COHEN, Marcel 1937-

PERSONAL: Born October 9, 1937, in Asnières, France; son of Jacques and Marie (Salem) Cohen. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Attended École Supérieure de Journalisme and École du Louvre, both Paris, France. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Home—197 rue de Grenelle, 75007 Paris, France.

CAREER: Journalist, 1958—. Worked as a military correspondent, 1960-61.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grant for Macalester College, World Press Institute, 1970-71.

WRITINGS:

Galpa (novel), Éditions du Seuil (Paris, France), 1969.

Malestroit: Chroniques du silence, Éditeurs français réunis (Paris, France), 1973.

Voyage à Waïzata, Éditeurs français réunis (Paris, France), 1976.

Murs: anamnèses, Éditeurs français réunis (Paris, France), 1979.

Miroirs, Éditions Gallimard (Paris, France), 1981, translation by Jason Weiss published as Mirrors, Green Integer (College Park, MD), 1998.

Je ne sais pas le nom, Éditions Gallimard (Paris, France), 1986.

Le grand paon-de-nuit, Éditions Gallimard (Paris, France), 1990, translation by Cid Corman published as The Peacock Emperor Moth, Burning Deck Press (Providence, RI), 1995.

Assassinat d'un garde, Éditions Gallimard (Paris, France), 1998.

Quelques faces visibles du silence: Antonio Saura, L'Echoppe (Paris, France), 2000.

Faits: lecture courante à l'usage des grands débutants, Éditions Gallimard (Paris, France), 2002.

Shorter works include "Letras a un pintor ke kreya azer retratos imaginarios por un sefardi de Turkia, ke se akodra perfektamente de kada uno de sus modeles," illustrated by Antonio Saura, Almarabú (Madrid, Spain), 1985, bilingual edition published as "Lettre à Antonio Saura," L'Echoppe (Paris, France), 1997. Contributor to books, including Les Camps en Provence: exil, internement, déportation, 1933-1944, Éditions Alinéa et L.L.C.G. (Aix-en-Provence, France), 1984.

SIDELIGHTS: Marcel Cohen once told CA: "After a difficult childhood, marked by the death of most of my family in the Nazis' camps, I started to hitchhike extensively all over Europe during high school vacations. At the age of twenty, I traveled from Paris to the Himalayas through Italy, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, sleeping on truck platforms or sidewalks and spending several months in a Tibetan monastery. As a journalist, I have covered almost all kinds of events (except sports). In 1970 and 1971 I studied and traveled in the United States. Soon afterward I began to write about contemporary art for museums and art galleries.

"Although my main interest since childhood has been literature, I have always seen in journalism a privileged way of discovering the real race of this world. My first writings were poems. Accepted by the two Paris publishers to whom they were sent in 1968, they were never printed. My first novel Galpa, dealing with my experience of India, was considered by many critics to be a prose-poem. This ambiguity, to be considered a poet by novelists and a novelist by poets, still persists.

"In fact, belonging to a generation that can neither testify as a witness of the Shoah nor remain silent, I do not recognize myself in the linear form, the unity, the psychology, or the symbolism of the novel, and I do not recognize the habitual boundaries between prose and poetry. Scattered in dozens of small and unrelated chapters, my books have no real beginning or end. In many ways, they can be seen as an echo of the task that Samuel Beckett assigned to today's writers: 'to find a form to express the chaos.'

"The texts of The Peacock Emperor Moth are so short that, with some humor and irony, the writer Stacey Levine could call me the world's shortest writer."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Jabès, Edmond, Du désert au livre: entretiens avec Marcel Cohen, Pierre Belfond (Paris, France), 1981, translation by Pierre Joris published as From the Desert to the Book, Station Hill (Barrytown, NY), 1990.

periodicals

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1999, Jeffrey DeShell, review of Miroirs, p. 193.

Times Literary Supplement, May 31, 2002, John Taylor, review of Faits: lecture courante à l'usage des grands débutants, p. 30.

Translation Review Supplement, July, 1999, review of Miroirs, p. 26.*