Denise Epstein (1929–2013)

Denise Epstein was born in Paris, France, where her parents, Irène Némirovsky and her husband Michel Epstein, both descended from wealthy Russian-Jewish families, had emigrated after the 1917 Russian Revolution. In 1929, the year Denise was born, her mother made a name for herself on the literary scene with the publication of her first novel, David Golder. She went on to publish eight more well-received novels in the 1930s. At the start of World War II, Némirovsky and her husband sent their two daughters, Denise and Elisabeth, to the Burgundy village of Issy-l’Eveque, the childhood home of Cécile Michaud, their nanny. In 1942, Némirovsky and Epstein were deported separately by the Nazis to the death camp at Auschwitz; neither returned. But before they parted, her father had handed Denise a small leather suitcase and told her, "You must never part with this because there is a notebook of your mother's inside." The girls went into hiding for the next two years. Hunted by the French police, they found refuge with nuns, then were passed around to various safe houses in Bordeaux, hiding in cellars and attics. Denise grew up to become an archivist, married, and had three children. For decades, she could not bring herself to look at the manuscript in the suitcase that she assumed was her mother’s personal diary. In 1975, after a flood in her apartment caused her to examine it, she discovered it was a novel. For several more years, she held back from approaching a publisher, and shared the information only with her sister Élisabeth Gille, who wrote a 1992 biography of their mother called Le Mirador. In 2004, Denise finally arranged to publish the book, Suite Française, which became a huge bestseller and won the Prix Renaudot. In the book Survivre et vivre: Entretiens avec Clémence Boulouque (To Survive and Live: Interviews with Clémence Boulouque, 2008), Denise Epstein told the story of her life to a noted French writer and journalist.