The Morning Star - Hardcover

Andre Schwarz-Bart (1928-2006) was born in Metz, France, of Jewish Polish parents. Fifteen years later his parents were arrested and shipped to a Nazi concentration camp. Schwarz-Bart served with the French Resistance and was himself imprisoned, but escaped. His first book, The Last of the Just, won the Prix Goncourt in 1959. He went on to write A Woman Named Solitude, Pork and Green Bananas and In Praise of Black Women (the latter two with his wife, Simone Schwarz-Bart). He won the Jerusalem prize in 1967.

Acclaimed French novelist and Holocaust survivor Schwarz-Bart’s last novel, discovered after his death, begins in the year 3000, after the earth has been obliterated by a nuclear war. One survivor uncovers chests filled with manuscripts that document a human massacre occurring one thousand years earlier. The central narrative shifts to the Polish village of Podhoretz, and chronicles the life of Haim Shuster, descendent of the town’s fabled rabbi who is rumored to have hosted the prophet Elijah. Sensitive and inquisitive Haim possesses a gift that links him, in music and religion, to his lineage. When Nazi troops enter 1939 Poland, Haim’s family is cruelly separated, leaving him to care for his three young brothers. While Haim becomes increasingly disillusioned with God and humanity, he struggles to survive in the Warsaw Ghetto and, subsequently, Auschwitz. Years later, Haim, much older and expecting a child of his own, struggles to reconcile the horrors of the Holocaust with the weight of his oscillating spirit. Schwarz-Bart’s tale is a delicate, necessary portrait, wavering between faith and disbelief, reconciliation and doubt. --Leah Strauss