I don't know. Maybe I shouldn't bother with outlines, but I have to be different from Peter, right? I could just talk. So what we're doing now is we're reading The Last of the Just. And implicitly I hope, comparing it to poem, Sir Paul Solon's poem to to Aaron Applefeld. But Schwartz-Barts does something that I think makes him a little different. Because Schwartz-Barts' novel raises a major issue, especially about the modern world. And it's about violence. Violence is front and center in that novel. Whereas, it exists in the other stories, but in a different way. In Schwartzbard's account, the protagonist, the major characters all have to deal with direct acts of violence against them. So does Wiesel, so does Primo Levi, but it isn't so confrontational. So the notion of violence in the modern novel, violence and these books, is something that I want to elicit. And the question is, how does one think, or imagine, or write about, and here is where Schwarz-Bart is so powerful, psychological issues of violence. And he's even more interesting because its not just violence from the perspective of the perpetrator. But violence from the perspective of the one on whom it is perpetrated. So as I was working on this, I have several versions. And I said, should I say violence from the point of view of the perpetrator, And violence from the point of view of the victim. But I crossed that word out because victim implies something is being done to you, which it is, and you can't do anything about that. And in some ways, the Jews could not. When the Nazi state what shall we do with the Jews? The Nazi state had all the power, and yet my argument is that within very narrow constraints There was an effort to take some kind of action. And I ask you, as you think, for example as you read Rywka Lipszyc's diary. Are there things that people do to try to respond to the violence that's being done to them, and they don't have the option of pulling out a gun, right? Is there anything they do that keeps them psychologically able to have some kind of sense of control over what they're doing. I would suggest that for example, when the Nazis in the Wooch ghetto do the roundups, the selections. She talks about how one of her friends is taken because they can't find, they're taking only the older men, right? They can't find her father who's hiding. So they take the daughter and make her a hostage. So the father, eventually the father comes out of hiding. They release the daughter. Is this a useful way of dealing with violence? Well it's- I don't know. But it's one way. Right? And that seems to me, psychologically an issue that we need to think about. Does that become a way of framing future crisis and future options? And it seems to me that the diary, told in that diary first person, asks us to think about it. And so does Schwartz-Bart. Other things would have been better, but they weren't possible. Now Schwartz-Bart thinking about violence and the modern world asks another question. He asks whether in Europe, where there was so much Jew hatred in the medieval world, but there was not genocide. How is the Jew hatred of the medieval world connected to the anti-Semitism of the modern Hitler world. And Peter has been very good pointing to the fact that Hitler invents what we could call, what I call a unified field theory of anti-Semitism. The Unified Field Theory means if you're a communist and a Jew, you're bad. If you're a capitalist and a Jew you're bad. There's no way out of it in that ideology. In the medieval world there were options. Including conversion, and, as far as Hitler is concerned, it's no good if you convert to Christianity. That's not going to save you. Because he has a racial idea of it, right? And, the whole racial idea Is different. Now, this leads, To a question that we've seen over and over again. And then Aharon Appelfeld in Baden 1939, but also in a wonderful autobiographical memoir says, wherever we were in the ghettos, whatever we talked about, we kept coming back to why us? Why did they pick on us? What did we do? And this of course is the question that we've seen throughout these texts, why us? Whatever we're talking about, and it's there in a famous joke. The nazi show's up, and he grabs an older jew. And he says, you Jews are our misfortune. We're gonna take care of you. And the Jew says yes, yes, because he's being forced to agree. That's part of authoritarian and totalitarian habits. You're not only are the victim but you have to agree to your victimization in some ways. So the Jew what can he do? The Nazi is there. The Jew says, yes, yes we did all those things. And he says, and that's why you are asking me why the Jews. And he says, it's the Jews and the bicyclists. And the Nazi says to him in response- You know, what you've done, but where'd the bicyclist come from? And the old guy says, why the Jews! Why the bicyclist! So this is part of a little bit of trying to figure out the senselessness of the world in which there is [FOREIGN] remember. And, Schwarz-Bart is very aware of folk traditions. So, I suggest that he's writing about the destruction of communities, and we move from Poland to Germany in that book. And the folk wisdom is very old and it's deep in Yiddish, and I've suggested that the word that I like to use for this course, but you wouldn't know what it was if I said [FOREIGN], right? I suggest that there's a Yiddish proverb. And the Yiddish proverb tells you a great deal about Yiddish, which is, sort of German syntax, and full of Hebrew words and Hebrew traditions. It begins with a Hebrew phrase. And it's the Hebrew phrase, [FOREIGN] God who choose us and then: and the Yiddish phrase [FOREIGN]. Which is best translated as, you chose us from among the nations, why did you pick on us? To God. And that's of course a very different kind of understanding. Why did you pick on us? But that's a very older tradition. So Schwarz-Bart has to deal with how the Jews have been picked on, not by God, although to say that you're asking this of God suggest that you still believe the world makes sense. Schwartzbard comes to- A myth. He comes to a parable. He comes to a folk story. Which is probably Christian in it's origins. And the folk story is that in the world there are 36 just men. They're called Lamed Vovnik. Cuz the two letters the lamed and the vav in Hebrew add up to 36. Hebrew letters were also numbers. And that it's these 36 just men who take on the suffering of the world. So this is an earlier idea of suffering and how you deal with suffering, and it goes back to the middle ages. But it's really a Christian question, and we know that from folklore analysis. But also the notion of these 36 just men as taking on the suffering of the world, is also echoing the Christian tradition of Jesus, right? Who suffers for everyone. So here we have Schawrtz-Bart saying, in the modern world, we continue with this tradition of the 36 just men. And the very title [FOREIGN] was written in French, the last of the just. Now, The story of the 36 just men is that, as long as these 36 just men are hanging around and going from generation to generation, the world can continue to function. Schwarz-Bart is asking in the modern world if they've killed all the just men, what's left? And we have a tradition that the just man and Schwarz-Bart Dramatizes it, is the man who, as Jesus said, turns the other cheek when he is hit. You'll recall that this happens early in the novel. But then other things happened as well in the novel. And we have a just man who rebels, just to show you this,
