Books: Book of Lamentations

THE LAST OF THE JUST (374 pp.)—André Schwarz-Bart—Atheneum ($4.95).

This first novel, a quasi-epic panorama of Jewish suffering from medieval pogroms to Nazi crematories, is a publishing phenomenon in France. The Goncourt Academy last year held an unprecedentedly early meeting to give the book its prestigious award, ahead of other eager prize committees. Running at a 10,000-copy-a-month clip, sales have risen to the 400,000 mark, a rare bestselling figure in the U.S. but almost unheard of in France. Translations are appearing or due to appear in 17 countries.

Part of the phenomenon is the author himself. André Schwarz-Bart, 32, is largely self-taught. Born in the long-embattled French-German border city of Metz, the son of a Polish-Jewish peddler, Andre spoke Yiddish as his first language and picked up French in the streets while selling newspapers to help support his family. At 14, after the Nazis invaded France, Andre lost his parents to the gas chambers, subsequently escaped a French internment camp to join the Maquis, and was finally mustered out of the French army at an underage 17. As a postwar tractor-factory worker, he voraciously read detective novels until he was decoyed one day by the title Crime and Punishment, which revealed to him that “one could ‘put into thoughts’ things which happened inside us.” After a two-week stab at the Sorbonne, Andre was profoundly disillusioned with education. For a year he read nothing, then furiously scribbled five, and scrapped four, versions of The Last of the Just in four years.

The book is not as remarkable as its reputation. To the agonizing, centuries-old why of antiSemitism, Author Schwarz-Bart replies with a non sequitur —there’ll always be a Jewry. At times this makes his novel a disconcerting cross between The Wall and a Jewish Cavalcade. His persecuted characters bleed purple prose, and he persistently confuses an assault on the nerves with a cry from the heart. Nevertheless, there are a great many moments when the book is as affecting as a wronged child’s tears, and as unanswerable.

Dialogue with Jehovah. The plot is strung on the ancient Hebrew legend of the Lamed-Vov or 36 Just Men, who, although indistinguishable from their fellows, take unto themselves the collective grief of mankind: “If just one of them were lacking, the sufferings of mankind would poison even the souls of the newborn, and humanity would suffocate with a single cry.” So frozen with man’s woes is the Just Man that sometimes when he rises to heaven, “God must warm him for a thousand years between his fingers before his soul can open itself to Paradise.” Author Schwarz-Bart imagines a familial dynasty of Lamed-Vov called the Levys. The first of the line, Rabbi Yom Tov Levy, forces himself to slit the throats of 250 of his coreligionists in an 1185 A.D. pogrom in York, England, rather than have them tortured or converted. After this follows an inexorable litany of torment, in which generation after generation of chosen Levys are burned, torn apart by horses, slashed by Cossacks, impaled on stakes, or drip-tortured in eyes, ears, mouths with molten lead. The rare Just Man who dies in bed regards it as God’s inexplicable little joke.

Not till his novel is a third over does Author Schwarz-Bart focus on German-Jewish Ernie Levy, his slight-bodied, lion-spirited hero, whose destiny is marked by Adolf Hitler’s rise to power (“It was the year 1933 after the coming of Jesus, the beautiful herald of impossible love”). Ernie’s fate is no less poignant for being predictable. At school he wins moral victories with the Pimpfe, his Hitler Youth classmates, at the cost of savage physical defeats. Catching him in a puppy-love affair with the blonde-braided gentile, Ilse, the Pimpfe beat Ernie bloody. In a surrealistic scene that might have been painted by an embittered Chagall, the soul-sickened boy dives like a wounded bird from his third-story bathroom window in a suicide attempt. As the boy’s grandfather kneels beside the seemingly lifeless body, he turns his face skyward in the homely dialogue with Jehovah that is both the balm and the hemlock of Judaism: “0 Lord, did you not pour him forth like milk? . . . Hear me, you covered him with flesh and skin, you wove him of bone and nerves, and now you have destroyed him.”

After two years as an invalid, Ernie becomes a Wandering Jew, works as a farmhand, serves in the French army, and inevitably finds his way onto a death train. His last act: comforting ill, grieving and bewildered children with the thought that they are enduring a bad dream from which they will awaken to a serene kingdom of joy. With the tragic stinging power of the massacre of the innocents, the book ends.

Messianic or Existential? The dialectical thread that runs through The Last of the Just is what it means to be a Jew. Author Schwarz-Bart’s first answer is Messianic: Israel will redeem the world by bearing its sufferings. His second answer is close to existential: “To be a Jew is impossible.” Schwarz-Bart’s Jewish martyrs come close to being Christian martyrs turned inside out. A more disturbing aspect of the book is that Christianity becomes the explicit villain of the piece. Whatever cogency such an argument might have had in the past, it does not help to explain Hitler, whose anti-Semitic holocausts were performed for that monstrous pseudo god, the modern totalitarian state.

When he polemically trades scapegoats, Author Schwarz-Bart is far from his best, but when he apotheosizes the martyred dead, he can scarcely be bettered.