Irène Némirovsky’s posthumous Suite Française has become a publishing phenomenon, selling more than half a million copies since its publication in 2006. As those who know it are keenly aware, Némirovsky was killed by the Nazis before she had a chance to write the last three sections of what she intended to be a five-part work. As Claire Messud wrote in Bookforum, Némirovsky’s “hope in the midst of hopelessness . . . is a rare gift.”
As they were being deported to concentration camps, Némirovsky and her husband, like so many other German Jews, sent their two young daughters, then five and seven, to live under assumed identities—in this case in a Catholic boarding school in the south of France—which enabled them to survive the war. The younger daughter, Elisabeth Gille, became a well-known French publisher, and chronicled her wartime experiences in her own novel, Shadows of a Childhood.
Originally published long before the manuscript of Suite Française was discovered, Shadows of a Childhood is now available for Némirovsky fans who want to know more about the circumstances of her death and her daughters’ survival. Gille’s haunting novel is a moving sequel to her mother’s masterpiece and an important part of an extraordinary family’s literary legacy.

Shadows of a Childhood: A Novel of War and Friendship

Literature & Fiction

Gille, Élisabeth

United States

The New Press

A "riveting" and "unforgettable" (Kirkus Reviews) novel of war and friendship.

Genre Fiction

New Pr

A New York Review Books Original Élisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, Irène Némirovsky, a once popular novelist, a Russian émigré from an immensely rich family, a Jew who didn’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 mother’s memoirs. The first part of the book, dated 1929, the year David Golder made Némirovsky 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 “moderation, freedom, and generosity,” where at last she is happy. Some thirteen years later Irène 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 Française made Irène Némirovsky 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.

The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irene Nemirovsky by her Daughter

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

NYRB Classics

Contemporary

Un paysage de cendres

Literary

SEUIL

LE MIRADOR

Stock

« Si les choses tournent mal, très mal, quelle image mes filles garderont-elles de moi ? Quels reproches pourront-elles légitimement m'adresser dans dix ans, dans vingt ans, quand elles seront devenues femmes ? » s'interrogeait Irène Némirovsky, qui fut déportée à Auschwitz en 1942 et n'en revint jamais. L'une de ses deux filles, Elisabeth Gille, a écrit l'autobiographie « rèvée »de cette mère perdue à l'âge de cinq ans. Grâce à des témoignages et des écrits intimes, elle reconstitue la vie d'une romancière talentueuse, issue de la haute bourgeoisie juive de Russie.

Le Mirador (Littérature) (French Edition)

Livre De Poche

LE CRABE SUR LA BANQUETTE ARRIERE

MERCURE DE FRAN

POINTS

Used. Very Good conditions. May have soft reading marks and name of the previous owner.

Le mirador: Mémoires rêvés (French Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Presses de la Renaissance

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