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8 The Challenge Accepted BENJAMIN FONDANE Throughout this book appears the name of Benjamin Fondane. There is a silhouette of him in the Prologue and there are a number of references and quotations from his works. My readers, moreover, can find his name and extracts from his texts and poems in most of my previous books. This is sufficient demonstration of Benjamin Fondane's position in my spiritual universe. However, lowe my readers an admission. I first came across the name of this philosopher and poet whose thought has so strongly influenced me, and the whole of whose work was previous to the tragic date of October 2, 1944, when he perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, only following the Liberation, in 1945. But every line he wrote has since marked and accompanied me. A study of Le Lundi Existentiel in 1947 led me to a reading of the works published by Fondane before the war (Rimbaud le Voyou, La Conscience Malheureuse, Ulysse, Titanic, and Faux Traite d'esthhique ) and those which were published after his death (Baudelaire et l'Experience du Gouffre, 1947, "Rencontre avec Leon Chestov," preface to volume three of the works of Shestov, 1966, and Super Flumina Babylonis, 1965). In this last collection of poems there was a fragment entitled La Mort de Dieu (The Death of God) which had already been published in Edmond Fleg's Anthologie Juive (1951). But, above all, an astounding poem called L'Exode circulated from hand to hand from 1945 onwards. It was only much later that we learned that this text was only a fragment. The Cahiers du Sud published it in the collection Le Genie d'Israel. Together with others, I have done what I could to make this poem generally known (it is included in its partial form in my book Moise et la Vocation Juive, with eight editions since 1956 and translations into six languages including Hebrew and Japanese). It was only in 1965 that, thanks to Claude Sernet, the poem was published in its entirety. Since then, studies on Fondane have 105 106 FROM DENIAL TO REAFFIRMATION multiplied: The journal Non Lieu devoted an issue to him in 1978 and Bernard Chouraqui gave him a chapter in Le Scandale Juif. If I give all these details, it is because I am afraid that, despite the present dissemination of the name of Benjamin Fondane, there will no doubt be a large number of readers who will read his name here for the first time, just as I only met it for the first time after October 2, 1944 ... And also because the experience of teshuva, in the sense which I have given it, has not, thus far, been sufficiently emphasized by interpreters of Fondane, but that is just what has fascinated me ever since my first spiritual encounter with this figure. Turning Around Judaism Like a Moth "Benjamin Fondane, an authentic Jewish poet," it has been written here and there, and that is correct, providing this authenticity is apprehended in all its complexity. In Benjamin Fondane, there is a sub-structure of Jewish fidelity, but also an irruption of Jewish identity as a completely new discovery. From the time of his birth in Jassy, Romania, in 1898, until that of his death in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944, Benjamin Wexler, who became Barbu Fundoianu (and then Benjamin Fondane on his emigration to France in 1923), never for a moment stopped declaring himself a son of the Jewish people. His position as a Jew was acquired in the cradle. Jassy, at the end of the nineteenth century, was one of the centers of European Judaism. Half of its population was Jewish, amounting to more than a hundred thousand souls. Shemuel Joseph Agnon celebrated the renown of the city in many of his stories. The adolescence and youth of Benjamin Wexler were rooted in Jewish Romania. His maternal uncles, the three Schwartzfeld brothers, were historiographers and Hebraists of worldwide reputation. It was when living on his paternal grandfather's rural estate that he adopted his nom-de-plume Fondane, and after the First World War became one of the group of outstanding young Jewish contributors to Romanian poetry. Like many of his friends, however, he was attracted to France, to which he now devoted his pen and his poetical and philosophical inspiration , and he went to live in Paris. Having gained French citizenship in 1939, he volunteered for service in the armed forces and...

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