Book of My Mother

Albert Cohen: Albert Cohen was born on the island of Corfu in 1895 and emigrated to France when he was five. He grew up in Marseilles and studied law at the University of Geneva, becoming a Swiss citizen. During the 1930s he devoted himself to writing and after the fall of France spent seven years in London, where he was a legal adviser to the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. In 1947 he returned to Geneva and was in charge of a division of the International Refugee Organization. After 1952 he resumed his literary activities, determined to complete his novel-cycle begun with Solal (1930) and Mangeclous (1938) and ending with Belle du Seigneur (1968) and Les Valereux (1969). Belle du Seigneur was awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman. He died in 1981.

Bella Cohen: Bella Cohen was born in London in 1919 of Romanian Jewish parents. During the war and the immediate postwar years she worked in London at the Free French Headquarters and at the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. In 1947 she moved to Geneva, where she worked successively for the International Refugee Organization and the International Labour Office. She met Albert Cohen in London in 1943 and was his constant companion from 1947 until his death in 1981. She is her husband's literary executor.