The French author Nathalie Sarraute was born as Natalie Tcherniak in Ivanovo-Voznesensk in Russia. She grew up in an intellectual Jewish environment. Her father was a scientist and the founder of a paint factory. Due to her parents' divorce, she went with her mother to Paris in 1905. She spent her childhood alternately in Russia and in France. Sarraute went to a French school and then pursued university studies in the humanities and law at Sorbonne, in Oxford, and in Berlin. During the years 1925-41, she and her husband worked as lawyers in Paris, but during the German occupation she was forced to give up her profession, divorce her husband and flee. She had three daughters who needed her care. At this time, Sarraute already had begun writing.