Jewish Quarterly

ISSN: 0449-010X (Print) 2326-2516 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjeq20

Interlude: Visionary Anger

Benjamin Fondane

To cite this article: Benjamin Fondane (2017) Interlude: Visionary Anger, Jewish Quarterly, 64:2,
6-6, DOI: 10.1080/0449010X.2017.1345124

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0449010X.2017.1345124

Published online: 13 Jul 2017.

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Download by: [Pepperdine University] Date: 04 August 2017, At: 11:37

 Interlude: Visionary Anger
By Benjamin Fondane
I
And I said to my vision: ‘So what is Exodus?
What is Babylon? What is Jerusalem?
If there is not, in the world and under the world, a river,
that runs, invisible, beneath the appearance of peace
if no one worries about the innumerable leaves
of the forest,
if human cries fall to the ground
like chestnuts, as the wind wills,
without disturbing the peace of Angels,
what then is Exodus?
If there is really no eternal thing
—what is it then?’
And I was abruptly thrown into the countryside of France.
Downloaded by [Pepperdine University] at 11:37 04 August 2017

V
I have counted you all
yesterday’s civilians, accountants, shopkeepers, peasants
and factory workers and tramps whose nests
are under the bridges of Notre-Dame
and sacristy beadles and dependents
of the State, all Frenchmen from France, with clear eyes,
or from Congo, from deepest Algeria, from Annam
with palm trees floating in their gaze
and Frenchmen come from Caribbean islands,
French according to the rights of man,
sons of the barricade and of the guillotine,
sans-culottes, incorruptible foreheads, free,
and Czechs, and Poles, and Slovaks
and Jews from all the ghettos of the world,
who loved this earth and its shadows and its rivers,
who have sown this earth with their death
and who have become French, by right of death.

Two verses from the poem “Interlude: Visionary

Anger”, written in 1934 and only published after
Fondane’s death in the book L’Exode: Super
flumina Babylonis (1965, La Fenètre ardente).
Translated by Henry King and Andrew Rubens.

10.1080/0449010X.2017.1345124

6 Jewish Quarterly — Summer 2017