The Last Of The Just (Vintage Classics) [Paperback]

There is a Jewish legend that there is a line of just men. This novel chronicles the tragic demise of the last of those just men (hence the title) at the hands of the Nazis. The story is thick with struggle and triumph, good and evil, joy and misery, but is never maudlin or melodramatic. Schwartz-Bart's words are like brush strokes in a painting, creating a cinematic cast, landscape, and sweeping emotion. In addition to being a gripping intrapsychic read, the book is an excellent individual-level history of the Holocaust--though fiction, it is remarkably true to reality and detail.

In this classic of 1959 André Schwarz-Bart reworks the Jewish legend of the Lamed Vavs, the handful (36 in most versions of the story) of Just or Righteous Men who live among the Jews in every generation and who provide the merit on which the world depends. The tradition dates back to the 5th century Babylonian Talmud. It was elaborated by kabbalistic Jews in the 16th and 17th century and by hasidic Jews in the 18th century: the Lamed Vavs are humble men and unnoticed as special by their fellow Jews. At times of great peril, so this version has it, "a Lamed Vavnik makes a dramatic appearance, using his hidden powers to defeat the enemies of Israel" (Encyclopedia Judaica).

Schwarz-Bart was born in France and lost most of the members of his family in the Holocaust. His will not have been the first persecuted Jew in history to question whether any Lamed Vav has ever arisen to defeat the enemies of Israel. He retains the idea that he will be humble and unknown, but he totally subverts the idea that he can be a saviour. Instead his role is to offer to God his own martyrdom for his faith and for his people.

Schwarz-Bart imagines the story of the Levys, one family in which the role of the Just Man was hereditary. They have suffered death down the ages, beginning with the massacre of the Jews of York in 1185. In later generations this wandering Jewish family suffers at the hands of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions; they are expelled from one area after another; the Cossacks add their contribution; and when we come to the late 19th century, the family leaves its home in Zemyock in Russian Poland and settles in Germany. At this stage there are three generations: at the head of it is Mordecai, the venerable patriarch, who accepts that all suffering is part of God's will and who tells his family that there is no point in putting up any resistance. His son Benjamin thinks there is an escape in trying to merge into German society; but the Patriarch tells the story of the Just Men to his frail and scholarly little grandson, Ernie. Ernie lives in his own intensely active and romantic imagination, and, with the arrival of the Nazis in 1933, he is convinced that he is to be the next Just Man.

The remaining two thirds of the book deal with Ernie's life from that time onwards. There are terrible scenes of brutality - gangs of Nazis attacking Jews as they go to the synagogue, atrocious bullying of the Jewish children by a teacher and by their fellow-students. Ernie's life is full of suffering and strengthens his conviction that the calling of being Just Man has indeed fallen upon him. The scenes of cruelty are interspersed with the vivid poetical and mystical nature of Ernie's imagination. With one terrible exception when he is in utter despair - a touch of human nature which rescues the portrait of him from being just too accepting - he identifies with suffering everywhere, not just among the Jews; he is open to the beauties of the earth amid all the horrors that rage upon its surface. It is this lyrical element of the book which sets it apart from so many other accounts of what happened to the Jews under Nazi persecution.

Before the gates of the prison that was Nazi Germany finally slammed shut, the Levy family managed to emigrate to France, only to be trapped there when the war broke out. Ernie volunteers for the French army, though in a non-combatant role as a stretcher-bearer. The horrors of war are described, not with the excruciating detail with which the author had dealt with the brutality in Germany, but with Voltairian brevity and irony.

After the defeat of the French Army, Ernie manages to get into Vichy France. The instinct for survival overcomes for a while his mission to become a martyr: he converts, he attends Mass, he fornicates, he nearly begins to lose his Jewish appearance; but in his ever fertile fantasy he sees himself as a dog and sometimes literally behaves like one. Anyway, his disguise does not work: he is recognized as a Jew, and with that moment he recovers for himself his Jewish identity.

He makes his way back to the Jewish quarter of Paris where he finds four devout old men from Zemyock who have not yet been deported. Before his own deportation, old Mordecai had told them that he believed his grandson to be one of the Just Men. Ernie is now treated by them with the utmost reverence, and he becomes conscious again of his destiny.

But what will drive him to seek entry into the hell of Drancy and the extinction that awaits in Auschwitz is not the consciousness that he is one of the Just Men, but something altogether less mystical, more human. At one point in the heart-wrenching last pages, Ernie`s compassion makes him tell the terrified children in the cattle-truck that they will soon be in the Kingdom where "an eternal joy will crown your heads; cheerfulness and gaiety will come and greet you, and all the pains and all the moans will run away." He is reproved by an old woman for not telling them the truth. He replies, "There is no room for truth here". So will they find the truth in the next world? Will they find an answer to the question that, in his dreams, he heard a fiddler sing:

"Oh, can we rise as far as heaven

To ask God why things are as they are?"

Powerful and moving. The journey through the generations is exhilirating. The outcome just heartbreaking. A beautiful book you will remember.