“This story will not finish with some tomb to be visited in memoriam. For the smoke that rises from crematoriums obeys physical laws like any other: the particles come together and disperse according to the wind that propels them. The only pilgrimage, estimable reader, would be to look with sadness at a stormy sky now and then.” So ends André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just, published in French in 1959. Immediately acclaimed around the world as one of the great post-war novels, it is a unique, million-selling creation which went through five complete drafts in as many years.
Always intended to culminate with the Holocaust, he decided to begin it in York eight centuries earlier. Not only a version of the times through which his family lived and died, its array of history, theology, folklore and legend is testament to Schwarz-Bart’s omnivorous reading.
He was born as Abraham Szwarcbart in 1928 at Metz, in Alsace-Lorraine, to which his parents had moved a few years earlier from Poland. Although steeped in rabbinical learning, his Yiddish-speaking father now eked out life by selling clothing on a market stall. With war, the half-dozen children born in Poland were separated from those born on French soil, and as the eldest of the latter group he took charge of his siblings as they were shuttled around farms. In 1943 they were sent to an internment building in Paris.
There, the canny teenager contacted the Resistance, and the children reached the Free Zone while he lived underground until arrested by the Germans in Limoges. Again he escaped, living exiguously until the Liberation, when he joined the French army on the Atlantic coast.
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Come 1945, it became clear that part of his family, including his parents, had been killed in a camp somewhere. The 17-year-old, who had not been to school since the age of 11, now took a series of mundane jobs. After teaching himself the French necessary to pass the Baccalauréat, he alleviated work by reading mystery novels, and one day a librarian gave him a copy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Puninshment, thinking that it was in the same genre.
In a country gripped by existentialism, the deliberations upon free will in the novel changed Schwarz-Bart’s life. He now read widely and attended the Sorbonne. Meanwhile, he had met some of the city’s French African community, and talk about their sufferings made him set aside attempts at a novel about working-class Poland.
He now began his great novel which duly opened in York on March 11, 1185. That day, the mob besieged a tower to which Jewish families had retreated. Rather than succumb, they let themselves be killed by a sacrificial knife to the throat from Rabbi Yom Tov Levy, whose own son Solomon survived. From this, Schwarz-Bart fashioned a story across the centuries akin to the ancient Jewish tradition of the Lamed-Vov: in every generation there are 36 just men upon whom the world’s sufferings repose.
In Schwarz-Bart’s exhilarating novel the Levys’ destiny is clear to them, however humble and misguided they might be. In a hundred pages he traverses centuries to focus on an 18th-century slaughter by the Cossacks and a Polish settlement which, moving across Europe, narrowly survives pogroms. With the 20th century comes Ernie who, as the novel’s title makes clear, will not live to pass on his special status.
Teeming with vignettes, the neat stitching of this patchwork creation reveals more on every reading; the arcane taking its place beside such touching moments as Ernie first going to bed with the girl whom he will follow to their deaths in a Nazi camp.
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The novel’s controversial success, with the Prix Goncourt, disconcerted Schwarz-Bart. He had meanwhile met Simone Brumant, from Guadeloupe, with whom he had a son in 1960, and they married the next year. At work in the 1960s on a second novel, he wrote to his wife for help in evoking its local language, and was so struck by her reply’s unforced eloquence that he decided they should collaborate on Plat de porc aux bananes vertes.
Published in 1967, it has not, alas, been translated, for the memories of an elderly woman from Martinique now ensconced in a grim Parisian nursing home have a saltiness lacking in Schwarz-Bart’s own next, short novel, A Woman Named Solitude (1972). This story of an 18th-century uprising in Guadeloupe is lyrically evoked, so much so that it is difficult to engage with its heroine’s tragedy (consciously likened at the end to the Warsaw ghetto).
While his wife continued to write, he struggled; retreat brought many attempts but nothing emerged, although he helped her with the essays in the multi-volume, lavishly illustrated In Praise of Black Women. Such long silence does not diminish The Last of the Just, whose great achievement is all the more remarkable for its 20-something author being forced by history to work from a standing start.
He is survived by his wife and by two sons.
André Schwarz-Bart, writer, was born on May 23, 1928. He died on September 30, 2006, aged 78.