The death of Edmond Jabes in January 1991 silenced one of the most compelling voices of the postmodern, post-Holocaust era. Jabes's importance as a thinker, philosopher, and Jewish theologian cannot be overestimated, and his enigmatic style--combining aphorism, fictional dialogue, prose meditation, poetry, and other forms--holds special appeal for postmodern sensibilities.

In The Book of Margins, his most critical as well as most accessible book, Jabes is again concerned with the questions that inform all of his work: the nature of writing, of silence, of God and the Book. Jabes...

The late Edmond Jabes was a major voice in French poetry in the latter half of this century. An Egyptian Jew, he was haunted by the question of place and the loss of place in relation to writing. He focused on the space of the book, seeing it as the true space in which exile and the promised land meet in poetry and in question. Jabes's mode of expression has been variously described: a new and mysterious kind of literary work - as dazzling as it is difficult to define, cascading aphorisms, a theater of voices in a labyrinth of forms. The manner of his writing embodies the meaning of his...

The Book of Questions, of which volumes IV, V, VI are together published here, is a meditative narrative of Jewish Experience, and, more generally, man's relation to the world. In these volumes the word is personified in the woman Yael, silence in her still-born child Elya. Even though words imply ambiguity and lies, they are the home of the exile. A book becomes the Book, fragments of the law that are in some way unified, where past and present, the visionary, and the common place, encounter each other. For Jabes every word is a question in the book of being. Man defines himself in the world...

"To take the wrong door means indeed to go against the order that presided over the plan of the house, over the layout of the rooms, over the beauty and rationality of the whole. But what discoveries are made possible for the visitor The new path permits him to see what no one other than himself could have perceived from that angle. All the more so because I am not sure that one can enter a written work without having forced one's own way in first." - from In Place of a Foreword