Jewish Identity in Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of Irene Nemirovsky, a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
No booking required
in collaboration with IHR Modern French Seminar
Speakers: Susan Suleiman, Harvard University, in conversation with Ann Jefferson, University of Oxford and Daniel Lee, University of Sheffield
Susan Suleiman will speak about her recent book, The Némirovsky Question (Yale University Press, 2017) that explores the fraught issue of Jewish identity in the life and work of Jewish Franco-Russian novelist Irène Némirovsky. Némirovsky was a successful novelist in 1930s Paris, who perished at Auschwitz. Forgotten for most of the postwar period, her writings shot her once again to fame in 2004 following the discovery in a suitcase of her masterwork, Suite Française. The novel was an instant bestseller and part of it was made into a film in 2015. Since Némirovsky's rediscovery, her Jewish identity - and her tortured relationship with that identity - has occasioned fierce controversy, with some critics condemning her as a 'self-hating Jew' due to what they consider as antisemitic stereotypes found in her earlier works.
Ann Jefferson and Daniel Lee will engage Suleiman in a three-way conversation about Jews in interwar and occupied France, antisemitism in fiction, and other subjects she treats in her book.
Contact name: Elaine Hudson
Contact phone: 020 7631 6881
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