Word: barts
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...LAST OF THE JUST (374 pp.)-André Schwarz-Bart-Atheneum...
Part of the phenomenon is the author himself. André Schwarz-Bart, 32, is largely self-taught. Born in the long-embattled French-German border city of Metz, the son of a Polish-Jewish peddler, Andre spoke Yiddish as his first language and picked up French in the streets while selling newspapers to help support his family. At 14, after the Nazis invaded France, Andre lost his parents to the gas chambers, subsequently escaped a French internment camp to join the Maquis, and was finally mustered out of the French army at an underage 17. As a postwar tractor-factory...
...book is not as remarkable as its reputation. To the agonizing, centuries-old why of antiSemitism, Author Schwarz-Bart replies with a non sequitur -there'll always be a Jewry. At times this makes his novel a disconcerting cross between The Wall and a Jewish Cavalcade. His persecuted characters bleed purple prose, and he persistently confuses an assault on the nerves with a cry from the heart. Nevertheless, there are a great many moments when the book is as affecting as a wronged child's tears, and as unanswerable...
...newborn, and humanity would suffocate with a single cry." So frozen with man's woes is the Just Man that sometimes when he rises to heaven, "God must warm him for a thousand years between his fingers before his soul can open itself to Paradise." Author Schwarz-Bart imagines a familial dynasty of Lamed-Vov called the Levys. The first of the line, Rabbi Yom Tov Levy, forces himself to slit the throats of 250 of his coreligionists in an 1185 A.D. pogrom in York, England, rather than have them tortured or converted. After this follows an inexorable litany...
...they're not there." On the same theme, Mort announced: "President Eisenhower is in charge of everything-whenever Nixon leaves the country." Picking off the mighty and famous, Sahl got the surprise of the week when his angriest foe turned out to be his TV sponsor, California Millionaire Bart Lytton (Lytton Savings & Loan Association). A Kennedy backer.* Lytton simmered in the control booth as Sahl and guests enthusiastically reviewed the merits of Adlai Stevenson on the air, finally barged into the studio and woofed into the microphone that the show was not "a Stevenson rally." Complained Sahl: "I have...