Letters to the Editor
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Well thank the lord
We now have a Salon piece that trumpets antisemitism every single day now.
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You mean like readers of Salon?
Pish posh and harrumph. A day without liberal antisemitism is like a day w/o sunshine.
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Context of Time
It's important judge these pieces in the time they were written. The majority of people everywhere were immersed in severe prejudice that was across the board taken for granted. Even among jews themselves. There were very, very few people who didn't think and say things that would just shock and be unacceptable to most of us off now. I do believe there are other works by other authors of the same time period that show this.
Does it excuse it, no. But we should use it to understand why the holocaust came into to being with out too much more than of a blink of eye by the rest of western civilization until it was too late. Némirovsky's writings are really a statement about how the world was. All our pretty TV shows and movies of that time period where people don't say these things that she says in her books are just repainting the past so we can forget and redeem our illusions of ourselves.
I am sure Némirovsky felt her sin keenly in the last moments of her life. It's a sin the majority of people shared at that time in history.
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Barra's cheap shot
Allen Barra has apparently not read the fine biography of Irene Nemirovsky, "Irene Nemirovsky: Her Life And Works" by Jonathan Weiss, in which many of Barra's insuations are addressed. Nemirovsky's mother was apparently quite egocentric at the expense of neglecting Irene, while her French-spoeaking nanny was quite loving, which may have contributed to Irene's early ambivalence about her own heritage and her attraction to all things French. After being forced when she was still a child to move with her family from Russia and eventually settling in France, Irene tried to find herself as a Francophile. Weiss leaves little doubt that as Irene matured, an evolution of sensibility and cultural identification took place with her own Jewishness, such that her depiction of Jewish characters became far more sympathetic to the point that it is apparent that Irene had reconciled with herself. Weiss portrays this quite effectively. It is easy for someone like Barra to sit in judgment. The truth is far more complex.
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It's never that simple.
It's too easy to take one particular thing someone wrote and magnify it as a defining factor of the person who wrote it. People and stories are always more complex than that. Simply labeling someone as either anti-semitic or nobly Jewish or whatever is pretty meaningless. Why the first two anonymous posters -obviously readers of Salon or they wouldn't be here - need to throw out silly flippant comments is just sort of meaningless as well. Don't waste your time, seriously. I come from a German family with a complicated history. My great-grandfather was part of the political opposition while Hitler was in power. He was briefly put into a camp, but had connections which helped him get out. Should he have stayed in the camp and died, leaving his family without a provider or was it okay that he allowed some relative in the Nazi party to get him out? It's too easy to look back and judge - the reality of daily existence and the need for survival leads people to say and do all sorts of things which we in our comfy armchairs can then just sit back and judge.
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Only in America?
You would think that after the fall of the Twin Towers and the fear and hysteria that came afterwards, that Americans could finally understand the complexity of what living in wartime is. But alas they are still looking for the heroes of film and TV and still clinging to the hypocritical political correctness that, ironically, smoothed the path for right-wing reactionaries like George Bush. Most people when faced with death (which is usually what a visit from the Nazis meant) would say and do anything to survive. Judging them and condemning them for wanting what most of us living in our comfort take for granted is arrogant, not to mention immature. Grow up, already. As for her being anti-semitic, do these same people who condemn her take African-Americans to task when they racially slur their own? Or have any ambivalent feelings about their own culture and upbringing? Give me a break! Of course, Nemirovsky regretted her novel later. What was written in a novel as part of a portrait of humanity -- as part of a complex artistic endeavour -- was later used by fascists to justify oppression and murder. That certainly was not her intention. Can we get some mature critiquing happening at Salon? At times, the commentary reads like an undergrad essay where the writer is trying to score points not by placing some substance in her argument but by bolstering a weak argument with cheap moralizing.
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No it's just more of the same from Salondotcom
It's sad it's popular it's lazy it's you in spades (and by spades I mean the card kind, before you declare me a linguisto-war criminal).
It used to amaze me the therapeutization of everything here at Salon, the desperate search for anything good and cuddly in everyone. Except of course for all the Jews. Now it's just boring.
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correction for Bruno Schulz
This might be a typo in the article, but the Polish writer Bruno Schulz was not killed by a "Nazi office in Austria." He was murdered in his hometown, Drohobycz, while apparently out on an errand to buy bread. Schulz had found a protector in a Gestapo officer who admired his art-work, but was murdered by the rival of his admirer.
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literary freedom
The offensive remarks quoted by Allen Barra are expressions of the thoughts of various characters. Can an author be said to be anti-semitic if some of her characters express dislike for jews?
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not enough info
To better understand the nature of Nemirovsky's purported anti-semitism in her novel David Golder, don't we need a much fuller description of the book, the characters and where such sentiments occur and how they fit into the story? Plucking them out at random doesn't tell us enough, and as a novelist, I know people could schlep quotes out of many of my books and claim this or that. Even if she did regret how she wrote the book, what's not clear is did she regret the mere writing of such sentiments or was the regret larger?