Man's Naked Absurdity:

...He is far closer to the tolerant laughter of Zangwill, the astringency of Babel, or the rueful, cosmic humor of I. L. Peretz's Heavenly Tribunal, before whom Bontshe the Silent, as his reward for a lifetime of being ground into the dust, asked only for a hot roll and butter...

...As a work of art based on the agonies of Hitler's Europe, only House of Dolls (by a man who writes under the bitter nom-deplume of "Ka-tzetnik") can be mentioned in the same breath...

...How perfectly normal it seems for Ernie, after a hardly worse than average day of unpleasantness in and after school, to make a thoughtful, inept, but persistent effort at taking his own life in some way that would not leave too much of a mess for his grandmother to clean up...

...But never mind...

...Rolled up in a ball against the door, he was wriggling like a wounded caterpillar in its own juices...

...And, like a superb humorist, he never pushes his effects...

...For close to a hundred pages the author gives us, in brief, pungent "bloody anecdotes," a thumbnail history of the Levy family, blessed with the harrowing privilege, once in every generation, of supplying the world with one of the 36 Just Men, whose merits and tears are, according to Jewish legend, God's justification for permitting the world to continue...

...This is how he describes Ernie, after having been tortured by a humorous Gestapo man as the result of a kind of gross comic-opera misunderstanding: "The techniques of torture are ridiculously limited...

...No contemporary novelist, to me, has ever so completely conveyed the naked absurdity of the human situation, so effectively and credibly dramatized in the old Jewish dictum that this is the "false world" and the "true world" is something you attain only after your death...

...The author's mocking eye is as ready to spot the foibles of Jews as those of Cossacks or Germans...

...His incisions through the protective layers of our consciousness are almost painless...

...His anesthetics are humor-or rather a teasing, Voltairian irony-and poetry, both of a high order...

...Listen to Ernie's friend, a young Galician, who never quite recovered from the eight days he spent burying the pogrom victims in his village, and finally fell victim to the corruption of Berlin: "In Poland, my friend, a Jew can hold out alone, with a herring and a synagogue...

...Yesterday, as I stood in the street, trembling in despair, rooted to the spot, a drop of pity fell from above upon my face...

...But there was not breeze in the air, no cloud in the sky...

...Ernie, the "inconsolable-one of those whom God dares not even caress with his little finger," whose whole life is simultaneously a drive toward self-destruction and an exuberant song to the joy of living, ends his brief days in gas chamber and crematorium, after having tried his best to comfort a carload of doomed children...

...And while "the democracies refrained from any vulgar show of emotion" at Buchenwald, 10,000 new guests of the state were earnestly requested not to hang themselves without first placing in their mouths a slip of paper bearing proper identification...

...There was only a presence...

...But the triumph of this distinguished and memorable work is its first and third acts...

...In matters of honesty as to one's own intentions and motives, history must surely give the Germans the best of it...

...Reviewed by Shimon Wincelberg Contributor, "Commentary," "The New Yorker" In his Prix Goncourt novel and rather surprising bestseller, The Last of the Just, Andre Schwarz-Bart, its youthful, self-educated author, gives life to a catalogue of the most unnamable horrors (in other words, the normal minutae of EuropeanJewish history) with the tact of a great clown and the delicacy of a surgeon...

...Its middle section-detailing the boyhood of Ernie Levy, the book's remarkable hero, in the German town of Stillenstadt-suffers from a certain flatness perhaps unavoidable in writing of a world which, just like bad fiction, is divided with such dreadful simplicity into the good guys and the bad guys, the hunters and the hunted...

...And yet even here, Schwarz-Bart conveys, with force and economy, the sickening, madhouse quality of life in pre-World War II Germany...

...On purely novelistic grounds, The Last of the fust is conceivably somewhat short of perfection...

...The most audacious, the most industrious imagination must limit itself to variations on a few fundamental themes bearing on the five senses...

...But here, believe me, if all you have in the way of roots is two feet, life ceases to rise as far as your heart...

...And then Schwartz-Bart quietly concludes, in what must be one of the most hard-won statements of faith since Job: "Yes, at times one's heart could break in sorrow...

...He had been stripped of all shame, his eyes were staring whitely, and the only defense he offered was to cup his hands around his genitals...

...How else could they possibly remain untainted by the arrogance of faith without questioning, or the vulgar striving for martyrdom...

...His imagination remains ever fresh, ever eager to please, ever conscious of giving value for money...

...In the canon of Jewish literature, Schwarz-Bart has little beyond his love of language in common with the cheerful nihilists of the current American and English scene...

...Perhaps the only time SchwarzBart permits himself the indulgence of editorial comment is when he makes clear, to the credit of the Nazis, that (at least up to the murder of Vom Rath by poor, grief-demented Hershel Grynszpan) the difficulty for Jews to save their naked lives by leaving Germany was largely due to the successful world-wide embargo against admitting them...

...But often, too I can't help thinking that Ernie Levy, dead six million times, is still alive somewhere...

...Who, after all, wishes to shell out $4.95 only to have his feelings ravaged, his stomach turned, his belief in the basic goodness of people cruelly torn to shreds (poor Anne Frank, what an industry they have turned you into...

...And here, Schwarz-Bart's tactfulness and skill are most superbly in evidence...

...It is my impression that he has taken liberties with the essence of the legend, whose beauty surely rests on the ironic assumption that the "36" go through life without ever knowing how indispensable they are...

...World War II and the fall of France at last propel Ernie into familiar territory, and face the author with the artistic problem of dealing with horrors of such magnitude as to be simply beyond the imaginative grasp of anyone who hasn't experienced something similar...

...He almost succeeds in making the mystique of the "stiff-necked people" seem like the only possible philosophy for a hard-headed skeptic...

...He also has a proper measure of compassion for the plight of that most noble, heroic and lonely of 20th-century men--the decent German...

...For what is essentially a martyrology, The Last of the Just is remarkably free of propaganda...

...Like the instinctive poet he is, Schwarz-Bart does not waste a word (for which, surely, some credit must go to Stephen Becker, his excellent translator...

...And his gentle irony makes such emotions as hatred and forgiveness seem almost equally irrelevant...