Albert Cohen died in 1981, hailed in France as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His passing barely registered in the English-speaking world; not even the New York Times ran an obituary, and it is unlikely to correct this particular mistake in its “Overlooked” feature. Cohen was the author of a fictional tetralogy that included a masterpiece called Belle du Seigneur, as well as three volumes of memoirs, but at the time of his death he had not been translated into English since 1933. In that year his first novel, Solal, published in 1930 in France, appeared in English to dithyrambic reviews. The vagaries of the translation market deprived us of translations of Belle du Seigneur until 1995 and of The Book of My Mother until 2012. The rest of Cohen’s work remains untranslated. Lost to Anglophone readers is a body of work of real genius, books that are humorous, romantic, tragic, sensuous, challenging, enthralling, and occasionally exasperating and even repugnant. They are books that are overflowing with love, thought, and ambiguity; that are extremely Jewish and extremely French, and explore the ties and the disjunctions between those two adjectives of belonging. There is much in them to admire and even to adore, and much that will enrage. Cohen really does contain multitudes, a writer roaming in style and form — there is humor, there is Biblical narrative, there is stream-of-consciousness realism, there is exalted lyricism, there is even the language of swashbuckling tales and serial novels à la Eugène Sue. His language flows drunkenly and freely yet also precisely, with a seeming infinity of verbal resources, able to change tone on a dime. The result is a body of work that is utterly unique. It is also, in both its fictional and autobiographical forms, an oeuvre that contains a philosophy of love, mortality, and Jewishness that is complex and sometimes shocking. Cohen was born in Corfu on August 16, 1895 to a Jewish family involved in the soap trade. The Jewish settlement on Corfu dates back at least to the High Middle Ages, and in the early modern period the community — which developed customs and liturgies uniquely its own — suffered many anti-Semitic adversities, and so into the modern centuries, until in 1891 a blood libel forced many Jews to flee the island. In 1944 almost two thousand Jews were deported to Auschwitz. As for Cohen’s family, business difficulties led them to move to Marseille in 1900. He attended school there and began a lifelong friendship with Marcel Pagnol, the novelist and filmmaker, the bard of Marseille and the Midi. Cohen adapted well to the Midi — but on the day of his tenth birthday he experienced the central event of his life, the formative event that “drove [him] from humankind.” On August 16 at 3:05 in the afternoon, as he was leaving summer school, Albert saw a street vendor selling stain remover. He listened with delight to the seller’s pitch and held out the coins to him. As he later recalled, the vendor addressed him directly: “You, you’re a kike, right?” said the blond street merchant with his thin mustache whom I’d gone to listen to with faith and tenderness on the way from school. ‘You’re a filthy kike, right? I can see it in your mug. You don’t eat pig, right? Given that pigs don’t eat each other you’re a miser, right? I can see it in your mug, you eat gold coins, right? You like them more than you do candy, right? You’re a fake Frenchman, right? I can see that in your mug, you’re a filthy Jew, right? A filthy Jew, right? Your father is in international finance, right? You’ve come here to eat the bread of the French, right? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you a buddy of Dreyfus, a little purebred yid, guaranteed member of the brotherhood of the snipped, shortened where he should be. I recognize them on sight: me, I can’t be fooled. Well, we don’t like Jews around here, it’s a filthy race, they’re all spies in the pay of Germany, look at Dreyfus, they’re all traitors, they’re all bastards, they’re as awful as the mange, bloodsuckers of the poor world, they roll on gold and smoke big fat cigars while we have to tighten our belts: am I right or am I right, ladies and gentlemen. Get lost, we’ve seen enough of you, you’re not at home here, this isn’t your country, you have no place here in our home, c’mon, get lost, take a hike, get going, go see if I’m in Jerusalem.” Cohen never recovered from this tirade, though he later declared that his love of the country that had “rejected” him did not waver, finding its focus instead in literature. Cohen’s suspicion of all claims about universal brotherhood grew from this early confrontation with the actual, smiling face of hatred. Cohen attended law school in Geneva from 1914 and took Swiss citizenship in 1919, the same year in which he married his first wife, Elisabeth Brocher, a Protestant pastor’s daughter. He published his first book, a volume of poetry called Paroles juives, in 1921, a volume that he refused to republish during his lifetime though it was eventually included in the Pléiade collection of his work. The poetry of the young Cohen bears within it the same pride about Jews and Jewishness, later diversified by ambiguity, that will persist throughout his writing life. In the first lines of the collection Cohen writes: Listen My People. My people I looked upon you. You taught me. As he admits, “my words are crude.” These poems are exhortations to his people, which sometimes involve criticism of them. I know only how to shout I know only how to shout. I come to you My people lacking in courage. Ah, how my words burn you Ah, rise and go forth. Ah, puff up your mane and growl Indolent lion Lion that awakens the flame of
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