March/April 2009

The Last of the Just
Book club

André Schwarz-Bart is not exactly a household name in Jewish America these days. His books do not adorn shelves alongside those of Sholem Aleichem and Philip Roth. But his 1959 novel, The Last of the Just, sails alone in the vast sea of Holocaust literature and is among author Elie Wiesel’s favorite books.

Unlike most Holocaust stories, The Last of the Just begins long before the Nazis decided to put an end to European Jewry. In 1185 in York, England, after six days of siege at the hands of local Christians, Rabbi Yom Tov Levy and his followers take their own lives in the tradition of Masada. Schwarz-Bart uses the incident to introduce the Talmudic concept of the Lamed Vovniks, which holds that in every generation there exist 36 “Just Men” who bear the suffering of the Jewish people on their shoulders. In Schwarz-Bart’s twist, God allots one spot out of every 36 to a Levy, and it is this line of Just Men that he follows up to the death of the last descendant, Ernie, in Auschwitz.

Traces of Schwarz-Bart’s own experience during the Holocaust also inform the story line. Born in France in 1928, he joined the resistance as a teenager after his family was deported to Auschwitz in 1941. After the war, he set to work writing the novel, which reportedly took him 11 years to complete. Schwarz-Bart, who died in 2006, was not a prolific writer and never achieved success on the level of his wife, Simone, whose books chronicled the suffering of Caribbean women under colonialism, but The Last of the Just won him immediate fame. Published when he was 31, it quickly sold upwards of a million copies and won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary award.

A poignant, tortured novel, The Last of the Just may be temporarily out of favor thanks in part to the historian Leon Poliakov’s charge that it pushes a dangerous narrative of passive, even willfully sacrificial Jewish suffering. But as the frenzy of Holocaust writing subsides and much of it falls into the abyss of history along with the lives it seeks to commemorate, a few timeless stories will remain. Schwarz-Bart’s novel will surely be among them.—Jeremy Gillick

Read about the January/February 2009 selection, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman.

Read about the November/December 2008 selection,Goodbye Columbus and Other Stories by Philip Roth.

Read about the September/October 2008 selection, Jerusalem 1913: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict by Amy Dockser Marcus.

Read about the July/August 2008 selection, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.

Read about the May/June 2008 selection, A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz.

Read about the March/April 2008 selection, Bee Season by Myla Goldberg.

Read about the January/February 2008 selection, Night by Elie Wiesel.