This book was written in 1959 by a young French Jewish man who fought with the French resistance, was himself imprisoned, and somehow survived the holocaust. Mythical and artistic and touched with a bit of magic realism, it is the story of the persecution of the Jews in Europe in the context of history dating back to the eleventh century. The basic premise is a fictional Jewish myth of 36 just men, one from each generation, who absorb the burden of humanity's suffering so that mankind can survive.

The first third of the book relates one gruesome story after another, all the in the context of Jewish persecution as it moves through different historical periods, with some of the stories even including a bit of humor. It gave me the feeling of the inevitability of Jewish suffering and how long it has been going on. Once this concept is firmly established we are soon in the beginning of the twentieth century and are introduced to a family in the Polish ghetto. Each one becomes an individual and I was drawn into the personalities, especially the courtship and marriage of a young couple who later figure prominently in the story. We watch them move from Poland to Germany and then to France, each time hoping for a better life. We meet their grandchild, Ernie Levy, as a child in Germany, suffering the mental and physical violence of his schoolmates. Later, we see him as a young man in France, as the Nazi war machine moves in. Always, we are aware of the realities of history and the horrors that still await him as he gradually realizes his fate as the "last of the just men". Eventually he and the woman he loves await death in a concentration camp surrounded by Jewish children who have all lost their parents. I shuddered throughout at the awfulness of it all. But I just couldn't stop reading.

This book is a small masterpiece and a literary gem. Yes, it is sad. It is very sad. And yet, there is beauty in it too, and love and courage. I will never forget the impact it had on me. I give it my highest recommendation. It is a true work of art.

The Last of the Just
THis novel ,in my opinionis the greatest,most moving and most unllifting book about the holocaust ever written; about a jewish boy ,a just man ,in the midst of NAzi Germany and finally the concentration camps.The belief that there a a finite number of Just men ,who keep the balance of goodness in the world, in any given generation and the holocaust ,by killing them tipped a cosmic balance is a powerful . I first read it over 20years ago and I have never forgotten it .It is one of the world's great books .
I have just replaced my copy { my old one stolen by book lover]because it bears a re read often to remind us all of us may be "just men/womenTHe world can then will be a better place . Read this book to remind yourself of your humanity and that of others who suffer .

My father got me this book and it took me a few years to get around to reading it. After I did, I found "The Last of the Just" to be quite a memorable story, to say the least. Once you get a couple of chapters into the story, it becomes emotionally gripping as you begin to get to know the characters. The story weaves together fiction and legend against a historical backdrop. The writing is poetic, haunting and beautiful. To me, the spiritual and emotional depth of this novel is unmatched. I plan to read this again some time, after taking some time to digest the entirety of this story. This book is definately a first-class work of art in my opinion.

This book is a deeply personal account of a Jewish family in the 19th and 20th centuries. Part of it's power comes from following the lives of the family well before the holocaust began... thus showing that anti-semitism was not only a Nazi trait and making the continually worsening conditions even harder to bear in contrast to their lives before. Ernie Levy, our main anti-hero, is so real. Every moment of his roller coaster of life is so charged with real emotions and desires that you cannot help but be 100% invested in what happens to him. The paragraph on the final page is possibly one of the most powerful in all of literature. I finished this book two days ago, and am already ready to read it again. It is a cleansing, miraculous experience.

This book is a deeply personal account of a Jewish family in the 19th and 20th centuries. Part of it's power comes from following the lives of the family well before the holocaust began... thus showing that anti-semitism was not only a Nazi trait and making the continually worsening conditions even harder to bear in contrast to their lives before. Ernie Levy, our main anti-hero, is so real. Every moment of his roller coaster of life is so charged with real emotions and desires that you cannot help but be 100% invested in what happens to him. The paragraph on the final page is possibly one of the most powerful in all of literature. I finished this book two days ago, and am already ready to read it again. It is a cleansing, miraculous experience.

An immensely illuminating and personal history of the Jewish people. It educates and elicits emotional response. Brilliantly written. Essential for anyone interested in Jewish history.

Brilliantly written, and shockingly touching.... It will have an effect for much time after you've put it down.

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?"

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?"

In 1959 The Last of the Just won the Prix Goncourt, the top literary award of France (the French Booker). A sweeping epic of a thousand years of Jewish life in Europe, the novel traces the fortunes and tragedies of one family with a special heritage. A member of each generation of the family is one of the 36 just men that Jewish tradition claims feel the suffering and pain of all the living, and without whom the world could not go on. Since the Jewish word for 36 is lamed vov, these men are often called Lamed Vovniks.

This strange and singular honor was attributed to the Levy family in 1085 following an attempt by the Bishop William of Nordhouse to massacre the Jewish citizens of York. To save his people, the Rabbi Yom Tov Levy leads them to an abandoned tower where they withhold a siege of six days by the local Christians. Rather than succumb to the indiginities of their captors, the Jews decide to take their own lives. As was done in Masada a thousand years earlier, the Rabbi takes on the role of blessing and killing each of the members of his community and then taking his own life. Some of the children, including the rabbi's son Solomon, survive. When Solomon becomes a man he has a vision from God where he is told that, because of his father's noble act, beginning with him, each generation of his family will contain one of the Lamed-Vovniks.

The first 140 pages of this book presents a history of the Levy family, their lineage of Lamed-Vovniks, and their fame in the Jewish community. The last three hundred pages tells the story of Ernie Levy, who is born in the Twentieth Century, during the events leading up to and in the Holocaust.

Sweeping in scope and yet focused on the life of a single man, this book presents the joys of Jewish community life and the accomodations they make to survive being a European minority marked for extermination by the Christian majority. It presents European history from a Jewish perspective and provides a detailed background to the insanity that is the Holocaust.

The point of view is that of a family of holy men whose compassion and wisdom gives the story great depth and understanding. Sadly, the Levy Lamed-Vovniks are all male. While the women of the story are well portrayed and strong personalities, they are never the main characters so the book has a decidedly male perspective. Sometimes funny, often sad, this is a great single volume introduction to Jewish history and culture, and a novel that is a classic in Jewish literature. I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the subject.

This book was recommended to me by a well-read teaching colleague as being "the best book he has ever read". That is an understatement, to say the least. This profoundly sensitive rendering of an incomprehensible human tragedy belongs way up there on the same shelf as the Bible.