Raymond Federman (1928–2009)

Raymond Federman was born to a Jewish family in Montrouge, France. His parents were Marguerite (Epstein) and Simon Federman, a painter, and he had two sisters, Jacqueline and Sarah. He was 14 years old in 1942 during World War II when the Nazis arrived at his family's apartment in Paris. His mother pushed him into a small stairway landing closet to hide just before the rest of the family was taken away. He never saw his parents and sisters again: all four were killed in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. Federman hid for the rest of the war on farms in southern France. He emigrated to the USA in 1947 and served in the U.S. Army in Korea and Japan. Afterwards, he studied at Columbia University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1957. He then went to UCLA, where he received an M.A. in 1958 and a Ph.D. in 1963 with a dissertation on Samuel Beckett. Federman wrote in English and French and taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara and at SUNY Buffalo. He was named Distinguished Professor in 1990, and was appointed in 1992 to the Melodia E. Jones Chair of Literature, which he held until retiring in 1999. From 1979 to 1982, he was co-director of the Fiction Collective, a publishing house dedicated to experimental fiction. Federman's writing was experimental and postmodern, featuring unorthodox formats, punctuation, and typography. He coined the term "surfiction" to describe the way his work moved between fiction and nonfiction. He often returned to his early life in autobiographical works with black humor. He was a prolific writer who published 10 novels, five volumes of poetry, four books on Samuel Beckett (who became a friend), three collections of essays, and numerous articles, plays, and translations of French writers. His own works have been translated into many languages. Several books have been written about Federman's work, including Federman From A to X-X-X-X by Larry McCaffery, Thomas Hartl and Doug Rice (1998), and Federman's Fictions: Innovation, Theory, and the Holocaust (2010). His last book was released posthumously in 2010: SHHH: The Story of a Childhood ("Shhh" was what his mother whispered to Federman when she pushed him into the closet).