Collected Prose

aphorisms, dialogues, songs, and commentaries that endlessly move around the central question of the book: how to speak what cannot be spoken. The question is the Jewish Holocaust, but it is also the question of literature itself. By a startling leap of the imagination, Jabès treats them as one and the same:
    I talked to you about the difficulty of being Jewish, which is the same as the difficulty of writing. For Judaism and writing are but the same waiting, the same hope, the same wearing out.

    The son of wealthy Egyptian Jews, Jabès was born in 1912 and grew up in the French-speaking community of Cairo. His earliest literary friendships were with Max Jacob, Paul Eluard, and René Char, and in the forties and fifties he published several small books of poetry which were later collected in Je bâtis ma demeure (1959). Up to that point, his reputation as a poet was solid, but because he lived outside France, he was not very well known.

    The Suez Crisis of 1956 changed everything for Jabès, both in his life and in his work. Forced by Nasser’s regime to leave Egypt and resettle in France — consequently losing his home and all his possessions — he experienced for the first time the burden of being Jewish. Until then, his Jewishness had been nothing more than a cultural fact, a contingent element of his life. But now that he had been made to suffer for no other reason than that he was a Jew, he had become the Other, and this sudden sense of exile was transformed into a basic, metaphysical self-description.
    Difficult years followed. Jabès took a job in Paris and was forced to do most of his writing on the Metro to and from work. When, not long after his arrival, his collected poems were published by Gallimard, the book was not so much an announcement of things to come as a way of marking the boundaries between his new life and what was now an irretrievable past. Jabès began studying Jewish texts — the Talmud, the Kabbala — and though this reading did not initiate a return to the religious precepts of Judaism, it did provide a way for Jabès to affirm his ties with Jewish history and thought. More than the primary source of the Torah, it was the writings and rabbinical commentaries of the Diaspora that moved Jabès, and he began to see in these books a strength particular to the Jews, one that translated itself, almost literally, into a mode of survival. In the long interval between exile and the coming of the Messiah, the people of God had become the people of the Book. For Jabès, this meant that the Book had taken on all the weight and importance of a homeland.
    The Jewish world is based on written law, on a logic of words one cannot deny. So the country of the Jews is on the scale of their world, because it is a book … The Jew’s fatherland is a sacred text amid the commentaries it has given rise to …

    At the core of The Book of Questions there is a story — the separation of two young lovers, Sarah and Yukel, during the time of the Nazi deportations. Yukel is a writer — described as the “witness” — who serves as Jabès’s alter ego and whose words are often indistinguishable from his; Sarah is a young woman who is shipped to a concentration camp and who returns insane. But the story is never really told, and it in no way resembles a traditional narrative. Rather, it is alluded to, commented on, and now and then allowed to burst forth in the passionate and obsessive love letters exchanged between Sarah and Yukel — which seem to come from nowhere, like disembodied voices, articulating what Jabès calls “the collective scream … the everlasting scream.”
    Sarah: I wrote you. I write you. I wrote you. I write you. I take refuge in my words, the words my pen weeps. As long as I am speaking, as long as I am writing, my pain is less keen. I join with each syllable to the point of being but a body of consonants, a soul of vowels. Is it magic? I write his name, and it becomes the man I love …

    And Yukel, toward the end of the book:
    And I read in you, through your dress and your skin, through your flesh and your blood. I read, Sarah, that you were mine through every word of our language, through all the wounds of our race. I read, as one reads the Bible, our history and the story which could only be yours and mine.

    This story, which is the “central text” of the book, is submitted to extensive and elusive commentaries in Talmudic fashion. One of Jabès’s most original strokes is