The publication of a new work by a writer killed in the Holocaust happens often enough that we can lose sight of the miracle involved in every such resurrection. It is not just the sheer improbability of a manuscript’s survival that commands our attention, remarkable though it may be – from Anne Frank’s diary, rescued by a family friend, to Kazimierz Sakowicz’s “Ponary Diary,” buried in empty lemonade bottles in 1944 and published in English just last year. More important is the historical, even the metaphysical victory that each recovered story represents. One of the first crimes of the Nazis was the obliteration of Jewish voices and words, through book-burning, censorship, and the imprisonment and murder of writers. Erasing the Jewish perspective from history was the necessary prelude to erasing the Jews themselves from history. That is why stealing back a manuscript from oblivion represents a decisive victory over Nazism, a reassurance that no evil is so powerful that it can shape history in its own image.

“Suite Francaise” (Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages, $25), by the French novelist Irene Nemirovsky, is the latest book to be so redeemed. Nemirovsky’s name is unknown in the English-speaking world, but in France between the wars she was a popular and prolific writer. Her first novel, “David Golder,” written in 1929 when she was 26 years old, was made into a hit movie the next year. “David Golder,” with its stinging portrait of a rich Jewish businessman and his selfish, grasping wife, was Nemirovsky’s revenge on her own family and milieu. Her father was a wealthy banker in Tsarist Russia, her mother a vain, promiscuous socialite, whom she loathed.

The family managed to escape Russia after the revolution and rebuild its fortunes in postwar France, where Irene cut a swath through high society. She married a fellow Jewish emigre, Michel Epstein, and had two daughters, while publishing a string of successful novels in the 1930s. Thoroughly alienated from Judaism, and sensing which way the wind was blowing, Nemirovsky converted to Catholicism in 1939. But she was not a French citizen, and after the fall of France in 1940, her situation became precarious. She was finally arrested in July 1942 and deported to Auschwitz, where she died a month later. Her husband, whose frantic efforts to rescue her are documented in the correspondence printed in this volume, followed her later that year.

Only the courage and kindness of a family servant, Julie Dumot, prevented the Epstein daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, from sharing their parents’ fate. As they fled their home in the village of Issy-L’Eveque, Denise slipped her mother’s leather-bound notebook into her suitcase, wanting to keep it as a memento. For the next half-century, she found it too painful to open the book, which she presumed to be her mother’s diary.When she finally decided to read it, she found that it was not a journal but a novel, two novels in fact: the first parts of what Nemirovsky planned as a five-volume sequence about France during the war. The book was published in French in 2004, 62 years after its author’s death, and now appears for the first time in English in a translation by Sandra Smith.

The immediately striking, even shocking thing about Nemirovsky’s aborted epic is how quickly she dared to turn history into fiction. The first of the two novellas she completed, “Storm in June,” tells the story of a group of refugees fleeing Paris during the German invasion in June 1940; the second, “Dolce,” takes place in a German-occupied village in the spring and summer of 1941. Since Nemirovsky herself died in the summer of 1942, she must have been writing about these events just weeks or months after they took place.

The pressure of immediacy is more obvious in “Storm in June,” not just in its I-was-there reporting on the exodus from Paris,but in the deep anger and bitterness that informs the whole work. In assembling her cast of characters, Nemirovsky combines the zeal of a prosecutor with the method of a sociologist – appropriately enough, since her goal here is the indictment of a whole society. Indeed, “Storm in June” deserves to be read alongside Marc Bloch’s famous treatise “Strange Defeat,” as an expose of the spiritual and social failures that doomed France.

Each of Nemirovsky’s characters stands in for a social class that crumbled in the face of Nazi assault. Madame Pericand, the grande bourgeoise, is paralyzed by status anxiety; Corbin, the banker, is greedy and brutal; Arlette Corail, his dancer mistress, is a pure opportunist. Most vicious of all is Nemirovsky’s portrait of Gabriel Corte,a famous novelist whose reverence for art is just an excuse for his unlimited self-indulgence. When he spots German planes flying over his villa, his instinctive response is to cry: “Won’t they leave me the hell alone?”

On the other hand, Nemirovsky reserves all virtue for a few favored categories: the petty-bourgeois Michauds, bank employees who suffer at Corbin’s hands, and the priest Philippe, whose spiritual mission is consummated in a luridly symbolic death. Such obviously tendentious construction damages “Storm in June” in literary terms, but it reveals the intensity of Nemirovsky’s helpless rage. So do her vivid descriptions of columns of refugees fleeing Paris, clearly written from personal experience: “Occasionally the road rose more steeply and they could see clearly the chaotic multitude trudging through the dust, stretching far into the distance. The luckiest ones had wheelbarrows, a pram, a cart made of four planks of wood set on top of crudely fashioned wheels, bowing down under the weight of bags, tattered clothes, sleeping children.”

“Dolce,” the second novella in “Suite Francaise,” is a more assured and complex work. Here Nemirovsky tightens her focus, concentrating on a few villagers who appear briefly in “Storm in June.” Chief among these is Lucile Angellier, a young woman whose husband, Gaston, is a prisoner of war in Germany. Lucile never loved Gaston, however, and her lack of sincere grief at his absence is a source of bitter resentment to her mother-in-law, Madame Angellier, with whom she lives in a state of frozen hostility.When a handsome and musical German soldier is billeted in the house and awakens Lucile’s loving instincts for the first time, the stage is set for a classic tragedy, pitting love against loyalty, passion against patriotism. Nemirovsky’s skill at natural description stands her in good stead here, as the ripening of spring in the French countryside offers a counterpoint to Lucile’s hopeless flowering: “Against a sky of pure and relentless blue – that deep but lustrous Sevres blue seen on certain precious pieces of porcelain – floated branches that appeared to be covered in snow. The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground.”

Passages like this mark the distance between Nemirovsky’s lyrical fiction and the terse, stenographic style we associate with most writing about modern war. Considering the circumstances in which Nemirovsky wrote – invasion, occupation, poverty, and the constant expectation of arrest – the dedication to artistry demonstrated in “Suite Francaise” is deeply moving. In Nemirovsky’s notes and journal entries, published at the end of this volume, we see her focusing on technical problems of novel-writing with the single-mindedness of a shipwreck survivor clutching to a spar: making lists of characters and plot points, sketching volumes she guessed she would not live to finish. “Never forget,” she wrote on June 2, 1942, just six weeks before her arrest, “that the war will be over and that the entire historical side will fade away. Try to create as much as possible: things, debates … that will interest people in 1952 or 2052.”

Nemirovsky’s determined neglect of the “historical side” is essential to “Suite Francaise,” for good and ill. Fully aware that she was living through epic events, she decided not to write about them epically. This was not just an aesthetic choice but an ethical one: In an age that seemed intent on abolishing the individual in favor of the mass, Nemirovsky focused on a handful of ordinary characters, showing grand events only as they impinged on humble lives. This method is a perfect complement to what seems to be Nemirovsky’s “message,” the moral code that her most sympathetic characters avow. Lucile states it most directly: “I hate this community spirit they go on and on about. The Germans, the French, the Gaullists, they all agree on one thing: you have to love, think, live with other people, as part of a state, a country, a political party. Oh, my God! I don’t want to! I’m just a poor useless woman; I don’t know anything but I want to be free!”

Lucile’s deeply human plea, however, seems to bear the seeds of the same selfishness that Nemirovsky criticizes so roundly in “Storm in June.” “Suite Francaise,” as we have it, represents just one moment in the response to the fall of France, the hope for individual salvation in the face of mass calamity. Comparing it to Camus’s “The Plague” – a genuine masterpiece of World War II fiction, as “Suite Francaise” finally is not – shows that Nemirovsky fails to proceed to the second, answering moment, in which the genuine ethical claims of the community on the individual are reasserted.

For Nemirovsky, France has failed so shamefully that it forfeits any claim to allegiance – a reaction that Camus fully understood but also managed to transcend. Nemirovsky only begins to approach this trancendence in “Dolce,” when Lucile’s atavistic patriotism finally thwarts her love for her German soldier. For it to appear fully, Nemirovsky would have had to embrace the genuinely political aspects of the war – the real nature of Nazism, the peril and necessity of the Resistance – which are almost completely absent from “Suite Francaise” as we have it. Nemirovsky’s notes show that, in the planned later volumes, the action would have moved to Paris, and the themes of resistance and collaboration would have taken center stage. The elements missing from “Suite Francaise,” then, only serve to remind us of how much Nemirovsky did manage to accomplish in the time allowed her – and how lucky we are to have her truncated novel at last.

akirsch@nysun.com