Albert Cohen

Greek-Swiss · 1895 to 1981

Born Abraham Albert Cohen on August 16, 1895, in Corfu to a Romaniote Jewish family that ran a soap factory on the island, Albert Cohen was five when his parents emigrated to Marseille and put him into a private Catholic school. At Lycée Thiers he formed a lifelong friendship with the playwright Marcel Pagnol. In 1914 he moved to Geneva, took a law degree, became a Swiss citizen in 1919, and married Elisabeth Brocher, who died of cancer five years later, leaving him a small daughter. He worked for decades as an international civil servant, first at the International Labour Organization and later for the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees in wartime London. In 1939, in Paris, he was made personal representative of Chaim Weizmann and helped smuggle European Jews to Palestine; in 1957, offered the post of Israeli ambassador, he turned it down to keep writing. Solal (1930) introduced his alter ego, the handsome Sephardic civil servant of the League of Nations torn between his Mediterranean Jewish family and the European drawing rooms he conquered. Mangeclous (1938) followed the Cephalonian uncles. Le Livre de ma mère (1954) is a stricken elegy for his mother, who had died in occupied Marseille in 1943. Belle du Seigneur (1968), eight years in the writing, charts the slow ruin of Solal's passionate affair with Ariane, a married Calvinist gentile, and won the Grand Prix of the French Academy. By 2022 his works had entered the Pléiade. He died in Geneva on October 17, 1981, at eighty-six, and is buried in the Jewish cemetery at Veyrier.