BOOKS
297
out of the nightmare and be the more capable of a decent working
dream. This sense of possi'0ility Williams reveals through a crafts–
manship that justifies some examination.
It
is the craftsmanship of
one who, working to make a familiar territory, the West, produce
the best that it can, rejects the popular quick-profit single-crop
system that requires only mechanical repetitions of familiar steps,
and takes the hard way of surveying the land anew and exploring
complex possibilities that are there only when they are seen.
Robert B. Heilman
FICTION CHRONICLES
THE LAST OF THE JUST. By Andre Schwllrz-Bllrt. Atheneum. $4.95.
TEM PO 01 ROMA. By Alexis Curvers. Meridilln. $1 .45.
THE MARQUISE OF
0-.
By Heinrich von Kleist. Criterion. $5.
A great success when it first appeared in France, Andre
Schwarz-Bart's novel about the extermination of the Jews is
another of those worthy books which makes every
claim
upon us
except a literary one.
Mr. Schwarz-Bart begins with a series of vignettes based on the
lovely
.J
ewish legend of the
lamedvovniks,
the thirty-six obscure men
whose devotion to the idea of justice allows the world to continue.
Martyr after m<trtyr
is
sketched, each of them a
lamedvovnik
who
passes the hope of justice on to his son, until, in the bulk of the
novel, there is a full-scale rendering of the agonies and destruction
in
the gas chambers of Ernie Levy, the last of the just. Mr. Schwarz–
Bart's use of this legend to carry his central idea suggests the influ–
ence of recent Yiddish poetry, with which he is apparently familiar.
This idea, most forcefully developed in the work of the Yiddish
poet Glatstein, is that the killing of the six million irrevocably broke
the tacit assumption which had made possible three thousand years
of Jewish history-the assumption of a bond between the Jews and
their God, resting on the promise or even the possibility of justice-–
and that now the very people who had once been closest to God
must stand apart in abandonment, waiting for an answer to ques-
