Preface to the French Edition [1]

In 1929 the French publisher Bernard Grasset was so enthusiastic about a manuscript he had received in the post that he immediately decided to publish it. It was only as he was about to send a contract to the author of the novel, entitled David Golder, that he realised no name or address had been given-just a post office box number. He put an advertisement in the newspapers asking the mysterious author to make contact.

When Irène Némirovsky arrived to meet him a few days later, Bernard Grasset was astonished: how could this fashionable, cheerful young Russian woman, who had lived in France for only ten years, have written a book that was so brilliantly daring, cruel, and mature? He questioned her carefully to make sure she wasn't standing in for a famous author who wished to remain anonymous, but as he did so his admiration grew. Her French was impeccable (although born in Kiev, she had learned it from her governess); as well as Russian, she knew Polish, Basque, English, Finnish and a little Yiddish (a language she would make use of in her novel Les Chiens et les Loups, published in 1940).

David Golder was an overnight success, unanimously acclaimed by the critics and admired by other writers. However, the twenty-six-year-old Irène Némirovsky refused to be carried away by her sensational entry into the literary world. She was surprised that so much fuss was made over David Golder, which she considered, without false modesty, a "minor novel." On 22 January 1930 she wrote to a friend, "How could you think I could possibly forget my old friends because of a little book which people have been talking about for a few weeks and which will be forgotten just as quickly, just as everything is forgotten in Paris?"

Irène Némirovsky was born 1903 in Kiev, then part of the area known as Yiddishland to which Russian Jews were confined. Her father's family came from the Ukrainian city of Nemirov, which had been an important centre of the Hassidic movement in the eighteenth century. Léon Némirovsky had the misfortune to be born in 1868 in Elisabethgrad, the city where the great waves of pogroms against the Jews began in 1881. However, his family had prospered, becoming wealthy by trading in grain. As a young man Léon had travelled widely before making his fortune in finance, going on to become one of the richest bankers in Russia. His business cards read, "Léon Némirovsky, President and Managing Director of the Bank of Commerce of Vorononej, Administrator of the Union Bank of Moscow, Member of the Private Commercial Banking Committee of Petrograd." He bought an enormous private house overlooking St. Petersburg, on a quiet street lined with gardens and lime trees.

Irène was not a happy child. Her mother, who liked to be called Fanny (after her Hebrew name, Faïga), saw the birth of her daughter as the first sign of her declining youth and beauty. She felt a kind of aversion to Irène, for whom she never showed the least sign of love, and would spend hours in front of the mirror pampering herself, or away from home in search of extramarital affairs. She could not bear the idea that her looks would fade, or that she might turn into the kind of older woman who kept young men. She forced Irène to dress like a schoolgirl well into her teens in order to convince herself that she wasn't growing older.

Léon, whom Irène adored and admired, was always busy with his work and most of the time was away, or betting large sums of money at the casino. A lonely, solitary child, entrusted to the care of her governess, Irène took refuge in books, and fought off despair by developing a ferocious hatred of her mother. This violent and unnatural relationship between mother and daughter would be at the heart of many of her novels, as would her disdain for her mother's wealthy Jewish milieu.

In Russia the Némirovskys led a life of luxury. Every summer they would leave the Ukraine for the Crimean coast, Biarritz, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Hendaye or the French Riviera. Irène's mother would take up residence in a villa, while Irène and her governess were sent to lodge with a family. At fourteen, after the death of her French teacher, Irène began writing. Settled on the sofa, a notebook on her lap, she developed a technique inspired by Ivan Turgenev. As well as the narrative itself, she would write down all the ideas the story inspired in her, without any revision or crossing out. She filled notebook upon notebook with thoughts about her characters, even the minor ones, describing their appearance, their education, their childhood, all the stages of their lives in chronological order. When each character had been detailed to this degree of precision, she would use two pencils, one red, the other blue, to underline the essential characteristics to be retained; sometimes only a few lines. She would then move quickly on to writing the novel, improving it, then editing the final version.

In 1917, the Némirovskys were still living in the large, beautiful house in St. Petersburg they had occupied since 1914. Némirovsky described the house in her autobiographical novel Le Vin de solitude: "The apartment… was built in such a way that from the entrance hall, you could see all the way back to the other rooms-a series of white and gold reception rooms that were visible through the large, open doors." For a number of Russian writers and poets, St. Petersburg is a mythical city; to Irène Némirovsky it was nothing more than a collection of dark, snow-covered streets, swept by the icy wind that rose from the disgusting, polluted canals of the Neva. When the October Revolution broke out, Léon Némirovsky thought it expedient to move his family to Moscow since he frequently went there on business and had sub-let an apartment from an officer of the Imperial Guard who had been assigned to the Russian embassy in London. His plan proved misguided. Moscow was where the more violent fighting took place and the family were trapped in the apartment for five days, their only food a bag of potatoes, some chocolate and sardines. Wedged in between other apartment blocks and surrounded by a courtyard, the house was hidden from the street. While battles raged outside, Irène explored the officer's library. There she discovered Huysmans, de Maupassant, Plato and Oscar Wilde (The Portrait of Dorian Gray was her favourite book). When the street was deserted she would quietly go down to pick up the empty cartridges.

During a lull in the fighting, the Némirovskys went back to St. Petersburg, but the Bolsheviks had put a price on Léon's head and he was forced into hiding. In December 1917, taking advantage of the fact that the borders had not yet been closed, Léon Némirovsky made arrangements for his family to travel to Finland, disguised as peasants. Irène spent a year in a little hamlet consisting of three wooden houses in the middle of a snowfield. She still hoped to return to Russia and the wait seemed long. While they were there, her father returned to Russia several times in disguise to try and rescue their belongings. Yet despite the uncertainty and lack of comfort, Némirovsky experienced for the first time a period of serenity and peace. She was absorbed by her writing, composing prose poems inspired by Oscar Wilde.

With the situation in Russia deteriorating and the Bolsheviks drawing dangerously nearer to them, the Némirovskys moved on to Sweden, finally reaching Stockholm after a long journey. They spent three months in the Swedish capital, where Irène would always remember the mauve lilacs growing in the courtyards and gardens. Then, in early 1919, the family took a small cargo boat for France, sailing for ten days through a terrible storm, which inspired the dramatic final scene in David Golder. Safe in Paris, Léon Némirovsky took over as director of a branch of his bank and so managed to rebuild his fortune.