"...the fact is that if non-Jews had written many of the things she wrote, they would be reviled as anti-Semitic."-AB

This is a point worth exploring from writers to the things politicians say.

There's an old joke that the way to keep Jews out of your country club is to let one in and rely on him to keep out the rest. Nemirovsky somewhat fits the description. Her family were highly privileged Jews in Czarist Russia -- bankers allowed to live in St. Petersburg and moving at high levels of society. They lost everything in the Revolution, fled penniless first to Finland and then France, where her father made a second fortune. She moved, and very much wanted to move, among the well to do in France, where excessive Jewishness was a definite social handicap. Its no surprise that she wrote of less well placed Jews as vulgar. It's a not uncommon snobbery among those in her situation.

Having suffered through one Communist revolution, Nemirovsky was terrified of another. Her pre-war politics were aligned with the anti-parliamentary ultra-right. She published in weekly political and literary magazines affiliated with that group, Gringoire and Candide. Gringoire's editor, Robert Brasillach, was a highly vocal collaborator during the Occupation and was excuted after the Liberation. That milieu in general, and the two magazines in particular, were stridently anti-Semitic. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

The first portion of Suite Francaise and Nemirovsky's notes for the never written part of the novel reveal what the French might call a certain disillusionment with her pre-war friends. Nonetheless, at a time when it wasn't generally known that the Germans were determined to kill all the Jews of Europe, her husband might plausibly have thought that her arrest was a political mistake and that her pre-war connections, now prominent collaborators, could get her released. Whatever grovelling and cringing he thought might save her, he tried. Not having lived through that situation, I'm not in any position to blame him.

I read Irene Nemirovsky's book, Suite Francaise, last year and was blown away by it. The writing is gorgeous and the universe within the novel is morally complex -- it is an extremely satisfying read.

Based on my strong reaction to this novel, I tracked down an early copy of David Golder, which was published in the 40s, I believe, in England. I've read other articles debating Nemirovsky's anti-Semitism, which specifically mention this novel. I must say that when I read it, my main reaction was surprise that the book was such a literary sensation because, to my disappointment, it just struck me as simply BAD.

Has Allen Barra read James Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man"? I wonder if he would consider Baldwin racist for writing a short story from the point of view of a racist Southern white man?

The whole question of a writer's self-image strikes me as irrelevant if the characters depicted in the universe of a story are believable. Anti-Semitism was very common in the time Nemirovsky was writing. Why not put on the page an accurate depiction of one's society? Personally, I find historically accurate fiction makes for a much more compelling way to learn history that the dry text of history books, which often are themselves quite skewed in perspective.

The issue of whether Irene Nemirovsky was a Jewish anti-Semite is one that not only can't be resolved from her writings but is hardly worth resolving. The evidence of her "anti-Semitism" is far too thin to make a case against her. And, moreover, it is irrelevant to judging the quality of her literature. Trying to figure out what her personal beliefs were based on fragmentary evidence is an exercise in futility. Her work speaks for itself.

And her work was, in many ways, spectacular. Suite Francaise is reminiscent of Zola at his best, a study of human nature. Her characters span the spectrum of humanity, including a wealthy bourgeois family, an effete art dealer, children, peasants, tradespeople, soldiers, and priests, and it focuses on human behavior under the stress of war and occupation, some of it noble, some of it venal, and some of it stupid. Her point, I think, was that, even in war, people behave pretty much according to their upbringing and their station in life. In that regard the novel comes close to Zola's great work about the Franco Prussian War, La Debacle.

Ideology or even personal beliefs have nothing to do with her work. There is not an iota of sympathy for the Nazis or French facism in the book.

If non-Jews had written many of the things Némirovsky wrote, they would be reviled as anti-Semitic.

This says much more about the people passing judgement than it does about Némirovsky.

First, what everybody else has said about the complexity of lives and literature.

Second, I have not read Nemirovsky and am responding to Mr. Barra's essay on its own terms

I just want to hold up a remark of Mr. Barra's from early in the article. He notes with approval Nemirovsky's depiction of "some of the French characters [who] are so arrogant and smug that you almost root for the Germans to knock the starch out of their insular, complacent little world."

I will grant Mr. Barra that "almost." He has still been brought to the point of envisioning, desiring (though not rooting for) the Germans to give it to these people whom Nemirovsky has brought him to loathe.

So it is all right for N. as a novelist to give a hateful portrait of French provincials, but not for another (Jewish) character to reproach her husband with the most hateful slurs at her command.

Mr. Barra admires the novelist's art in the first case, but turns on N. with accusations of anti-semitism in the second. What this means to me is that B. reserves the right to deny Nemirovsky's work the distinction of being literature, when it is informed by her Judaism.

Let Mr. Barra almost root for the Germans, while passing judgment on whom he will. More thoughtful critics and scholars will prevail.

But salon.com, why do you run this stuff? I propose a second editorial staff, to do the thinking twice.