The vicissitudes of Irène Némirovsky place us before a problem of identity, of cultural belonging, of citizenship and of exile. Imprisoned in a kind of eternal limbo, in diasporic structures that in her short life repeated themselves with amazing regularity,
dragged through a series of wanderings and provisional identities, the secret key to Irène
Némirovsky’s novels is scission, separation, belonging through exclusion, eternal marginality.
This explains her decision, at the beginning of the war, not to flee any longer, not to face another exile. She died in Auschwitz