[1] Vigée was born in Bischwiller, Bas-Rhin, the son of Germaine (Meyer), a homemaker, and Robert Strauss, who worked in business.
Displaced from Alsace by the invasion of the Germans in 1940, he began to study medicine in Toulouse before joining the Résistance.
From his first collection, La Lutte avec l'ange (1949) he imposes himself by the tone both biblical and rilkean of his language, the magnitude of his visions, the anguished fervor with which he seeks the face of God through the immensities of time and space, the happy spontaneity of his images and the symbolic value of which he knows how to charge: "L'humide et chaude nuit rendit coptif des songes Ce grand arbre irrite par les vents eternels."
In La Corne du Grand Pardon (1954), L'Ete indien (1957), Canaan d'exil (1962) he has sometimes expressed in classics, sometimes in liberated verses, sometimes in prose, a feeling of exile which is probably less due to the fact he has long lived out of his native Alsace than that born in a Jewish family, he felt everywhere separated from his religious homeland.
In Le Poeme du retour (1962), written after he had settled in Israel, he said, in a "militant" tone quite close to Paul Eluard's, his joy at having found the haven he was looking for, and to be able to work for the cause of his brothers; "Apres tant d'abandons, dr misere et de ruines Ce pays est vivant par la grace d'un peuple."