Edmond Jabès: The Hazard of Exile

Steven Jaron. Edmond Jabès: The Hazard of Exile. Oxford, European Humanities Research Centre/Legenda, 2003.

The Jewish poet Edmond Jabès, born in Cairo in 1912, characterized his writings as “not belonging.” Drawing on unpublished archival and rare printed sources, Steven Jaron traces this sense of exile to early beginnings, while Jabès was still living in Egypt. At that time, the young writer, moving in Francophone literary circles close to the Surrealists, felt that he belonged in France. But his expectations of integration remained unfulfilled: on his arrival in Paris in 1957 after the Suez crisis, Jabès was disturbed to find persistent anti-Semitism. This led him to assume what he called his “Jewish condition,” and in his critically acclaimed Livre des Questions cycle (1963-'73) the Shoah became a focal point. Jaron examines how Jabès's oeuvre formed a cohesive whole, providing the exile with the homeland he lacked.