SCHWARZ-BART, ANDRÉ

SCHWARZ-BART, ANDRÉ (1928– ), French novelist. Schwarz-Bart was born in Metz, the son of immigrants from Poland. His childhood and education were disrupted by World War II, and at the age of 15 he joined the Maquis. He was arrested by the Germans, but escaped and served in the French army after the Liberation. Returning home, he learned that his entire family had been murdered in Nazi camps. After several years of hardship he was able to complete his education at the Sorbonne. Schwarz-Bart's first novel, Le Dernier des justes (1959; The Last of the Just, 1961) sought to reinterpret the old Jewish legend of the Lamed Vav Ẓaddikim ("Thirty-Six Hidden Saints") in terms of the martyrdom of European Jewry, from the 12th-century massacre of york to auschwitz . The author's comparative ignorance of Jewish history and culture – the legacy of his tragic boyhood – led him to distort the real tradition by making the Ẓaddikim (his "Justes") a hereditary clan, rather than three dozen hidden saints whose virtues preserve the Jews in each generation. Paradoxically, therefore, there is a distinctly Christian element in this tale of pre-ordained self-sacrifice, whereby men's sins are atoned for by Schwarz-Bart's lamedvovniks. Despite this blemish, The Last of the Just remains a powerful indictment of Christendom from the era of until the death of the fictional Ernie Levy, the "last of the just," in the European Holocaust. A kind of Jewish passion play, Schwarz-Bart's novel was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1959. Schwarz-Bart received the Jerusalem Prize in 1966. A dedicated champion of society's outcasts, Schwarz-Bart later turned to the problems of non-whites, whose emancipation and restoration to dignity he advocated no less than he had that of the Jews. In collaboration with his West Indian wife, Simone, he embarked on a seven-part epic, the first volume of which, Un Plat de porc aux bananes vertes, appeared in 1967. In 1972, he published La mulatresse Solitude (A Woman Named Solitude, 1973), a novel about an episode of the 1802 revolt against the reinforcement of slavery in the French colonies of the Antilles. André and Simone Schwartz-Bart then published together, in 1989, a seven-volume encyclopedia of black women, Hommage à la femme noire (In Praise of Black   Women, 2001). The museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris organized a one-day symposium with André Schwartz Bart on the May 25, 2003. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: C. Lehrmann, L'Element juif dans la littérature française, 2 (1961), 185–91. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: F. Kaufmann: Pour relire Le dernier des Justes – réflexions sur la Shoah (1961). (Claude (André) Vigée / Philippe Boukara (2nd ed.)