly David Golder, her first novel, published to a great sensation when she was only twenty-six. The novel depicts a villainous Jewish businessman, alternately cruel and pathetic, who is bled of his fortune by his rapacious, unfaithful wife and his materialistic daughter. It is written in language steeped in anti-Semitic caricature, referring at one point to Golderâ??s nose as â??enormous and hookedâ? and repeatedly comparing Jewish characters to old, sick dogs.