Benjamin Fondane Research Articles

Benjamin Fondane, Paul Celan et Norman Manea. Trois frères de lait noir

In this essay, we study the presence of Benjamin Fondane in the work of Paul Celan, especially in Gespräch im Gebirg (Dialogue dans la montagne). Starting from the interesting hypothesis of Norman Manea — the interlocutor of Celan would in fact be Fondane — we adduce further proof to his considerations while expanding our research to Stimmen from the collection Sprachgitter and Vor dein spätes Gesicht from the collection Atemwende, texts that Norman Manea did not consider. Finally we point out to the intertextual relations that exist between the poetry of Benjamin Fondane and that of Paul Celan and Yvan Goll while relying our philological analysis on the textual indices disseminated in their works, indices toward which criticism has not pointed up to the present time.

The Rhetoric of Reason: Language in Benjamin Fondane

Abstract: Lev Shestov considers all discourse rhetorical. His work denounces rationalist discourse as an imposture that denies its own appeal to irrational impulses. Fondane’s poetry betrays the same consciousness of rhetoric: while it does not have a persuasive function per se, it involves circuits of address and oratorical concerns. In Fondane, there is a subjectivist tendency at work: selfhood can never be set aside. Fondane locates the self and the passions at the heart of all speech, denouncing philosophy’s pretensions to dispassionate, objective, “rational” discourse.

Panentheism, History and the Problem of Evil

Abstract In this paper I consider the thought of two Jewish existentialists from the first half of the 20th century, showing how their critique of pantheistic and panentheistic thinking grounded novel ideas about politics, history and human thought. In place of a concept of history directed towards a teleological redemption of suffering in the future, Lev Shestov (1866–1938) and Benjamin Fondane (1898–1944) abandoned notions of philosophical rationality in order to avow a ‘reversal’ of history according to which historical suffering could be expiated through the unforeseeable powers of the divine. From here, I look at the work of a contemporaneous philosopher – Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) – for the way in which his own conception of history as ‘rescuing’ the past provides an alternative panentheism, one according to which political responsibility derives from a need to redeem God whose existence has been exiled throughout the mundane world.

Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France by Julia Elsky

Reviewed by: Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France by Julia Elsky Nick Underwood Julia Elsky. Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020. 288 pp. For those interested in the history of Jews in France, the current moment is exciting. Building upon Paula Hyman's, Nancy Green's, and David Weinberg's pioneering work (the most recognizable to English-speaking academics), an increasing number of scholars are working on a wide range of issues related to the histories and cultures of the varieties of Jews in modern France. The growing body of literature on Jewish migration to France has broadened our understanding of Jewish France and has illuminated the contours of the French Jewish communities. Adding to these new approaches and interjecting an explicitly literary framework to the recent literature is Julia Elsky's Writing Occupation: Jewish Émigré Voices in Wartime France, which, over seven chapters (including the introduction and epilogue), analyzes how the writers Benjamin Fondane, Jean Malaquais, Romain Gary, Elsa Triolet, and Irène Némirovsky wrote about their Jewishness and Frenchness during the years of occupation, collaboration, accommodation, and resistance in wartime France. Elsky's writers all immigrated to France during the interwar years and all adopted French as their literary language. Indeed, one of Elsky's major contributions is to challenge us to read French as a Jewish language and explore the content of Jewish identity as it was written by these authors in the French language. Elsky utilizes these writers' works to explore the ideals of French national belonging. For Elsky, the war and occupation were turning points for these authors and highlight how "under the pressures of war, [these writers] wrote a Francophonie that shifts the paradigm of dominant and dominated cultures to one of immigration and transnational circulation and expands the idea of what a Jewish language is" (206). As Elsky shows, it was under the occupation that these authors addressed the choice to write in French in new ways. These Jewish immigrants to France, as Elsky highlights, expressed hybrid and shifting cultural, religious, and linguistic identities. In fact, "French became universal in a different way; a language with no center or periphery, in which they could represent Jewish voice and multiple languages, including their maternal tongues and the language of prayer" (28). As Elsky argues explicitly, this group of "Eastern European Francophonie … blur distinction between center and periphery" (5). Again, as Elsky argues repeatedly, defeat and occupation changed Jewish immigrant writers' approach to French; they blurred the boundaries of belonging within national borders. In this line of [End Page 465] thinking, Elsky here pairs these Jewish writers' experiences with those of postcolonial French writers. Although focused on the occupation broadly, the writers highlighted in Writing Occupation wrote about some specific experiences during World War II, from the June 1940 flight from Paris to life in the occupied and southern zones, roundups, and internment camps, and the Resistance. In addition to these moments, these writers were also influenced by contemporary debates about Yiddish, the importance the French held in governmental rhetoric related to citizenship, and attacks in the antisemitic press about Jewish immigrants and their adulterated French. The role that French played in the immigrant imagination was central to these writers, as Elsky makes clear. In chapter 3, which focuses on Romain Gary, Elsky shows how his "multilingual heteroglossia" (95) demonstrates how languages are in contact with each other. They do not cancel one other out. "Gary represents French as the language of democracy that could encompass a wide range of languages—and therefore national identities," writes Elsky, "in one democratic European language" (96). In challenging the binary relationship between periphery and center and demonstrating how these French and Jewish writers articulated their sense of belonging and not belonging in wartime France, Elsky expands the historical and literary function of the French language. "Under the Occupation in particular, Benjamin Fondane, Romain Gary, and Jean Malaquas wrote in a French that incorporated Jewish voice," argues Elsky, "or even rejected the notion of French as a closed, monolingual language" (203). This was a direct challenge to the Vichy government's exclusionary nationalist practices. "Taking a different approach...

Humour in Film as a Method of Expression

Living in a social world, we experience feelings and react to others’ feelings as they appear to us. For instance, we have all smiled since we were babies. The first “genuine” social smile typically occurs sometime between weeks 6 and 8, as a response to recognizing someone very special: Mom or Dad (Kail, V., Robert & Cavanaugh, John C., 2019). We see, we are happy, we smile. We are born with the desire to be happy.
 Humankind has searched for different revelations of happiness, and this is how humour was born. From ancient times to the present day, humour has been an instrument of communication, a social behaviour that is an integral part of mass media and social interaction. Humour provides a reciprocal influence. It is a way to interpret information as well as a specific media that can be used to convey this information. What happens to the media once it is "infected" by humour? Does humour necessarily satisfy the need for entertainment? Can humour have a "serious face"? Is it true that "Humour is always a monopoly of the semi-literate" (McLuhan, 2016)?
 This essay will explore the above-mentioned topics from the perspective of the humour applied in motion pictures, during the interwar era. It will specifically discuss the genre of satire using as a case study the humour found in Latin America during that time as evidenced in the movie Tararira, the film of Benjamin Fondane produced by Falma Film in Buenos Aires in 1936.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Ethical Writing and Commemoration: Benjamin Fondane's ‘Preface in Prose’ and the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas

The end of Benjamin Fondane's iconic poem, the ‘Préface en prose’, is inscribed at the entrance of Yad Vashem's Hall of Names. The quote is a resonant call to recognize the humanity of all victims in the poet's human countenance. This reference, among many other elements in this poem, prompts a comparison to Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy. The poem's speaker specifically resembles Levinas's ‘Other’. Contrary to Levinas, it is maintained that written discourse, and not just the face-to-face encounter, involves an ethical summons, implying a responsibility on the part of the reader: the responsibility to commemorate, in this case to commemorate the innocent humanity murdered in the Shoah.

Benjamin Fondane’s ‘Ulysses’: Bilingual Edition. Translated and with an introduction by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody; foreword by David Rieff

Benjamin Fondane’s ‘Ulysses’: Bilingual Edition. Translated and with an introduction by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody; foreword by David Rieff

Lev Shestov’s Ideas in the French Philosophical and Cultural Context

The focus of this article is the influence of Lev Shestov’s ideas on European intellectuals, especially French philosophers and poets. The author shows that the Russian thinker had a significant impact on shaping the intellectual atmosphere in France at the first half of the twentieth century, contributing to the rise of existentialist philosophy. Among Shestov’s direct philosophical followers are literary critic, writer, and musicologist Boris de Schloezer; essayist and philosopher Georges Bataille; and poet Benjamin Fondane.

Lost and Found: the Re-Discovery of Benjamin Fondane

Lost and Found: the Re-Discovery of Benjamin Fondane

Escaping History: Benjamin Fondane's "Mal des Fantomes" and Interiority

The author of Mal des has something of the revenant. Until recently, Benjamin Fondane's problematic posterity has relegated him to the fragile margins of the canon, partly due to the relative scarcity of his works. Most of these works only reappeared in the early eighties, almost forty years after Fondane's death at Auschwitz in 1944. The publishers Plasma, which went bankrupt in 1983, and Paris-Mediterranee, which ceased activity in 2009, both helped republish Fondane's most essential works, but with little publicity. In 1989, Monique Jutrin published the second monograph on the work of this poet, existentialist philosopher, and polemist, Benjamin Fondane ou le periple d'Ulysse. (1) In 1997, Jutrin founded the Cahiers Benjamin Fondane, now in their 17th annual issue; Fondane's works have reappeared, this time through the well-established Editions Verdier; and monographs are being produced at the remarkable rate of close to one per year. (2) Alluding to Stendhal's famous remark, Fondane once claimed he might find a readership in 1980; history seems to be bearing out his claim. (3) Born Benjamin Wechsler in Jassy, Moldavia in 1898, the future Fondane began publishing at fourteen, and soon adopted the pseudonym Benjamin Fundoianu. Emigrating to France in 1923 and gallicizing his pseudonym to Fondane, he became one of Andre Breton's most ferocious critics and a disciple of the anti-rationalist philosopher Lev Shestov. His subtle, original, and deeply sophisticated polemical essays include the Faux Traite d'esthetique (1938), a philosophical pamphlet critiquing Surrealism and Roger Caillois. Fondane is often read in light of philosophers, as in Bruce Baugh's recent dual study of Fondane and Jean Wahl (Baugh 33-51). But where Levinas is concerned, the most convincing resonances begin, not between the philosophies of the two thinkers, but between Levinas's philosophy and Fondane's poetry. (4) I have elsewhere studied the points of contact between Fondane's most iconic poem, called the Preface en prose, and Levinas's conception of ethical speech, a kind of discourse that recognizes the authority and fragility of the Other without coercion. Here, I focus instead on Fondane's elegiac long poem Le Mal des fantomes (1943). (5) In this powerful elegy, history appears as an oppressive, violent force of erasure. And while the poem cannot itself preserve the singularity of an individual existence, it nonetheless bears witness to that existence, provoking an awareness of the reader's own fragile and transient inner life. That inner life, and human interiority in general, necessarily lie outside of History, according to both Levinas and Fondane. This position opposes, as both Levinas and Fondane consistently do, Hegel's totalizing conception of History. Yet this conception of interiority as extrinsic to History represents a game of qui perd gagne. Levinas and Fondane intend to preserve interiority as a space of infinite possibility or pure potentiality, to safeguard interiority from the closure and fixity of History. Yet in excluding interiority from History, these thinkers also define it as necessarily lost or missing, as perpetually unrecorded and unrecordable. I argue, in short, that for both Fondane and Levinas, interiority constitutes the elegiac object par excellence. Fondane discusses Hegel's conception of history at length in his last philosophical essay, Le Lundi existentiel et le dimanche de l'histoire (1945, posthumous). Fondane critiques Hegel's notion that History is utterly rational, because it requires that Hegel maintain, for instance, that war can be necessaire (Le Lundi existentiel 66). In other words, a rational history implies rationalizing all the evils of history. To make matters worse, for Hegel as Fondane reads him, the finite is inauthentic, a kind of unreality in the face of the infinite Spirit: [L]'idealisme de la philosophie consiste en la non-reconnaissance du fini comme etre veritable [Hegel]; le fini, le dechire, le meurtri existent, sans doute, mais ne saurait avoir voix au chapitre; si, pourtant, ils elevent leur voix, on la tiendra pour une lamentation sterile, une plainte sentimentale, un pur reflet de besoins et d'appetits. …

Faith in the Mode of Absence: Kierkegaard’s Jewish Readers in 1930s France (Rachel Bespaloff, Benjamin Fondane, Lev Shestov, and Jean Wahl)

Abstract In the 1930s, Jean Wahl, Lev Shestov, Benjamin Fondane, and Rachel Bespaloff were among the first to seriously introduce philosophical readings of Kierkegaard’s works in France. As Jewish intellectuals within a particularly troubled period in history, their readings of Kierkegaard were informed both by the problems of self-identification imposed upon them by the political context, and by a particular ontological understanding of human nature. This article argues that these considerations are essential for understanding how these early existential thinkers read the Dane and appealed to him in ways quite distinct from the Christian or atheist trends in existential philosophy.

Private thinkers, untimely thoughts: Deleuze, Shestov and Fondane

It has gone largely unnoticed that when Deleuze opposes the “private thinker” to the “public professor,” he is invoking the existential thought of Lev Shestov (1866–1938). The public professor defends established values and preaches submission to the demands of reason and the State; the private thinker opposes thought to reason, “idiocy” to common sense, a people to come to what exists. Private thinkers are solitary, singular and untimely, forced to think against consensus and “the crowd.” Deleuze takes from Shestov and Kierkegaard the idea that genuine thinking manifests itself in a thinking which rebels against rational necessity, a theme central to Shestov’s leading French interpreter, Benjamin Fondane (1898–1944). Although Deleuze at first (Nietzsche et la philosophie. Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 1962) expresses doubts as to whether Shestov’s critique of reason can overcome the legislative reason of Kant, or whether it is entirely free of ressentiment, I argue that Shestov and Fondane’s anti-rationalism is more radical than Deleuze sometimes admits, and show how Deleuze’s attitude toward Shestov became more unreservedly positive over the years. On the other hand, against Shestov and Fondane, I agree with Deleuze that the private thinker is in solidarity with the “strange powers” which can remake the world, and thus with “the people to come.” Nonetheless, I argue that Deleuze’s philosophy cannot form the basis of a politics of egalitarian consensus, but that “the people to come” can only be a “broken chain” of untimely and singular exceptions.

Paris-Bucharest, Bucharest-Paris: Francophone Writers from Romania ed. by Anne Quinney

Quinney, Anne, ed. Paris-Bucharest, Bucharest-Paris: Francophone Writers from Romania. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. ISBN 978-90-420-3451-8. Pp. 285. $78. Why did so many twentieth-century Romanians write in French? Clustered at the crossroads of intellectual history, cultural studies, and language politics, these ten essays approach this question through the writings of Romanian Francophone intellectuals. In the introduction, Quinney describes the Franco-Romanian relationship as one of “exchange, borrowings, and crossovers” (13), a departure from the hierarchy of the postcolonial francophonie. This difference, she contends, works to “free language, once and for all, from its exclusive relationship to nation”(22). Several essays introduce Romanian intellectuals and plot their participation in twentiethcentury French thought: Monique Jutrin describes the cultural plurality of Benjamin Fondane’s poetry, philosophy, and criticism; Ashby Crowder analyzes discontinuity between interwar traditionalist intellectuals and the“protochronists”of the 1970s and 1980s; and Monique Yaari argues that Romanian surrealists used French to write beyond the competing postwar pressures of fascism and communism. The volume responds most directly to its central question in Quinney’s article on the postwar texts of Emile Cioran,which she reads as un-writing the fascism of his earlier work.Quinney wagers that for Cioran, writing in French is “a perverse form of salvation, both the cause and its cure” (269). Catherine Rossi invests French with different powers in her study of Panaït Istrati, who wrote in French to celebrate the freedoms of expression, democracy, and human rights. Unexamined in Rossi’s analysis, however, are the dangers that attend any equation of French with freedom, democracy, or rights in the early part of the twentieth century, when the language was being forcibly imposed on much of the southern hemisphere. And when Rossi describes a young Istrati reading French Enlightenment thinkers for the first time as a man “discovering a new world [...] where everything seemed so unlike his dear Eastern Romania” (162), she leaves undisturbed troubling assumptions about France,the Enlightenment,Eastern Romania, and discovery. These essays work to exchange postcolonial Francophone studies for a newer model of the littérature-monde variety; but too often, the authors fail to acknowledge their affinities with, or explain their departures from existing scholarship on exile, migration, and hybridity when they use these terms.As a result, Rossi accepts unchallenged Istrati’s association of French with human rights, and Ferdâ Asya, in an essay on Orientalism in the work of Anna de Noailles, uses a charged vocabulary— “Eastern ambiance [...] exotic aura [...] the penetrating quality of the Orient” (39–40)—without accounting for its loaded history and without mentioning Edward Said.Also curious is the paradoxically national language in which the volume appends a post-national framework to Francophone studies. Arguing that Romania’s cultural production in French differs from that of the former colonies—precisely because it was never colonized—maintains the nation as a fundamental literary determinant and undermines the collection’s post-national aspirations. In places, closer editing would have been welcome, as when four lines are repeated, largely unchanged, on the same 228 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 229 page (16). Despite these flaws, the volume’s detailed study of key literary figures is sure to interest scholars of twentieth-century Franco-Romanian writing. University of Minnesota Corbin Treacy Requemora-Gros, Sylvie. Voguer vers la modernité: le voyage à travers les genres au XVIIe siècle. Paris: PU Paris-Sorbonne, 2012. ISBN 978-2-84050-820-5. Pp. 879. 28 a. À partir d’un abondant corpus qui rassemble des romans, des récits de voyages, des pièces et des textes poétiques écrits entre la fin du seizième siècle et le début du dixhuiti ème, Requemora-Gros s’est proposé deux objectifs: offrir une nécessaire mise au point sur la question, copieusement traitée par la critique depuis les années 1980, des multiples rapports qui s’instaurent entre la littérature et le voyage au dix-septième siècle, en même temps qu’un essai sur la modernité de la littérature viatique après 1580. La première partie concerne “l’art d’écrire le voyage” (33): l’auteur étudie la rhétorique du...

Poetry Today: "Discovering Benjamin Fondane"

Poetry Today: "Discovering Benjamin Fondane"

Writing Against Theodicy: Reflections on the Co-Existence of God and Evil in Baudelaire’s Poetry and Critical Essays

This article uncovers a sustained reflection in Baudelaire’s writings on the coexistence of God and evil. In the 1857 and 1861 editions of Les Fleurs du Mal , there is already a movement away from the divine in poems that depict evil as a more compelling concept and as the dominant force. In his critical writings and prose poems, Baudelaire increasingly engages in questions of theodicy to suggest the incompatibility of God and evil. This article describes an overarching system of writing “against theodicy” that links Baudelaire’s book reviews, art criticism, and essays on child psychology and psychedelic drugs, and that provides a conceptual framework for the shift in his poetics from romanticism to realism. As a textual analysis of these works demonstrates, Baudelaire’s writing “against theodicy” repeatedly leads his readers to draw the conclusion of God’s nonexistence in the face of the reality of evil. ( smp )

How We Are Untranslatable and How Nobody's There to Care

Review introductionto focus: Contemporary Romanian Poetry in Translation and in Interstitial English Andrei Codrescu, Focus Editor The idea of a "Focus" on Romanian literature in English translation in the US looked simple enough at first, until I started surveying the field. The field is strewn with a variety of products of varying quality and intent that will simply not sit under one umbrella, no matter how Romanian-sounding the authors' names. The Romanian presence in American letters is fairly substantial, but only some of it is literature, and the "some of it" is not always representative of Romanian literature. Worse, the translations of even the "some ofit" that may be representative are spotty at best and atrocious in many instances. In addition to bad translations of haphazard work, there is disagreement within the Romanian literary community as to what is and what isn't "representative." Before 1989 and the fall of the Ceau§escu regime, there was very little worthwhile Romanian work in English. Unlike their Czech, Polish , or Hungarian contemporaries, Romanians produced no earth-shaking dissident tomes. Romanians excused their absence from the Cold War literature ofprotest by pointing to the greatness oftheir poetry. In Romania, it was said, poetry carried the weight of the opposition, and it was mightily feared by the tyrant and much loved by the people. In the absence of decent translations, there was no way to verify its subversive efficacy, so that assertion remained mostly unproven. On the other hand, Tristan Tzara, Paul Celan, Ilarie Voronca, Benjamin Fondane, and Gherasim Luca were well-known poets in the West since before the Second World War. These Romanian-born, Jewish poets, writing for the most part in French, had been translated almost simultaneously into English. They had, in fact, created an international idiom for poetry , a kind ofur-ground hospitable to infinite poetic experiment. The nationalist and communist epochs severed the connection with this international avantgarde . Romanian poets within the Romanian borders condemned themselves (and were condemned by the official ideologues) to provincialism. After 1989, Romanian writers felt the urgent need to be heard outside their borders, and there was a stampede of traducing. Well-respected writers , whether pre- or post- 1989, felt that they had to be read on the "outside," hoping for recognition that the increasingly bitter internecine polemics made impossible. The Romanian literary scene is contentious , the heir of innumerable storms in teapots and art-hostile political ideologies. Needless to say, most fiction didn't make it this time around either, with the exception of Mircea Cärtärescu's work. Cärtärescu, however, is the exception among Romanian fictioneers : primarily a poet, his prose has more in common with the masters of the international dream idiom pioneered by Tzara. In Romania, it was said, poetry carried the weight ofthe opposition. The poets crossed over into American English in great numbers and in a variety of craft. At first, there was only a single boat, a canoe really, named Adam J. Sorkin. The canoe that is Sorkin brought to the US dozens, maybe over a hundred, Romanian poets. Sorkin translated indefatigably for over three decades, often with the help of the poets, sometimes with the help ofthe dictionary. Even as we speak, the sea-worthy craft of Sorkin's labor is being offloaded by small press publishers far and wide. In 2006, Carmen Firan and Paul Doru Mugur's anthology Born in Utopia inaugurated a whole new understanding of Romanian poetry. For the first time, a picture of an entire poetic culture became visible. Other poets crossed in their own vessels in the first decade of the new millennium when the Internet and the open border made it possible for some younger poets to begin writing directly in English. This English (American-flavored mostly) seems to me a new language, something I call "interstitial English," a language in which a great many foreign-born writers are becoming fluent. Some of these writers have learned their English from MTV and Animal Planet before actually and physically coming to the US. Others are practicing in the interstices between literary and pop-cultural English, mixing in a variety of accents from the ethno-enclaves of...

The sounds of silence: Benjamin Fondane and the cinema

The sounds of silence: Benjamin Fondane and the cinema

Self-Portrait in Fondane's Poetry

The poetic work of Benjamin Fondane appears in our view as representative of the embodiment of the ambiguous relationship between the Jewish writer and Western literature. Through his works, we can retrace the course followed by the Jew-poet in the Western world. Indeed, for Benjamin Fondane, born Benjamin Wechsler, the conquest of identity was harsh: it was to be a lifetime achievement, gained through the existential experience of the man, the Jew, and the poet. Born in lassy, Moldavia, in 1898, Benjamin Wechsler chose the name of Fundoianu when he made his entry in literature. He belongs to the generation of Romanian writers like Tzara, Voronca, and Sernet who were fascinated by the prestige of French literature. A precocious writer, he left many writings in the Romanian language: poems, critical essays, chronicles, plays for the theatre, etc. As an adolescent, he was already fluent in several languages and, in addition to Romanian, he knew French, German, English, and Yiddish. In 1923, at the age of 25, he arrives in Paris. From then on, Benjamin Wechsler becomes Benjamin Fondane. It does not take him more than a few years to master perfectly the French language and to use it as his tool for poetic expression. At the age of 35, he is in fact a real French writer. In 1933, two of his works are simultaneously published: the poem Ulysse and the essay Rimbaudle voyou (Rimbaud the Hoodlum). He has another ten years left before dying in the gas chamber at AuschwitzBirkenau.2

Benjamin Fondane and Romania

Benjamin Fondane and Romania