Irène Némirovsky
Random House
Otago Daily Times, 2009
Irène Némirovsky may be familiar to New Zealand readers from Suite Francaise, a novel left unfinished when she was transported to Auschwitz in 1942, and finally published in 2007. Since then, English translations of a number of her other novels (and a second, posthumously discovered manuscript) have been produced. The Dogs and the Wolves was the last of Némirovsky works to appear before her death, and the title refers to the French phrase describing dusk as ‘entre chien et loupe’: a time in which it is the domesticated dog and his savage cousin the wolf are not readily distinguished, a metaphor that echoes throughout the novel.
Ada Sinner’s father, Israel, is a mackler, moving between the strata of Jewish communities in an unnamed Ukranian city as he buys and sells goods on other people’s behalf. Although he deals with the wealthy Jews who live high on the hill among Russian officials and Polish nobility, he and Ada are barely above the ghetto to which the ‘unsavoury’ Jews (self-employed craftsmen, sordid shopkeepers, vagabonds) are banished. There is another branch of the Sinners in the city, however, the family of Salomon Sinner, reputedly the richest man in Europe. A source of fascination to Ada, and when she finally sees their house and Solomon’s great-nephew Harry, she falls instantly and irrevocably in love. These dreams are shattered, however, when on the first two occasions they meet Harry recoils lest he be infected by the unhappiness represented by this girl from a sordid world far from his life but linked by blood.
Many years later their paths cross again in Paris, where Ada (now married to her cousin Ben) is scratching by in a one-room apartment surrounded by strangers, while Harry is accepted into the highest social circles. Despite the Russian revolution, the rich Sinners’ banking empire is thriving and Harry has married into an equally wealthy French banking family. This time, however, Ada is successful in establishing the connection she always knew existed between them and the couple turn their backs on their respective lives to create a new one together – but if Harry is epitomised by the dog of the title, Ben is the wolf and his revenge is slow but sure.
Although Jewish, Némirovsky reverted to Catholicism in 1939, and wrote for magazines with an anti-Semitic reputation. She has been described by some as a ‘self-hating Jew’ and accused of pandering to the fascist right, particularly in her early novels that contained (according to a review in The New Republic) “corrupt Jews-some even [with] hooked noses, no less!” I did my best to read ‘The Dogs and the Wolves’ with an open mind, but found myself struggling with parts of it. There is a sense of a perpetuated stereotype in the number of characters with long, narrow noses and long, thin necks, for example, or in the explanation that: “Everyone thought money a good thing, but to a Jew, it was a necessity, like air or water. How could they live without money? How could they pay the bribes? How could they get their children into school where there were already too many students enrolled… without money, how could they live?”
There is indeed a sense of loathing in the depiction of the Jews in the lower town as “religious and fanatically attached to their customs… [how Ada’s family] would like to leave their fellow Jews to rot in their filth, their poverty and their superstitions.” On the other hand, this could well be a reflection of the reality of life in the ghetto, and although the pogroms are dismissed as a “serious and sometimes tragic inconvenience”, their actual brutality and violence is clearly described. It is hard to know what she intended with such passages, and it is easy to over-analyse. In the end this is an unsettling novel about pride, prejudice, love, loss and the difficulty of always being seen as the ‘other,’ written by woman whose reputation as a major author is well deserved and sensitively translated by Sandra Smith, who is deeply familiar with Némirovsky work.
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