Max Jacob by Modigliani (1916)
“The truth is always new.”
—Max Jacob, Le cornet à dés (The Dice Box)†
A Jew from Quimper in Brittany,
Max saw a vision of Christ
And converted (feeling a bit queer).
Picasso was his roommate on the Boulevard Voltaire.
Max taught him French.
In ’44, with his siblings en route to Auschwitz,
Max asked Sacha Guitry to help—
The famous playwright had some pull with the Boche.
They liked his comedies.
He'd saved others before—
Even the Gestapo enjoyed a farce!
Sacha tried, it seems, but failed.
“If it were him,” he said,
“I might have done something!”
[« Si c’etait lui, je pourrais quelque chose ! »]
Then it was Max’s turn.
« Eh bien, c’est moi, » he wrote from a railroad car at the Drancy deportation camp
[« par la complaisance des gendarmes qui nous encadrent. »].
He died a few days later.
† Poetic licence—this is not actually in Max’s collection of prose poems Le cornet à dés (1917), but the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan insisted that Max said it, so I shall imagine it there.
October 31, 2024
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