Albert Cohen

Albert Cohen was born on the island of Corfu in 1895 and emigrated to France when he was five. He grew up in Marseilles and studied law at the University of Geneva, becoming a Swiss citizen. During the 1930s he devoted himself to writing and after the fall of France spent seven years in London, where he was a legal adviser to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. In 1947 he returned to Geneva and was in charge of a division of the International Refugee Organization. After 1952 he resumed his literary activities, determined to complete his novel-cycle begun with Solal (1930) and Mangeclous (1938) and ending with Belle du Seigneur (1968) and Les Valereux (1969). Belle du Seigneur was awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman. He died in 1981.

"Albert Cohen defies classification. Born in Corfu, raised in France, holder of a passport issued by the Ottoman Empire until he was twenty-four, when he became a Swiss citizen, he claimed his true homeland was the French language.... In many ways, [Book of My Mother] remains a wartime book written by an exile. But it is much more than this. Cohen turns his grief into a meditation on human solitude. We each become islands, worn down by circumstance and the hostility of other people. But we are also very diligent architects of our own isolation, for we deny love through our own selfishness. Cohen may chide his mother... but he is much harder on himself.... The book is a study in guilt, an act of contrition, for in mourning his mother he grieves for his own lost childhood... [It] is an achingly honest, autumnal book, generous in its humanity, composed with art but without guile, the sincerest tribute of a neglectful son.... And in translating her husband's prose into sly, poetic, incantatory English, Bella Cohen... has reunited him with words, his true homeland." - from David Coward's introduction