The Last of the Just
The Last of the Just is a post-war novel by André Schwarz-Bart originally published in French in 1959. It was published in an English translation by Stephen Becker in 1960.
The debut novel of Schwarz-Bart, it won the Prix Goncourt, France's highest literary prize. The author was the son of a Polish Jewish family murdered by the Nazis. He based the story on the medieval massacre of Jews in York.
The story follows the "Just Men" of the Levy family over eight centuries. Each Just Man is a Lamed Vav, according to legend, one of the thirty-six righteous souls whose existence justifies the purpose of humankind to God. Each "bears the world's pains... beginning with the execution of an ancestor in 12th-century York, England... culminat in the story of a schoolboy, Ernie, the last... executed at Auschwitz."
Critic Michael Dorris in 1991 described the novel as an enduring classic that reminds readers "how easily torn is the precious fabric of civilization, and how destructive are the consequences of dumb hatred - whether a society's henchmen are permitted to beat an Ernie Levy because he's Jewish, or because he's black or gay or Hispanic or homeless".
Gilbert Highet, a Book-of-the-Month Club judge described it as "the saddest novel I have ever read, almost as sad as history".
Summary
The very first sentence, “Our eyes receive the light of dead stars”, shows the reader that they are about to follow a story of a vanished world. Each episode of the family saga comes from Jewish history.Ernie Levy's ancestors
Schwarz-Bart begins his book with the massacre of the Jews of York on March 16, 1190. He imagines the story of the Lévy family, who inherited the strange privilege of producing a tzadik in each generation, that is, a righteous person belonging to the Lamed Vav. The first of these Lamed Vav was Yom Tov Lévy of York, who died a martyr on March 11, 1185 during a "Kiddush Hashem" (sanctification of God), a mass suicide instigated by the persecution of an English bishop. Schwarz-Bart then quickly recounts the tragic deaths of all the Righteous family members of each generation, up to Haim Levy. He is the first to die in his bed in Zemyock, a small Polish village, leaving behind many sons. The novel then focuses on one of his descendants, Mordechai the peddler, Ernie's grandfather, and on Benjamin, his eldest son, but the most fragile and the least loved by his father. It is then that the village learns that German and French Jews have donned uniforms to fight each other in the First World War. The Righteous of Zemyock then says: " Our unfortunate brothers have become French, German, Turkish, and perhaps Chinese, imagining that by ceasing to be Jewish they would end their suffering." The Russian Revolution brings about a new wave of antisemitism. The Jews of Zemyock are slaughtered in a pogrom. Benjamin Levy's three brothers perish. Benjamin then leaves Poland and settles in Stillenstadt. The family is torn between Jewish traditions and German modernism. Hitler'Ernie Levy, the last of the righteous
Ernie Levy is as frail and small as his father. He is a dreamy child who likes his grandfather's traditional teachings, but also an excellent student with his head full of adventure novels. One day, when the Nazis threaten to attack the worshippers in the synagogue courtyard, young Ernie intervenes and prevents the Jews from being beaten. For his grandfather, Mordechai, it is a revelation. Ernie is a Lamed-waf, a Righteous Man. He then reads to his grandson the story of the Levy family's martyrdom since the Middle Ages. The child is convinced in turn by the story. But the clumsy and insistent way in which he plays his role as a "Righteous Man" only brings him trouble from the very next day. Like all the Jewish children at his school, Ernie is subjected to harassment and humiliation by the Aryan boys in the courtyard. When Mr. Krémer, the old schoolteacher who protected them, is dismissed, he is replaced by a Nazi from Berlin who relentlessly harasses and humiliates the four Jewish children in Ernie's class. Ernie attempts suicide. He is saved at the last minute by his grandfather. After two years in the hospital, the reader discovers a tough young man, ready to take on the Nazis.In France, at the beginning of the second world war, Ernie joins the army to prevent his family from being interned. It is all in vain; the Levys are all interned at Gurs in May 1940. After the collapse of the French army, he takes refuge in Marseille. He is determined to live like a dog, that is, to enjoy life without any reference to his Jewishness or spirituality. He settles on a farm. He becomes the lover of the farm's owner, whose husband is a war prisoner in Germany. But one day, the village blacksmith tells him that during a stay in Drancy, he has seen busloads of Jews arriving at the internment camp there: "They all had eyes like I had never seen before and like I hope I will never see again in this life. And when I saw you for the first time I immediately recognized your eyes. Do you understand? " Deeply moved, Ernie realizes that he cannot escape his Jewish identity. In his despair, he begins to open himself up again to "the light of the past". Deported to Drancy and then to Auschwitz, he disappears in a crematory oven after telling comforting stories to the children in the sealed wagon.
The novel's final page ends with a striking Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the deaths): "So, this story will not end with some grave to be visited in remembrance. For the smoke rising from the crematoria, like any other, obeys the laws of physics: the particles gather and disperse in the wind, which drives them. The only pilgrimage, esteemed reader, would be to sometimes gaze melancholically at a stormy sky. And Blessed. Auschwitz. Be. Majdanek. The Lord. Treblinka. And blessed. Buchenwald. Be. Mauthausen. The Lord. Belzec. And blessed. Sobibor. Be. Chełmno. The Lord. Ponary. And blessed. Theresienstadt. Be. Warsaw. The Lord. Vilnius. And blessed Skaryzko. Be. Bergen-Belsen. The Lord. Janow. And blessed. Dora. Be. Neuengamme. The Lord. Pustkow. And blessed… »
Genesis of the book
In December 1956 André Schwarz-Bart, a former member of the Resistance and the son of deportees, published excerpts from a novel entitled *The Biography of Ernie Lévy* in *The FSJU Review *. The theme explored is that of a segment of the persecuted Jewish people who refuse to use violence in self-defense. He writes, by way of foreword: "...I did not seek hero among the rebels of the Warsaw Ghetto, nor among the Resistance fighters who were also the terrible exception. I preferred him disarmed of heart, remaining naive in the face of evil, like our distant ancestors. This type of hero is not spectacular. It is readily contested today in the name of a more martial humanity... Some would have us believe that a thousand years of Jewish history is nothing but the paltry chronicle of victims and their executioners... I wish to show a Jew of the old lineage, unarmed and without hatred, and yet truly a man, according to a tradition now almost extinct." André Schwarz-Bart continued to work on his text for a long time and only submitted it to a publisher in its fifth version. It was then published by Seuil in the autumn of 1959 under the title The Last of the Just.To write his novel, André Schwarz-Bart gathered extensive documentation. He scoured the Jewish collection of the Sainte-Geneviève Library and other libraries in Paris. At the end of his book, he cites the principal works he consulted: Léon Poliakov's *Le Bréviaire de la haine*, Poliakov's *Du Christ aux Juifs de cour*, Michel Borwicz's * Écrits des condamnés à mort*, David Rousset's * L'Univers concentrationnaire*, Georges Wellers's * De Drancy à Auschwitz*, and Olga Wormser's * Tragédie de la déportation * .
The Jewish historian and philosopher Gershom Scholem notes in his analysis of the book: “The publication of André Schwartz-Bart’s novel, The Last of the Just, which by its theme and development has created such a stir among so many readers, has drawn attention to the Jewish folk legend that forms the basis of the book. This legend, widespread in Jewish folklore, speaks of thirty-six Tzadikim, or righteous men, on whom—though they are unknown or hidden—the fate of the world rests. The author of the novel gives this tradition a most imaginative angle. According to some Talmudists, he says, it dates back to ancient times. As a novelist, Schwartz-Bart is not bound by academic conventions and can give free rein to his speculative imagination.”