Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky, Sandra Smith (Translator)

For those of you who don't Irene Nemirovsky's story, well you should.  When Nemirovsky was a young girl her family immigrated from Russia to escape persecution of Jews.  They relocated in Paris where Nemirovsky was schooled and later became a much published writer.  She began Suite Francaise during World War II.  In 1942 Nemirovsky was arrested for being a Jew and deported to Auschwitz.  She died there a month later at the age of 39.  Ironically Suite Francaise is a book about the German occupation of France and how the people of France coped with the occupation.  Two years before she was arrested she and her husband with their two small daughters fled to a small village in central France in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis.  Suite Francaise is a story of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the manuscript.  Her daughters took the manuscript with them into hiding. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Nemirovsky's literary masterpiece.

I am such a pacifist that whenever I read a book about war it angers me. Irene Nemirovsky gave me a different viewpoint in Suite Francaise. So that leaves me a conflicted pacifist but a pacifist nonetheless. Her story is beautiful, full of love, bittersweet, and most of all tragic. I feel that humankind as a whole should feel a huge hole in their heart at the loss of Nemirovsky and all the others who were killed in war in the guise of religion/power. Its been 3 yeas since I read this book and although I didn't personally know Nemirovsky, I miss her as though I did. This book is powerful.  I gave it 5 stars.