Les Chiens et les Loups (The Dogs and the Wolves) is a novel by Irène Némirovsky (1903–1942), published at the end of 1939 as a serial in the weekly magazine Gringoire, and then in book form by Éditions Albin Michel in 1940. Overshadowed by the Phoney War, it was the last work by Némirovsky to be published in volume under her own name during her lifetime, before she was banned from the profession and deported to Auschwitz, where she died after one month.
The story follows the characters from Kiev to Paris, from the beginning of the 20th century to the interwar period. The plot is essentially a combination of two threads: the passionate love of the heroine Ada Sinner, a painter married to her cousin Ben, for the rich and distant Harry; and Harry's rediscovery, through her painting, of the Jewish community to which he belongs.
The title refers to the two male protagonists and, beyond that, to two opposing characters: the "dogs" who, like Harry, wait for destiny to be fulfilled, and the "wolves" who, like Ben, confront it, even provoke it. Ada appears to be a double of the author, embodying her relationship to artistic creation. Finally, through the misfortunes of two Jewish families who fled an anti-Semitic Russia, the novel depicts exile and the desire to integrate, as well as to find one's roots. It allows Némirovsky to express her questions about the Jewish people, about social success and assimilation, as well as about her own Jewishness.
The Dogs and the Wolves is not free of the stereotypes about Jews which the author is often accused of. It does, however, offer a masterpiece counterpoised against those who would like to see her as an antisemitic Jewish novelist: this story expresses more than others her compassion for the Jewish people, and betrays her growing doubts about the protection to be expected from her adopted country. As such, it confirms a turning point in Némirovsky's career as well as in her inner self.
Summary
In a Ukrainian ghetto, during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, little Ada Sinner lives with her father Israel, a widowed stockbroker, her maternal grandfather, her aunt Rhaïssa, her cousin Lilla and her cousin Ben. The latter already loves her with a kind of fury. One day, Ada sees young Harry Sinner in the garden of her rich hillside villa and can't stop thinking about him. She is eight years old when a pogrom breaks out. After hiding all night, Ada and Ben flee to the upper town and find refuge with their distant banker relatives: Harry is horrified by their story and especially by their miserable appearance. Several successful negotiations allow Israel to leave the shtetl, and Ada takes up painting. Mrs. Mimi, an old Parisian woman who teaches French, introduces him to Harry at an Alliance française party. The boy, although aware and even confused that he is mortifying her, refuses to dance with Ada, as she represents to him a dreadful world of poverty, opposed to his own and yet obscurely linked to it. In May 1914, Rhaïssa and Mrs. Mimi decide to leave for Paris with the children.
The First World War and the Russian Revolution deprived them of the subsidies sent by Israel. Rhaïssa becomes a seamstress and Lilla dances in a music hall. One morning, Ada delivers a dress in the street where Harry lives, whose family has also emigrated, with all his belongings: recognizing him from afar, she loses the money for the order. Chased away by her aunt, she then agrees to marry Ben, who exults and hopes that she will end up loving him. Harry is in love with the beautiful Laurence Delarcher, but she has to overcome the antisemitic preconceptions of her banker father. Two years later, while Lilla ties her fate to a rich foreigner, Ada takes a kind of masochistic pleasure in prowling under the windows of Harry, now engaged.
Three years later, Harry is married and a father. One day, he stops in front of two small paintings exhibited in his bookshop: this desolate street under the snow and this luxuriant garden in spring arouse violent emotions in him, confused reminiscences. He buys them and then lets friends take him to the artist's studio. He had forgotten Ada, but her embarrassment touches him. Both of them soon move from memories to confidences. Harry often saw Ada in his dreams, without knowing who she was: she took him by the hand and led him somewhere. The young man tries to make his wife understand what is upsetting him in this painting, where he feels he has found himself. But Laurence mocks his exaltation and refuses to receive Ada, of whom she is jealous, even though she considers her as insignificant as she is proud.
Harry and Ada become friends, then lovers. While Laurence considers separating, Ben – now the Sinner's stockbroker – chooses, in order not to lose her forever, to let Ada live her passion. She survives by selling a few paintings and caricatures to newspapers.
Some time later, as Harry prepares to divorce his wife and marry Ada, Ben resurfaces. He has engaged the Sinner household in fraudulent financial dealings. Ready to flee, he predicts that Harry will be unable to avoid prison or disgrace, but will not forgive his mistress for reconnecting him with his outcast roots. The young woman hopes that the influential Delarcher will be able to quell the scandal. Confident of Laurence's support for her husband if she herself leaves his life, Ada still hesitates to give up her love forever: a deportation order encompassing Ben's entire family, followed by news from South America where he is waiting for his mother, makes her decide.
In an Eastern European town full of refugees, Ada gives birth with the help of a neighbour who will look after the baby when she goes back to work. Convinced that Harry has not ceased to love her, realizing that she has been happy, she relies on her courage, her child and her art to continue to be happy.
The characters "This novel is a story about Jews": so begins the prière d'insérer (inserted prayer) that Némirovsky sent to her publisher Albin Michel in April 1940. If the title sheds light on the relationships between the characters, the three heroes in particular embody different facets or ideas of the author.
Heroes who are close to the author
Each of the three protagonists is both opposed to and united with the other two, while remaining solitary. Ada grew up with Ben and marries him, but he is motivated by money, which leads to social recognition, and she by her artistic quest. She is also not of the same world as Harry, who is himself isolated in his in-laws. As for Harry and Ben, they are brothers-in-arms – dog and wolf.
Ada Sinner has many points in common with the author Irène Némirovsky, to the point of appearing to be "cut from the same cloth": born in Kiev at the dawn of the century, with a strong temperament under a fragile exterior, adoring her father who was in business, and hating her aunt (a substitute for her mother), who returned the favour. Caught up in her vocation as an artist at an early age, she works for newspapers (illustrated): Similarly, the young Irène had moved away from the beaten track of her milieu at an early age to become "the writer of stubborn solitude",Laure Adler, preface to the collection of short stories Dimanche, Paris, Stock 2000/Le Livre de Poche 2011, p. 7. and she published in magazines. "If Irène [Némirovsky] chose an artist as the heroine of this novel, it was not by accident".
Accustomed to suffering, Ada endures exile through her painting and her passion for Harry. She thus falls into one of the two categories to which Jonathan Weiss refers to the novelist's Jewish characters: those who are generous and draw their strength from a long and painful history of persecution. The young artist draws all her inspiration from the Jewish world, both past (the Ukraine of her childhood) and present (the Rue des Rosiers); she has no faith at all, but a strong sense of her historical and cultural identity: "Ada personifies Irène Némirovsky's latent Jewishness", say Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt. Susan Rubin Suleiman also sees in the heroine's pictorial choices a mise en abyme of what her author has always sought through her writing: to pierce the secrets of families and broken couples, of people who are unhappy or especially bruised by prejudice, historical upheavals, and the constant difficulty of adapting.
Harry Sinner has a "hooked nose", "frizzy hair", a "weak and sickly look", and he feels uncomfortable among his French friends once he has admitted "the ascendancy of his Jewish side" – a portrait that must have pleased the antisemites of the time. Harry feels attracted to Ada less by erotic passion than by "the obscure call of blood", and because her painting provides him with a key to access his "true self" beyond the social self he has constructed for himself. Like her, Harry comes from a bourgeoisie that has been enriched and westernised for two generations, and is also reminiscent of Némirovsky, especially in the late 1930s: Speaking as little Russian as possible and ignoring Yiddish, he is steeped in French culture, but discovers with pain that he remains a foreigner in the eyes of the French – a double exile. Like her, "he is the quintessential assimilated Jew", and feels as distant from the poor of the ghetto as from the shady speculators, two extremes to which the prevailing antisemitism reduces the Jewish people. He also hates Ben as an excited and scowling alter ego.
Ben Sinner is Harry's dark double. He has the same physique but a much more determined character: it is he who compares Harry to the dog awaiting punishment, while he himself would be the barking wolf who always bounces back. Némirovsky's diary shows that this ambitious character was inspired by the swindler Alexandre Stavisky. Expelled from the country for his involvement in a financial scandal whose scope and consequences remain unclear, Ben falls into the second category of characters analysed by Jonathan Weiss: those whose generous instinct has been diverted by the need to get rich, such as David Golder, of whom he is a new version. Always in search of love and recognition, this unloved man who has nothing and can never settle anywhere is reminiscent of the wandering Jew. It is also possible that the novelist was thinking of the savage nobility that the wolf sometimes embodies in the literary tradition, notably the famished and independent wolf of La Fontaine's fable (as opposed to the polite but servile dog): however, there is no evidence of this in her workbooks, and the central issue here is not freedom.
Secondary characters Ada and Ben's family is based on the activity of the little girl's father, Israel, who is loving but very busy: flexible and firm at the same time in business, he is a probable figure – among many others in her work – of Némirovsky's father. Aunt Rhaïssa is Israel's sister-in-law: downgraded by her widowhood, a volcanic mistress with no tenderness, she is reminiscent of the author's hated mother. As for Lilla, her eldest daughter, everyone agrees that she is as foolish as she is beautiful. As for the grandfather, an intellectual who has travelled, he had to become a jeweller out of necessity. Ada discovered Russian and foreign classics in his library long before he went to declaim Racine at the Alliance française. In the evening he works on an essay, Character and Rehabilitation of Shylock, "that is to say, to repair prejudices; his life's work will be thrown into the fire by the Cossacks" during the pogrom: the old man loses his reason. Finally, Mrs. Mimi joins the family: fine and understanding, she is a faded archetype of the elegant Parisian who would have known her hours of glory at the court of Petersburg.