The legacy of Irene Nemirovsky

And the Exodus of Syrians

In 1938, Irene Nemirovsky, famous for her last, long lost and relatively recently discovered novel ‘Suite Francaise’ told her daughter “The idea is to create something that will be relevant to people in 1950 as well as 2025”.

Daughter of a wealthy Russian Jew, Nemirovsky grew up in the Jewish finance circle and turned her observations on this elite clique into timeless novels such as David Golder, Le Bal, Dogs and Wolves, The Solitude of Autumn and many other.

She wrote what she saw, what she believed to be true. However, circumstances, especially ones as traumatic as war are harsh to contemporary writers who write immortally. Even Irene Nemirovsky almost apologises for her harsh portrayal of Jews in the turbulent late 30’s and early 40’s. Being a famous author who belonged to the French literally circles did not save her from the Holocaust as she thought it would. However, even until the end, while she was writing about what was happening around her in her final novel (now a BBC series), Nemirovsky stuck to depicting the reality around her, which had much changed.

This loyalty to depicting and characterising human nature, in my eyes, have made her novels treasured literature indeed. And it is tempting to look for comparisons of 1940’s French society, the ones that were anti-semitic and if not who did not dare help Jews in fear of the state and for fear of not upsetting the authorities- with Turkish and European societies of the 2010s, with their intense and unusual xenophobia or indifference at this mass exodus of Syrians.

I wonder, if it is a trait of human kind to be inherently a hypocrite. The ability to forget and/or ignore seems to be a tool rather than a condition that we weave around according to our fears and comforts. We are good at making history out of it, we are just bad at situations themselves. And what a history we have made out of the Holocaust! It is almost one of the only subjects taught in British high schools and Hollywood constantly forge stories around it. We are already doing that with the Syrian ‘Crisis’ as we call it. The BBC’s new Night Manager series and other films have already turned Syria’s mass exodus into entertainment (literature would be too strong a word and entirely inappropriate). The justifications are plentiful.

I cannot help but see the world’s reaction to Syria as a reflection of Europe’s ethos in the ’30s and early ’40s.

Syrians have no other state to create. They had a state and now are stateless. They have been stripped off their identities as Syrians, which has been replaced with the identity of ‘refugee’.

I cannot see people’s prejudices against that word changing anytime in the near future. They will be outcasts and the word will be the synonym of uneducated and poor.

Coming back to Irene Nemirovsky, if she has anything to do with it at all, it is fortunate that she immortalised the characteristics and lives of certain classes of Jews before the Holocaust and shed some light to that history.

It will be nice to do the same for Syrians.