Elisabeth Gille (1937–1996)

Élisabeth Gille, born Élisabeth Epstein in Paris, was a French translator and writer best-known for Le Mirador: Mémoires rêvés (1992), her biography of her mother Irène Némirovsky. Élisabeth was the younger daughter of Némirovsky, a French-Russian-Jewish émigré writer who achieved significant success as a novelist in the 1930s, and her husband Michel Epstein. The couple were deported separately from France during World War II by the Nazis to the Auschwitz death camp in 1942; neither returned. Némirovsky's novels fell into obscurity, but in 2004, her Suite française, which had remained until then in manuscript form, was published for the first time. It became a bestseller and the renewed interest in the author led in 2011 to the English translation of Gille’s biography as The Mirador: Dreamed Memories of Irène Némirovsky by Her Daughter. Élisabeth also wrote the novel Un paysage de cendres (literal meaning, A Landscape of Ashes, but titled Shadows of a Childhood in English, 1996), a fictionalized account of her experiences as a Jewish child hidden during the German Occupation and then adopted by non-Jewish Resistance fighters. That work portrayed the incomplete understanding of the specificity of the Holocaust even among those sympathetic to its victims. She also wrote about her battle with cancer in Le Crabe sur la banquette arrière (The Crab on the Back Seat, 1994).