Trust Me On This : Remembering a Book of Remembering
In the traditional Navajo belief system, as well as in those of many other native peoples, harmony is regarded as the key to perfection. Illness, personal or group disaster, every manner of evil comes into being because some disparate element within the universe has gone out of kilter. Health is restored only after the natural order of things is put back into sync by some established ceremony or sacrifice, only after the scales of every interaction are once again in balance.
An analogous legend in Jewish apocrypha concerns the required presence in the world of the Lamed-Vov , or “Just Men”--”the hearts of the world multiplied . . . into (whom), as into one receptacle, pour all our griefs.” As described in the 1959 novel “The Last of the Just,” this cadre of otherwise ordinary individuals collectively acts as a kind of sponge for misery, absorbing pain and cruelty before it spills out and overcomes everything. “If just one of (the Just Men) were lacking,” we are told, “the suffering of mankind would poison even the souls of the newborn, and humanity would suffocate with a single cry.”
French author Andre Schwarz-Bart focuses on the lineage of the Levys, a diaspora family renowned through the ages for their gentleness and intelligence, but even more because one son in each generation inherits the mantle of being a Lamed-Vov . The nature and cosmic purpose of this burden is not easy to explain, or to understand:
“If a man suffers all alone,” Mordecai asks of his beloved and adoring grandson, Ernie, “it is clear his suffering remains within him. Right?”
“Right,” Ernie said.
“But if another looks at him and says to him, ‘You’re in trouble, my Jewish brother,’ what happens then?”
”. . . I understand that too, (Ernie) said politely. “He takes the suffering of his friend into his own eyes.”
Mordecai sighed, smiled, sighed again. “And if he is blind, do you think he can take it in?”
“Of course, through his ears!”
“And if he is deaf?”
“Then through his hands,” Ernie said gravely.
“And if the other is far away, if he can neither hear him nor see him and not even touch him--do you believe then that he can take in his pain?”
“Maybe he could guess at it,” Ernie said with a cautious expression.
Mordecai went into ecstasies. “You’ve said it, my love--that is exactly what the Just Man does! He senses all the evil rampant on earth, and he takes it into his heart.”
A finger against the corner of his mouth, Ernie followed the course of a thought. He exhaled sadly, “But what good does it do to sense it if nothing is changed?”
“It changes for God, don’t you see?”
“The Last of the Just” is about the nature of empathy, about why an old man must prepare a child for life with such a sad and bleak lesson, and more generally, it is a book that places the Holocaust within a wider frame in order to demonstrate that the Final Solution was but the culmination of a thousand years of religious persecution.
Beginning with the Maccabean-like suicide of Rabbi Yom Tov Levi in York in 1185, Schwarz-Bart provides in rapid succession vignettes describing the martyrdom of each Just Man ancestor before focusing on a particular clan of modern Levys dwelling in the Polish town of Zemyock just before the turn of this century. For all their illustrious legacy of persecution, these characters initially seem more the stuff of folklore or domestic comedy than epic. Fathers and sons dispute questions of religious practice, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law are at odds over child-rearing practices, children struggle to grow up, and young people stumble into unlikely and complicated romantic entanglements.
And yet these simple, well-intentioned men and women live in a time of gathering insanity. Ordinary events--a confrontation with a schoolyard bully, a walk down the street to a place of worship, the purchase of bread--are laced with grave danger.
The Levys have no choice but to become reluctant heroes, and for a while their innocence, their love for each other, their large and small acts of courage constitute the only evidence of humane behavior, the dam battered by the world’s relentless grind. But finally, inevitably, they are swept away along with six millions others--as were Andre Schwarz-Bart’s own parents.
The bulk of the novel is set in Germany--where the family migrates after a pogrom--and later in France--where they flee after the advent of National Socialism. Much of the action is seen through the at first precocious and then prematurely old eyes of Ernie Levy as he comes of age in a world that seems bent upon his obliteration. We watch him recoil from one disappointment, one injury after another, and yet he is not altogether beaten. There’s a flame within him that yearns for goodness, that insists upon a modicum of peace, and through his spiritual journey we contemplate the unthinkable and search for meaning and sense where there seems to be only madness.
The sole survivor of his line, Ernie for a time shuns his heritage, becomes agnostic, passes for a Gentile, crosses safely into unoccupied territory, but he cannot sustain his escape and goes back into the maelstrom. “He had no intention of . . separating himself from the humble procession of the Jewish people,” Schwarz-Bart writes; and ultimately Ernie assumes the responsibility of a Lamed-Vov , perishing in an Auschwitz gas chamber while consoling a terrified flock of orphaned children. Throughout the novel, Ernie has functioned as a living embodiment of hope. When he dies without descendants, the world is forever a Just Man short.
“The Last of the Just” is very much a work of the postwar period, when the shock of the Holocaust was still immediate and raw--and as such it is a necessary and important book. The passage of time undoubtedly obscures the context, dulls our connection with victims who, in the words of one elderly patriarch, were “so permanently afraid.” “The Last of the Just” brings them vividly to life.
All the same, the attitudes with which the novel’s characters regard events and social conventions are occasionally at radical odds with contemporary sensibilities. While poignantly demonstrating the brutishness and awful consequences of intolerance, for example, Schwarz-Bart occasionally lapses into the language of condescending sexism. Of Ernie’s mother we are told: “All women are little girls getting on in years, each endowed with a body greater and more important than her mind, and all of whom adore surrounding themselves with meaningless mysteries.” Such instances of gender chauvinism--invisible, in all probability, to many readers 30 years ago--provide telling evidence that insidious cultural biases come in all shapes and sizes.
Equally arresting is the book’s philosophical rationalization for passive submission. Those few characters who attempt to take up arms in self-defense are presented as relatively short-sighted, naive in their belief that destiny can be averted. In the end, Ernie not only refuses to fight, but literally presents himself at the gate of a camp, imploring the guards to take him in, to do their worst--and of course they oblige.
Today such head-bowed acquiescence seems remote, an almost incomprehensible response. Using the lessons of genocide as their justification, many contemporary Israelis hold the position that the only alternative to being helpless is to be stronger, more aggressive than any opponent, to inspire fear rather than be fearful. This attitude is the antithesis, the repudiation of Ernie Levy’s route to blessedness.
Yet whatever one’s politics, “The Last of the Just” (still available in paperback from Atheneum) remains a powerful argument. Every page demands to know: “Why? How could this abomination have happened?” Whether Jewish or Gentile, we are reminded how easily torn is the precious fabric of civilization, and how destructive are the consequences of dumb hatred--whether a society’s henchmen are permitted to beat an Ernie Levy because he’s Jewish, or because he’s black or gay or Hispanic or homeless. The novel endures precisely because it forces us to empathize, and thus to remember.