Elisabeth Gille was only five when the Gestapo arrested her mother, and she grew
up remembering next to nothing of her. Her mother was a figure, a name, Irene N
emirovsky, a once popular novelist, a Russian emigre from an immensely rich fami
ly, a Jew who didn t consider herself one and who even contributed to collaborat
ionist periodicals, and a woman who died in Auschwitz because she was a Jew. To
her daughter she was a tragic enigma and a stranger.
