Occupied territory

Irène NÉMIROVSKY has had a literary resurrection most writers can only pray for. Her incomplete masterpiece, "Suite Française," has sold some 1.5 million copies in 30 languages since its publication in France in 2004. Written in tiny script -- to conserve paper and ink -- while in exile with her family in the German-occupied Burgundy village of Issy-l'Evêque, it presents a penetrating portrait of France under siege.

The publication of a second, recently found novel, "Fire in the Blood," and the reissue of many of Némirovsky's earlier works (four of which are due from Everyman Library in January) make it clear that "Suite Française" was no fluke. But the phenomenal success of her posthumous publications raises interesting questions about this very French, Russian-Jewish novelist who died at Auschwitz in 1942 at age 39. Her tragic fate and the miraculous survival of her manuscripts -- preserved in a suitcase by her two daughters, who were hidden from the Nazis after their father was hauled off to Auschwitz, three months after their mother -- make for a riveting back story that has fanned interest in her work. But this is not enough to explain her renaissance.

Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903, and her first language was French. Because of her Jewish banker father's privileged relationship with imperial Russia, the Némirovskys had to flee after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. By 1919, they made their way to Paris, where her father promptly rebuilt his fortune, and Némirovsky made a name for herself as a Balzacian novelist.

It is noteworthy that of her prolific output, about a dozen novels and many short stories, the two books first offered to American readers in the 21st century are not only previously unpublished but also her most purely French in subject matter and setting: no Russian or Jewish characters, and no hint of the stereotyped "hook-nosed," "frizzy-haired" Jews that populate her earlier work, including her 1929 French bestseller, "David Golder."

It is impossible to read "Suite Française" without being profoundly moved -- especially if one knows its heartbreaking provenance. Némirovsky's ability to capture a wide spectrum of French society under duress with such unblinking, pitiless acuity is astonishing. "Suite Française" is much more than a feat of on-the-spot reporting, however. Ambitiously conceived as a cycle of five novellas structurally modeled on Bach's "French Suites," its prose resonates with echoes of Tolstoy and Flaubert.