Shortly after Albert Cohen left France for London to escape the Nazis, he received news of his mother’s death in Marseille. Unable to mourn her, he expressed his grief in a series of moving pieces forLa France libre, which later grew intoBook of My Mother. Achingly honest, intimate, and moving, this love song is a tribute to all mothers. Cohen himself expressed, I shall not have written in vain if one of you, after reading my hymn of death, is one evening gentler with his mother because of me and my mother.