Born in Casablanca in 1959, the son of a French-educated German Jewish historian of philosophy and a French Jewish painter, Emmanuel Moses spent his early childhood in France, lived in Israel from the ages of ten to eighteen, and then returned to Paris, where he lives. A polyglot whose experience of the world comes as much from travel and human intercourse as from books, from an interrogation of the past which coexists with his experience of the present, Emmanuel Moses is a kind of poete sans frontieres. Moses' poems interrogate the crossing and the porosity of actual borders, geographical and temporal. A train of thought set in motion by the placement of a park bench, the stripe of sunlight on a brick wall, will move the speaker and the poem itself from Amsterdam to Jerusalem, from a boyhood memory to a 19th century chronicle, from Stendhal to the Shoah. It is clear here that the macro-events of "history" are made up of the miniscule events of individual existence, and must be perceived as such to be understood.
