Claude Vigée

Claude Vigée was born in 1921 in Bischwiller

Claude Vigée was born Claude André Strauss in Bischwiller, Alsace, on 3 January 1921, to an old Alsatian Jewish family. His father worked in business and his mother was a homemaker. At home the family spoke the Jewish Alsatian dialect of German.

He finished secondary school in Strasbourg and began medical studies there in 1937. After the German occupation of Alsace he continued medicine in Toulouse and joined the Résistance through a Jewish group. In 1942 he published his first poems under the pen name Claude Vigée.

He fled with his mother to the United States, where he earned a doctorate in Romance languages and literature in 1947. He married his cousin Evelyne Meyer, and the couple had 2 children. He taught French literature at Ohio State University, Wellesley College and Brandeis University.

In 1960 he moved to Israel at the invitation of Gershom Scholem and taught French and comparative literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In Israel he began writing poems in Alsatian. His work dealt with roots, exile, uprooting and hope.

In 2001 he returned to live in France. A cultural center named for him opened in Bischwiller in 2000. He died in Paris on 2 October 2020 and was buried in Bischwiller.