EXODUS: the face of poetic resistance under the Holocaust

by Benjamin Fondane

Exodus is the work of Benjamin Fondane (1898–1944) a poet, critic and filmmaker of Rumanian Jewish extraction and a naturalized French citizen. The “Exodus” meant many things to Fondane, all of which he internalized and felt intensely. The archetypes and narratives of the Exodus from Egypt and the Babylonian Captivity became ways to understand other experiences: the emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe in response to pogroms and oppression; his struggles in Paris as an artist who had left his native Rumania; and more immediately for him, the retreat of the French Army from the Eastern frontier and the capitulation to the Nazis. Fondane holds all these threads together by borrowing from the methods of the Greek chorus to create a multi-voice piece with many styles, literary traditions, and borrowings of forms, as from the Biblical Song of Songs. In 1940, Fondane joined the French army only to find himself taken prisoner, to escape, and be taken prisoner again. He was eventually hospitalized and released after the Armistice. Although friends offered assistance and encouraged him to leave, Fondane chose to stay in Paris where he lived in an apart ment with his wife near the Pantheon. There he completed Exodus, a manuscript begun in 1934. In 1944 he was denounced on account of his Jewish heritage, held at the Drancy transfer camp and then sent Auschwitz where he died.

132 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2008

About the author

alt spelling: Benjamin Fundoianu

Benjamin Fondane or Benjamin Fundoianu; born Benjamin Wechsler, Wexler or Vecsler, first name also Beniamin or Barbu, usually abridged to B.; was a Romanian and French poet, critic and existentialist philosopher, also noted for his work in film and theater. Known from his Romanian youth as a Symbolist poet and columnist, he alternated Neoromantic and Expressionist themes with echoes from Tudor Arghezi, and dedicated several poetic cycles to the rural life of his native Moldavia. Fondane, who was of Jewish Romanian extraction and a nephew of Jewish intellectuals Elias and Moses Schwartzfeld, participated in both minority secular Jewish culture and mainstream Romanian culture. During and after World War I, he was active as a cultural critic, avant-garde promoter and, with his brother-in-law Armand Pascal, manager of the theatrical troupe Insula.
Fondane began a second career in 1923, when he moved to Paris. Affiliated with Surrealism, but strongly opposed to its communist leanings, he moved on to become a figure in Jewish existentialism and a leading disciple of Lev Shestov. His critique of political dogma, rejection of rationalism, expectation of historical catastrophe and belief in the soteriological force of literature were outlined in his celebrated essays on Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, as well as in his final works of poetry. His literary and philosophical activities helped him build close relationships with other intellectuals: Shestov, Emil Cioran, David Gascoyne, Jacques Maritain, Victoria Ocampo, Ilarie Voronca etc. In parallel, Fondane also had a career in cinema: a film critic and a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures, he later worked on Rapt with Dimitri Kirsanoff, and directed the since-lost film Tararira in Argentina.
A prisoner of war during the fall of France, Fondane was released and spent the occupation years in clandestinity. He was eventually captured and handed to Nazi German authorities, who deported him to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was sent to the gas chamber during the last wave of the Holocaust. His work was largely rediscovered later in the 20th century, when it became the subject of scholarly research and public curiosity in both France and Romania. In the latter country, this revival of interest also sparked a controversy over copyright issues.

Reviews

[Laura Leaney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was skimming around the internet last weekend – Sunday afternoon to be exact - when I happened upon a photograph of Benjamin Fondane. It was one of those old black and whites from the thirties, and Fondane’s hugely thick hair was brushed straight back off his head, his long neck swanning out of a zippered pull-over. He is looking off into the sun, misty hills behind him. Very European. Romanian as it happens. And Jewish.

There was something in the architecture of his face, the interesting v-shaped eyebrows, that drew me in. I looked him up, but I had to move backwards from his death because it was difficult to get past the fact that the Nazis gassed him at Auschwitz. While still at the Paris police station (before being sent to Drancy and then to Auschwitz), he wrote “fatalistically” to his wife: “If ever there was a Jew, an authentic Jew whom Hitler should have arrested, it’s me.”

Close friends sped to Gestapo headquarters to beg for his release on “the grounds of his great literary talent.” I can only imagine this. It’s enough to break your heart, as Exodus will do if you read it.

EXODUS
SUPER FLUMINA BABYLONIS

The gods have ordered the death of these men to be the subject
Of songs for generations to come.
Homer



And so it was.


I could only read this poetry knowing what happened to Benjamin Fondane. There was no other way for me to do it, and the words on the page became prophetic – not just for his life’s end but for mankind. What shall we do if the rivers / one after the other take their leave? / My god, what will we do?

You don’t have to be Jewish or religious to read the beauty and terror here. Written in 1934, the pieces are interwoven, like some strange play-song, and there’s a nod to the Greeks with a Chorus and a priest, and Hebrew prophecy, and French theater, and surrealism.

The author himself wrote the postscript in 1942 or 1943: “Poetry is in search of friends, not a public. And so through clandestine means this poem may gain a worthy life in the eyes of a dedicated audience. Let it be understood that the reader who shares our views will commit to spreading the word and, for that, is entitled to the trouble of copying or having the manuscript copied.”

Currently, the Kindle edition is under ten bucks.