Max Jacob is saddened by the war and the fate of the Jewish people. 1942.

Max Jacob (1876.1944)

Autographed letter signed to a friend.

One page in-4°.

St Benedict. February 23, 1942.

« I too am deeply saddened by the misfortune of my Jewish family and by the cruel arrest of a first-class man, my protector. »

A moving letter from the poet, philosopher and concerned man, lamenting the tragedy of the world war and the fate reserved for the Jewish people.

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“My dear friend, I share your sorrow. That’s it! Pray! That’s the purpose of true pain: to draw us closer to God. I was still in high school, and I remember a brilliant lawyer taking such an interest in me that he held a conversation about God. I shared with him theories we were learning in school at the time. He smiled sadly. ‘You can see,’ he said, ‘that you haven’t suffered yet.’ He had just lost a young wife. This incident has stayed with me for 50 years. Pain breaks down all that hardness within us, that which is the devil. And only the devil separates us from God.”

“Only those circles that want you,” you say. I reply cruelly: “ We keep the company we deserve […] Scholars seek out scholars, Catholics seek each other out, worldly people seek each other out. If you are not wanted anywhere but in places of pleasure, it is because you are a man of pleasure. Raise yourself and you will be raised.”

I too am deeply saddened by the misfortune of my Jewish family and by the cruel arrest of a first-class man, my protector. That's it! Pray! Max Jacob.

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Max Jacob seems to be referring to the collector and patron Georges Heilbronn (1901-1942), arrested in February by the Germans; he died in Auschwitz.