Benjamin Fondane

The poet and essayist Benjamin Fondane was born Benjamin Wechsler in Iași, Romania. When he began writing in local Zionist periodicals, he adopted the pen name Fundoianu, which he later Gallicized to Fondane when he settled in Paris in 1923 and began writing in French. In Paris, he worked at an insurance company and for Paramount Pictures as a screenwriter while establishing himself as an avant-garde poet and existentialist philosopher. His poetry was deeply imbued with Hebrew imagery. In 1944, he was arrested and imprisoned in Drancy and then deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.