David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) Read Free

these efforts, the story of a girl of fourteen, Antoinette Kampf, whose newly wealthy parents are preparing to throw a ball. Set in 1928, two years after Alfred Kampfs fantastic “killing on the stock market,” the action is contained, and rather implausibly melodramatic. Antoinette, forbidden by her mother to attend the ball, wreaks her revenge by destroying all but one of the invitations when she is sent to post them, a sin masked by the fact that her English governess, Miss Betty—who was to have taken them to the post office but who was, instead, trysting with her boyfriend—maintains that she herself mailed the envelopes. As a result of Antoinette’s vicious act, the single guest at the Kampfs’ ball is their Cousin Isabelle, a resentful and impoverished music teacher to the aristocracy, who gloatingly witnesses the debacle. Madame Kampf, in whom the vanity of the socially aspirant is excruciatingly caught, is bitterly shamed by her apparent failure in society and turns to her despised daughter for consolation. It is somewhat difficult to suspend disbelief in this tale—Would the Kampfs really have expected their guests to appear, not having heard from any of them? Would they not have smelled a rat?—but the novella’s strength lies in its portrait of the relationship between Antoinette and her mother.
    Nemirovsky, whose relations with her own mother were strained, repeatedly creates monstrously selfish middle-aged women in the maternal role, women who rage at the passing of their beauty and who see material compensation as their due and their only hope (Gloria Golder is another such character). The novella’s interest lies, particularly, in the mind of young Antoinette, who sees herself and her parents more clearly than they possibly can, and yet whose immaturity prevents her from feeling any compassion: “No one loved her, no one in the whole world… But couldn’t they see, blind idiots, that she was a thousand times more intelligent, more precious, more perceptive than all of them put together—these people who dared to bring her up, to teach her? These unsophisticated, crass nouveaux riches?” Antoinette is a dual creature, a living paradox, enacting at once her inevitable association with, and simultaneous detachment from, her parents: like Irene herself, she is caught between two worlds, one in which she can step back and condemn her parents as “unsophisticated, crass nouveaux riches,” and another in which, at the novella’s end, she eagerly accepts her mother’s needy embrace. That this young woman is condemned to live this paradox, and that this paradox awakens in her a terrible and inevitable rage, is what makes
The Ball
more than a simple melodrama: there is here, albeit in embryo, a novelist’s understanding of the intractable ironies of human nature of which Leon M. speaks so frankly in
The Courilof Affair.
    Snow in Autumn
appeared a year after
The Ball,
in 1931, but is the definitive version of a tale published in 1924, “La Niania,” a discreet homage to her grandmother, Rosa Margoulis, who had just fled from the USSR to France. It represents a departure of sorts for Nemirovsky, in that it tackles the Russian emigres’ flight to France from a different angle, and also in its choice of a servant as the protagonist. The Karine family is aristocratic, and the novel opens on their Russian estate as their two sons, Youri and Cyrille, depart for war against the Bolsheviks. The story focuses on Tatiana Ivanovna, the household’s nanny, who has been with the Karine family for fifty-one years and who sees anew, in the departure of these young men, the departure and loss of her earlier charges, generations before. The unraveling that ensues—the loss of one son, the family’s retreat to Kiev and eventually to France, where they are forced to begin again with nothing—is painful to Tatiana Ivanovna chiefly as the loss of history. Long the repository of family lore and the keeper of family