At first I thought I'd end up thoroughly hating it, but somewhere after the second third, when the betrayed old man faces his impossibly spoiled daughter (who probably isn't his), I gave in to the passion of the story and the pathos of the character, writ so large where others are merely sketches. For such a short book it's odd how difficult it felt--for one thing, Golder is a dead man walking, in agony for almost the entire time; for another, he's surrounded by a swarm of odious characters, none worse than his monstrously greedy wife and daughter.

But all of them, including Golder, who self-made himself out of the desperate Russian-Jewish mud, have substituted appetite for money for every other zeal in life. At least the young daughter still has the capacity to enjoy the intoxication of love--except that even to her it comes in the character of a degraded young aristocrat who lives off rich old women. Money could literally free and buy him for her, if only she could persuade Dad to open his wallet. (Mother hates her as a competitor, no help from that side.)

This seems to be based on Némirovsky's own experiences with her parents, and knowledge of moneyed circles.

It is easy to see the character of David Golder as antisemitic, but somehow it transcends the negative stereotype. One doesn't only feel sorry for Golder; once we see where he came from, his existential struggle becomes not only understandable but admirable--epic. Like all tragic heroes he loses tremendously; left in the end with no tangible achievements, only the fight he put up all his life gives a measure of his size.

Rich, greedy, unplesant....the eponymous Jewish businessman wheels and deals and shows no mercy.
And yet his wife and child are so vastly much worse that we feel for him, as - on his last legs with heart disease- they only bother with him if they want a hand-out.
Short, punchy and sad...the futility of worshipping wealth. ( )

> Irène Némirovsky, DAVID GOLDER, Cahiers rouges, Grasset. — Publié à 26 ans, David Golder (1929) reste pour moi le chef-d'oeuvre littéraire d'Irène Némirovsky. Dans la course à l'argent pour l'argent du personnage principal, image du père d'Irène, le lecteur rejoint, me semble-t-il, le courant des représentations actuelles des « libéralismes » de l'inconscient collectif européen.
—Carnets du Yoga n° 239 - Sept. 2005

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Nemirovsky-David-Golder/29832

There are two camps on Nemirovsky. Those who see her literary worth as negligible due to her anti-Semitism. Those who see her as a victim of Auschwitz and of the highest literary merit. I must say, as the capitalist marketing machinery goes, it showed exceptional chutzpah in promoting a person who was clearly first and foremost an anti-Semite as a victim of the anti-Semitic Nazis. But what the hell. It worked. Westerners greedily lapped up the invented idea of Nemirovsky, one of the gas chamber fallen, without the least concern as to the fact that what she wrote about Jewish people could have been cut and pasted into Nazi propaganda, no copy editor needed.

I am shocked at the disingenuity of the introduction of this book, the audacity of its spin.

‘By underminding the assumptions of the anti-Semitic right, Nemirovsky was playing a skilful double game.’

Just to be plain about what we are talking about, here is a description of ‘an old German Jew’, Soifer.

Bankrupted by inflation, Soifer had played the money markets and won everything back again. In spite of that, he had retained a mistrust of money, and the way revolutions and wars could transform it overnight into nothing but worthless bits of paper. It was a mistrust that seemed to grow as the years passed, and little by little, Soifer had invested his fortune in jewellery. He kept everything in a safe in London: diamonds, pearls, emeralds – all so beautiful that even Gloria had never owned any that could compare. Despite all this, his meanness bordered on madness. He lived in a sordid little furnished room, in a dingy street near Passy, and would never take taxis, even when a friend offered to pay. ‘I do not wish,’ he would say, ‘to indult in luxuries that I can’t afford myself.’ Instead, he would wait for the bus in the rain, in winter, for hours at a time, letting them go by one after the other if there was no room left in second class. All his life, he had walked on tiptoe so his shoes would last longer. For several years now, since he had lost all his teeth, he ate cereal and pureeed vegetables to avoid having to buy dentures….It was only his gaping, spluttering mouth…that inspired a feeling of revulsion and fear.’

Of course, I could have just pulled out a piece out of context, but this IS the context. The entire book is written like this. She sold her stories to anti-Semitic publications, it was how she made her living. Let’s say, enough said.

But may we not put her anti-Semitism in a broader context? We have a special word for being negative about Jewish people in a way we don’t in general – a word like ‘racist’ doesn’t cover what we mean by it. And yet it is such a common thing when we think about the nature of her attitude rather than the label we put on it. Black people down on black people is an obvious example. My shrinking away in embarrassment in a pub here as I see Queenslanders being, well Queenslanders. Being in an émigré community and living with the sort of thing she deals with, the sponging, the people who are poor thinking their wealthier compatriots owe them something, even if just charity, the ones who are rich and sponge from you too. This is not a Jewish thing specifically, but she is writing about her community.

Stereotypes? Absolutely. But stereotypes exist because they are based on the real world. I know a lot of extremely wealthy Jewish people, Nemirovsky made me picture friends and acquaintances of mine more than once. She IS writing about what she knows. That’s what most writers do, it is so much easier than having the imagination to move past that.

Ruth Franklin wrote in the Guardian:

In David Golder, an appalling book by any standard, Némirovsky spins an entire novel from that stereotype. The title character is an oil magnate who has sacrificed his life to his business and has nothing to show for it but money—money that his wife and daughter are constantly bleeding from him. His wife, Gloria, openly cuckolds him while expecting him to support her extravagant lifestyle. (When he enters the room, she hides her checkbook "as if it were a packet of love letters.") Their eighteen-year-old daughter, Joyce, forces him to gamble until he collapses to win her money for a new car. "It's just that I have to have everything on earth, otherwise I'd rather die!" she tells him. Golder, for his part, is alternately cruel and pathetic. In the novel's first scene, he mercilessly refuses to cut his own partner a break on the sale of some oil shares, showing no pity and offering no explanation: "'Business,' was all he murmured, as if he were naming some terrifying god."

In the hands of Edith Wharton or Ford Madox Ford, these characters might have acquired some complexity—perhaps a redeeming quality, or just a kind word at some point to someone. But Némirovsky's portrayals are relentlessly one-sided. The women come off particularly poorly. After the partner's suicide, Golder overhears his wife, wearing an enormous pearl necklace, negotiating with the undertaker to downgrade the quality of his coffin. Gloria, too, will pursue a bargain at any cost: she haggles with a woman trying to sell a fur coat to help her boyfriend pay off his debts, but while she is waiting for the woman to agree to a better price, the boyfriend kills himself. (Gloria sees herself as the loser here, because now "of course she'll keep the coat.")

I’m sorry, I beg to differ. This stuff all rang so true for me. The husbands, the wives, the daughters. For the men it is no different to have the compulsion to make money than it is for a tennis player to have a compulsion to play tennis. One-dimensional? Absolutely. The women live to spend it. One-dimensional? Yep.

Extremely wealthy people are frequently like this, fullstop. Stereotypes are true.

Franklin continues later on:

David Golder appeared in 1929. Would it be too much to say that such a book published in such a year was complicit, as many similar books were complicit, in the moral degradation of culture that became one of the causes of the imminent genocide? It has been painful to watch Némirovsky's contemporary defenders tying themselves into knots to explain this racist travesty of a novel. In his introduction to the British edition of David Golder, Patrick Marnham sets the context with his first sentence—"Irene Némirovsky died in Auschwitz in 1942"—and argues that "Men like Golder existed, and no doubt still exist. They had come a very long way, just how long we discover in the novel's devastating climax." He makes the book sound like merely a Continental version of William Dean Howells. And what does it mean to say that David Golder is true to life? To which part of life, exactly—the harshness of the arriviste's lot, or the Jew's love of money? "Golder is Jewish because Némirovsky was Jewish," Marnham writes, persisting in his argument that the book's ugliness is nothing but realism, "but her choice of an unsympathetic Jewish character did not make Némirovsky an anti-Semite any more than Robert Louis Stevenson was anti-Scottish because he created the diabolical figure of Ebenezer in Kidnapped." This lets Némirovsky off too easy. For Golder's Jewishness is not simply one of his many traits; it is his defining trait, the very essence of his being, the root from which his character and his corruption grows. And he is hardly an isolated case: all the novel's primary characters are Jewish, and all are despicable.

I completely agree with her, Marnham’s introduction is an embarrassment, but I take issue with her last sentences there. Why shouldn’t Golder’s Jewishness be a defining trait? Is it any great surprise that it would be? As a kid I spent a bit of time in Haifa and a local asked me what I was religiously and I said ‘nothing.’ Our conversation didn’t pick up after that because he had no conception of nothing. Jewishness isn’t just about religion in the way that we Anglo-Saxons pigeonhole our religion, if we have any. It isn’t something one does on Sundays, like religion is at best for us.

But then, I also take issue with the idea that Golder is portrayed as a corrupt villain. He isn’t anything of the sort, he isn’t portrayed that way, he shouldn’t be seen that way either. Being a brutal businessman for whom the meaning of life is collecting money does not make you either a villain or corrupt. The characters are Jewish because she is writing about that community. They are despicable because it is a book about despicableness.

So, Nemirovsky is anti-Semitic. The amazing thing is that in a book where she talks about Jewish pigs and Jews and dirt and Jews and greed and Jews and miserliness and – she still manages to strike a chord. The book is completely engrossing, the main character has you on his side, which is quite an incredible achievement given what we have so far observed here. I guess I’m trying to explain the impact of this book by suggesting that we have to view anti-Semitic attitudes as having colour and broadness to them, ‘anti-Semitic is not anti-Semitic is not anti-Semitic.’ I wish I had a more elegant way of putting that. In the end this is a book about a businessman we could so easily hate, but we don’t. That is a triumph for the author.

Nonetheless, I remain extremely uneasy about liking this book for all the obvious reasons.
( )

The length of the book is just nice, it has all the ingredients to be developed into a longer book. At the heart is David Golder, a Jewish businessman at the brink of bankruptcy but is hounded by his wife and daughter for more and more money. They are unsympathetic even when he suffers a heart attack. Golder wonders why he is working so hard for and manages to rouse himself for one last effort for his daughter, whom he suspects not even to be his. Love still trumps everything in the end. ( )