My Father’s Holocaust Obsession and André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just
I wasn’t raised on an exclusively Jewish tradition of suffering. Quite the contrary. From a young age, my father introduced me to a tradition of unfortunate events that traversed nations, cultures and centuries. I was encouraged to read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, watch Ben Kingsley as Ghandi, and witness the impoverished and lonely death of Mozart in Milos Forman’s Amadeus. On family outings we often visited old cemeteries and Civil War museums. My father would grow withdrawn, pensive. I once saw him cry listening to public radio on Martin Luther King Day, saying nothing but, “Why did such a great man have to die?”
That being said, the Holocaust always held a marquee slot on my father’s priority list of human affliction. Emblematic of this near-obsession was his regard for André Schwarz-Bart’s Holocaust novel The Last of the Just. His five or so copies of the book regularly made their way onto the dinner table, the couch, and into casual conversation. “When are you going to read The Last of the Just?,” my father would ask, in a tone that implied that by reading anything else, I was betraying some long-held-family rite.
As a child in the ’80s and ’90s, I actively shunned the book, preferring delicious juvenile distraction in the form of The Babysitter’s Club and Nancy Drew mysteries. In fairness, my aversion is complicated by a few relevant tidbits of family history. While my father’s forbearers made it to the Land of Plenty before Hitler’s bloodbath began, my mother is a gentile-born German. Although she long ago accepted the yoke of Jewish peoplehood, the mixed nature of my family brought questions blame and accountability into my own living room. By dodging my father’s attempts to imbue me with historical awareness, my German grandfather could remain a grandfather like any other. I was a Jew born to two Jewish parents, end of story.
In his other attempts to introduce me to the injustices of the ages, my father tired quite easily. The Last of the Just was different. The story of the Levys of Zemyock was always on the agenda. And so, after over 20 years spent rebuffing my father’s efforts, I finally caved.
Reading the book was a little like leafing through a yellowed family album. It was an album of fictions that were somehow more real than actual fact, representing an overwhelming reality condensed into a single bloodline.
The story begins in the year 1185 with the inauguration of a line of Just Men descending from the family of Levy. One member of each successive generation is destined to suffer an abysmal fate, his worth being measured by how truly awful his end turned out to be. In each generation, facing the sword in the Spanish inquisition, the pogroms of Eastern Europe and, ultimately, Germany’s Final Solution, the Just Man was often the overlooked, ungodly child of the fields, the perpetual middle child.
While immersed in literary descriptions of Jewish suffering throughout the ages, I began to feel as if my father was a character in the book, a Just Man who feels the suffering of others particularly deeply, one who has been chosen (or has chosen himself) as that sponge of human misery. His relentless attempts to make me read The Last of the Just were part of an effort to help me understand the silence behind his sad Polish eyes.
The Last of the Just is a tale of generations united by shared burdens and dismal fates. And so, from one generation to the next, from my father to me, this book has been passed down, like the tradition of suffering maintained by the Just Men who populate this book, dying terrible deaths or silently suffering in anonymity, for the sake of their people.
