Impressions: Who else is reading?

Deborah Tompkins Johnson/Columnist
Published: April 19, 2008

Former Prince William County Board Chair Kathleen Seefeldt is reading.

This week's reader served as the first at-large chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors from 1992 to 1999. She holds a gubernatorial appointment to the statewide, five-member Commission on Local Government. Community service does not keep Seefeldt, who calls herself an avid reader, from her books. She not only recommends this week's book, "Suite Francaise" by Irene Nemirovsky, to us, but also to her daughter and her newly formed neighborhood book club, saying it is the best book she's read in years.

Nemirovsky was a young French novelist who fled Paris with her family, as the Nazis invaded France. She died in Auschwitz in 1942. However, her hand-written manuscripts survived.

Seefeldt explains, the older daughter carried her mother's leather writing book with her over the years. About three or four years ago the daughter decided to read and translate the stories into English. The task was painstaking, as Seefeldt explained, because the daughter needed a microscope to read the print: her mother's way of preserving precious ink and paper.

Everything—cover to cover—is important to read just to understand how the events came about. Also, readers should start with the appendices. Appendix I is the author's hand-written notes and her plans for the book. Appendix II is correspondence between 1936 and 1945 to include letters from Nemirovsky's husband seeking his wife's release.

The novel also comes in two parts, originally intended to be a five-part series. The first part tells how people fled the city and what they encountered along the way. 

"In Nemirovsky's stories many of her characters just couldn't cope and behaved in ways you just wish they wouldn't," Seefeldt explained.

The second half shows life in an occupied village.

"This reflects, I presume, what she saw in the little village where she and her husband sought safety with their two daughters,"Seefeldt explained.

Seefeldt beleives it astonishing for a young woman in such peril to maintain enough objectivity to put these stories in writing.

"It's a classic story of how humans respond to loss, to changing dramatically different circumstances in their lives. What their aspirations are as opposed to what they're confronted with in the midst of upheaval. In that way it's the classic tale of life and loss and how we survive change and loss as individuals."

Seefeldt seemed enthralled as she contemplated, "When your world is changing beyond anything you could imagine, when would you run? And where would you go?"

Deborah Tompkins Johnson's Impressions appear in the Potomac News and Manassas Journal Messenger every first and third Saturday. She can be reached at .