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Abstract
On the Path to War: Irène Némirovsky's Fiction in Interwar France is a critical literary-historical study of Irène Némirovsky's French-language novels related to the experience of war, exile, and anti-Semitism during the interwar period and German occupation of France. Némirovsky was a Russian-Jewish émigré living and writing in France in the interwar years until her arrest by the French police on July 13, 1942. She was deported to Auschwitz where she died shortly after her arrival. Some sixty years later, Némirovsky's last novel, Suite Française, was published posthumously for the first time in 2004 and became an international bestseller. Némirovsky often wrote about controversial subjects, such as Jewish identity and Franco-Jewish society, and consequently her legacy is often contested and interpreted through a biographical lens of author's Jewish identity, her use of Jewish stereotypes in her writing, or her status as a Holocaust victim.
This dissertation will focus on Némirovsky's fiction that offers insight into a variety of experiences in the French interwar period such as exile and statelessness of Jewish immigrants, Franco-Jewish society, class conflict, and the status of women in the in interwar years and occupation that tends to be overshadowed by the fate of the author or her representation of Jewish characters. Némirovsky multicultural identity allowed her to draw on a variety of themes in her writing, and she was able to switch focus in her