UNESCO collection of representative works
1 total work
This is a moving memorial to his mother's life by Albert Cohen, the internationally renowned author of Belle du Seigneur. Cohen left France for London to escape the Nazis in 1940. In 1943 he received news of his mother's death in Marseilles. Unable to mourn her, he expressed his grief in a series of articles for La France libre and revised them in 1954 for publication as Le Livre de ma mere (Book of My Mother). Since then the book has been translated into eleven languages. Cohen intended it as a tribute to all mothers: 'I shall not have written in vain if one of you, after reading my song of death, is one evening gentler with his mother because of me and my mother.'.