Assessing Némirovsky

A new biography of writer Irène Némirovsky, author of “Suite Française,” rejects the idea that the Jewish author, eventually killed by the Nazis, was anti-Semitic. Instead they write, her extreme right-wing friends and ugly caricatured portraits of Jews were a result of her “deep and complex feelings about her Russian-Jewish bourgeois background, shtetl Jews and, in particular, an overwhelming loathing for her mother, Anna.”