The Child Prodigy

Set in a port on the Black Sea around the turn of the twentieth century, L’Enfant Génial tells the story of a small boy with a magical gift for song and poetry. Ismaël Baruch is born into an impoverished Jewish family and handed over to be educated in the household of a wealthy Russian ‘Princess’. Exploited as a ‘cash-cow’ by his parents and a passing plaything by his guardian, Ismaël loses his genius when he reaches adolescence, with tragic consequences. The text was written in 1923 and first published in 1927 as part of a monthly subscription series featuring new fiction by various authors. It occupies the literary ground somewhere between a short story and a folk or fairy tale. Although it clearly belongs to Némirovsky’s juvenilia, it is of particular interest because it prefigures themes that appear in her later work.

Irène Némirovsky was born in 1903 to a wealthy banking family that fled the Russian Revolution and settled in Paris when she was sixteen years old. She was educated at the Sorbonne and enjoyed considerable literary success during the inter-war years. In 1942 both she and her husband were deported to Auschwitz where they died.Their two young daughters survived the war. In 2004 her unfinished novel, Suite Française, detailing the aftermath of the Nazi invasion of France, was published for the first time and hailed as a masterpiece.


Genre: Fantasy