What sort of savage beast is a banker at bay? Irene Nemirovsky, the author of the acclaimed Suite Francaise, seems to have been in a good situation to tell us. Her father had been a powerful financier who was expelled from Soviet Russia, and her husband banked in France before anti-Jewish policies made his activities (not to mention Nemirovsky’s novels) unacceptable.
Nemirovsky could have been in a better situation to tell the story of David Golder only if she had been a financier herself, and it’s the complex truth that she brings to her titular character that redeems an otherwise unengaged story.
The novel, which follows the twilight of Golder as his career as a financier and a family man follows a series of highs and bottom-scraping lows to its end, was the first of Nemirovsky’s to receive critical acclaim. One can see why the New York Times called her Dostoevsky’s heir in view of her later work and in view of the fact that Golder is very well drawn indeed.
The reader comes away from the novel with an empathy for the beast at its centre, while mystery over his character lingers; we understand him, but we never understand if it was love or ambition that powered his drive to self-destruction.
But while David Golder himself lives, breathes, and dies through the spare and direct narrative, the other characters and objects are just words on a page, only obstacles in his path. Perhaps that’s the point, but such single-minded character studies don’t make for scintillating reading even at the novella length.
With the Suite Francaise in wide distribution, I can only recommend reading or re-reading that for all but the most devoted Nemirovsky fans. Reading this before or instead of the Suite would be like reading Shirley instead of Jane Eyre to get to know Charlotte Bronte. Nonetheless, if you have the time and inclination to get into it, you’ll be treated to a fine portrait of a vicious, animal, yet sympathetic antihero.
David Golder and the Suite Francaise are both published by Vintage and are available in Canada through Random House Canada.
Article comments
1 - Richar Spear
It is hard to fathom that David Golder, which established Irène Némirovsky’s reputation when it was published in Paris in 1929, is by the same author as Suite Française, Némirovsky’s brilliant, unfinished novel about the Nazi’s invasion and occupation of France in 1940-41. Suite Française is a tour de force of scrutiny of complex human behavior amidst different levels of society, nationalities, and ages; by comparison, David Golder is insistently shallow because of its mono-dimensional characters. If the painful story of Suite Française, which Némirovsky began in 1940 while the events it relates were still unfolding, makes the author’s death at Auschwitz in 1942 (aged 39) appear all the more tragic, the tone of David Golder suggests a wholly different reading of Némirovsky’s death as that ironic twist of fate known as poetic justice.
That is a harsh judgment, but so is the harsh anti-Semitism that pervades David Golder. All of its characters are paper-thin caricatures of unscrupulous, money-grubbing Jews. The only sympathy that David Golder might occasionally elicit results from the contrast between him and his utterly selfish, faithless, bejeweled wife, or his brainless, spoiled, cynical daughter, the least probable figure in this cast of implausible creatures.
The plot is no more subtle: a relentless account of a rich broker’s Yiddish greed, and its consequences on those he had ruthlessly trampled, as he himself is dying. Repeatedly, Némirovsky introduces her Jews with unmistakable markers of racial disparagement: they have hooked noses; they are dirty; they are sweaty; Golder’s tightfisted Jewish friend Soifer “rubbed his trembling hands together in an expression of sheer delight as he reeled off… the names of the ruined shareholders” he destroyed. An unflagging litany of derision permeates this and other early books by Némirovsky, whose language aims to belittle Jews: just as she labels the youth with Golder while he dies “the little Jew,” so in The Ball (1930) Alfred Kampf is “a dry little Jew;” in The Courilof Affair (1933) an anonymous American journalist is “a rosy-cheeked little Jew” and Fanny Zart’s uncle is a “little Jewish banker with his fat stomach.”
Apologists for Némirovsky, herself a Russian Jew who led a privileged life in a banker’s family in Kiev and Paris, stress that she told Les Nouvelles Litteraires she “would have greatly toned down” David Golder after Hitler's ascent to power -- as if her scathing portraits of Jews somehow was acceptable in the 1920s, and as if it didn’t matter that her book was rich fodder for the Nazis and French Jew haters. Her apologists also aim to justify Némirovsky’s Yids as claiming they are presented as pathetic products of their repressive culture, overlooking evidence to the contrary. Consider how Némirovsky frames Golder’s response when he is accused of wasting his own life on making money and of ruining the lives of others through his devious dealings: “I have always done what I wanted to do on this earth.”
Astonishingly, Sandra Smith, Némirovsky’s skilful translator who must be too close to her subject to see the proverbial forest, reportedly declared, "I'm Jewish and I don't find [David Golder] anti-Semitic." Step back from the trees, Ms. Smith and your co-apologists, and you might see Némirovsky more clearly: as an author affiliated with right-wing, anti-Semitic journals in Paris, and as an assimilationist convert to Catholicism who wrote to the head of the Vichy government, Marshall Pétain, that although she was Jewish by birth, she deserved special status because she disliked Jews. She might have enclosed a copy of David Golder to prove her point.