On a July morning in 1942, Raymond Federman's childhood ended, as his parents and two sisters were arrested by collaborationist French police and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz, with Raymond alone evading capture, surviving because his mother pushed him into an upstairs closet. The Voice in the Closet is Federman’s most important book, the place where this author of more than a dozen other works of fiction addresses himself to the story at the core of all his work, putting the author in dialogue with the child he was that day, who protests, “no I cannot resign myself to being the inventory of his miscalculations I am not ready for my summation nor do I wish to participate any longer willy nilly in the fiasco of his fabrication failed account of my survival abandoned in the dark with nothing but my own excrement to play with now neatly packaged on the roof to become the symbol of my origin in the wordshit of his fabulation…”
RAYMOND FEDERMAN (1928-2009) were many persons: Holocaust survivor and WWII orphan, farm worker, paratrooper in the US Army, Korean War veteran, interpreter in Tokyo, sporting ace (swimming, tennis, golf), jazz musician, black marketeer, gambler, bon vivant, inventor of surfiction, bilingual author (novels, poems, short fiction, plays), translator, teacher, renowned Samuel Beckett scholar, Distinguished Professor (French, English, Comparative Literature, Creative Writing), husband, and father.
Federman was born in Paris, France, in 1928. When he was fourteen years old, his parents and two sisters were arrested during the 1942 roundup by the Nazis and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp for extermination. In different versions, and both in English and in French, Federman again and again told various parts of the life story of a man called “Federman,” “Namredef,” “Moinous,” “Featherman,” “Hombre de la Pluma,” and on and on, trying to decipher the gesture of his mother that saved his life. He received the American Book Award, the Frances Steloff Prize for Experimental Fiction, and his books have been translated into 14 languages.
“Federman is inarguably one of the most significant vanguard writers of the second half of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first.”—Lance Olsen, author of Always Crashing in the Same Car
“Remember one thing as you read this book. I do not write to make the reader comfortable. Federman writes texts that impose a state of loss that discomforts, unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of their tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis their relation with language.”—Raymond Federman, quoted in the Introduction to Shhh: The Story of a Childhood.
“In Federman’s early novels [inclusive of The Voice in the Closet] there are definitely two closets, and both of the protagonist’s identities (Jewish and queer) are by turns exposed and decoded.”—Natalie Camerlynck, Raymond Federman and Samuel Beckett: Voices in the Closet.
Originally published in 1979 by Coda Press, reissued by Starcherone Books in 2001. This 2025 edition features a new introduction by author and Starcherone Books founder Ted Pelton.
