Ã‰lisabeth Gille,Marina Harss
A New York Review Books Original , Â , Ã‰lisabeth Gille was only five-years-old when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, IrÃ¨ne NÃ©mirovsky, a once popular novelist, a Russian Ã©migrÃ© from an immensely rich family, a Jew who didnâ€™t consider herself one and who even contributed to collaborationist periodicals, and a woman who died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger., It was to come to terms with that stranger that Gille wrote, in The Mirador, her motherâ€™s memoirs. The first part of the book, dated 1929, the year David Golder made NÃ©mirovsky famous, takes us back to her difficult childhood in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Her father is doting, her mother a beautiful monster, while Irene herself is bookish and self-absorbed. There are pogroms and riots, parties and excursions, then revolution, from which the family flees to France, a country of â€œmoderation, freedom, and generosity,â€ where at last she is happy., Some thirteen years later IrÃ¨ne picks up her pen again. Everything has changed. Abandoned by friends and colleagues, she lives in the countryside and waits for the knock on the door. Written a decade before the publication of Suite FranÃ§aise made IrÃ¨ne NÃ©mirovsky famous once more (something Gille did not live to see), The Mirador is a haunted and a haunting book, an unflinching reckoning with the tragic past, and a triumph not only of the imagination but of love.
Biography,Nonfiction,Cultural,France,History,Autobiography,Memoir,World War II,Holocaust,Biography Memoir,Cultural,Russia,War,War,World War II
The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irene Nemirovsky by Her Daughter