伊莱娜·内米洛夫斯基，1903年出生于俄国基辅的一个乌克兰犹太银行家家庭，十月革命后，她移居巴黎，凭借其处女作小说《大卫·格德尔》（1929年）迎来了文学上的成功，紧接着，她又创作了小说《舞会》（1930年）。第二次世界大战的巴黎大逃亡之后，她躲在摩万的一个小镇里，后遭法国宪兵逮捕，1942年夏被杀害于奥斯维辛集中营。当时，她在十三岁的长女德尼斯带着一口箱子东躲西藏，箱子装着承载着痛苦的圣物：母亲的遗稿——直至今天才出版的《法兰西组曲》。

By the early l940s, when Ukrainian-born Irène Némirovsky began working on what would become Suite Française —the first two parts of a planned five-part novel—she was already a highly successful writer living in Paris. But she was also a Jew, and in 1942 she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz: a month later she was dead at the age of thirty-nine. Two years earlier, living in a small village in central France—where she, her husband, and their two small daughters had fled in a vain attempt to elude the Nazis — she’d begun her novel, a luminous portrayal of a human drama in which she herself would become a victim. When she was arrested, she had completed two parts of the epic, the handwritten manuscripts of which were hidden in a suitcase that her daughters would take with them into hiding and eventually into freedom. Sixty-four years later, at long last, we can read Némirovsky’s literary masterpiece

The first part, “A Storm in June,” opens in the chaos of the massive 1940 exodus from Paris on the eve of the Nazi invasion during which several families and individuals are thrown together under circumstances beyond their control. They share nothing but the harsh demands of survival—some trying to maintain lives of privilege, others struggling simply to preserve their lives—but soon, all together, they will be forced to face the awful exigencies of physical and emotional displacement, and the annihilation of the world they know. In the second part, “Dolce,” we enter the increasingly complex life of a German-occupied provincial village. Coexisting uneasily with the soldiers billeted among them, the villagers—from aristocrats to shopkeepers to peasants—cope as best they can. Some choose resistance, others collaboration, and as their community is transformed by these acts, the lives of these these men and women reveal nothing less than the very essence of humanity.

Suite Française is a singularly piercing evocation—at once subtle and severe, deeply compassionate and fiercely ironic—of life and death in occupied France, and a brilliant, profoundly moving work of art.