(Guardian-UK) Jon Henley - A remarkable and previously unpublished wartime work by an emigre Russian Jew in France has taken the world of publishing by storm. Irene Nemirovsky, considered one of the most talented and celebrated authors in Paris in the 1920s and 30s, died in Auschwitz on August 17, 1942. Her daughter Denise took with her into hiding the thick leather binder that had never left her mother's side. In the mid-1970s Denise began to transcribe what she found inside. Written in minuscule letters of barely a millimeter, on cheap wartime paper, were two completed novels. Storm in June is a series of vital, vivid, and often cruel tableaux of families and individuals during the panic-stricken exodus of June 1940 that saw half of France take to the road to flee the Germans. Dolce is a more studied and literary portrait of a small village, Bussy, at the very beginning of the occupation, and of the first tentative complicities of collaboration.
2004-10-29 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive