Suite Francaise

Miniature furniture at Galeries Lafayette, Paris.

These haiku are inspired by Irene Nemirovsky's powerful book Suite Francaise:

Child's play at dinner
news that Germans are coming
upset apple cart

Feast is abandoned
guests race home to pack their cars
danger draws closer

I started reading the Third Day Book Club selection Suite Francaise on the train from London to Paris. I'd read about half of it when two Frenchmen nearby started talking to me about the book. They were interested in my views as an American, particularly as an American who lives in France.

The French haven't forgotten the horrors - or the lessons - of World War II. And I have to say, for me, much of the book was familiar - the characters are exactly spot-on and true-to-life - not unlike modern French society. The French still cling to their traditions; still have valuable family heirlooms that they can't imagine giving up; still struggle with social and immigration issues.

One Frenchman I know had a friend whose grandmother lived in a large chateau near Nantes. During the war, the Germans occupied her house and used her family's precious porcelain for target practice. Fifty years later, her granddaughter brought a bag full of broken pieces of porcelain to a restorer - asking if there was anything he could do to salvage the piece. Over a period of two years, he worked to restore the bowl. In the process he found a remnant of a German bullet embedded in the porcelain!

Despite their revolutionary past, the French resist change to this day. So for them, WWII was hard to take. Nemirovsky's book beautifully captures the French citizens' bewilderment and varying means of coping with poverty and uncertainty, both in fleeing their homes from the Nazis and later under German occupation.

"All in all, it's only the initial shock that counts. People get used to everything, everything that happens in the occupied zone: massacres, persecution, organised pillaging, are like arrows shot into mire!...the mire of our hearts.

They're trying to make us believe we live in the age of the 'community,' when the individual must perish so that society may live and we don't want to see that it is society that is dying so the tyrants can live."

Nemirovsky knew something about fleeing war. In 1918 she came with her family to France, after the Russian Revolution. She began writing this book in 1941, intending it as a multi-part novel. After her death in 1942 in Auschwitz, her daughters rescued the manuscript, but couldn't bring themselves to read it until nearly 50 years later.