The Jewish poet Edmond Jabes, born in Cairo in 1912, characterized his writings as 'not belonging'. Drawing on unpublished archival and rare printed sources, Steven Jaron traces this sense of exile to early beginnings, while Jabes was still living in Egypt. At that time, the young writer, moving in Francophone literary circles close to the Surrealists, felt that he belonged in France. But his expectations of integration remained unfulfilled: on his arrival in Paris in 1957 after the Suez crisis, Jabes was disturbed to find persistent anti-Semitism. This led him to assume what he called his...