Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in 1903 into a wealthy Jew­ish fam­i­ly. From there they moved to St. Peters-burg, Rus­sia where she con­tin­ued a life of priv­i­lege until the Bol­she­vik Rev­o­lu­tion caused the fam­i­ly to emi­grate to Fin-land, then to Swe­den, and final­ly to France in 1919 where she immersed her­self in the com­pa­ny of thinkers, artists, musi-cians and cul­tur­al elites as a part of the Parisian literati of her time. Six­ty-two years after her death, in 2004, Irene Némirovsky’s nev­er-before-pub­lished Suite Française, a nov­el of France dur­ing the Ger­man Occu­pa­tion, received the pres­ti­gious Prix Renau­dot, and brought inter­na­tion­al acclaim to this gift­ed writer whose life was trag­i­cal­ly lost in the Holo­caust. She passed from typhus in 1942 in the Auschwitz con­cen­tra­tion camp at the age of thir­ty-nine, leav­ing behind two young daugh­ters and an endur­ing lega­cy in literature.