THERE is an extraordinary scene in the 1947 film Gentleman's Agreement when Gregory Peck, an investigative journalist researching anti Semitism, accuses his secretary of being a 'self-hating' Jew after she lets rip with a diatribe about how 'the wrong kind of Jew' in their office will reflect on her. I watched this powerful film just about the same time as accusation and counteraccusation about the bestselling author Ir�ne N�mirovsky were flying around. Of course she is not here to respond to such accusations, having died in Auschwitz on 17 August 1942, aged 39. Most readers of Sunday literary supplements are by now aware of the phenomenal posthumous success of Suite Francaise. It is still on bestseller lists worldwide two years after its publication and some 60-plus years since its author wrote it in wartime France. A novelist who garnered fame in 1930s France, her literary stature was no bulwark against anti-Semitic legislation and she fell victim to the draconian measures introduced under the Vichy regime, was eventually arrested and deported to Auschwitz.

As a result of the success of Suite Francaise, several earlier N�mirovsky novels are being republished. For those who like their Holocaust literature redemptive, it seems as if Ir�ne N�mirovsky from beyond the grave has had the last word.

However with the re-publication of David Golder, this tale touted by the literary marketing machine has taken a distinctly darker - and complex - turn.

David Goldermakes uncomfortable reading.

Published in 1929 to great acclaim and later made into a film, it was hailed as the work of a precocious talent. N�mirovsky was just 26. Indeed according to its modern promotional blurb, it is a forgotten classic. Some reviewers have compared it ecstatically to Balzac. However it is far from a classic. A slight book, a novella really, it tells us more about literary taste in 1920s France than it does about literary genius. At its heart is David Golder, a Jewish plutocrat, a one dimensional and stereotypical character portrayed with all the clich�s of Shylock and Fagin rolled into one. He is surrounded by ingrates, his rapacious and demanding wife Gloria and spoilt brat daughter Joyce. The tale is melodramatic, a high class soap opera, Dallas meets Moulin Rouge. Of course through the course of the book Golder realises all the wickedly accumulated wealth is of no avail and he succumbs to ill health with a realisation of the futility of his life's work and achievement.

The waspish and trenchant insights so effecting in Suite Francaise are missing. Here is where the youthfulness of the writer shows. For there is little subtlety in this tale, either in its exposition or its rather crass portraits. The acute observations about class and society that characterised Ir�ne N�mirovsky's writing at her most insightful are nowhere to be found. The story is completely decontextualised, ignoring the hypocrisy of a French bourgeoisie that vilified Jews even as they socialized and befriended them.

Does N�mirovsky's cruel portrayal of Golder reflect her own internalized version of the racial slurs that were barely under the surface in French bourgeois circles? Certainly N�mirovsky later recognised the problematic portrayal of David Golder, intimating she would never have written it if she had known the consequences of Hitler's rise to power. The climate of the times too puts the work in context. Negative representations of Jews in French literature and popular culture were common rather than unusual.

As Professor Bryan Cheyette, author of The Image of the Jew in Western European Liberal Culture, observes: "The thing about the novel David Golder is that essentially it's not that unusual in [how] it is framed. French culture was saturated with racial images of Jews and the way N�mirovsky frames it, within parameters of 'good' Jew and 'bad' Jew is very part of the broader culture [in France] in the 1920s and 1930s. So the way she is portraying Jews and thinking about Jews is quite normal for the time. . . . Writers such as Amy Levy and Julia Frankau were vilified . . . for portraying Jews as vulgar and overly materialistic. It is complicated as my own research shows images of Jews have been fantastically ambivalent. She was writing within a French culture that is very suspicious of Jews."

At certain periods in France, the 1890s for instance and increasingly through the 1920s and 1930s, newspapers, novels and indeed paintings reflected back to Jews in French society a hideous distorting mirror, displaying hooked noses, clasped sweaty palms and beady eyes. As the 1930s progressed, a number of political events sparked the resurgence of an anti Semitism that had never really gone away.

And by the time the real nightmare began for the N�mirovskys, as foreign born Jews, whatever pathetic and pitiful bargains Irene and her husband tried to make with officialdom were less than useless. Ensnared in the nightmarish landscape of Vichy France, N�mirovsky along with several other French and foreign-born Jewish writers and intellectuals saw all their acclaim count for nothing in the roundup and betrayal of Jews. Historians have now clearly identified that Vichy officials were more zealous in their hunting down of Jews than was actually demanded by their German occupiers.

However, it is neither constructive nor accurate to trumpet the glib accusation that Ir�ne N�mirovsky was a selfhating Jew. Her life of exile, acclaim and eventual extermination on racial grounds demands more complex and nuanced assessments. The label 'self-hating Jew' is problematic in itself. As Dr Ronit Lentin, Coordinator Ethnic and Racial Studies Masters programme, Trinity College puts it:

"Denouncing Ir�ne N�mirovsky as a 'self hating Jew' because of her early novel and her comments about other Jewish people owes to two separate discursive processes. Both derive from the supposition of homogeneity, the belief that all Jews are the same and share the same commitment to their religion and congregations, while in fact Jewish people differ from each other as do members of other groups. . . .

Ir�ne N�mirovsky should be remembered for her beautiful novel Suite Francaise, and mourned for having been murdered by the Nazis, rather than accused of not loving all Jewish people simply because they were Jews."

The tragic narrative of Ir�ne N�mirovsky's life has become inextricably bound up with the novel Suite Francaise. The history of Western European cultural representations is strewn with racist stereotypes and high art has been no exception. If for some sinister reason such books or portrayals again come into fashion, then we had all better watch out.

'David Golder' by Ir�ne N�mirovsky (Vintage Press) �11.95