unfinished symphony; Discovered 60 years after her death, Suite Francaise is Irene Nemirovsky's brilliant portrait of the Nazi occupation.(Brief article)(Book review)

Byline: Alice Truax

Several chapters into Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise (Knopf), Madame Pericand is fleeing Paris with her household when the Nazis bomb the refugee-flooded village in which they have stopped for the night. After bullying a local man into driving them to the nearest train station, Madame takes stock: She has lost her linens, true, but she still has her jewelry, her children, the family silver. Only after congratulating herself does she realize that she has left something behind in the burning village, after all: her invalid father-in-law.

The German defeat of France in the summer of 1940 instigated all kinds of bad behavior among the vanquished, and much of it is pitilessly (if often comically) cataloged in this posthumous work. "My God! What is this country doing to me?" Nemirovsky wrote in the summer of 1941, a year before she was deported to Auschwitz. "Since it is rejecting me, let's consider it coldly, let's watch as it loses its honor and its life."

Irene Nemirovsky came of age in Paris; her family, privileged Russian Jews, had been chased into exile by the Bolsheviks in 1919. By 1937, she had written nine books in French. Four years later, however, she was trapped in a Nazi-controlled town in Burgundy with her husband and children, unable to publish under her own name. Nevertheless, she was writing a novel about the occupation of her adopted country-an epic that she envisioned as a symphony with five movements. Unfortunately, the first two were all that she managed to complete before her death. During the war, the manuscript was saved by Nemirovsky's young daughters, who lugged it from one hiding place to another, believing it to be their mother's journal: Only a few years ago did they realize what they had.

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