“Well, I would like to say that I have a bedside table book, but not so. The pandemic forced me out of my gym and into the street for daily runs and along with that change came my attachment to audio books. After a few novels, I decided that I wanted to listen to something that would put our current state of affairs – in which people fight about whether or not to wear a mask – into perspective. I found Irene Nemirovsky’s book, ‘Suite Francaise.’ This book, which is two novellas, was written contemporaneously with the German invasion of France in June of 1940. Ms. Nemirovsky, who immigrated from Ukraine to France in 1919 and became a member of the French literary community, was eventually arrested in 1942 as a ‘stateless person of the Jewish descent’ and transported to Auschwitz. Her husband was also sent there to die. Ms. Nemirovsky’s transcript was found by her daughter, but she never really read it until the 1990s and only then discovered that it was not a diary, which she thought would be painful to read, but two complete novellas.
The novellas themselves paint a multi-faceted picture of human suffering with all of the self-centered actions which humans bring into stressful situations such as war. Simultaneous with the pain and humiliation of defeat visited upon the French by the Germans, Nemirovsky uses a handful of characters to put the listener smack in the middle of the everyday existence of citizens trying to cope with and survive an unthinkable tragedy and ruination of all that was normal. The fact that she wrote these novellas without knowing the outcome of the war and then losing her own life at Auschwitz is quite incredible.
Listening to this book and knowing the fate of its author, all the while marveling at the fact that the book was found and published long after her tragic death, makes our present day problems seem like child’s play.”
— JERRY CONLEY, PORTLAND
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