First edition, numbered copies on vélin pur fil, most limited deluxe issue.
A handsome copy complete with the publisher’s announcement slip.
Rare and important presentation copy inscribed by Irène Némirovsky: "A Benjamin Crémieux hommage de l'auteur. Irène Némirovsky". Némirovsky died in Auschwitz in 1942, and Crémieux in Buchenwald in 1944.
Crémieux had published a glowing review of Némirovsky’s first novel, David Golder. Its film adaptation by Julien Duvivier was among the earliest French talkies. On this short stories collection fittingly titled Films parlés (Talking Films) Némirovsky, the émigré writer, paid homage to Crémieux, a descendant of a long-assimilated Jewish family from southern France. Two years after the publication of this collection, Irène Némirovsky’s name would appear alongside Crémieux’s in an anonymous antisemitic pamphlet entitled Voici les vrais maîtres de la France [Here are the true masters of Frabce] listing over 800 names of writers (Mémorial de la Shoah, Olivier Philipponnat).
Neither would return from the death camps: “In Geneva, in February 1945, Olga Jungelson, an envoy from the Ministry of Refugees to the Red Cross, was unable to obtain any information about her, nor about the other deported writers she had been tasked with tracing: Benjamin Crémieux, Robert Desnos, Jean Cavaillès, Maurice Halbwachs” (La vie d'Irène Némirovsky, Patrick Lienhardt, Olivier Philipponnat).