Maxime Decout über Albert Cohen

Bei ›K. Jews, Europe, the XXIst century‹ erschien ein Aufsatz von Maxime Decout über unseren Autoren Albert Cohen; darin heißt es u.a.:

»Readers will first have to wait until 1972 to become acquainted, with Ô vous, frères humains, with what can be considered an original scene of Cohen’s relationship to Jewishness. This brief autobiographical text recounts a single event: in the streets of Marseille where he was walking on his birthday, the child approached a crowd gathered around a peddler and stopped, fascinated by the man’s eloquence. The man looks at him and, after a moment, pours out a torrent of antisemitic insults that exclude him from the French crowd with whom he thought he was in communion. This discovery of his Jewishness, in the midst of insults and hatred, provides a key to the retrospective reading of the entire work: it is here that a Jewishness lived in exclusion is deeply rooted, as are the messianic dreams that animate Solal. The event, in all its violence, is the foundation of Cohen’s writing as well as of his political commitments to Zionism at the beginning of his career.

Cohen began to write in the context of France’s “Jewish Renaissance” of the 1920s, which saw an increase in the number of publications by Jewish authors such as André Spire, Edmond Fleg, Jean-Richard Bloch and Henri Franck, and the development of a literature conceived as the affirmation of an identity that was both Jewish and French. Cohen is one of the few of these authors, who chose to write ostensibly on Jewish themes, to have achieved lasting recognition in the French literary field. The first text he published was a collection of poems, Paroles juives (untranslated), in 1921, strongly inspired by André Spire and his Poèmes juifs. Supported by Chaïm Weizmann, who was then president of the World Zionist Organization, Cohen then managed to create in 1925 a short-lived but important review, intended to promote the dissemination of Zionist ideas and which was discontinued after its fifth issue: La Revue Juive.«