Max JACOB / Signed Autograph Letter / Occupation / Jews / Deportation / 1942

  

Autographed letter signed "Max" to Pierre Lagarde [St Benoît sur Loire], August 10, 1942, 1 p. In-4° Traces of contemporary folds, slight browning at the central fold and on the right margin with some tiny tears, typographic annotations. Important letter from the poet expressing his thoughts on the persecution of Jews during the occupation. We are not saved by external misfortunes but by the way we receive them, by how we sympathize, by how we adopt them. The inner suffering related to events of lesser importance is just as valid as the other.

Everything is in this thorn in the flesh that St. Our repentance can be equivalent to the flood, and I can suffer more from my gossip, from my sensual glances than from the persecution of the Jews. One does not prevent the other, and the whole constitutes an end of life that I did not expect [.] I received a visit from an 18-year-old boy, a bank employee who paints. He finally admitted that he would like to enter the Church.

I managed to get him "retreated" to the small monastery here. His name is Jacques Doucet. Also, pray for my poor older brother imprisoned in Quimper without pretext.

Excuse my brevity and believe me faithful Max ». 2- Gaston Jacob, Max's older brother, was arrested in 1942 in Quimper. He died in deportation to Auschwitz the following year.

A central figure of the Montmartre and Montparnasse avant-garde, converted to Catholicism in 1915 after having several visions, Max Jacob left Paris in 1936 to settle in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire in the Loiret. There, he leads a monastic life.

His poetic works and meditations, partly taken up by Pierre Lagarde in his admirable work Max Jacob - Mystique et martyr (La Baudinière, 1944), are close to the Quietist movement. He then assumes his life as a fisherman as a condition of his redemption.

His Jewish origins result in him being arrested by the Gestapo six months before the liberation of Paris, a fate he accepts as a martyr. He is interned by the French gendarmerie in the Drancy camp and dies there five days later, just hours before his scheduled deportation to Auschwitz. Pierre Lagarde Archives Then private collection, Christie's, Dec. 14 Max Jacob - Mystique et martyr, ed.

Pierre Lagarde, La Baudinière, 1944, p.