The just never last in ‘The Last of the Just’

The lists of undeservedly forgotten or underappreciated great novels of the previous century are long—and varied, for every lover of literature keeps his or her own. Somewhere near the top of mine is André Schwarz-Bart’s novel of Jewish persecution and the Holocaust, The Last of the Just, which marks its 50th anniversary this year.
Published in France—where Schwarz-Bart was born in 1928, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants—in 1959 as Le Dernier des Justes, it was a great commercial and critical success, won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, and was translated into more than a dozen languages. Now, in English at least, it struggles for attention.
A pity, for it is the most artistically satisfying and at the same time emotionally affecting novels on its terrible subject that I can think of. The author came by his knowledge of it horribly honestly: Both of his parents and two brothers perished in the Holocaust.
Schwarz-Bart builds his story upon the Jewish legend of the “Lamed-Vov,” the 36 Just Men in each generation (“lamed-vov” means 36 in Hebrew) who carry the weight of mankind and its sorrows. In his acute explanation: “[I]ndistinguishable from simple mortals, often they are unaware of their station. But if just one of them were lacking, the sufferings of mankind would poison even the souls of the newborn, and humanity would suffocate with a single cry. For the Lamed-Vov are the hearts of the world multiplied, and into them, as into one receptacle, pour all our griefs.”
He starts with a quasi-historical chronicle of European persecution, focusing on one family, the Levys, in the previous millennium, going back to a slaughter of Jews in York, England, in 1185. After giving gruesome examples of pogroms, murder, rape, pillage and plunder in several succeeding generations of Levys, each of which produced its Just Man, Schwarz-Bart jumps ahead to the village of Zemyock in Russian Poland in the late 19th century and the family of Mordecai Levy.
From this point the story slowly develops into that of Mordecai’s grandson, Ernie Levy, in Germany in the mid-1930s. Ernie is torn between the evil he sees all around him—the Levys are of course persecuted by both Nazis and ordinary Germans—and a personal search for an overarching divinity.
The family makes its way to France, but it is no escape. When France comes under the Nazi jackboot, they all disappear into concentration camps except for Ernie. He is left behind, just as his creator was.
With the loss of his family, Ernie—always living inside a vivid, romantic, poetic imagination—grows more psychologically unmoored than ever. He briefly converts to Roman Catholicism, thinks himself (and behaves like) a dog, takes up with the Christian wife of a farmer off in a POW camp.
Gradually we become aware that Ernie considers himself the latest Lamed-Vovnik, the Last of the Just. In Paris he comes across four devout old men, not yet deported to the camps. They treat him with great reverence, because Mordecai, before his deportation, had told them that he, too, believed that was his grandson’s destiny.
Though he identifies with suffering everywhere, not just among Jews, Ernie seems not to think of himself as a savior; after all, none of the previous Just Men had been. Rather, he is ready to offer his martyrdom—to God? who knows? not Ernie—for his people.
Indeed, he does so in a direct way in one instance. When Golda, the young woman he has come to love (and “spiritually” marries), is hauled away, he “reports” to the concentration camp at Drancy in northern France where she is being held and requests admission. He is not turned away.
The last 15-20 pages of The Last of the Just are absolutely wrenching. Riding toward death in a gas chamber with Golda in a sealed freight car filled with frightened children, Ernie does what he can to comfort them with visions of the Kingdom of Israel, where “happiness and joy will come to you, and pain and lamentation will flee.”
Reproached by a woman for telling the children dreams, he replies, “Madame, there is no room for truth here.”
No, the truth is all around them, has been for centuries, so enormous and awful that it becomes difficult to take in. The Last of the Just gives access to the reality behind the unimaginable.

Lack of regulation was literally disgusting

The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were approved by Congress on this date in 1906. Their creation and swift passage were inspired by the publication just four months earlier of Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle. Few novels, no matter how best-selling or classic, can be said to have changed our national life. Probably the greatest example of one that did is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which Abraham Lincoln credited, only half-jokingly, with starting the Civil War. A close runner-up is the novel to which it has been compared—The Jungle, about the horrifying conditions in Chicago’s stockyards and meatpacking industry. Published Feb. 26, 1906, the book was an immediate sensation and had enormous long-lasting effects, as we know.
But that was not Sinclair’s initial intent. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” Sinclair ruefully said after the book's initial publication, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” He had set out to make his fellow citizens outraged over the inhuman working conditions in the meatpacking industry—the novel is dedicated “To the Workingmen of America”—and instead he got them nauseated over the repulsive foodstuffs they were putting down their throats.
Sinclair, born in Baltimore in 1878, was supporting himself by writing in his teens. After a string of ho-hum novels, he was groping for his proper subject matter and growing in his newfound faith of socialism. The two merged in The Jungle.
Intrigued by a failed 1904 Chicago stockyard strike, he got a socialist weekly, Appeal to Reason, to commission him to write about the industry. Actually, the weekly published his writings first, in serial form starting in February 1905; book publication did not come until the next year, and only after a struggle.
Everything about The Jungle and its author is remarkable. Sinclair spent only seven weeks in Chicago, but he learned a trainload of stuff and got it down with an accuracy that proved impervious to savage criticism.
The Jungle is the story of Lithuanian immigrants, Jurgis Rudkus and his wife Ona and their extended family. Right from the time they first set foot in Packingtown—Sinclair’s name for the residential area known locally as Back-of-the-Yards—their lives become a downward spiral of despair and death.
Henry James he was not; one critic later said Sinclair’s distinguishing trait as an author was “a sub-literary belligerence.” Nevertheless, The Jungle is compelling reading, partly because of the passionate, vigorous narration, but mostly because of what is being narrated.
There is scarcely a page that does not contain something to turn your stomach or inflame your anger, or both. Packingtown itself is a festering sump of land made from dumping city garbage, where sickness seems to sprout from the very soil.
Jurgis earns 17.5 cents per hour (by no means the lowest wage) as a “shoveler of guts.” Through him we discover the revolting ingredients that make their way into breakfast sausages and pickled meats: cows with tuberculosis and hogs with cholera, floor sweepings, rats and their droppings, insalubrious chemicals—even, Sinclair claimed, the occasional Lithuanian rendered into lard.
That is not even a beginning of the disgusting litany. It extends to the tarting-up of spoiled meat with borax and glycerine to make it salable, and to lax government inspectors willing to look the other way.
Employees, living in filth and working without recourse to sanitary facilities, introduce diseases. The plant is a honeycomb of graft, jealousies and hatreds, where decency and honesty are nowhere to be found; “from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie.”
Sinclair skillfully throws a new ingredient into (or under) the pot now and then to keep it boiling, such as Ona’s being forced by her boss into prostitution. Horror follows upon horror, yet nothing seems unreal. The author, remember, has seen it all.
There are some really memorable touches. In a scene at a Lake Shore Drive mansion, for instance, the insouciant scion (a stage drunk, admittedly) of a meatpacking magnate exposes the emptiness of his family’s existence. Another is Sinclair’s description of the well-oiled Chicago political machine—six decades on and he could be describing the administrations of the first Mayor Daley.
Perhaps the most poignant and revealing touch of all, however, is a moment when Jurgis, in utter despair, goes out as a tramp after the death of his wife and son. A farmer refuses to sell him food, and so Jurgis, once out of sight, vindictively pulls up a row of 100 newly planted peach trees: Decent, honest, hard-working Jurgis has learned his lesson well.
The world was, then, literally a jungle, with everyone at everyone else’s throat—a world the narrator says, “in which nothing counted but brutal might.” What was the answer?
In a word: socialism. Jurgis stumbles into a socialist meeting, becomes converted, and the final 50 pages form a sort of socialist tract. “CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!” are the book’s closing, happily defiant words.
A limp ending, but somewhat fitting for the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of wage slavery. Here, however, the redemption is not spiritual, but socialist.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

An excerpt from early in The Jungle, as members of the immigrant family of Jurgis Rudkus are finishing the last leg of their long journey from Lithuania, and they—and readers—get the first inkling of what is in store for them:

A full hour before the party reached the city they had begun to note the perplexing changes in the atmosphere. It grew darker all the time, and upon the earth the grass seemed to grow less green. Every minute, as the train sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields were grown parched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare. And along with the thickening smoke they began to notice another circumstance, a strange, pungent odor. They were not sure that it was unpleasant, this odor; some might have called it sickening, but their taste in odors was not developed, and they were only sure that it was curious. Now, sitting in the trolley car, they realized that they were on their way to the home of it—that they had travelled all the way from Lithuania to it. It was now no longer something far-off and faint, that you caught in whiffs; you could literally taste it, as well as smell it—you could take hold of it, almost, and examine it at your leisure. They were divided in their opinions about it. It was an elemental odor, raw and crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual, and strong. There were some who drank it in as if it were an intoxicant; there were others who put their handkerchiefs to their faces. The new emigrants were still tasting it, lost in wonder, when suddenly the car came to a halt, and the door was flung open, and a voice shouted—“Stockyards!”

Milking Guernsey for its history

Technically, the German invasion and occupation of the Channel Islands began June 30, 1940, when a reconnaissance pilot landed on Guernsey and the island officially surrendered to him. The other islands—Jersey, Alderney, and Sark—did the same to the incoming occupation forces within the next week. But it could be said that in actual military fact the invasion began two days before, June 28, when a squadron of German bombers flew over and bombed the harbors of Jersey and Guernsey. The occupation story has been told many times in fiction and nonfiction, but never with such devastating charm as in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, which proved a great hit last year with lady book-review editors.
Now, epistolary novels, their venerable heritage (Pamela) notwithstanding, are tough to pull off; if not done well, the lack of a narrative line can tend to cause them, and their readers’ minds, to wander. And novels with unusual food or clothing in their titles (Fried Green Tomatoes, Traveling Pants) can justifiably raise suspicions that the reader is about to be treated to something terminally cute.
But with The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society the reader can relax and enjoy. It is a bit unfocused, but in the main moves along smoothly, and its potato peel pie is a legitimate, if not terribly appetizing, dish that plays an actual role in the story (and in the Society of the title). The worst one can say of the book is that it is a “small blameless comfort,” in that phrase of Barbara Pym’s, creator of a few such comforts herself. Indeed, it is populated by characters who themselves are content with such comforts, such as real tea and bread with butter amid the scarcities of postwar rationing.
Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows are aunt and niece. Or were; Shaffer died early last year. When she became ill, she called on Barrows, a children’s book author, to help complete this novel on a subject with which she had become obsessed—Guernsey under German occupation during World War II.
The letters exchanged by the couple dozen or so correspondents, mostly in Britain and Guernsey, span the period from January to September 1946. The story they tell has two interwoven strands: One involves the romantic entanglements of the chief character, 32-year-old London writer Juliet Ashton; the second involves her growing fascination with how the Guernsey islanders had weathered the five-year rule German rule.
One way several of them did was through the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, originally formed to deflect German suspicion about proscribed activities. Juliet learns of it from Dawsey Adams, an islander who writes her on a whim, having seen her name and address in a used book.
The notion of the Society enchants her. She begins corresponding with a number of its members and becomes equally enchanted with them. And with reason. They are nearly universally delightful and for the most part believable as human beings.
Juliet learns that wartime adversity got them to read—and discuss—books they otherwise never would have considered. Eben Ramsey tells her that, in the bleakness and deprivation of the occupation, “We clung to books and to our friends; they reminded us that we had another part to us.”
Isola Pribby, whose candor about her unprepossessing appearance recalls the brassbound stoic Coker in Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, says reading “perked up our spirits.” Her quixotic behavior includes mixing and prescribing potions of dubious efficacy, not to mention safety, though later she abandons that to practice phrenology on her fellow Society members.
The Germans allowed the islanders access to no news, not even mail. Dawsey, in referring to criticism of “collaboration,” explains: “I don’t think some Islanders credited the boredom of those years as a reason to befriend the enemy.” (Several years ago Tim Binding explored the issue of collaboration in his excellent novel, Lying With the Enemy, also set on Guernsey; see blog post of June 30, 2008.)
Amid all this, and a subsequent visit to Guernsey, Juliet is trying to decide whether she really loves Markham Reynolds, a wealthy American publisher ardently pursuing her. Their courtship, frankly, is pretty sticky, he a handsome, square-jawed, capable Yank and she a lovely and intelligent-but-slightly-flighty Brit. It turns out that he is also an overbearing Yank who essentially wants her as a pretty, intellectual showpiece, so I leave you to guess how that ends.
This is a Happily Ever After novel—After, that is, Several Sorrows Are Endured. It is also a book-lover’s delight, an implicit and sometimes explicit paean to all things literary, to libraries personal and public, to bookstores and their owners, customers, and contents, and expressed in Juliet’s comment to Dawsey: “That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive—all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.”
Come to think of it, that’s sort of what the letters in this book do.

Fascinating Fact, Lit. Div.

Sloan Wilson, before he became the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, A Summer Place, and other books, attempted a short stint as a publisher’s reader for Houghton Mifflin just after World War II. He was given a sloppily typed, dog-eared manuscript titled The Captain’s Palms to evaluate. It was a wartime naval story. To Wilson, who had spent more than three years in the U.S. Coast Guard commanding ships, sometimes in combat, it was nothing like what he knew of men and ships at war. He wrote and turned in a scathing reader’s report. The Houghton Mifflin editor said he was surprised that Wilson didn’t like the novel; there was a lot of advance interest in it. Wilson replied that he thought it was a dishonest book and would be surprised if it went anywhere. Houghton Mifflin published it anyway, under the new title Mr. Roberts, and where it went was everywhere—the best-seller lists, to the Broadway stage, and then to Hollywood. (And much later a TV series and a second, TV movie.) In his memoir What Shall We Wear to This Party? Wilson admits with some chagrin that his judgment in those days was fundamentally wrong and Mr. Roberts, he came to realize, is a wonderful novel.

War without end

Fifty-nine years ago the Korean War broke out when communist North Korea invaded South Korea. Officially, it has never ended.

On the morning of the Monday after Eileen’s funeral, June 26, 1950, a bold, 72-point headline stretched across the top of the front page of the Guldwyck Standard:

RED ARMY STABS INTO SOUTH KOREA

To Tim, reading it at Jean’s where he was having breakfast, its screaming significance seemed to pulsate above the gray columns of type. He lifted his coffee cup to his lips and scanned the thicket of secondary headlines.

U.S. Rushes Arms, Ammunition to
South; Truman Returns to Capital,
Calls in Defense, Diplomatic Aides

A confusing welter of news stories on the same subject covered nearly the entire page. Dour, one-column photos of Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stared out at Tim. Still holding his steaming coffee cup in mid-air, he skipped what seemed to be the main story under a yet smaller headline—“President Explores Means of Aid to South; Weekend Missouri Trip Cut Short to Fly Back to Meet Korean Crisis”—to read one in the last column on the right side of the page. “North’s Rush Reported Halted, Thrown Back,” its headline said:

Seoul, Monday, June 26 (AP) —Communist North Korean invaders today slashed to within 20 miles of Seoul, but a high South Korean military official said the rush apparently had been stopped and thrown back.
(Korean Minister Kim Yong Ju said in Tokyo, however, that the invaders had reached Uijongbu, only 12 miles north of Seoul.)
Cloudy skies, which checked the Northerners’ superior air arm, brightened South Korean hopes of holding the estimated 50,000 Red troops who struck yesterday across the border.
Maj. Gen. Choi Byung Duk, chief of staff of the South Korean Army, reported.…

Tim read all of the story on the front page but didn’t stay with it to its continuation page. Instead, his glance jumped around, taking in bits of the other stories: “Planes to Aid in Evacuation of Americans”; “M’Arthur Will Ship Munitions to South Korea”; “U.N. Security Council Orders Cease Fire in Korea War.”
He put down his cup. This looked serious. He looked up at Jean, who was working at the sink.
“Did you see this in the paper?”
“Yes,” Jean said. With a dishcloth she swept some bread crumbs from the counter into the sink. She wiped her hands on her apron and turned to face Tim. “It was all over the radio yesterday.”
“Yeah, I heard something about it. I didn’t pay that much attention. I guess I didn’t think it was that big a deal. Just more communist shenanigans, like with Berlin.”
“No, this sounds bad.”
“Well, maybe we won’t get involved. I mean, Korea? Where is Korea?”
“Oh, we always get involved, anymore, it seems.” Jean twisted her hands together on her apron, and two ugly vertical lines split the lovely smoothness of her brow. “We’re already involved, from the looks of the paper. Why should this country care if one part of Korea starts a fight with the other part? So that young men like you—” Jean broke off, not wanting to follow her thought where it was going, and turned around to face the sink and wash dishes. She reached over to turn on the radio. The discordant rhythms of If I Knew You Were Comin’ I’d’ve Baked a Cake came out, and she angrily switched it off again, not willing to be jollied out of her current concerns.
Tim sat drinking the last of his coffee and skimming the news stories. Slowly it crept into his mind that something about the date troubled him. The Korea story said June 26. But this was June 26. How could the Guldwyck newspaper report a story from half a world away on the same day it happened? It must be the time difference. The events happened on June 26 there, and get reported on the 26th here. In Korea they must be at least 12 hours ahead of us, he reckoned. He examined the other stories for corroborating evidence of his calculations. The fighting had started on Sunday morning, June 25, there, which was sometime Saturday night New York time.
He took a sip of his coffee. It had grown too cool for his liking, and he absent-mindedly set the cup down on the table while continuing to stare at the paper. No, he thought, it wasn’t the time difference that troubled him about the date. It was something else, as if he already knew something about this date. It was too weird. This sort of thing is always happening to me, he told himself. He folded the newspaper and tossed it onto the table.
—From Invisible Hero, Chapter 13

He saw life through smoke-colored glasses

Ambrose Bierce, born this date in 1842 in Meigs County, Ohio, is definitely not a new millennium kind of guy. Bierce’s unrelievedly caustic and cynical view of life does not go down well in a thin-skinned, squeamish society seeking feelgood answers to groupthink questions. As one of the best newspapermen in American history, he would go unemployed today by a profession more concerned with raising consciousnesses than hell. All the more reason, then, to read about him, as he provides a tonic, if not a corrective, to our chronically aggrieved Age of Whine. It’s a bitter tonic, as Roy Morris Jr. shows in Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company, a dandy, compact biography.
To the extent that Bierce’s life is known at all today, it is for the manner of his leaving it. Or perhaps that should be “supposed manner,” which is by disappearing into revolutionary Mexico in late 1913 at the age of 71. Borrowing John Lennon’s remark about Elvis Presley, Morris says Bierce’s death could be considered a “good career move.”
Again, if he is known at all, it is as “Bitter Bierce,” one of several dark appellations given him in his lifetime, and with reason. Bierce’s life, if it was not perpetually unhappy, was certainly never easy. If that was anyone’s fault, it was largely his own, but he never complained of it. Why should he? He could say, with Thomas Hobbes, that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, and be proud of telling what he considered the unvarnished truth.
An entry in The Devil’s Dictionary, the compilation of perverse definitions on which his reputation as a writer rests, reveals his attitude succinctly: “Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.” (This “dictionary,” by the way, is the source of Morris’ subtitle: “Alone, adj. In bad company.”)
Bierce’s reputation also rests upon the Civil War short story, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” one of the most anthologized tales in American literature, though he wrote many others, fiction and nonfiction, that are nearly its equal. His knowledge of his subject matter was hard-earned: He served in the Union army almost four years. As Morris points out, Bierce is one of only two notable American writers to have survived extensive Civil War experience, the other being the Southern poet, Sidney Lanier.
For most of his career, however, he was a newspaperman, for a time in Washington but mostly in San Francisco, where, in the glorious style of the times, he gave everything and everybody a continual shellacking. He was honest, incorruptible, and generally, though not always, a champion of the weak against the mighty. When some fastidious readers complained of his vituperativeness, he told them to “continue selling shoes, selling pancakes, or selling themselves. As for me, I sell abuse.”
Indeed he did, and it cost him dearly. For 50 years, Morris writes, Bierce doggedly rejected “the comfortable hypocrisies and spirit-killing compromises” that most of his countrymen settled for, and it brought him “loneliness, rancor, and spiritual isolation.” He became estranged from his wife and three children, and saw his two sons die terrible deaths at an early age.
Whatever the wellsprings of his outlook, it was one that led him to dwell on the macabre. Suicide, parental murder, and wife murder were among his chief obsessions. “Death is Bierce’s only subject,” Edmund Wilson maintained.
Yet it gave him a savage wit and the ability to write chilling ghost stories and scrupulously honest war stories. In writing about war, Hemingway may possibly—possibly—have said it better, but Bierce said it first. Had he not wasted so much of his time straining at journalistic gnats and “breaking butterflies on a wheel,” as one protégé put it, he might have produced far more.
As for the mysterious manner of his passing, the longtime favorite explanation is that he disappeared into Mexico in 1913. Some versions have him becoming either a victim or a supporter of one of the revolutionary leaders, like Pancho Villa. Others have him living on for decades with this or that Indian band.
Morris thinks that Bierce’s trip to Mexico was an elaborate smoke screen for something else. His theory, well argued, is that Bierce—aging, discouraged, alone, and in poor health—doubled back up into the United States and went and committed suicide in the Grand Canyon. He had always maintained that suicide could be an honorable act, and that the canyon would be a perfect place to do it.

Questions needing answers No. 7

Canada, that notoriously rogue, pariah state, is once again becoming the United States’ Poster Nation for How Not to Have a Health Care System. In the scare advertisements being run by front organizations for insurance companies and medical mega-corporations, and in comments made by their Republican running dogs in Congress, we are warned that no way do we want a government-provided health-care system like they have in Canada, where, it would seem, people are all falling over from lack of medical attention, whether it be for ingrown toenails or for quadruple bypass surgery—except for those lucky few who manage to crawl over the border to our medical paradise to get the care they desperately need. The specter that Our Protectors continually raise is that of “some government bureaucrat coming between you and your doctor.” So the question is, Where does or will that ubiquitous bureaucrat stand should we find ourselves in the shackles of “socialized medicine?” Say you’re a guy with an aging prostate and you’re getting that annual finger wave from ol’ Doc Squint. Where is the bureaucrat in that scenario? Kinda close quarters for even the slimmest bureaucrat to slip in there. Or you ladies, on the table and feet in the stirrups for whatever those examinations are. A bit difficult to think of a convenient place for your government bureaucrat in that situation. I think we’re going to need some creative carpentry here to accommodate the many bureaucratic vantage points.