André Schwarz-Bart's contribution to Holocaust fiction rests solely on his controversial work Le Dernier des justes (1959; translated as The Last of the Just, 1960), which remains one of the best-selling and most widely translated Holocaust novels. Following the history of European Jewry, the narrative moves from the mass suicide of the Jews of York in 1190 through eighteenth-century Hasidic village life and nineteenth-century assimilation and anti-Semitism--all of which encompass the heritage of a Jewish family named Levy--and culminates during the Nazi era with Ernie Levy, who becomes a victim of the gas chambers at Auschwitz. Because of this broad historical scope, the novel has often been read as suggesting that the Holocaust was not an historical anomaly but rather the twentieth-century nadir of Jewish persecution in Europe, from medieval blood-libels through massacres and expulsions to the destruction of nearly the entire Jewish population of Europe in Adolf Hitler's "Final...