{"id":507,"date":"2009-01-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-06T00:04:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=507"},"modified":"2024-12-31T14:02:08","modified_gmt":"2024-12-31T01:02:08","slug":"the-dogs-and-the-wolves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/01\/01\/the-dogs-and-the-wolves\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dogs and the Wolves"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ir\u00e8ne N\u00e9mirovsky<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Random House<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Otago Daily Times, 2009<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ir\u00e8ne N\u00e9mirovsky may be familiar to New Zealand readers from Suite Francaise<\/em>, 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<\/em> was the last of N\u00e9mirovsky works to appear before her death, and the title refers to the French phrase describing dusk as \u2018entre chien et loupe\u2019:  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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ada Sinner\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2018unsavoury\u2019 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although Jewish, N\u00e9mirovsky reverted to Catholicism in 1939, and wrote for magazines with an anti-Semitic reputation. She has been described by some as a \u2018self-hating Jew\u2019 and accused of pandering to the fascist right, particularly in her early novels that contained (according to a review in The New Republic) \u201ccorrupt Jews-some even [with] hooked noses, no less!\u201d   I did my best to read \u2018The Dogs and the Wolves\u2019 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: \u201cEveryone 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\u2026 without money, how could they live?\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is indeed a sense of loathing in the depiction of the Jews in the lower town as  \u201creligious and fanatically attached to their customs\u2026 [how Ada\u2019s family] would like to leave their fellow Jews to rot in their filth, their poverty and their superstitions.\u201d   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 \u201cserious and sometimes tragic inconvenience\u201d, 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 \u2018other,\u2019 written by woman whose reputation as a major author is well deserved and sensitively translated by Sandra Smith, who is deeply familiar with N\u00e9mirovsky work. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Irene Nemirovsky
\n
\nOtago Daily Times review 2009<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[88,370,421,111,18],"class_list":["post-507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-88","tag-fiction","tag-historical","tag-irene-nemirovsky","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1441,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507\/revisions\/1441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}