Overview
This story begins in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has reduced our world to ashes. Luckily, a few found their way to the stars and into immortality. In the year 3000, nostalgic for the past, they return to earth in an effort to reconstruct the loves of the people who lived there.
The Morning Star flows between the poetic, the fantastic and the realistic as it weaves the tale of the Jewish people from Abraham to the Holocaust and into the future.
Synopsis
This story begins in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has reduced our world to ashes. Luckily, a few found their way to the stars and into immortality. In the year 3000, nostalgic for the past, they return to earth in an effort to reconstruct the loves of the people who lived there.
The Morning Star flows between the poetic, the fantastic and the realistic as it weaves the tale of the Jewish people from Abraham to the Holocaust and into the future.
Library Journal
Schwarz-Bart's debut, The Last of the Just (1959), is regarded as one of the great works of contemporary Jewish literature. Fifty years later and four years after his death, a bookend to that novel appears, patched together from the author's manuscripts by his widow, Simone. Like the earlier novel, this is an intensely personal tale of the Holocaust that stands apart from other works of its type in its distinctive approach. Combining fact, myth, folktale, and fantasy, the plot spans several thousand years, from a small Polish village in the late 19th century to the year 3000 in another solar system. At its heart is a simple and powerful story of a flute-playing cobbler's son who loses his family but survives both the Warsaw ghetto and the extermination camp at Auschwitz. VERDICT Schwarz-Bart's harmonious prose stirs the emotions as he considers the unfathomable darkness of the human soul and the brightness of the morning that will always follow. A moving and illuminating read in its own right, his final novel serves as a fitting coda to one of the past century's most striking literary careers.—Forest Turner, Suffolk Cty. House of Correction Lib., Boston