Tag Archives: Jewish author

David Golder by Irene Nemirovsky

Posted on by
Reply
David Golder cover

David Golder by Irene Nemirovsky was first published in 1929 and it was her first book to be published.

In 1930 The New York Times said of it: The work of a woman who has the strength of one of the masters like Balzac or Dostoyevsky.

I really like Nemirovsky’s writing and although I enjoyed this one it isn’t close to being a favourite. I can see that a lot of people would see it as being anti-semitic, but I see it as just being anti shallow, grasping and self-obsessed people, and there are plenty of them around in every society – no matter what religion or tradition people have been brought up in.

David Golder is getting on in years, he’s very wealthy but he has worked hard to get to where he is, with a fabulous property in Paris and an even more beautiful one in Biarritz. His wife Gloria and horribly spoiled daughter Joyce spend most of their time in Biarritz where they spend his money as fast as he can make it, but they are never satisfied. They always want more jewellery and better cars.

But Golder’s business affairs are very precarious, not that his wife believes that, she thinks he is just being mean with his money. although her idea of mean would be anybody else’s idea of generosity.

When he begins to have pains in his chest he does his best to ignore them but the stress of his business problems make him more ill until he eventually collapses. You might think that that would shock his wife, but of course all she is worried about is the lack of money. She has been supporting her lover financially for 20 years and she knows he’s only with her for the money too. The doctor wants Golder to retire from business but Gloria insists that he can’t tell her husband to do that, she needs him to keep supplying her with money and doesn’t seem to realise that when he dies her meal ticket will end anyway.

Golder recovers – after a fashion – but he gives up business and as his possessions disappear to pay debts, so does his wife. Joyce had fallen for a pretty but penniless young man and had already left with him, expecting her father to cable money to her whenever she needed it.

After living a very simple life for some time and finding a sort of contentment, it’s Joyce’s need for money that leads her father to go to Russia to complete one last oil deal, it is of course fatal.

Obviously Nemirovsky was influenced by everything that was going on in the world stock markets around the time she was writing this book, and probably by her mother too.

The Misunderstanding by Irene Nemirovsky

Posted on by
2
The Misunderstanding cover

The Misunderstanding by Irene Nemirovsky was first published in France in 1926 and it was her first novel.

Yves Harteloup is a young man, an only child who had been brought up by his very wealthy parents to expect a very comfortable life, never needing to work or do anything for himself. The Great War put paid to all that, Yves had been a soldier and had survived in one piece, although nothing was ever going to be the same after his experiences. By the end of the war his parents were dead and as most of their investments had been in Germany and Belgium – their money was all gone. Yves finds himself having to work in an office, something he hates.

He looks forward to his summer holiday, deciding to go back to Hendaye a resort where he was very happy on childhood holidays with his parents. There he has a dalliance with Denise, a young mother with a wealthy husband, she has never had to think about money. When they begin their affair it comes as something of a shock to her to realise that Yves isn’t in the same financial situation, he still has the veneer of money about him because of his upbringing.

Back in Paris they continue to see each other, with Denise being clingy and obsessive. She’s a demanding woman, spoiled and self obsessed and Yves can’t ever satisfy her need for adoration.

He’s still socialising with Denise and her husband – in Paris nightclubs and restaurants, always paying his way and so getting deeper and deeper in debt. It’s all going to end in tears.

The Misunderstanding was being written at the same time as The Great Gatsby and so the era and types of people are similar, that generation that went a bit crazy after the First World War, it was a time of extreme poverty for some, and obscene wealth for others.

Irene Nemirovsky was only 23 when this book was published, it’s just as beautifully written as her later books. Tragically her life was cut short when she was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz when she was 39.

Headless Angel by Vicki Baum

Posted on by
9
Headless Angel over

Headless Angel by Vicki Baum was first published in 1949 and I believe it is sometimes titled Clarinda and it has an intriguing beginning. The prologue starts:

Now that September is blue and hazy upon the land, I like to walk up to my grave in the early afternoon and remain there until in the slanting sun the shadow of my tombstone grows long and lean and begins licking at the hem of my skirt.

It’s Clarinda who is speaking and she is a young married woman living in Weimar where the writer Goethe is a frequent visitor to her house, she has known him since she was a child and he’s a great friend. Clarinda’s husband Albert is a bore as well as a philanderer and when an astonishingly handsome young Spanish man visits the neighbourhood she is bowled over by him and they end up running off together. Too late she discovers that just about everything her beloved Felipe tells her is a lie, he’s a dreamer and a gambler, but she’s still hooked on him.

Because of the political situation in Spain Felipe isn’t able to go back there so it’s to Mexico that they go to live. He’s well known there and pins his hopes on being able to make money out of a mine he owns. It’s the boom and bust existence of a gambler and Clarinda copes with the changes in her life – whether she’s living the life of a princess or a pauper.

The setting is the 1800s around the time of the Mexican wars for their independence from Spain and I was impressed that Vicki Baum, an Austrian Jew had been able to write a book around an era in history that must have been completely alien to her, she moved to the US in the 1930s when one of her books was made into a film. It was a very lucky move for her as her books were banned in Nazi Germany. She must have been drawn to that era in history when men were men – and she could dress her hero in leather finery and a cloak, I couldn’t help thinking of Dirk Bogarde while I was reading this book. He would have been perfect to play the part of Felipe. Think Zorro and you get a picture of how Felipe liked to look, minus the mask.

I really like her writing, I suppose this book could be described as a romance, but it’s more than that and Clarinda is such a good strong character. It’s a shame that Headless Angel doesn’t seem to have been reprinted as I think it must be quite difficult to get hold of a copy, I was just lucky to pick it up in a second-hand bookshop.

Baum’s earlier books were definitely written in German and I would love to know if she eventually switched to writing in English as this book doesn’t mention a translator.

The Classics Club Spin – The Castle by Franz Kafka

Posted on by
4
The Castle cover

When I got Franz Kafka‘s The Castle in the Classics Club Spin I have to admit that I was less than chuffed. After all, I’ve been studiously ignoring our copy of the book since Jack read it way back in 1976 – or around about then.

The Castle was first published in Munich in 1926, in German of course and called Das Schloss. Despite being born in Prague, German was Kafka’s first language. He died of tuberculosis in 1924 and his friend Max Brod published Kafka’s books posthumously. The family was Jewish and his sisters died in Nazi concentration camps. I was dismayed when I realised that the book is unfinished, for some reason Kafka just didn’t finish it, possibly deliberately given the theme of the book but he apparently spoke about how he intended it to end and his notes are at the end of the book.

It’s apt that he didn’t reach the end of the book as that sort of echoes the book itself. The main character only has an initial ‘K’ – originally K had been ‘I’ throughout the book, so presumably the author was writing from his own frustrating experiences of life.

K is a young land surveyor and he has been given employment at The Castle, he isn’t a local so has had to travel there and he knows nothing of the neighbourhood. The first chapter is: It was late in the evening when K arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village K stood for a long time gazing at the illusory emptiness above him.

The Castle is too far away to reach in the darkness and K stays at a local inn overnight. The locals are fairly sceptical about him being a land surveyor and having been given work at The Castle. The whole town is ruled by The Castle, so it seems and you can’t just pitch up at The Castle and expect to gain entrance.

The entire book is about K’s efforts to get to The Castle and so start his work of land surveying, but the locals say there is no need for such a thing. Every time K thinks he might be getting somewhere he doesn’t, and he ends up in a worse position than he was before. There are plenty of bizarre characters but none of them are what you would call likeable.

The Castle is about how it feels to be entangled with supposed authority and bureaucracy and will be recognisable to anyone unfortunate enough to have had dealings with such entities as the local council, the sorts of places and people where the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. It’s also about people’s position in a community giving them a status and the appearance which is very different from the reality.

To begin with The Castle reminded me of a literary version of that Escher artwork with never ending stairs – below

Escher stairs

or a game of snakes and ladders, just when you think you might be getting somewhere you end up back at the beginning. I can’t say I enjoyed reading The Castle, I was glad that I got to the end of it before it completely did my head in.

However – I am glad that I read the book, but I’m not at all sure about reading The Trial which is Kafka’s other well known book.

Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski

Posted on by
2

Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski was first published in 1949 but it has been republished by Persephone Books.

Hilary Wainwright had been married to a French woman, Lisa and they were living in France with their baby son John, unfortunately Hilary had to leave his wife and son in France as they weren’t well enough to flee when the Germans invaded France. Hilary only received a few letters from his wife after that and he has no idea what has happened to them. Lisa had been working for an escape organisation helping British servicemen.

In 1943 a Frenchman tells Hilary that Lisa is dead, having been rounded up by the Gestapo, but his son may still be alive, and after the war Hilary tries to track John down, but in a Europe full of displaced and orphaned children it’s a huge task, and he has no idea what his son would look like. He’s not even sure if he wants to track him down, he’s planning to marry again and a young son by a dead wife wasn’t in his plans.

This was a great read with a main character who is anything but perfect but is completely believable and understandable. The book also gives an authentic view of France and the French as they struggled in a post war society with little to live on and memories of who did what with whom during the German occupation.

Results of an Accident by Vicki Baum

Posted on by
6
Results of an Accident cover

Results of an Accident by Vicki Baum was first published in 1931. It was written originally in German as Zwischenfall in Lohwinckel and was translated by Margaret Goldsmith.

Doctor and Frau Persenthein live in an ancient wooden house which creaks and groans and leans at angles, making it difficult to sleep in a bed without worrying about falling out of it. But it’s a cheap house which is all that the doctor is bothered about. Nick, the doctor is only interested in his medical research and buying more apparatus to help with it. The upshot is that his poor wife Elisabeth never has enough money for food and she has to spend most of her time cleaning up after her husband and his patients. He makes them have mud baths and she has all the towel washing and bathroom cleaning to do. It’s a hard and boring life for Elisabeth and she doesn’t get much joy from their strange five year old daughter Rehle, who is so like her father.

Some well known people are being driven by a chauffeur through the town, they’ve come from Berlin and are on their way to Baden Baden but they crash and are taken to the doctor’s house to be patched up.

The people of the small town are agog, never did they think that a well known and beautiful young actress, a famous boxer and a wealthy and handsome industrialist would be staying in such a backwater.

Their arrival and the fact that they have to stay in Lohwinckel for some time leads to mayhem as the townspeople hang about in the hope of glimpsing the celebrities. For Nick and Elisabeth it could be the nail in the coffin of their marriage.

I enjoyed this one although it did remind me a lot of The Pastor’s Wife by Elizabeth von Arnim. Not only because of the German setting but also the husband who spends all of his time experimenting and trying to prove theories and also a change in the attitude of the wife when she meets people from outside her small world.

Vicki Baum has one of her female characters talking about the possibility of lesbian relationships, something which must have been a very risque subject for books in 1931 when this was published. But so authentic when you think of Berlin of the 1930s, think Cabaret. In fact given that Vicki Baum was Jewish and that she was writing about people who would have been deemed to be degenerates as far as the Nazis were concerned, she was doubly lucky when she was asked by Hollywood to write the screenplay of her 1929 book Grand Hotel, she took the chance to emigrate to the US, thus avoiding the fate which befell poor Irene Nemirovsky.

I’m going off subject here but have you heard that Suite Francaise has been made into a film? Sadly I think the film is one to avoid, according to the reviews I’ve read anyway.

Anyway, I now feel that I have to track down Grand Hotel. Have any of you read it? The only other book by Baum which I’ve read was her 1943 book Hotel Berlin and that was very good although completely different from Results of an Accident.

All Our Worldly Goods by Irene Nemirovsky

Posted on by
2
That Summer cover

All Our Worldly Goods by Irene Nemirovsky begins not long before the beginning of World War I and the setting is of course France. Saint-Elme is a rural community where the main employer is Julien Hardelot who owns a paper mill and rules his family as only tyrants do.

Julien expects his grandson to marry his wealthy cousin, keeping the money in the family and so helping the family business, but Pierre is in love with someone and when he marries her it begins a feud which splits the family.

This book begins in France prior to the outbreak of World War 1 and continues until the outbreak of World War 2 with all the usual Nemirovsky themes of fractured families, domineering mothers and refugees, which is just what she was experiencing at the time she wrote it.

I’ve been on a bit of a Nemirovsky kick recently and I think I only have a couple more of her novels to read – and some short stories. All good things must come to an end I suppose, it’s just a shame that her end came far too soon.

Jezebel by Irene Nemirovsky

Posted on by
4

Jezebel by Irene Nemirovsky was first published in 1940 and the main character is obviously based on the author’s mother.

Gladys Eysenach is on trial for the murder of her young lover. She’s still a beautiful woman although no longer young herself but she has never been able to accept that she is growing older and pretends to be much younger than she actually is. She’s self-centred, narcissistic and probably a nymphomaniac and she makes her daughter dress as a little girl so that nobody will realise just how old Gladys must be.

This is a good read although I do find Nemirovsky’s books to be so sad, you can’t forget that the author’s end came in a concentration camp. Her novels are so autobiographical, often involving a ghastly mother, and I end up thinking that every cloud has a silver lining as the author’s mother obviously gave her so much copy for her novels.

I don’t want to say too much about the book itself but after reading the introduction, which I always do after finishing a book, I was surprised to read that Nemirovsky’s mother actually had a copy of Jezebel and another of her daughter’s books – David Golder, both of which were found in her safe after her death. So the mother must have known exactly what her daughter thought of her and it wouldn’t improve the relationship, in fact I believe that when Irene was arrested her mother was busy having a high old time in the south of France, ‘entertaining’ Germans. No doubt the mother would not have risked associating herself with her daughter for fear of being discovered to be a Jew herself. At no point did she lift a finger to help Irene or her family, in fact this book must have made matters a lot worse but no doubt at the time it helped Nemirovsky to get a lot off her chest!

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

Posted on by
2

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky is one of the many books which Jack placed on one of my many book piles, saying I would enjoy reading it. You can see his review of it here.

I did enjoy it, it’s about the German occupation of France and the effects on the inhabitants of a small rural area. As I was reading it I thought to myself that parts of it reminded me of War and Peace, which I really enjoyed, so I was pleased to read in Nemirovsky’s notes at the back of the book that it had indeed been her intention to write a sort of War and Peace, after all, she was Russian.

The notes are fascinating as well as heartbreaking as we know that she didn’t survive to complete her masterpiece. She only finished two sections – Storm in June and Dolce, when she had planned five sections, the third one was to be Captivity and she hadn’t decided on what to call the last two sections.

Of course she didn’t live to complete this book because she had that terrifying knock on the door and was taken away by the police on 13th July 1942. A flurry of increasingly frantic letters from her husband follow, to just about anyone he could think of who might be able to help him find out what was happening to Irene. He knew that as she shuffered from asthma she wouldn’t be able to stand up to bad living conditions for long. Sadly the letters continue for far longer than poor Irene did, unknown to him she had died in Auschwitz on 17th August 1942.

I always find myself appalled that people didn’t see the way the wind was blowing and get themselves out. I suppose for a lot of poor people they had no option but to sit at home and hope for the best, but Irene and her husband Michel Epstein were wealthy. She was a successful author with nine books under her belt and he was a banker, they lived a very comfortable life and would have been able to get themselves to Switzerland easily.

I was left wondering if she decided to stay in France so that she could experience the German occupation and chronicle it in her fiction. As a Jew and a Russian she had two big strikes against her. Were they naive enough to think – we aren’t religious Jews so we don’t count and nobody could complain about us, possibly they thought that their wealth would insulate them from what was going on. Eventually her husband lost his job at the bank and they seemed to be living off charity as her publisher was sending them money.

Irene’s husband only survived her by a few months, he was sent to Auschwitz on 2nd November 1942 and immediately sent to the gas shamber, still not knowing what had happened to his wife.

Their two daughters, Denise and Elisabeth were saved by a trusty servant who took the yellow triangles off their clothes and managed to dodge the French police who were determinedly hunting them down. Denise had shoved her mother’s notes into a suitcase when they first had to hide and it was only 64 years later, and sadly after the death of Elisabeth, that Denise decided to try and decipher her mother’s teeny writing, she was amazed to discover that they were actually a book and not just notes as she had assumed.

Show Boat by Edna Ferber

Posted on by
8
Show Boat cover

It was Anbolyn of Gudrun’s Tights who nominated the author Edna Ferber for the CPR Book Group, the idea of which is to give neglected authors and or books a bit of a boost and breath some new life into them. So thank-you Anbolyn because I hadn’t even heard of Ferber who was so popular in the 1920s and 30s and even won a Pullitzer Prize.

I started off with Show Boat which I think everyone will know was made into a Broadway musical in 1927. The 1951 movie is so famous that it’s one of those ones which I’m not sure if I’ve actually seen in entirety or maybe I’ve just seen lots of clips over the years. Anyway next time it’s on TV I’m going to watch it to see if it differs from the book.

I really enjoyed this. The show boat is the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theatre and it plies its trade on the Mississippi River, calling in at towns on the river as the local crops ripen and the inhabitants have money in their pockets. Magnolia’s parents are the boat owners, they are Captain Andy Hawks and Parthenia Ann Hawks and while Andy is a popular and kind chap, Parthy is a grim-faced terror with a dislike of the theatre, actors and just about everything else. She has a tongue that would cut cloot (cloth) – as we say here.

Against Parthy’s wishes Magnolia ends up on the stage and when they call in to St Louis she falls for the wonderfully named Gaylord Ravenal, who ends up joining the show boat’s cast.

That’s a brief outline but there’s lots going on in this book with characters being accused of miscegenation (marriage between a black person and a white person) which was illegal in some places in America at the time and that ‘n’ word is used quite a lot by the more ignorant characters. One of the characters is ‘passing’ as a white person.

As a Jew Edna Ferber was no stranger to prejudice but it didn’t stop her from having a very successful career as a writer, which you can read about here. I have one other book by her – Ice Palace, but I’ll certainly be looking out for more in the future.

I’ve loved the idea of a Mississippi river boat since I started reading Mark Twain years ago but I know that the reality would kill me in no time – too hot!