Ô vous, frères humains

At the age of seventy-seven, Albert Cohen published a book revealing the formative trauma that had devastated his childhood and marked his entire life: his discovery of antisemitism on his tenth birthday, in 1905. “In this book, I tell how a street peddler in Marseille, on my tenth birthday, insulted me and drove me away because I was Jewish. Today, it is a strange sympathy, a tender pity that I feel for that poor, helpless and destitute man who wanted an enemy to blame for his miserable life and believed his hatred to be just and praiseworthy; a tender pity for this wretched, inferior man, despised and knowing it, for whom it felt good and comforting to feel superior by despising in turn; a tender pity above all because he is my brother in death, condemned to death as I am, and how then can I hold it against him, how can I not forgive him? I even feel a kind of satisfaction at the thought of that hour of small glory the poor fellow experienced in expelling the Jewish child.” (Interview with Franck Jotterand, Le Monde, 16 August 1973). In this near-sequel to Le Livre de ma mère, Albert Cohen deploys the beauty of his lyrical prose to convey the violence of this wound, in a book that is intense, sorrowful, but never pessimistic.

An issue on vélin pur fil was produced a little less than a month later (printed 5 June, the ordinary printing having been completed on 10 May), for the author — presumably at his request — and in a very small number of copies for a few friends. About ten copies are known, all inscribed.