A Jewish Poetics of Exile
Benjamin Fondane lived through two displacements: first when he immigrated from Romania to France in the 1920s; and then again when he went into semihiding in Paris under the Occupation. Although he had come to French in search of a literary community through language adoption, in his wartime poetry he questions the possibility of a monolingual language. This chapter focuses on Fondane’s revisions of his poetry during the war, and in particular on L’Exode, his literary representations of the June 1940 flight toward the Southern Zone. Fondane writes in many languages at once: he not only incorporates the names of Hebrew letters and transcriptions of prayer in his French text but he also states that even if only one word existed in the world there would still be no one language. In this chapter, Fondane’s texts are also put into dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other.