Jacques Sternberg (1923–2006)

Jacques Sternberg (originally Nathan Jacques) was born to a wealthy Polish-French Jewish family in Antwerp, Belgium. His parents were Berthe (Lacloche) and Leopold (Abraham Lobel) Sternberg, a diamond merchant. Jacques was a poor student in school, particularly struggling in French. He began writing around the age of 15 or 16. At the outbreak of World War II, the family moved to the Côte d'Azur in southern France. In 1942, his father was deported to the Nazi concentration camp at Majdanek, where he died. Sternberg went to Spain, where he was arrested and sent back to France. He was shuttled between internment camps such as Gurs and a labor camp, from which he escaped. In 1946, Jacques went back to Belgium, where he married Francine, with whom he had a son. He moved to Paris with the hope of becoming a publishing writer and worked a series of menial jobs. The literary climate of 1950s Paris was dominated by the Surrealists, and Sternberg found some success in that environment. In 1953, he published his first book, a collection of stories called La Géométrie dans l'impossible (Geometry of the Impossible). Sternberg owned a small dinghy with which he sailed up and down the French coast, even in bad weather; it is one of the keys to understanding the important place of the sea in his work, such as his novels, Sophie, la mer et la nuit (1976) and Le navigateur (1977). He wrote bleak satires, some of which straddled the line between fantasy and science fiction. The causes of terror in his writings were not supernatural creatures but the modern-day city, often depicted as a giant, evil entity, ready to crush the humans who dared to live within its body. This theme reappeared in novels such as L'Employé (The Employee, 1958), L'Architecte (The Architect, 1960) and La Banlieue (The Suburb, 1976) and short stories, in collections such as La Géométrie dans la Terreur (The Terror Geometry, 1958), Contes Glacés (Icy Tales, 1974) and Contes Griffus (Clawed Tales, 1993). Besides his prolific body of stories, novels, and essays, Sternberg also wrote screenplays, including the script for director Alain Resnais's New Wave time travel film, Je t'aime, Je t'aime (1968). He wrote four volumes of memoirs published between 1945 and 2001.