Exodus (excerpt) by Benjamin Fondane

Poet: | Nationality: , | Filmmaker:

Remember only that I was innocent
and, just like you, mortal on that day,
I, too, had had a face marked by rage, by pity and joy,
quite simply, a human face!

A striking, abstract envideoing of the excerpt from Fondane’s Exodus inscribed at the Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Hadas Zarbiv, the filmmaker, said she produced this in collaboration with Yad Vashem, which would account for the language choice.

Benjamin Fondane was a surrealist poet and existentialist philosopher in France, part of what the English translator of Exodus calls “the extensive Rumanian contribution to French intellectual life” in the 20th Century, which includes such luminaries as Tristan Tzara, Constantin Brancusi, E. M. Cioran, Mircea Eliade and Eugene Ionesco. The Wikipedia article is also quite extensive.

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