So many people have commented to us that seeing the original manuscript and the valise in person is so powerful — it is as if these objects have personalities themselves. We take for granted the tools we use on a regular basis with no thought given to what they might say about us as individuals. What objects do you possess that you believe define who you are? What do they say about you?
a map of occupied France, of Vichy France, and of exactly where their village was located, would have been enormously helpful. Denise’s map just doesn’t do it.
This has been a very interesting exhibit, very nicely done with, sadly, so few artifacts. I’m curious about the possiblity that Nemirovksy and her family might have escaped France. I know Varian Fry had a list of 100 intellectuals & artists, but I’m sure you would have mentioned it if her name were on it. I think the exhibit might have mentioned other writers and artists who did escape France, to put her refusal in some larger context.
My friend and I who visited the exhibit together both thought the frequent reference to her as Irene, rather than using her last name, was a little awkward — you’d probably not have said Albert for Einstein, or Marc for Chagall.
I disagreed with several of Edward Rothstein’s criticisms of this exhibition in his New York Times review on October 20, 2008. His review can be read here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/arts/design/21nemi.html
My responses of his comments can be read here:
http://sexualityinart.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/in-defense-of-irene-nemirovskys-work-responses-to-edward-rothsteins-ny-times-review-of-irene-nemirovskys-exhibition-at-the-museum-of-jewish-heritage/
Thank you all for your work,
OneMoreOption
I am shocked at your celebration of Irene Nemirovsky, a shameless apostate who renounced Judaism in hopes of wriggling out of the Nazi grasp. Brave Jews, fierce and loyal Jews did not survive, why should this naive sneak have expected to?
I can understand, in light of her postumous literary success, that she would be an interesting subject – but not in a museum of Jewish heritage. How does one who turns her back on our glorious heritage, one who used her modest literary gifts to mock and scorn her fellow Jews, deserve such an honor? She died a Roman Catholic, a conversion of her choice – let her chosen religion celebrate her cowardice.
At the very least, since this ill-advised exhibit is already on view, it needs to expose her duplicity. By treating her like a Jew, when by choice she was not a Jew, and like a Jewish heroine, you perpetrate a fraud. I have taken my Jewish daughter to MIJNYC and she was deeply moved by our Jewish suvivor guide. We have visited the Memorial to the Shoah in Paris and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I would be hard pressed to explain to my child how you attempted to dignify this pathetic traitor, Nemirovsky, and didn’t have sense enough to explain the other, cowardly side of her story.
Your exhibit is open until March 22, 2009. Fix this disgraceful mess you’ve made.
Why is one person’s suffering more worthy than another’s? Irene Nemirovsky (and her husband Michel)died like so many others at the hands of the Nazis. How does anyone in the safe here and now judge another for trying to ‘wriggle out of the Nazi grasp?’ The brave, fierce and loyal Jews who died with her, whether by gas or typhus, might have a thing or two to say about such a callous denigration by one who cannot possibly understand the horror they shared. Unless you have lived it, you cannot know what you might or might not do to save those you love.
No one knows the truth about Mrs. Nemirovsky’s politics, beliefs or loyalties. No one can. To make a judgement on your own suppositions and prejudices is unfair at best, injustice at worst.
Whatever your opinion of Irene Nemirovsky and her choices, she died in Auschwitz as a Jew. Her death is proof that it did not matter if you were wealthy or poor, famous or no one, French or German or Polish. If you were a Jew, you were forfeit. By celebrating her literary achievement now, decades after her death, the Museum of Jewish Heritage takes back something the Nazis stole from the world. They take back something worthy and good and noble. They take back a piece of this life so horrifically ended, and sculpt it back into existence; because that brilliant thing that survives after the horror is done is what the museum celebrates.
I can hardly understand the invective lobbed at this brilliant Jewish author (one has only to read her work to note the compassion of a Jewish soul)–a loving mother and wife who devoted her life to chesed, in her writing,in her actions, in her care for her family.
That the world is now recognizing the tragedy of her loss, not only to her daughters but to the world in general (for there is much to learn from her writing, as with all excellent authors) and I commend the Museum for putting on such an amazing exhibit.
With gratitude, from an author who writes about Jewish families in Occupation France.
Nemirovsky’s ‘Tolstoyian’ brilliance aside, I must say that I am frankly saddened, but not surprised, at the vituperative nature of Ms. Levy’s post (above). It unfortunately betrays a sort of ignorance commonly expressed in the Diaspora, one that assumes that religious identity is inclusively — and exclusively — defined by practice. One must not forget that many of the murdered Jews (those in my family, for example) were secular, assimilated citizens who regarded their faith as equal or secondary to other, non-religious, ritualistic practice.
Nemirovsky’s conversion (and, by extension, the wartime emigration out of Europe by those lucky enough to leave; the saving of children by Catholic nuns who kept their identities secret; etc.) is precisely indicative of the arbitrariness at the root of the Nazi regime, indeed the arbitrariness of hatred, generally.
As we continue to deal collectively with atrocities such as the Holocaust, it is imperative that we refrain from the practice of prejudice, lest we run the risk of expressing the same resentment and hatred as our adversaries.
Exhibitions such as these illuminate the multidimensionality of suffering, and therefore aid in a more comprehensive understanding of the history of Holocaust persecution; and for that I aplaud your museum.
–a colleague at The Metropolitan Museum of Art
I agree wholeheartedly with Ms. Weinfield. Ms. Levy’s posting betrays a simple-minded conception of pre-war European Jewry – particularly the assimilated Jews of Central and Western Europe – or indeed of the sorts of hoops someone in Irene Nemirovsky’s circumstances had to go through in order to aspire to acquire the French citizenship they so fervently believed would save them. As for the Rothstein article, he misses the point of Suite Francaise when he criticises the author. The clue is in the title. It is a book about the French experience of the interwar and the war, much as War and Peace, to which IN often referred in her notes, is a book about the Russian experience of war. It is precisely her ability to abstract herself, and her terrifying personal predicament, from the book, and to turn it, instead, into a lucid analysis of what went wrong with French society between 1918 and 1940, that makes it so powerful, as does her writerly empathy for all the innocent individuals drawn into the vortex of a conflict, whether French or German.
i loved the ebtire muesum …5 stars
My family and I came here today because of an assignment my daughter received from her french teacher at BTHS. I am awed and amazed with this entire museum. I am however shocked that the exhibit does not make it more clear that Ms. Nemirovsky converted from judiasm and had her daughters baptized in her foolish attempt to get the always anti-semetic french goverment to give her and her husband citizenship and in turn save them from the nazis. How naive was she?
I can very well appreciate this exhibit in a museum dedicated to women in history but in this Jewish Heritage Museum I question its presence
this is a very interesting exhibit.
As riveting and brilliant a book as Suite Francais is – and I could not put it down – the exhibit made me wonder, without judgement, how Irene and her families’ fate might have been altered had she, as so many others, had resisted, joined the French Resistance – rather than convert – had she heeded the many warnings of those who believed the Jews were in peril/
This week, the NY Times published an extraordinary obituary of Dina Vierny, muse to the scuptur Maillot, who, though also Jewish, worked for the Resistance and led Jews and others over the Pyrenees from France to Spain and to freedom. She survived to live a full and fruitful life.
I thought the exibition was very meaningful because it was about the woman who wrote a book about how evil the Nazis were. I think the real hero was Irene’s daughter Denise because she kept her mother’s suitcase with the novel draft in her sight for over 50 years. If she let that suitcase out of her sight it would probably have been stolen and destroyed by the Nazis. Ever since she was 14 years old she has kept that suitcase with her throughout the second world war and her lifetime.