The very title of Susan Rubin Suleiman's book on the French novelist Irène Némirovsky (1903–42) encapsulates the book's critical trajectory: to reposition the debate about Némirovsky's oeuvre from Némirovsky's tenuous, if controversial, relationship to Jewish identity to a wider discussion about the author and her family, her work and its reception. Rather than simply providing more answers to the so-called “Jewish question” posed by Némirovsky's problematic depiction of Jews and their absence in her famed novel Suite Française, Suleiman reviews how most of these answers have been fashioned on a rather rudimentary series of assumptions, myths, and misunderstandings, which Suleiman succeeds in challenging.

The Némirovsky Question is in no sense of the word an ordinary work of literary criticism. Suleiman, after all, is the author of Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (1994), in which she professes her wish to express ideas in a “language that will allow nonspecialists to read us. It is a desire to speak to a larger public. One way to speak to a larger public is to implicate yourself, your self, in what you write” (2). This is very much the case with her study on Némirovsky, whose beginnings Suleiman chronicles back to the year 2000, when she read a joint review of a selection of stories by Némirovsky originally published between 1934 and 1941 and of Le mirador (1992), a biography of Némirovsky by her daughter Elisabeth Gille. It is exactly this doubling of perspective that makes Suleiman's book so extraordinary, pertinent, and illuminating. It portrays Némirovsky as a writer against the backdrop of the cultural politics of the first part of the twentieth century and it pursues the refractions of her life, work, and legacy in the work and the life of her family members, primarily her two daughters, Denise and Elisabeth.

To be sure, this undertaking rests on both literary criticism and on literary research; much of it, however, goes far beyond the scope of archival work to enter the realm of oral history and cultural journalism. Suleiman is a superb reader not only of literary texts and cultural documents but also of people. Over the course of her preparation of this volume, Suleiman interviewed at length many of Némirovsky's family members and acquaintances to put together a puzzle of which most of her predecessors (e.g., Jonathan Weiss in his 2005 Irène Némirovsky [Félin/Kiron]) had known only few pieces. Once and for all, Suleiman bids farewell to the myth that had placed the unread manuscript of Némirovsky's Suite Française in a suitcase that her daughters allegedly did not dare to open for several decades, mistaking the unread manuscript for their mother's diary. Suleiman's meticulous research discovers that both daughters had been aware of the true nature of the papers in their possession for many decades, which allows her to frame the posthumous publication of the novel in 2004 in a discussion of the conditions that would have made publication of the book in the decades immediately following the end of World War II so difficult. Here, again, Suleiman approaches her subject with a profound knowledge of the aesthetic preferences and ethnic prejudices that informed postwar European culture: “The nouveau roman was just gaining momentum, and Suite Française was definitley not that. Nor was there much interest in fiction about the Second World War or the Holocaust. The first French novel to evoke the Holocaust, André Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just, did not appear until 1959” (257). One may want to see some authors added to this list who, like Anna Langfus or Piotr Rawicz, in the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s, published important texts that were met with official recognition. It appears that there were some small openings after all in the cloud that, according to Henri Rousso, suffocated public discourse on the Vichy period in the years following the war. Rather than speculating how a novel on the wartime in which the Jews are conspicuously absent could have informed French public awareness if it had been published earlier, Suleiman moves to open up yet another chapter in her multigenerational tableau of French Jewish life. Reviewing major markers, thinkers, and groups that accompanied and impacted the development of Jewish life in post-Vichy France (paying proper homage, for example, to Richard Marienstras's Cercle Gaston Crémieux), Suleiman concludes by offering a final look at the generation of the children of Némirovsky's grandchildren, rounding out a narrative of acculturation whose beginnings she traces back to the debates between Israélites and Juifs in the 1920s and 1930s.

It is in this grand scheme that Suleiman portrays in minute detail the genesis of Némirovsky's life and works, while presenting, at the same time, a theoretical discussion concerning the reading of antisemitic notions in literary fiction, for which she draws examples from a wide canon of texts and films, to arrive at the following reflection: “Why do I count myself among Némirovsky's defenders rather than among her attackers when it comes to her portrayal of Jews? Do I never wince when I read in one of her novels a description of Jews that sounds like a negative stereotype? Yes, I do wince at some moments” (154). Suleiman goes on to offer what she sees as a resolution to the dilemma in which she finds herself as a reader of Jewish figures in whom she does not discern a general statement by Némirovsky about “an idea or an ideology, either about Jews or about anyone else.” Suggesting that Némirovsky “does not pit Jews against non-Jews as the negative or harmful other against the positive same” (154), Suleiman turns to reading the Jewish protagonists in David Golder as well as in some much lesser-known texts by Némirovsky. The clichés and topoi of Jewish characters that Suleiman judges to be “quite distasteful” (172) should challenge the reader. Suleiman concludes one of the strongest chapters of her book with one of the underarticulated formulations in a book that will remain the gold standard of Némirovsky scholarship for decades to come: “Negative stereotypes must be examined not in isolation but in terms of their function in the work as a whole. This means not only comparing Némirovsky's portrayal of Jews to those of others, ranging from Jewish writers to ideological antisemites, but also giving her works the careful reading they deserve” (172).