EXODUS

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.
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.