André Schwarz-Bart

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André Schwarz-Bart (born Abraham Szwarcbart on May 23, 1928 in Metz ; died on September 30, 2006 in Pointe-à-Pitre , Guadeloupe ) was a French writer.

Life

Abraham Szwarcbart's parents moved from Poland to France in 1924, the family language was Yiddish . After the German occupation of France , the parents, two brothers and a great aunt were arrested and deported to extermination camps. Szwarcbart, then 13 years old, was spared with his younger siblings.

Schwarz-Bart received no regular schooling. In 1943 he joined the Resistance and was able to escape after being captured. After the Allies landed in 1944 , he joined the French army and was demobilized after the war. He got by as a laborer with odd jobs and devoted himself to reading novels; he was greatly impressed by the book Guilt and Atonement . He made up his Abitur and received a scholarship to study at the Sorbonne . In 1953 he began to publish essays in a student newspaper. In 1959 his novel Le dernier des justes was published , which immediately received the Prix ​​Goncourt and sold a million copies. The novel has been translated into seventeen languages. The novel tells the story of the suffering of the Jewish Lévy family, in which there has been a “ righteous person” in every generation since a bloodbath in York in 1135 , and refers to the legend of the 36 righteous people . The last one in this series, Ernie Lévy, suffers his ordeal in the face of the Holocaust . In 1967, Schwarz-Bart also received the Jerusalem Prize for the book .

Despite this public recognition, Schwarz-Bart remained an outsider in the literary business and published only very sparingly. In 1959 he married Simone Brumant from the Antilles island of Guadeloupe; they had two sons, of whom Jacques Schwarz-Bart , born in 1962, established himself as a jazz musician. In 1967 they wrote the novel Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes together and planned a number of other joint novels from the Creole circle . Simone Schwarz-Bart's novel Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle , published in 1972, received the “Grand prix des lectrices de Elle” and is now considered a key work of West Indian literature . The couple then moved to Guadeloupe. It is not certain whether Simone Schwarz-Bart was involved in the novel La Mulâtresse Solitude , published in 1972 . The book was well received because of its poetic language. In 1988, the author couple published the six-volume encyclopedia Hommage à la femme noire .

Schwarz-Bart was honored as Officier des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, and in 2008, posthumously, the author couple was awarded the Prix ​​Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde for his life's work.

Works

  • Le dernier des justes . 1959
    • The last of the righteous . Translation of Mirjam Josephson. Frankfurt a. M.: S. Fischer, 1960 [Berlin: Verl. Volk u. World, 1961]
  • with Simone Schwarz-Bart: Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes . Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967
  • La mulâtresse Solitude . Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972
    • The mulatto Solitude . Translation Eva Schewe, Gerhard Schewe. Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1975
  • with Simone Schwarz-Bart: Homage à la femme noire . Encyclopedia. Éditions Consulaires, 1989

literature

  • André Schwarz-Bart in the Munzinger archive ( beginning of article freely accessible)
  • Judith Klein : Literature and Genocide: Representations of the National Socialist mass extermination in French literature . Vienna: Böhlau, 1992, pp. 96-105
  • Kathleen Gyssels: Filles de Solitude. Essai sur l'identité antillaise dans les (auto) -biographies fictives de Simone et André Schwarz-Bart . Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996
  • Beate Wolfsteiner: Investigations into the French-Jewish novel after the Second World War . Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 2003

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Black-Beard, André
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Szwarcbart, Abraham
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1928
PLACE OF BIRTH Metz
DATE OF DEATH September 30, 2006
Place of death Pointe-à-Pitre , Guadeloupe