About
Susan Rubin Suleiman was born in Budapest and emigrated to the U.S. as a child with her parents. She is the C. Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France Emerita and Professor of Comparative Literature Emerita at Harvard University, where she joined the faculty in 1981. Her books include Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, (1983; appeared simultaneously in French); Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (1990); Crises of Memory and the Second World War (2006; translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese), and The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th Century France (2016; French translation 2017).
Suleiman is also the author of a memoir, Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1996; French translation 1999), and has published over 100 articles in professional journals as well as the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Moment Magazine, Tablet, and other publications.
She has won many honors, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Central European University. In 1990, she received the Radcliffe Medal for Distinguished Achievement, and in 1992 she was decorated by the French Government as an Officer of the Order of Academic Palms (Palmes Académiques). In April 2018, she was awarded France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur. She currently lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Featured Work
The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th Century France
Irène Némirovsky (1903-1942), an immigrant to France after the Russian Revolution, was a woman writer in a literary world dominated by men, and a “foreign Jew” at a time when prejudice against foreigners and Jews became increasingly rampant. Yet she succeeded in creating a brilliant career as a French novelist in the 1930s, only to see her life cut short: deported by the Nazis in 1942, she died in Auschwitz at age 39. But her two young daughters survived, and as adults they literally brought their mother back to life. After being forgotten for many years, Némirovsky came into view again when her daughter Elisabeth published a book about her in 1992; meanwhile, her daughter Denise deciphered and transcribed the manuscript of the novel Némirovsky had been working on when she was deported, Suite Française. Published in 2004, Suite Française became an international bestseller and earned stardom for its author sixty years after her death. Based on extensive archival research as well as interviews with members of Némirovsky’s family, The Némirovsky Question explores the writer’s fraught relation to Jewish identity and gives the first full account of her daughters’ lives as orphans of the Holocaust.
