Ruth Franklin, reviewing the life and works of the celebrated French Jewish author Irene Nemirovsky, discovers that the perception of Nemirovsky as "a great holocaust writer" is "spin" and "fraud":
The real irony of the Suite Francaise sensation is not that a great work of literature was waiting unread in a notebook for sixty years before finally being brought to light. It is that this accomplished but unexceptional novel, having acquired the dark frame of Auschwitz, posthumously capped the career of a writer who made her name by trafficking in the most sordid anti-Semitic stereotypes. As Weiss's important and prodigiously researched biography makes clear, N