Le Livre de ma mère

“Glas des endeuillés, chant des morts que nous avons aimés” (“Death knell of the bereaved, song of the dead we have loved”): with only a slight variation, these are the words Albert Cohen chose as the title of the first version of the text, called “Chant de mort.” It was published in four parts, from June 1943 to May 1944, in the review La France libre, while Cohen was in London, where he had taken refuge in June 1940 with his wife and daughter to escape the Nazi advance. He undertook the writing so that his new companion, Bella Berkowich, whom he had met in 1943, might have the sense of having known Louise Judith Cohen, née Ferro, who had not been able to make the journey. She remained in Marseille, where she died on 10 January 1943 without ever seeing her son again. The guilt never left Albert Cohen, and this feeling gave his work the lyrical dimension of a “chant de mort.”

The final text was published in 1954, barely altered from the original version. Literary critics praised a powerful and sincere work, already called a masterpiece twelve years before Belle du Seigneur. Marcel Pagnol, Albert Cohen’s childhood friend, was among the first to point out the universality of its message: “this tribute to one particular mother continually attains the universal” (Combat, 27 May 1954).

“To weep for one’s mother is to weep for one’s childhood. Man wants his childhood, wants it back, and if he loves his mother more as he grows older, it is because his mother is his childhood. I was a child, I am no longer one, and I cannot get over it.” In tones sometimes reminiscent of Proust, he would later recall, in his Carnets, the “angelic remedies” of his childhood: “never again, the tranquil balm whose name I loved, dear green oil that she spread on my back with a ball of cotton… Never again, camphorated spirits, tolu syrup, eau des Carmes, elixir of Garus, vulnerary alcoholate, polygala syrup, charming healers of my childhood” (Gallimard, 1979, p. 43).