August 17th, 2012 Meaghan (Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley
Project for the guest post. -ed.) On this date in 1942, 39-year-
old French/Ukrainian novelist Irene Nemirovsky was gassed at the
Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland. She was a victim of the
Nazis’ racial laws: anyone with even one Jewish grandparent,
even if they themselves did not practice the Jewish religion,
could be considered a Jew. Nemirovsky, born to a wealthy
Russian-Jewish family in what is now the Ukraine, had converted
to Catholicism in 1939 — sincerely, insofar as anyone can
discern. Irene Nemirovsky fled Russian territory after the
Bolshevik Revolution and spent a short time in exile in Finland
and Sweden before eventually settling in France. There she
married a banker, had two daughters, and published her first
novel in 1930. The book, called David Golder, was about a
ruthless businessman (described by modern readers as “a Bernie
Madoff of her time”) who in old age and poor health begins to
regret the way he lived his life. It w