Georges Clemenceau

Georges Clemenceau was a French physician, journalist, political writer, and twice prime minister whose literary work grew from the same arguments about power and justice that shaped his public career. At The Foot Of Sinai corresponds to Au pied du Sinaï, his 1898 sequence of social portraits about Jewish communities in Paris, Vienna, Kraków, and Galicia. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec created the original edition's lithographs, giving the book an unusually close partnership between reportage, satire, and visual observation. The modern French edition also confronts the racial stereotypes that remain within Clemenceau's intended reply to anti-Jewish prejudice. Amalie Kremper von Ende translated the English At the Foot of Sinai in 1922. The Surprises of Life collects twenty-five shorter pieces that turn everyday encounters into reflections on belief, charity, vanity, and social convention. Grace Hall translated that volume for Doubleday, Page & Company in 1920. Together the books reveal a storyteller and essayist working beside the better-known editor of L'Aurore and defender of Alfred Dreyfus.