André Schwarz-Bart
André Schwarz-Bart (May 28, 1928, Metz, Moselle - September 30, 2006, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe) was a French novelist of Polish-Jewish origins. He was awarded the 1967 Jerusalem Prize. Biography. Schwarz-Bart's parents moved to France in 1924, a few years before he was born. His first language was Yiddish and he learned to speak French on the street and in public school. In 1941 his parents were deported to Auschwitz. Soon after, Schwarz-Bart, still a young teen, joined the Resistance. It was his experiences as a Jew during the war that later prompted  him to write his major work, chronicling Jewish history through the eyes of a wounded survivor. He spent his final years in Guadeloupe, with his wife, the novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, whose parents were natives of the island. The two co-wrote the book "Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes" (1967). It is also suggested that his wife collaborated with him on "A Woman Named Solitude". The two were awarded the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde in 2008 for their lifetime of literary work. He is best known for his novel "Le Dernier des justes  (translated into English as The Last of the Just"). The book, which traces the story of a Jewish family from the time of the Crusades to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, earned Schwarz-Bart the Prix Goncourt in 1959. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1967. He died of complications after heart surgery in 2006. One of his two sons with his wife Simone is Jacques Schwarz-Bart, a noted jazz saxophonist.