The Legacy of Primo Levi (Italian & Italian American Studies)

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The Legacy of Primo Levi

Edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese

Italian and Italian American Studies Stanislao G. Pugliese Hofstra University Series Editor This publishing initiative seeks to bring the latest scholarship in Italian and Italian American history, literature, cinema, and cultural studies to a large audience of specialists, general readers, and students. I&IAS will feature works on modern Italy (Renaissance to the present) and Italian American culture and society by established scholars as well as new voices in the academy. This endeavor will help to shape the evolving fields of Italian and Italian American Studies by re-emphasizing the connection between the two. The following editorial board of esteemed senior scholars are advisors to the series editor. REBECCA WEST University of Chicago

JOHN A. DAVIS University of Connecticut

FRED GARDAPHÉ Stony Brook University

PHILIP V. CANNISTRARO Queens College and the Graduate School, CUNY

JOSEPHINE GATTUSO HENDIN New York University

VICTORIA DeGRAZIA Columbia University

Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film edited by Gary P. Cestaro July 2004 Frank Sinatra: History, Identity, and Italian American Culture edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese October 2004 The Legacy of Primo Levi edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese November 2004

Forthcoming Books Representing Sacco and Vanzetti edited by Jerome A. Delamater and Mary Ann Trasciatti April 2005 Mussolini’s Rome: The Fascist Transformation of the Eternal City by Borden Painter July 2005 Carlo Tresca: Portrait of a Rebel by Nunzio Pernicone July 2005

The Legacy of Primo Levi Edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese Illustrated by Antonio Pugliese

THE LEGACY OF PRIMO LEVI

© Stanislao G. Pugliese, 2005. “After R. M. Rilke,” “A Profession,” “Buna,” “Partisan,” “Ostjuden,” “Reveille,” “25 February 1944,” and “Unfinished Business” from COLLECTED POEMS by Primo Levi, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. English translation copyright © 1988 by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, Inc., an affiliate of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–6645–1 hardback Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: January 2005 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To the Memory of Lorenzo Perrone “Lorenzo was a man; his humanity was pure and uncontaminated, he was outside this world of negation. Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man.” —Primo Levi, If This is a Man

vi

Frontispiece, Primo Levi (courtesy Jillian Edelstein)

Contents Illustrations

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Editor’s Note

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Introduction Trauma/Transgression/Testimony Stanislao G. Pugliese

1 3

Writing 1.

A Clear Eye on Life: Renaissance Style in Primo Levi’s Writing Fred Misurella

15 17

2.

Primo Levi’s Short Stories: A Modern Midrashim Raniero M. Speelman

23

3.

Primo Levi, Dante, and the “Canto of Ulysses” Nicholas Patruno

33

4.

The Genesis of If This is a Man Ian Thomson

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Judaism

59

5.

Primo Levi and the Jews David Mendel

61

6.

The Jewishness of Primo Levi Joseph Sungolowsky

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7.

A Hybridism of Sounds: Primo Levi between Judaism and Literature Sergio Parussa

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CONTENTS

Memory 8. The Object(s) of Memory: Models of Remembering in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo Timothy C. Campbell 9. Primo Levi’s Odyssey: The Drowned and the Saved Isabella Bertoletti 10. “The Pain of Remembering”: Primo Levi’s Poetry and the Function of Memory Jay Losey 11.

The Drowned as Saviors of Humanity: The Anthropological Value of Se questo è un uomo Antoine Philippe

Philosophy 12.

13.

14.

95 97 105

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125 133

Primo Levi, Roberto Benigni, and the Politics of Holocaust Representation Marla Stone

135

Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and the New Ethics of Reading William McClellan

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The Question of Ethical Discourse: Emmanuel Levinas, Primo Levi, and Giorgio Agamben Dan Leshem

153

The Gray Zone

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15. The Gray Zone Expanded Joram Warmund

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16. A Typology of Gray Flowers: Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl on Auschwitz Timothy E. Pytell

177

17. “The Gray Zone” as a Complex of Tensions: Primo Levi on Holocaust Survival Marie L. Baird

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CONTENTS

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After Auschwitz

207

18.

209

The Biographical Fallacy Alexander Stille

19. On the Dangers of Reading Suicide into the Works of Primo Levi Jonathan Druker

221

20. A Bibliography of English and Italian Scholarly Writings on Primo Levi, 1985–2002 James Tasato Mellone

233

Contributors

267

Index

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Illustrations (Courtesy Antonio Pugliese)

Frontispiece, Primo Levi (courtesy Jillian Edelstein)

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Figures I.1

“Questo è un uomo?”, ink on paper, 1972.

2

1.1

Untitled, watercolor and ink on paper, 1973.

16

5.1

Untitled, watercolor and ink on paper, 1973.

60

8.1

Untitled, watercolor and ink on paper, 1971.

96

12.1

Untitled, watercolor and ink on paper, 1971.

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15.1

Untitled, watercolor and ink on paper, 1973.

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18.1

Untitled, watercolor and ink on paper, 1973.

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Editor’s Note

his volumes collects essays that were first presented at an international conference at Hofstra University in October 2002. The conference and the present volume would not have seen the light of day without the expertise and professional dedication of the staff of the Hofstra University Cultural Center. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the fine work of Ms. Natalie Datlof, Director of the Cultural Center and her staff, especially Ms. Athlene Collins-Prince, Ms. JoEllen Ryan, Ms. Deborah Lom, and Mr. Robert Spiotto. Dr. Alexej Ugrinsky, editorial consultant for the Hofstra University Cultural Center, assisted in the publication of this volume. At Palgrave Macmillan, I would like to thank the fine work and editorial support of Michael Flamini and Brendan O’Malley. Farideh Koohi-Kamali and Melissa Nosal guided the manuscript through the editorial process with skill and great care. My thanks to Professor James Tasato Mellone of Queens College, CUNY, for what is the most extensive scholarly bibliography on Primo Levi to appear in print. A generous grant from the Dorothy and Elmer Kirsh Endowment Fund for the Hofstra University Cultural Center assisted in the publication of the book. A special thanks to Paul Shapiro, Robert Eirenreich, Ann Mann Millan, and Severin Hochberg for inviting me to participate in a summer 2003 workshop on “Jewish Resistance and Jews in National Resistance Movements” at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. I hope the other members of the workshop will recognize some of the themes we discussed and thank them for their collegiality and insights. It is with deep appreciation and gratitude that I acknowledge the generosity of artist Antonio Pugliese whose visual work has added an important dimension to this project. Carmine Pugliese assisted with the reproduction of the artwork. I trust readers will not fault a decision to preface the various sections with Levi’s poems. As he himself wrote to an interviewer in 1972, “Poetry

T

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has been a mysterious necessity of all epochs and all human civilizations; it is a pregnant language that is both natural and artificial, whose origins are older than those of prose.” Although better known in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz, an editorial decision was made to leave the titles of Primo Levi’s most famous work in their different variations (If This is a Man in the British edition and Se questo è un uomo in the original Italian) as used by the various authors here. Similarly, La tregua is rendered as both The Truce (British) and The Reawakening (American). Both “Holocaust” and “Shoah” are used to describe the destruction of European Jewry. It is now commonly acknowledged that Levi’s writings have had an impact beyond the field of Holocaust studies. In this volume, some scholars examine how Levi has influenced the fields of philosophy, politics, and ethics; there are provocative comparisons with Dante, Giorgio Agamben, Franz Kafka, Emmanuel Levinas, Viktor Frankl, and Elie Wiesel; examinations of the role of science and the influence of Judaism; thoughtful contributions on Levi’s poetry and linguistics; the problem of memory and representation; the concept of the “gray zone”; and the controversy surrounding his death. In short, this volume promises to provide a unique perspective on the life and work of a writer who powerfully reminds us of what transpired in the extermination camps of Europe and what it means to be human after Auschwitz. Stanislao G. Pugliese Washington, D.C. August 2003

Introduction 25 February 1944 I would like to believe in something, Something beyond the death that undid you. I would like to describe the intensity With which, already overwhelmed, We longed in those days to be able To walk together once again Free beneath the sun. January 9, 1946

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Figure I.1 “Questo è un uomo?”, ink on paper, 1972

Trauma/Transgression/Testimony Stanislao G. Pugliese

Surveyor, I probed the secrets of the circle, The dubious paths of clouds and winds. I have known tears and laughter and much beauty. Therefore, don’t mock me, men of Agrigento, If this old body is deeply and strangely marked. “Autobiography,” from Primo Levi, Collected Poems, translated by Ruth Feldman

rimo Levi was born (July 31, 1919) into a highly assimilated and cultured bourgeois Jewish family in Turin, Italy. He spoke no Hebrew until late in life, did not observe the dietary laws, and only occasionally visited the Moorish-style synagogue in his native city on high holy days. Like most Italian Jews, he was shocked when the fascist regime published a “Manifesto of the Racial Scientists” in the summer of 1938. The following autumn, the regime promulgated a series of anti-Semitic laws patterned on the Nuremberg Laws in Nazi Germany. Although many Christian Italians disregarded the laws, Italian Jews suffered the first in a series of traumas that would quickly unfold over the next seven years. Obliquely, Levi recounted in his writings and interviews the numerous traumatic events that marked his life. In addition to the event that was to stamp him (literally: the number 174517 was tattooed onto his left arm) forever, the internment in Auschwitz, he suffered from several “minor” traumas: from failed physical and emotional relationships with women to the shock of the anti-Semitic laws, to the rejection of his first book by none other than Natalia Levi Ginzburg at the publishing house of Einaudi in Turin. In a self-fashioning that overcame numerous physical, psychological, and external obstacles, Levi managed to move from trauma to transgression and finally testimony in an attempt to defeat the demons (real and imagined) that plagued him for most of his life.

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The Fascist Party had come to power in 1922 without much trace of anti-Semitism (indeed, for many years the formidable Margherita Sarfatti, from a prominent Venetian Jewish family and patroness of the avant-garde, was Mussolini’s mistress).1 When, in the aftermath of increasingly close ties with Nazi Germany, the regime unleashed its first anti-Semitic campaign, not in 1938 as is usually thought, but as early as 1934,2 most Italian Jews failed to see the writing on the wall.3 This was eventually followed by the appearance of the Racial Manifesto and the promulgation of the Racial Laws. In 1943, most young men of Levi’s generation in northern Italy were confronted with some stark choices: they could obey the call to serve in the reconstituted fascist militia of the Republic of Salò alongside Nazi Germany, wait passively for the end of the war, or join the antifascist and anti-Nazi Resistance. Levi, as a Jew, obviously could not enroll in the fascist militia, nor could he afford the luxury of waiting for the end of the war. Having joined the antifascist Action Party (Partito d’Azione) in 1942, he entered the militant underground Resistance but was captured in December 1943. Somehow, he managed to shred his (obviously) false identification papers and swallow them while burying a notebook containing the names and addresses of his antifascist colleagues in the snow.4 Interned first at Fossoli, he was later transferred, in February 1944, to Auschwitz. He survived through a fortuitous combination of his extensive knowledge of chemistry, the humanity of a precious few other prisoners, and simple luck. His memoir of life in the extermination camp, Survival in Auschwitz (If This is a Man), has claimed its rightful place among the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. When the camp was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, Levi began a picaresque odyssey as recounted in La tregua (The Truce; later made into a feature film directed by Francesco Rosi). Levi’s final work, The Drowned and the Saved, is arguably the most profound meditation on the Shoah. In it, he conceptualized an ambiguous “gray zone” of moral life in the camps. The title of a major motion picture, the “gray zone” has influenced the fields of philosophy, theology, and Holocaust studies. * * * The memoirs are unanimous: Italian Jews were shocked into an “ancestral consciousness,” now painfully aware that the price of assimilation into Italian society had been some loss of identity. “I never thought of myself as a Jew until 1938” is a common motif.5 The taking up of arms against the Italian state—even if it was a fascist state—must surely have constituted another trauma for Levi and his fellow Italian Jews. Since the Napoleonic era, Italian Jews had benefited from an Enlightenment ideal that brought down—physically and culturally—the walls of the ancient ghettos. (Those ghettos had been constructed not just to separate Jews from

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Christians; rather the ghetto was created to better control Jews in a theological effort to force their conversion to Christianity, thereby hastening the Second Coming of the Messiah.) Bourgeois Italian Jews saw their emancipation as directly tied to the Risorgimento and the unification of the new nation state in the nineteenth century. Consequently, they were fervent nationalists and supporters of the Savoy dynasty. Two Italian Jews rose to the office of prime minister. This was difficult to imagine even in the birthplace of the Enlightenment, France. There, the Dreyfus Affair inflamed a nation and crowds chanted “Better Hitler than Blum!” in the streets of Paris when the Jewish premier was to take office in 1936. Italian Jews, although suffering from deep-rooted prejudice and anti-Semitism fostered by the Catholic Church, did not experience the pogroms of eastern Europe. Exponentially compounding the shock of being legally and socially expelled from civil society and having to take up arms against one’s own patria was Levi’s further trauma of facing life in what Albert Camus and others have termed the univers concentrationnaire. One incident among many, though surely not the most devastating, is illustrative: upon meeting a group of orthodox eastern European Jews in the camp and telling them he did not speak Yiddish, Levi was dumbfounded when they responded by adamantly insisting that “one who did not speak Yiddish was surely no Jew.” Levi was undoubtedly stunned: thrown into the concentration camp hell because of his religion in the eyes of the Nazis, yet denied by his own coreligionists. Here developed one of the many great paradoxes in Primo Levi: the Jew without Yahweh. “I became a Jew in Auschwitz,” he once wrote. At the same time, he could also insist, “There is Auschwitz, hence there can be no God.” The brutality of the guards and the absence of a deity were not the only shocks of the concentration camp universe. In an interview with a British intelligence officer after the war, Levi revealed: This was the most unexpected shock we received entering the concentration camp; more or less consciously we hoped in finding at least solidarity among comrade prisoners. But it was not so. We found a completely different society, everybody was the enemy of the other, it was extremely rare to be able to have a friendship . . . it was extremely demoralizing to be compelled to watch your bit of bread from it being stolen away by your neighbor . . . it was terrible.6

If trauma was the first stage of Levi’s psychic drama, transgression was surely the second. By joining the underground Resistance and taking up arms (albeit a rather effeminate pistol that he never fired, as he himself

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admitted), Levi ineffectively transformed the original trauma into transgression against fascism and nazism. This was no hardened member of the original antifascist underground, but a middle-class youth hardened physically only by his solitary hikes in the mountains outside Turin and psychologically devastated by his inability to forge close relationships with women. Carol Angier’s 2002 psycho-biography of Primo Levi locates the focus of the writer’s life-long melancholy and eventual depression in an inability to relate to the opposite sex.7 Perhaps. It does seem that Levi suffered from a “body anxiety” that was more similar to that of Kafka8 than to his native Italian Jewish tradition, where there was no need to promulgate the myth of the “virile” Jew. Tellingly, the most highly decorated officer of the First World War in Italy was General Emanuele Pugliese, a Jew. In such an Italy, there was little danger of a Dreyfus Affair or a receptive audience for the political pornography of Julius Streicher. While trauma can surely leave a person psychologically crippled in its wake, for Levi, the great trauma of his life may have paradoxically saved him. Late in life, Levi confessed that the months that he spent in the extermination camps were the only period of his life freed momentarily from a life-long struggle with melancholy and depression. An insightful friend once told him, “Your remembrances of before and after are in black and white; those of Auschwitz and your travel home are in Technicolor,” to which Levi laconically confessed, “he was right.”9 Levi’s transgression was to join the Action Party in 1942.10 In retrospect, it was an obvious choice. In Turin, he had attended the prestigious Ginnasio-Liceo Massimo d’Azeglio, which boasted such illustrious antifascist faculty members as Augusto Monti, Franco Antonicelli, Umberto Cosmo, Zino Zinni, Norberto Bobbio, and even Cesare Pavese. Most of these intellectuals had been members of the Justice and Liberty movement and had already been “purged” by the time Levi was enrolled, but students breathed the dangerously refreshing air of antifascism. At the University of Turin, besides reading the classic German chemistry books that would later contribute to saving his life, Levi also read Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, and Leo Tolstoy. The racial laws of 1938 should have meant his expulsion but he was permitted to remain and completed his degree (stamped “di razza ebraica”) in July of 1941. With his father dying of cancer and the family finances in dire straits, Levi found employment, first in a chemical laboratory attached to a nickel mine, then in a Swiss pharmaceutical factory in Milan. With the Allied invasion of southern Italy, Mussolini was deposed in a (temporarily) bloodless coup d’état in July 1943. By this time, Levi had already forged friendships and contacts with militant antifascists in the Piedmont region, joining the Fratelli Rosselli battalion of the Action Party

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operating in the Val d’Aosta province. “I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion,” he was to write on the first page of Survival in Auschwitz. The Action Party derived its name from Giuseppe Mazzini’s nineteenthcentury movement that was so instrumental in the Risorgimento. Established in 1942, it was the political and intellectual heir of the Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty) movement founded by Carlo Rosselli, Emilio Lusso, and Alberto Tarchiani in Paris in 1929 after Rosselli’s dramatic escape from confino on the penal island of Lipari.11 Rosselli and his colleagues insisted—contrary to popular opinion and the august judgments of political philosophers—that socialism and liberalism were not antithetical but that the former was the logical and historical culmination of the latter. Justice and Liberty was soon recognized as one of the most influential of the antifascist organizations and, from its headquarters in Paris, attracted a large number of Italian Jewish intellectuals. Rosselli and his historian brother, Nello, Jews from a patriotic family, were assassinated in June 1937 by French Cagoulards on orders from the Italian fascist regime. (The assassination became the basis for Alberto Moravia’s novel The Conformist and Bernardo Bertolucci’s film of the same name.) The Action Party published a newspaper, L’Italia Libera, which was distributed through a clandestine network of couriers in Italy (oftentimes women). Its program insisted on the abolition of the monarchy (Italy was to be a democratic republic based on socialist principles), the nationalization of major industries, land reform, workers’ rights in management and in sharing profits, and a European union of free and independent states. It alone insisted on a thorough purge of fascists from the civil service and military—a purge that sputtered out and was extinguished almost immediately after the war.12 Levi’s decision to join the Action Party affords an opportunity to briefly ponder the question of whether there was a “Jewish antifascism.” The late historian of Italian fascism Renzo De Felice insisted that while there were Italian Jews in all the antifascist movements, it is impossible to speak of a “Jewish antifascism.” Although the contribution of Italian Jews to antifascism was “numerically and qualitatively truly impressive,” and though “Judaism has undoubtedly a certain democratic and liberal substratum,” they participated as Italians rather than Jews. Instead of speaking of “Jewish antifascism,” De Felice concluded, “one could only speak of antifascist Jews.”13 Elsewhere, I have argued that figures such as Carlo Rosselli and Primo Levi might force us to revisit and contest De Felice’s claim.14 Italian Jews were represented across the political spectrum from ardent fascists to fervent communists. And although they were present in all political parties and all persuasions of antifascism, many Jews seemed to gravitate

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toward Justice and Liberty, which acquired a reputation as the “movement of Jewish intellectuals.” They then found themselves together again in the Action Party. They included Carlo Levi, Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani, Mario Levi, Sion Segre Amar, and Vittorio Foà. There were also women who made important contributions to the movement: Mario Levi’s sister, Natalia, was an active member in the movement and later achieved recognition as one of Italy’s finest writers. She married Leone Ginzburg, a Russian professor of Slavic literature who had refused to sign the oath of loyalty demanded by the fascist regime of all university professors in 1931. In 1935, he was arrested along with much of the Turin branch of Justice and Liberty. Released, he returned to his antifascist activities with the Action Party, but died under Nazi torture in Rome’s notorious Regina Coeli prison in 1944. Levi was intellectually and politically formed by the milieu of his native city of Turin.15 The Turin branch of Justice and Liberty/the Action Party was most immersed in the cultural battle raging within Italy. Under the patronage of Giulio Einaudi and the Einaudi publishing house, Carlo Levi, Leone Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese, and Luigi Salvatorelli came together to form a new journal, La Cultura. Carlo Levi often used the pretext of painting his friends’ portraits, including one of Primo Levi, as a cover to discuss their antifascist activities. The Action Party, like its nineteenth-century predecessor, never managed to transform itself into a mass party. Although its leader, the highly respected Ferruccio Parri, became the first postwar prime minister, his governing coalition was sabotaged by the Christian Democrats and he was forced to resign in November 1945.16 After the disastrous results of the 1946 elections, the party dissolved and its adherents either found their way to the other leftist parties or retired from active politics and became independent intellectuals. Although it might be judged a political failure, some perceive the Action Party as having left a “strong and lasting mark on Italian intellectual life.”17 This political reading of Levi has been all but ignored in the vast exegesis of his work, especially in America. While Levi has now claimed an iconic status comparable to Elie Wiesel, few of his readers would know that he was a socialist in his politics (although affiliated with neither the Italian Socialist Party nor the Italian Communist Party). Yet his brief experience with the partisans of the antifascist and anti-Nazi Resistance was to mark him for life. It resurfaced in his only novel, a work of historical fiction, and flowed, comparable to a subterranean current, in his essays for the liberal Turinese newspaper La Stampa; it occasionally surfaced in explicit form in his poetry. In “Partisan,” a poem from July 1981, Levi asks “Where are you now, partisans of all the valleys?” Many sleep in decorous graves; Those who are left are white-haired

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And tell the sons of sons how, In the remote times of certainties, They broke the Germans’ siege ... On your feet, old men: for us there is no discharge. Let’s find each other again. Let’s go back to the mountains, Slow, breathless, with stiff knees, With many winters in our backbones. The steep path will be difficult for us, Hard the cot and hard the bread. We’ll look and not know one another, Mistrustful, peevish and touchy. Like then, we will stand guard So the enemy will not take us by surprise at dawn. What enemy? Every man is the enemy of every other, With everyone split by an inner border, The right hand enemy of the left. On your feet, old men, enemies of yourselves: Our war is never over.18

While I should leave the exegesis of Levi’s poetry to others far more capable (including a contributor to this volume, Nicholas Patruno), here one cannot help but marvel at how Levi not only reveals in a few short lines his emotional and psychological debt to the Resistance, but at the same time offers an intellectual autobiography: with references to the partisan folk song “Bella Ciao” (“Many sleep in decorous graves”); classical antiquity (the Homeric epithet “white-haired”); Dante (“the steep path”); his own ineffectual military service (“take us by surprise at dawn”); Thomas Hobbes (homo homini lupus est); the gray zone (“everyone split by an inner border”); the New Testament (Matthew 6:3); and Mordo Nahum’s grim prophecy: “There is always war.” Levi’s multiple traumas were tempered—although never expunged— through his testimony. He was captivated by Coleridge’s image of the ancient mariner, compelled to tell his story. In fact, Coleridge’s haunting lines Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.

are used as an epigraph to Levi’s poem “The Survivor” and “at an uncertain hour” serves as the title of a collection of his poems.19 Although it can be argued that the Holocaust was the central event of our time, Levi did not want to be known as a “Holocaust writer”; he

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aspired to the simple title of “writer” without any adjective (“Holocaust,” “Italian,” or “Jewish”). Besides his Holocaust masterpieces, Levi also wrote poetry, essays, science fiction, and a novel concerning Jewish partisans in the Second World War. In addition, although he was painfully shy and adamant in protecting his privacy, Levi graciously granted hundreds of interviews, including two eloquent conversations with Tullio Regge (a physicist) and Ferdinado Camon (a writer).20 For Levi was too modest, at least publicly. His testimony was not only, as he stated, “to bear witness,” but to search for an ethical line of conduct and moral reasoning based on classical humanism but cognizant of humanity’s changed moral status after Auschwitz. Robert Gordon of Cambridge University has demonstrated how Levi’s writings constitute a complete ethical system based on “ordinary virtues.” These are in contrast to the “heroic” virtues of heroism, courage, and strength as traditionally conceived. This concept of “ordinary virtues” is derived partially from Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self and is in contradistinction to Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices. For Shklar, the ordinary vices are cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, treachery, and misanthropy (in that order). Levi transformed and made his own the traditional “heroic” virtues. “Heroism,”“courage,” and “strength” came to signify vastly different things in the moral universe of the extermination camp from what they meant in classical literature. Gordon is here closer to what Norberto Bobbio called the “weak” virtues, always social virtues of private individuals, usually the poor and the downtrodden.21 Bobbio’s “strong” virtues are those usually associated with history and politics. What, then, are Primo Levi’s “ordinary virtues”? They are divided by Gordon into those of the “ethical turn”: looking, memory, use, and discretion; wit or “practical intelligence”: measure, practice, perspective, and invention; “community”: common sense, friendship, and storytelling; and “diversions” such as play and irony. Gordon, I think, is correct in arguing that Levi’s writings can be collectively considered a complete ethical system for the post-Auschwitz moral universe that we now occupy.22 Another scholar who has argued that Levi’s writings constitute a complete ethical system is Massimo Giuliani. In his recent work A Centaur in Auschwitz: Reflections on Primo Levi’s Thinking, Giuliani crafts a neologism, salvaction, to describe a process of salvation through one’s actions. Giuliani employs a “star of salvaction” in which each of the six points of the star (similar to a star of David) directs one to a method or action, and these methods and actions collectively contribute to meaning—and thereby salvation—after the Holocaust. This schema reiterates Levi’s rational and demythologizing approach to the Holocaust, as opposed to the religious and mystical perspective of an Elie Wiesel.23

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This testimony and search for an ethical system can in no way be divorced from his continuing transgression, this time against conventional Italian literary models. For many years, beginning with Natalia Ginzburg’s now infamous rejection of Levi’s first book, the Italian literary establishment considered him a “minor writer.” Revealingly, Italo Calvino was one of the very few who described him early on as one of Italy’s most gifted writers. Italian literary critics were at a loss to analyze a writer who utilized “the language of the witness” governed by the spare rhetoric of science. Science and chemistry for the young Levi represented an intellectual and moral refuge from the false virility, military bombast, and perversion of language so characteristic of fascist rhetoric. Science for Levi was neither objective nor amoral but part and parcel of “the political and moral arena.”24 More forceful than C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” critique, Levi felt that the divorce of science from humanism was a tragic flaw of the twentieth century. He once revealed to an interviewer, “I am a centaur,” insisting that his roles as a scientist, chemist, and technician were complementary and not contradictory to his status as a writer and humanist.25 As he remarked in an interview with the American writer Philip Roth, “In my own way, I have remained an impurity, an anomaly, but now for reasons other than before: not especially as a Jew but as an Auschwitz survivor and an outsider-writer, coming not from the literary or university establishment but from the industrial world.”26 Even after his literary success late in life, Levi felt himself to be an outsider, and not just in Italy. A trip to the United States in 1984 proved to be especially difficult. Levi was simply too different: too Italian (he spoke English with difficulty); too Jewish for most Americans; not Jewish enough for American Jews who were put off by his criticism of Israel’s foreign and domestic policies. Particularly painful was what Levi perceived as a personal and professional slight from Saul Bellow. Levi represents both a paradox and an irony. An irony in that he, who was not an observant Jew, has become an icon of Judaism after the Holocaust, a circumstance he deplored. But if Jews must deal with Levi as ironic icon, Christians must contend with Levi as paradox: for in him, perhaps, we may find at least a response if not the answer to what transpired in the extermination camps of Europe during the Second World War, a moment in history that some have compared to a second “fall of man.” This in no way can be perceived or rendered as a “felix culpa,” no matter what banal dust jackets on Levi’s books may say about “the triumph of the human spirit.” In one of his last essays before his death, noted critic Gian Paolo Biasin traced Levi’s “haunted journey” through classical and modern literature, emphasizing the classic humanist tradition.27 But Levi was doubly “haunted,” I would argue, because he recognized the failure of both the classic humanist tradition and traditional religion in the light of

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the Holocaust. In an interview a year before Levi’s death, the writer Ferdinando Camon asked him, “Auschwitz is the proof of the nonexistence of God?” Levi replied at the time, “There is Auschwitz, and so there cannot be God.” As Levi checked the typewritten manuscript of the interview several days later, he penciled into the margin at this point, “I find no solution to this dilemma. I seek, but I do not find it.”28 This is surely a contemporary—though no less anguished—echo of Christ’s last words on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Notes 1. On Sarfatti, see the fascinating (but unfortunately titled) Il Duce’s Other Woman by Philip V. Cannistraro and Brian R. Sullivan (New York: Morrow, 1993). 2. See Joel Blatt, “The Battle of Turin, 1933–1936: Carlo Rosselli, Giustizia e Libertà, OVRA and the Origins of Mussolini’s Anti-Semitic Campaign,” in Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 1, 1 (Fall 1995): 22–57. 3. The dominant historiographical interpretation—that most Italians were free of anti-Semitism—has been challenged (correctly I believe) by Lynn M. Gunzberg, Strangers at Home: Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) and Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 2000). On the role of the Catholic Church much has been written: see John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope (New York: Viking, 1999); Susan Zuccotti, Under His Very Windows: The Vatican and the Holocaust in Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Michael Phayer, The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). More a work of polemics than history is Daniel J. Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Moral Repair (New York: Knopf, 2002); more scholarly—and therefore more damning—is David Kertzer, The Pope and the Jews: The Vatican’s Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism (New York: Knopf, 2001). 4. “Primo Levi in Conversation,” by Ian Thomson, first published in PN Review, 14, 2 (1987): 15–19; reprinted in Primo Levi: The Voice of Memory, trans. Robert Gordon and edited by Marco Belpoliti (New York: The New Press, 2001), 48. I am indebted to both Ian Thomson and Robert Gordon for their insightful comments, suggestions, and corrections regarding a first draft of this essay. 5. Two of the most poignant that have been translated into English are Fabio Della Seta’s The Tiber Afire, trans. Frances Frenaye (Malboro, VT: The Malboro Press, 1991), which originally appeared as L’incendere del Tevere (Trapani: Editore Celebes, 1969), and Aldo Zargani’s For Solo Violin: A Jewish Childhood in Fascist Italy, trans. by Marina Harss (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2002), originally Per violino solo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995). 6. From the transcript of the audio recording (Levi conducted the interview in his far-from-perfect English), held at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.

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7. Carole Angier, Primo Levi: The Double Bond (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). 8. Asked to translate Kafka’s The Trial, Levi found it a deeply painful experience, which contributed to another bout of depression. See his essay “Translating Kafka,” in Primo Levi, The Mirror Maker, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1989) and Ian Thomson, Primo Levi (London: Hutchinson, 2002), 427, 434, 443. 9. “A Conversation with Primo Levi by Philip Roth,” published as an afterword to Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 182. 10. The best history of the Action Party is Giovanni De Luna’s Storia del Partito d’Azione, 1942–1947 (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997). 11. On the charismatic Rosselli, see Stanislao G. Pugliese, Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 12. Roy Palmer Domenico, Italian Fascists on Trial, 1943–1948 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 13. Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, 4th ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1993), 419–427. 14. “Resisting Fascism: The Politics and Literature of Italian Jews, 1922–1945,” in Forging Modern Jewish Identities: Public Faces and Private Struggles, eds. Michael Berkowitz, Susan L. Tananbaum, and Sam W. Bloom (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), 269–283. 15. On Turin as an intellectual site of resistance to fascism, see Angelo D’Orsi, La cultura a Torino tra le due guerre (Turin: Einaudi, 2000) and Norberto Bobbio, Trent’anni di storia della cultura a Torino (1920–1950) (Turin: Cassa di Risparmio di Torino, 1977). 16. On the political and poetic significance of this moment in modern Italian history, see Carlo Levi’s The Watch (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 1999). 17. David Ward, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–1946. Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the “Actionists” (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 275. 18. “Partisan,” in Primo Levi, Collected Poems, trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (London and New York: Faber & Faber, 1988), 48; the original, “Partigia” (a Turinese abbreviation for the Italian “partigiano”), can be found in Primo Levi, Ad ora incerta (Milan: Garzanti, 1984 and 1991). 19. The Survivor,” in Primo Levi, Collected Poems, 64, is dedicated to “B.V.” (Bruno Vasari was a former partisan and a survivor of the Mauthausen concentration camp.) 20. Primo Levi and Tullio Regge, Dialogo, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, trans. John Shepley (Malboro, Vermont: The Malboro Press, 1989). 21. Norberto Bobbio, L’elogio della mitezza e altri scritti morali (Milan: Pratiche, 1998). 22. Robert S. C. Gordon, Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 23. Massimo Giuliani, A Centaur in Auschwitz: Reflections on Primo Levi’s Thinking (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003). For another study of Levi’s

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25. 26.

27. 28.

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ethical position, see Frederic D. Homer, Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001). Nancy Harrowitz, “Primo Levi’s Science as ‘Evil Nurse’: The Lesson of Inversion,” in Roberta S. Kremer, ed., Memory and Mastery: Primo Levi as Writer and Witness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 61. See Robert Gordon’s Introduction to Primo Levi: The Voice of Memory, ed. Marco Belpoliti (New York: The New Press, 2001), xx. “A Conversation with Primo Levi by Philip Roth,” 185. Levi’s explication of “the language of the witness” can be found in his afterword to The Reawakening, translated by Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 196. Gian Paolo Biasin, “The Haunted Journey of Primo Levi,” in Kremer, Memory and Mastery, 3–19. Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, trans. John Shepley (Malboro, VT: The Malboro Press, 1989), 68. In the Italian original: “C’è Auschwitz, quindi non può esserci Dio. Non trovo una soluzione al dilemma. La cerco, ma non la trovo.” Ferdinando Camon, Autoritratto di Primo Levi (Padua: Edizioni Nord-Est, 1987), 59.

Writing A Profession All you need to do is wait, fountain pen ready: The lines will whir around you, like drunken moths. One comes to the flame and you snatch it. To be sure, you’re not finished; one isn’t enough. Still it’s a lot—the beginning of your task. The others rival one another to light nearby, In a row or a circle, order or disorder, Simple and quiet and slaves to your command. You are the master—no doubt about it. If it’s a good day, you line them up. Fine work, isn’t it? Time-honored, Sixty centuries old and always new, With fixed or slack rules, Or no rules at all, just as you like. You feel you’re in good company, Not lazy, lost, or always useless, Sandaled and togaed, cloaked In fine linen, with your degree. Just take nothing for granted. January 2, 1984

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Figure 1.1 Watercolor and ink on paper, 1973. “Take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here.”

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A Clear Eye on Life: Renaissance Style in Primo Levi’s Writing Fred Misurella

rom the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance, important Italian writers have studied life with the alert eye of a committed scientist, fascinated by what they observe through the microscope whether their perceptions amuse, lift the spirits, or repulse. A forerunner from the Middle Ages, Dante’s clear, calculated study of Florentine history and politics in the Commedia followed his embrace of the daily language of common Italian people (as opposed to the more formal, intellectual, religious Latin of the Church) in De Vulgari Eloquentia, which I loosely translate as The Eloquence of Ordinary People. That essay, a landmark in the history of Western literary poetics, essentially laid the groundwork for the progressive liberalization of language, content, and form in world literature, a liberalization continued in the works, for example, of Flaubert, Whitman, Twain, Hemingway, Joyce, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and, starting with the 1960s, contemporary musical lyrics. In Italy Boccaccio hailed that eloquence and bawdily expanded upon it in his Decameron, essentially allowing his narrators to portray people, during a dangerous time of plague, not as they should be, but as they are, reflecting a humanity comprising flesh more than spirit, close to earth rather than heaven, prone to foolishness, venality, and self-love. Machiavelli promoted such a vision to justify the ways of his perfect prince. Galileo, a devoted botanist as well as stargazer, preferred sensory experience over theologically determined dogma as a footpath to truth. And we all know how Leonardo and Michelangelo, creators of divine images, grounded their work in the muscle and blood of human physiology. (Leonardo dissected cadavers and sketched their internal organs.) Yet each of these Renaissance Italians, gazing through the panoramic lens

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of life in general, also revealed individual humans as quite amazing and sometimes even divine. Dante, in The Inferno and The Purgatorio, provides that vision unstintingly. With his telling use of Virgil as a guide, he creates a powerful humanistic vision, grotesque, tortured, minutely detailed, that yields a larger, objective, Olympian understanding of humanity. While ostensibly about the imagined afterlife, Dante’s Commedia reflects the fleshy, faulty lives individual humans lead on earth, sometimes by choice, sometimes by necessity. Meanwhile, Dante’s portraits of individual people mired in their flaws moved Italian and Western philosophy forward into a new era where man became, as the saying goes, “the measure of all things.” That is, human decisions determined value. Because of that intellectual development, Galileo could look at the stars through his lens and challenge the dogma of his Church, and Machiavelli could evaluate the political actualities of his era and present a plan (partly realistic, partly ironic, I believe) to accomplish unity. With a shrug, Machiavelli seems to say, along with Galileo, “Still it moves. Such is human character.” Since their time, humanity’s confidence in itself has ebbed and flowed along with specific historical events, but the importance of humanistic studies, manifested through developments in anthropology, psychology, sociology, history, and medicine has quite clearly increased. These studies respond to many questions: What does it mean to be human? What is the purpose of the human individual in the face of a vast universe—indeed, all existence? What is a good life? What are our limits as individuals and as a race? Where do we go from here? Such questions haunt all human societies. Through arts and philosophy Europeans have examined them since classical times, with Italian writers and thinkers, especially since the Renaissance, frequently in the forefront. In our own epoch, Antonio Gramsci studied life among his contemporaries, and whether from his editorial desk at the political journal, L’Ordine Nuovo, or the depths of Mussolini’s fascist prisons, he described what he observed and prescribed what he thought Italians needed to improve ordinary human life. Like his Renaissance forbears, he saw life’s beauty as well as its misery and, along with his socialist vision, felt the pull of human complexity. In the last letter Gramsci wrote to his son from prison before his death in May 1937, he praises the study of history as about “everything that is about men, as many men as possible, all the men in the world united among themselves in societies, working and struggling and bettering themselves,” telling his son that such a process “must please you more than any other thing.”1 A decade later, Primo Levi would resurrect Gramsci’s clear-eyed, humanist view from Auschwitz. Levi’s memoir, Survival in Auschwitz,

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occupies a special place in this Italian tradition, being one of a cluster of well-known books about the Holocaust, including The Diary of Anne Frank, Schindler’s List, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, and any of Elie Wiesel’s writings. All describe the horrors of the Holocaust, all provide some perspective on its meaning, but Levi’s vision remains unique, in my opinion, because in writing the book—and reliving his experience— he preserves the Italian Renaissance method of rigorous observation and description, unveiling a rational, philosophic attitude toward events and people that is classical, scientific, resolved, yet, in the writing, almost optimistic in tone. The impact of Anne Frank’s diary depends on her hopeful, adolescent character and the loss of youthful idealism her death engendered. Keneally’s history moves us with the portrait of a sensual reprobate whose soul is saved by a heroic response to the one shining moment of possible goodness in his life: One must ask, if not for the concentration camps, how would Oscar Schindler’s life be judged? Tadeusz Borowski, a Polish journalist imprisoned in Auschwitz for political opinions, judged his own life and behavior harshly. His autobiographical accounts of stripping bodies, extracting gold teeth, and incinerating corpses after hauling them to the pits reeks of obvious despair and selfloathing, especially as a vision of human life and the depths to which an individual can descend. But Primo Levi’s narrative, autobiographical and true (“none of the facts are invented,” he sardonically informs us in the preface), remains lucid and reserved in tone, its contents full of the particulars of daily life in the Lager with little sense of disgust or despair hanging over it. He was lucky, he tells us, because of the timing of his deportation to Auschwitz, and shortly after that comment, he reveals one of the important lessons he learned there: “[E]veryone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable,” he writes in the first chapter, “but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable”2 (Survival 13; all subsequent notes refer to this text). To which the reader must nod and add, even in the hell of the Lager. Levi’s balanced portrayal of Lager life, a sort of gray, yet precise Purgatorial vision, shapes the narrative, providing an objective view of human existence that accepts evil as well as good with nearly equal amenity. As a result, Survival in Auschwitz lives as a masterpiece of anthropological observation as well as spiritual witnessing, a record of human horror and evil that also pays tribute to the perseverance and goodness of the human spirit in the face of the worst that life can offer. Levi says in the chapter titled “The Drowned and the Saved,” “We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced

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from this particular world we are describing” (87). He will provide no moral censorship, in other words, only accurate observation, the truth of an artist’s and scientist’s eye, whatever it happens to perceive. This courageous approach, founded on the achieved, intellectual traditions of Levi’s Italian Renaissance forebears, manifests itself not only in Survival in Auschwitz but also in The Truce, If Not Now, When? and other Levi books, providing a moving twentieth-century record of human distinction under stress. Stripped of clothes, shelter, hair, names, as well as sufficient food, the Auschwitz Häftlinge Levi describes fight to preserve their humanity and identities. Sent to the infirmary, Levi reflects on what has happened to him and the others: we have learnt that our personality is fragile, that it is much more in danger than our life; and the old wise ones, instead of warning us “remember you must die,” would have done much better to remind us of this great danger that threatens us. If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men, it would have been this: take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here. (55)

The remark, delivered with the representative pronoun “we,” speaks for all humans (those who suffer and those who inflict the suffering) and forms the rhetorical basis of Levi’s Italian Renaissance style: objective description, with individual sensual experience an indicator of broad human truths. One such indicator is Levi’s relationship with Jean, an Alsatian student who, at 24, Levi describes as the youngest Häftling of the Chemical Kommando. A bright young man in the privileged position of Pikolo (messenger boy and clerk) Jean doesn’t bear the burden of daily physical labor that Primo does. At the same time he carries influence with the Kapo and has saved many of the laborers from punishment with, as Levi phrases it, “a single word,” said in the right tone. He asks Primo to teach him Italian, and in the brief moments they have while fetching the daily ration of soup one day, Primo chooses to do so by reciting Canto XXVI of the Inferno about Ulysses. Several things occur during these precious moments of freedom: Levi attempts to explain the significance of Dante and the Commedia to Jean; he suffers lapses of memory as he tries to recite the canto in its entirety; and finally, as they walk and Primo strives to remember more of Dante’s lines, Levi sets up a parallel between his situation in Auschwitz and that of Ulysses, occupying a tongue of flame in Dante’s eighth circle of hell. The parallel provides an opportunity for the reader to put Levi’s Auschwitz experience in moral and philosophic perspective. Is he, like Ulysses, being punished for breaking God’s law—that is, for providing false counsel, or reaching too far? And is this punishment just?

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In the Commedia Dante and Virgil see twin tongues of flame, one inhabited by Ulysses, the other by Diomedes. Virgil asks for one to tell the story of his last journey, the one that ended in death. Ulysses, the larger flame, speaks, saying that neither the sweetness of his son, the piety of his father, nor the love he owed the ever-faithful Penelope could curb his appetite for more experience of the world, particularly the virtues and vices of human beings. He recounts his journey in a small ship with loyal followers beyond the Pillars of Hercules and then five months onward into the open sea. He encouraged the men by saying they were not born to live as brutes but to seek virtue and knowledge. Eventually they see a mountaintop, higher than any they had ever seen (Mount Purgatory, most critics say). But their joy over the discovery turns to sorrow because a storm rising from the new land strikes the ship, whirls it around until the sea, “as it pleased Another,” Ulysses says, closes over them. The walk to the soup line shadows Ulysses’s tale, with Primo and Jean seeking virtue and knowledge in their own twentieth-century hell. Primo seeks to recite Dante flawlessly; Jean seeks to learn an additional language. But as Primo works through the passage, halting, recalling fragments of lines while forgetting whole verses, Ulysses’s exhortation to his men about their birthright as human beings comes to him whole “like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God,” Levi writes. “For a moment I forget who I am and where I am” (113). Jean asks him to repeat the passage, and Levi excitedly reflects that his friend understands Dante too: “he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders” (114). For a few moments, Primo feels human again, one who thinks and imagines, one who doesn’t forget, demonstrating the function of art and history in human lives. Dante’s words lift the two men out of their misery, provide a momentary escape from hell, and lead to a feeling of shared humanity. What’s more, with the description of Mount Purgatory, Primo suddenly remembers the mountains he saw from the train around Turin, and when he reaches the passage about the boat going down “as it pleased Another,” he feels the urge to tell Jean that he has just seen “in a flash of intuition,” the reason for their fate, “for our being here today” (115). But before he can speak, they arrive at the soup line, and the press for food stops his words. Like Ulysses, they have come too far, but as in all human lives they have also not come far enough. Levi ends the chapter with Ulysses’s final line, about the sea closing over them. The moment is clear, somber, and moving in its insight. Levi has carried the narrative from the labor of the Häftlinge to a brief journey of shared discovery about Dante, language, and life, then closes with the inevitable frustration we all must face in the end. Still the human spirit

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shines through fleshly limitations; intelligence, imagination, and memory overcome physical bounds. In the next chapter, “The Events of the Summer,” Levi introduces Lorenzo, an Italian civilian worker he met at Auschwitz in 1944, and through his portrait completes his image of the good human character. For six months, Levi tells us, Lorenzo “brought me a piece of bread and the remainder of his ration” daily, gave Levi a vest, wrote a postcard for him, sent it to Italy, and returned afterward with the reply. Despite the risk to his safety, Lorenzo asked nothing for this service because, as Levi describes him, “he was good and simple and did not think that one did good for a reward” (121). It is perhaps the single most benevolent experience Levi recounts within Auschwitz, one that defines humanity as good, with or without education, and counters the horror of the rest of the story. While most of the civilian workers haughtily regarded the Häftlinge as untouchable, deserving their fates because, as Levi says, “we must be tainted by some mysterious, grave sin” (121), Lorenzo’s compassion shows, like Primo’s portrait of Jean, a broader, more optimistic view. The passage about Jean underlines the importance of history and art for the human mind, but the passage about Lorenzo points to our communal soul, “the eloquence of ordinary people,” as Dante put it. Levi gives Lorenzo credit for his own survival, not so much for the material aid he provided, but for his daily reminder “that there still existed a just world” for which it was worth surviving (121). It is the central message of the narrative, giving Survival in Auschwitz a special place in the Western tradition. Its Italian Renaissance method of rigorous observation and rational evaluation wrenches goodness and spirit out of the morass of awful human experience and, unique among Holocaust narratives, inspires hope for human history, even as it informs about the horrors that men and women must at times endure. Notes 1. Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings, trans. Louis Marks (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 5. 2. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 13.

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Primo Levi’s Short Stories: A Modern Midrashim Raniero M. Speelman rimo Levi remains less known as a writer of short stories than as one of longer writings. This is, of course, understandable in the light of the fundamental importance of what he wrote on the Shoah. Those writings have, however, a double nature: both testimony and narrative, both sociological analysis and description. They are in fact what we may call midrashim (from the Hebrew root drsh, cf. the word darasha, “preach”). Midrashim are not just stories, but have a deeper meaning as well, which may invite the reader to think about them. It is this double nature that we should always keep in mind when examining the particular character of Primo Levi’s narrative work. For Levi, literature as a whole is an Auseinandersetzsung, a coming to terms with two themes. This is clearly explained by the scheme Levi designed with his Macintosh when writing the introduction to La ricerca delle radici, a work I would not hesitate to call a key work for understanding his formation, way of thinking, and literary canon. It is a kind of personal anthology commented on by Levi himself, and was composed on the suggestion of Levi’s publisher Einaudi. Luckily, it has been translated into English and so is accessible for American readers as well.1 Our point of departure is the Biblical figure of Job, the man who feels betrayed in his belief in G-d. Job is the victim of a cruel bet between the Eternal and Satan, and loses everything he has. His lament is that of the Just unjustly punished. Our point of arrival is the conclusion that we are alone in the world, a mere product of the Big Bang that set Evolution in motion, and that at the end of it all are the Black Holes. In this bipolar world, Levi traced four lines of reading, one could say four approaches to literature (and life). Two are negative or neutral: Man Unjustly Suffering and Man’s Stature. In this seemingly hopeless scheme (which modernized Leopardi’s pessimism), there are, however, two positive lines as well that

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help Man to live the life that has been given to him. The most important are Salvation by Laughter (humorism, or, the possibility to enjoy and thereby recognize relativity) and Salvation by Understanding (or, the urge to know, the love of science). These two themes (which Levi points out in authors such as Rabelais, the romantic nineteenth-century poets Carlo Porta and Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, and the Yiddish author Schalom Alechem for the first and Lucretius, Darwin, and others for the second) counteract those of Man Unjustly Suffering (represented by T. S. Eliot, Isaac Babel, Paul Celan, and Levi’s friend Mario Rigoni Stern) and Man’s Stature, and his struggle with his destiny. This point of view enables us to place Levi’s short stories in proper perspective. Levi’s First Writings: Short Stories It was as a writer of short stories that the young Primo Levi made his debut, in the years before the overthrow of the Fascist regime (which took place in July 1943). The first short stories are of a fantastic nature: “Piombo” (lead) and “Mercurio” (Mercury). Both are about heavy metals. The setting of “Piombo” is prehistory and that of “Mercurio” reminds one of Robert Louis Stevenson. They were both included later in The Periodic Table (1975).2 This youthful production came to an end when Levi enrolled in a partisan unit after the German invasion of Italy in the summer of 1943. As we all know, Levi was soon arrested and, having made himself known as a Jew, deported to Fossoli and thence to Auschwitz. The first works that the young writer and chemist wrote after his return were a medical report on the camps’ sanitary conditions (with Leonardo Debenedetti) and Se questo è un uomo.3 The first text is of marginal significance; the second is essential to Levi’s work. Here we should mention as well his small and vigorous poems, which resemble his stories in their immense concentration. After the editorial rejection of Se questo è un uomo by Natalia Ginzburg at the Einaudi publishing house, Levi continued writing occasional short stories—if, that is, we define short stories as isolated creations. But there would be much to say for considering the various chapters of If This is a Man and The Truce,4 The Periodic Table, and The Wrench5 as short stories (or in some cases, as essays). In this case, the whole perspective that Levi’s work is usually fitted into would, of course, change radically. This interpretation can be accounted for by the fact that until 1975, Primo Levi was a writer in moments of leisure such as in the evenings and during holidays. It is justified by a statement of the author: “I had written stories after my

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return from the camps. I had written then without realizing that they could form a book.”6 One need only read the chapters “A Good Day” or “Chemistry Exam” from If This is a Man or any episode from The Truce to see they can exist in their own right as stories. This new examination of Levi’s work is a challenge I would propose but not enter into. We shall, return, however, to the question of the genre of The Periodic Table and The Wrench. I hope to show a different interpretation further on. But the tendency toward essentiality and concision that has been thoroughly analyzed by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo7 naturally directed Primo Levi toward shorter narrative prose. Levi was not a writer of psychological novels, even though, as a keen observer of others, he was a good psychologist. Throughout his life he was attracted to microscopic observations of the reality surrounding him (as microscopic as to include ants, spiders, beetles, and crickets) as well as to the invention of new situations, emblems, and icons of a critical outlook on history and humankind. The logical outlets of such an attitude are the essay and the short story. They are not always clearly separated in Levi’s work, but together constitute its core. Levi’s Shorter Narrative Prose, and the “Frame Story” Levi’s short stories8 were published in the following books: Storie naturali (Turin: Einaudi, 1966, henceforth SN); Vizio di forma (Turin: Einaudi, 1971, henceforth VF); Lilít ed altri racconti (Turin: Einaudi, 1980, known in English as Moments of Reprieve, henceforth L); and L’altrui mestiere (Turin: Einaudi, 1985, henceforth AM). Two of his other books contain stories as well as essays: Racconti e saggi (Turin: La Stampa, 1986, henceforth RS); and L’ultimo Natale della guerra; (Turin: Einaudi, 2000, henceforth UN, published posthumously). In other countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, many of Levi’s stories have been included in compilations whose contents may differ from the Italian ones, for instance, The Mirror-Maker.9 These six Italian titles are equal in number to the other prose works (SQ, LT, SP, CS, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?),10 and I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved)11), but are overshadowed by the popularity of the three Holocaust works. In fact, they have not all been translated into English, and those that have are not always in print. Upon closer reading, The Periodic Table and The Wrench—often called “novels”—are in reality frame stories. As a writer of these, Primo Levi can be ranked in the tradition of Boccaccio and Chaucer. This already is rather uncommon. The difference between the two books is that in The Periodic Table, the frame is invisible: it is Mendeleyev’s system of elements, or,

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rather, Levi’s life, whereas The Wrench has the traditional frame, which is a story in its own right. This frame is inspired by a number of trips Levi made for his work as a chemist to a plant in Togliattigrad in the Soviet Union. Of course, the travels were a happy encounter with the strange and often exuberant world of the Soviet Russians, who for Levi had been the liberators of Auschwitz and, thus, the men who had really won the war. Returning once again to If This is a Man and The Truce and applying this criterion, there would be much to say for considering them as frame stories too rather than as novels. But Levi had shown interest in frame stories in earlier works as well. In his SN, which he published under the pseudonym of Damiano Malabaila in 1966, a group of six stories deals with a certain Mr. Simpson, sales manager for Italy of NATCA, an American firm that produces state-of-the-art technology, such as a computer writing poems, a duplicator, an instrument that measures beauty, and a virtual reality cassette player. Of course, all the technologies are inventions of Levi, who didn’t ever dream of their becoming reality. But technology doesn’t redeem humankind: its champion, Mr. Simpson, ends his life miserably, addicted to virtual reality videotapes. In the same period as SN, Levi wrote “La carne dell’orso” (Bear’s Flesh), a tale of men and mountains. In a mountain hut high in the Piedmontese Alps meet three men, two of whom relate thrilling experiences of mountain trekking (the third, of course, would be the author himself). Shortly after, Levi reused one of the stories for a new tale, “Ferro,” to be included in SP. This must have been the reason for never again publishing “La carne dell’orso”; the text is included only in the new collected works published by Marco Belpoliti for Einaudi in the 1990s, in the appendix.12 It’s a pity, for it is a beautiful tale, and Primo Levi’s first experiment with the frame story. Levi’s original approach to frame stories was to inspire, among others, Oliver Sacks, who wrote a chemical autobiography, Uncle Tungsten,13 in 2001, and the Dutch writer Maarten Asscher, in his Dingenliefde (Love of Things);14 not surprisingly, because Asscher was Levi’s Dutch editor, and has published Levi to an extent practically unknown in other countries. The use of a pseudonym for SN must have contributed to the general opinion that Levi’s short stories, at least the fantastic ones, were second to the other works. This would be in line with the general prejudice that science fiction—and most tales could be ranked as such—is not much of a literary genre. Levi himself stated otherwise in the short text on the cover, which we may consider as his preface to the book: I have written some 20 short stories and I don’t know if I’ll write others. I have mostly written them in a jiffy, trying to give a narrative form to a single

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intuition, trying to tell in other terms (if symbolic, they are unconsciously so) an intuition that today is not infrequent: the conclusion that something doesn’t fit in the world we are living in, that there is a formal fault that makes one aspect or another of our civilization or of our moral universe worthless . . . I began writing (without it being my intention) with two books on the concentration camps . . . These were, no doubt, serious books written for a serious public. To propose to this public a book of fancy tales, moral traps, maybe amusing, but detached and cold: wouldn’t that mean a kind of fraud, like trying to sell wine in oil bottles? Those were questions I put to myself while writing these “natural histories.” Well, I would not publish them if I had not realized (even if not straightaway, to tell the truth) that between the camp and these inventions there is a bridge, a kind of continuity: for me the camps have been the most enormous of the “faults” . . . the most threatening of the monsters created by reason.15

I have quoted this text nearly in its entirety because sometimes critics cite only half of it, making it seem that Primo Levi wanted to write as an author entirely different from the one who wrote SQ and LT. It is, of course, a form of misunderstanding that the pseudonym gave birth to, and that eventually led to the depreciatory judgment discussed above. The second collection of stories, VF, appeared in 1971 under Levi’s own name. They are in line with SN, but there are differences as well. First, the invention of machines is substituted by that of situations, and so, pure and often playful science fiction gives precedence to more problematic situations. Even if always invented, they reveal serious concern with the environment, aid to the Third World countries, genetic experiments, and so on. Like many others of his generation, Primo Levi, having survived the war, would at first have thought that good times were on hand, soon, however, to be disillusioned by the cold war, the struggle for independence of the Jewish State, and other issues. “Something had gone wrong,” as it is put in the long story “Procacciatori d’affari” (Head hunters). The title of VF refers to these problems as a whole, as being not specifically caused by the war but innate to the human race. What Primo Levi strongly felt, he translated into a metaphor in the story “Il sesto giorno” (The Sixth Day). While the genetic engineers in heaven are still discussing how the new being that is to be the crown of creation should evolve, something has gone wrong and Man has already been created by chance. The portrait of humankind thus offered is merciless. Man is suicidal (the theme of “Verso Occidente,” Going West, where Man is described as a kind of lemming), cruel, and materialistic. What saves the book from seeming a dull litany or moralistic sermon are Levi’s subtle irony and sense of humor. We are invited, though, to dig deep into the stories’ meaning.

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I think two examples may suffice. In the story “In fronte scritto” (Written on the Forehead), a new kind of advertisement is invented: people can have a slogan or logo tattooed on their forehead. It becomes a form of hype. After the agreed term has expired, a young couple who submitted to this method of fund-raising in order to settle down are not able to remove the tattoo: a vestigial trace remains. And their baby is born with a slogan too: “Baby-food Cavicchioli,” an unregistered trademark. This, of course, may be read as a parable. The tattoo reminds the reader of the numbers tattooed on the arms of the Häftlinge in Auschwitz, which too could never be removed. Primo Levi is among the first to write about the problems of the second generation, the sons and daughters of survivors, who are marked by events they have never witnessed in their lifetimes. In another story, “I Sintetici” (The Synthetics), artificially generated children suffer from being treated as different because they have no navel. This comes to light in dressing rooms during gym hours. Mario, the synthetic boy who is the story’s hero, starts fantasizing about there being lots of children born this way, about their planning to take power on earth, and so on. Here there are two links with Jewish experiences: in the dressing room, circumcised Jewish boys are rather exposed by their being different, and of course, there have always been countless theories about Jewish conspiracies. Other references include those in the aforementioned story “Procacciatori d’affari” (Headhunters), where the candidate to be born is shown pictures of the concentration camps, and the report “Visto di lontano” (Seen from Far Away), which describes the earth as hypothetical “men in the moon” would see it, including a phenomenon that is called “Of the Seventh Day,” which can be observed once every week, but “one day before the rest of the earth in a small zone of the isthmus that links Asia with Africa.” Of course, these lines refer to the Shabbat’s rest in Israel. The tendency to closely link stories has not been abandoned in VF: there are two tales about development aid to Third World countries (“Recuenco: la Nutrice” [The Nurse] and “Recuenco: il Rafter” [The Rafter]), in which the same events are described from opposite points of view: respectively, that of the helped and that of the helpers. As such, the Recuenco diptych represents a renewal in Levi’s work. Two other tales, “Lavoro creativo” (Creative Work) and “Nel Parco” (In the Park), represent two moments in the life of a mediocre author, Antonio Casella, who comes to know about a kind of reserve where heroes of the classics of world literature live on for as long as they continue being read. At the end of his life, Casella decides to write a largely imaginary autobiography and, thus, to become a literary creation himself, ending up in the “Park” as well. The stories serve more than one purpose: they enable Levi to speak about his personal taste, and

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in this way are precursors of RR. They are a humoristic literary Disneyland, a kind of heaven for those who believe only in scripture, but, in a certain way, a concentration camp as well. By including the two diptychs in VF, Primo Levi once again denies the traditional definitions of the short story, and this fills the gap between them and the longer writings. The tables of contents of SN and VF bring up another question: why doesn’t Levi group together related stories? The Recuenco diptych is an exception, but both the Simpson tales and the stories about the literary park are separated by others. Why? I think Levi wanted to make it clear that all his stories are, in a way, interrelated, by showing the obvious relationships between the Simpson and literary park fantasies. In L, Levi combined fantastic stories with camp memories for the first time. For this book he chose to group texts into three different sections: “Passato prossimo” (Near Past), “Futuro anteriore” (Near Future), and “Presente indicativo” (Present Indicative), titles that refer to Italian grammar but primarily to something else. We should observe that the last section groups various stories, among which there is a partisan story (“Ospiti,” Guests), a short autobiographic story about a weekend in the mountains (“Fine settimana”, Weekend), another describing the hunt for a graffiti artist (“Decodificazione”, Decodification), and a sketch about a traveling painter (“La valle di Guerrino,” Guerrino’s Valley). Thus, as we have stories that take place between the beginning of the century and the late 1970s, the section’s title may mean “More or less present” as well. The last of the Shoah texts of the first section, “Il Re dei Giudei” (The King of the Jews), was later reused in SES. I consider it a key text in Levi’s work, not because of the description of the megalomaniac Chaim Rumkowski, “king” of the ghetto of Lodz, who was deported in a special first class railway car and was gassed like anyone else, but because of the conclusion: Just like Rumkowski, we too are so blinded by power and money that we forget our very fragility: and forget that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is wired, that outside the enclosure are standing the lords of death and quite near the train is waiting.

This may be the most pregnant of Levi’s sayings and the nucleus of his philosophy. These words link the Shoah to us, just like we are already linked to the Shoah. There is yet another key text on Primo Levi’s stories: the “Letter to the Editor” Levi wrote in 1987 as a kind of preface to a reprint of VF.16 In this letter, Levi answers Einaudi’s proposal to reprint this book, “the only one that has never been translated, that has won no prizes and the critics accepted with skepticism, declaring it not catastrophic enough.” Levi states

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that VF had been written from an apocalyptic world vision, but that the barbaric Middle Age he had expected, a “Dissipatio Humani Generis” (destruction of human race, the title of a novel by the Italian writer Guido Morselli), had not materialized. And he goes on: If I read it again today, regardless of much naiveté and errors of perspective, I do find something good in it. Synthetic children have become reality, even if they have a navel. On the moon we’ve been, and earth has to look, if seen from there, just as described . . . Aid to the Third World often suffers the fate I sketched in the Recuenco diptych.

Levi mentions still other things that have become normal in the last twenty years. We may conclude that SN, VF, and L, just like most of Levi’s books, were born out of a deep concern for humanity and its fate. Not consoled by the presence of G-d, we have to cope with life in a world torn apart by conflicts and evil, but governed at the same time by the laws of evolution and logic. Only Salvation by Laughter and Salvation by Understanding may offer relief. Levi’s stories belong to one or both of these approaches to literature: they help us to reflect on and become conscious of reality. In their moralistic inspiration, they are typical cases of midrashim. In the last collections of stories, memories of Auschwitz and ordinary tales are not even separated any more. The two narrative universes have merged into a single world where what matters is human experience. Since some of Levi’s most beautiful tales are collected in AM and UN (such as “Calze al fulmicotone,” GunCotton Stockings, “Un lungo duello,” A Long Duel, “L’ultimo Natale di guerra,” The Last Christmas of the War, “Anagrafe”, Registry office), we cannot reasonably consider them as the crumbs fallen from a rich table. It was Levi’s habit to leave texts for months or even years in a drawer and then to prepare them for final publication, a piece of good advice he gave in the essay “A un giovane lettore” (To a Young Reader).17 Conclusion With their particular moralistic and often allegorical character, Levi’s short stories could be defined as a kind of modern midrashim in which moral concern is combined with storytelling. Here, Levi’s Jewishness is in no way hampered by his atheism and gives rise to shrewd descriptions such as heaven being described as a maybe overrational bureaucracy, and such as the already mentioned stories “Il sesto giorno” and “Procacciatori d’affari,” or the posthumously published “Anagrafe.”18 At the same time, stories are interwoven like the threads of a spider’s web. Maybe it is no

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coincidence that Levi wrote both a poem (“Aracne”19) and two essays on spiders, “Romanzi dettati dai grilli” (Novels Dictated by Crickets, which, however, primarily deals with spiders) and “Paura dei ragni (fear of spiders)”20 Thus, he succeeds in giving new vigor and meaning both to the short story and to the tradition of frame stories. All this made him not only one of the most profound thinkers in modern Italian literature, but a very original writer as well, who was thus successful in trying to renew literature by demolishing traditional frontiers between genres. In the combination of both aspects lies, I would say, his importance. Notes 1. La ricerca delle radici. Turin: Einaudi, 1981. The Search For Roots: A Personal Anthology trans. Peter Forbes (Chicago: Ivan R. Dec 2001), henceforth RR. I am using the abbreviations introduced by Cesare Segre and others in the Einaudi edition of Levi’s works in the late 1980s. 2. Turin: Einaudi, 1975, The Periodic Table, henceforth SP. 3. Turin: De Silva, 1947, better known in English as If This is a Man, published in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz, henceforth SQ. 4. Turin: Einaudi, 1963, known in English as The Truce or The Reawakening; henceforth LT. 5. Turin: Einaudi, 1978, known in English as The Wrench or The Monkey’s Wrench, henceforth CS. 6. Interview with Nico Orengo in La Stampa (June 1, 1985). 7. P. V. Mengaldo, “Lingua e scrittura in Levi,” in Primo Levi, Opere III (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), now in E. Ferrero (ed.), Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 169–242. 8. For Levi’s stories, see G. Grassano, “La ‘Musa stupefatta.’ Note sui racconti fantascientifici” (1991), now in: Ferrero, Primo Levi, pp. 117–147, and R. Speelman, “Primo Levi novelliere,” in Incontri, 16 (2001), 79–87. 9. The English titles have often inspired the Dutch ones, such as De zesde dag and De spiegelmaker, but the actual contents of the books differ. 10. Turin: Einaudi, 1982, in English: If Not Now, When? henceforth SNOQ. 11. Turin: Einaudi, 1986, in English: The Drowned and the Saved, henceforth SES. 12. Primo Levi, Opere I (Turin: Einaudi, 1997), 1125–1135; the story had been originally published in Il Mondo in 1961. 13. New York: Vintage Books, 2001. Sacks quotes Levi in a footnote. 14. Amsterdam: Augustus, 2002. 15. Primo Levi, cover text of SN, now in Opere I, 1434–1435. My translation. 16. Primo Levi, “Lettera,” 1987, now in Opere I, 571–572. My translation. 17. In AM, now in Opere II (Turin: Einaudi 1997), 845–847. 18. “Registry Office,” in UN, now in Opere II, 1162–1165. 19. In Ad ora incerta (At an Uncertain Hour; Milan: Garzanti, 1984; now in Opere II, 562). 20. In AM, now in Opere II, 689–693 and 755–758.

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Primo Levi, Dante, and the “Canto of Ulysses” Nicholas Patruno t Auschwitz, by his own account, Primo Levi was shocked into confronting his Jewishness by the wild course of events that allowed the Shoah to occur. Yet he was also candid in admitting that the experience had the positive effect of awakening in him a sense of identity and an attachment to his long-neglected “cultural patrimony” (Jewish and Italian), of which he would be proud and draw from for the rest of his life. The other positive effect Auschwitz had on Levi was that it led him to become the highly regarded writer he is today. Before Auschwitz, little did Levi know how important his educational background would be for his survival, in both physical and moral terms. Educated no differently than other Italians with similar financial means and professional aspirations, and having been schooled in all the traditional texts that are the foundation of an education in the humanities and the sciences, Levi, drawing from this cultural well, was able to fuse his scientific mind with his literary creativity. This is the key to his importance as a writer and communicator. His acknowledgment of the importance of communication, not only of one human being with another but also between creative art and scientific disciplines, has been seminal to his work. In Se questo è un uomo (1947, 1958; henceforth referred to by the title of the English version, If This is a Man, a much more accurate title than the one adopted for the American version, namely Survival in Auschwitz, 1987), his first full-length work on the Shoah, form and structure, Levi tells us, were secondary in importance to recording the event in a straightforward manner so that it would never be forgotten. It should be noted, however, that the version we read today, published for the first time by Einaudi in 1958, differs somewhat from the original 1947 version published by De Silva, a virtually unknown publisher. In addition to some stylistic revisions, the more recent version includes one

A

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additional chapter, “Iniziazione.”1 These changes, although minor, raise some questions on how to interpret Levi’s claim that style takes second place to his urgent need to narrate. In other words, was he really as unconcerned about the style as he seems to lead the reader to believe? On the surface, If This is a Man reads as a document in which Levi recounts the experiences and events in which he was a forced participant while incarcerated in the concentration camp of Buna-Monowitz at Auschwitz. However, to designate the book a memoir or diary, as it has often been done, is neither completely accurate nor fair. At the core of the book, and behind its memorialistic façade, there is an eloquently expressed ethical and civic message. Through this chronicle of observations, Levi reveals not only the harsh realities of the daily struggle for survival but, often, the clash between good and evil, at both the physical and philosophical levels. The individuals he comes in contact with are sometimes laudable and sometimes ignoble, but, from a moral point of view, they confirm how the same event can elicit different human behaviors. By observing these individuals, and with his interaction with some of them, Levi is able to weigh the integrity of his own character in the face of such difficult conditions. This is clearly implied in the (Italian) title of the book: Se questo è un uomo (if this is a man). These words, included in the book’s powerful epigraphic poem suggested to Levi by the “Shemà,”2 a prayer defined by Herman Wouk as the creed of the Jew, besides contributing to the poem’s intent of condemnation, remorse, and stern admonition, also calls on the readers to judge for themselves if he, Levi, has come out of that horrific experience still a man, that is to say with his integrity relatively unscathed. Paradoxically, Auschwitz, with its assault on human dignity, often squeezed out of the prisoners those qualities of which they would not be proud. The Lager, in other words, often forced the human character to lay itself bare and, for the sake of survival, reveal his/her most hidden side. Levi must have had this in mind with his often repeated statement, borrowed from Lidia Rolfi Beccaria (in Le donne di Ravensbruck), that Auschwitz had been his true university. Nowhere else could he have learned so much about the complexities of human behavior, both good and evil. Levi’s vision of Auschwitz calls to mind Erich Auerbach’s compelling essay on Dante entitled “Figura,”3 in which Auerbach argues that the characters in the Commedia reveal their true selves only in the afterlife. They are, in other words, the fulfillment of the “figura,” that is, of how they projected themselves while living. After death, with their free will no longer of any consequence, they can no longer hide behind the façade they may have created for themselves to justify their actions while on earth. A comparable process takes place in Auschwitz. There too, with free

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will being denied by the Nazis’ very design of dehumanization, many prisoners often revealed a side, more often than not a dark side, of their true selves, a side that they themselves may not have been aware of possessing. However, the one overwhelming difference between Dante’s netherworld and Auschwitz is that while Dante presents what has been willed by a divine power, in the concentration camp all is decreed by a cruel and arrogant human force. With Dante being so central to the study of letters in Italy, it would not be at all unusual, for Levi or for any other Italian with a similar educational background and in similar circumstances, to turn to Dante for help and direction.4 In addition to seeing so much of his own plight mirrored in scenes from the Inferno, Levi’s closeness to Dante is also triggered by the keen perception of human behavior they share. Because of the many references he makes to the Divine Comedy, implicitly and explicitly, especially to the Inferno, Levi has been called a modern-day Dante. And no one has done a more comprehensive job in tracing and examining the connections between Dante and Levi than Risa Sodi in her noteworthy study A Dante of Our Time.5 Even before entering into Auschwitz, the reference to the Inferno is present in Levi’s description of the soldier who accompanies the prisoners from the cattle train to the camp in the truck. In the soldier’s request that those in the group turn over to him anything of value they may have, Levi relies on a parallel to Dante’s description of Charon, the demon who, in canto III of the Inferno, takes the damned in a boat across the Acheron River and who, according to the legend, expected some kind of compensation for his labor. Also, Levi clearly has Dante in mind when referring to the “arbeit macht frei” (work will make you free) sign that awaits the prisoners at the entrance to this modern-day hell. It echoes the words cast in stone over the entrance to Dante’s Inferno (canto III:9): “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate” (Abandon all hope, you who enter). That Levi has Dante in mind is further confirmed by his observation that the memory of those words on that sign still trouble him after so many years. Levi’s words “Il suo ricordo ancora mi percuote nei sogni” (the memory of it still strikes me in my dreams; in the chapter “Sul fondo”; On the Bottom) are a direct echo of Dante’s “che nel pensier rinnova la paura!” (the thought of it reawakens the fear!) (canto I:6). The words at the entrance of Dante’s hell would have been quite fitting to the outcome the Nazis had determined for the Jews. Echoing a modernday version of Dante’s city of Dis, in the Lager the rules that apply to the world of “the living” are either abused, ignored, or blatantly violated. As in the Malebolge, where the damned try to avoid physical punishment by

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resorting to any trickery and cunning act they know, in the Lager too there are those who behave similarly. Pushing satanic perversity to unparalleled heights, the Nazi oppressors deceive by raising false hopes in a place where there is no hope. Freedom can be gained only by death, which is immediate for some but slow and only after much physical punishment and mental anguish for others. Auschwitz, this anus mundi, is harsher than the Hell Dante visits. God’s hell does not mislead, and the sinners, as they enter, know why they are damned to punishment without hope. The Nazis’ hell, on the other hand, deceives, mocks, humiliates, and offends without ever giving reasons. After all, there are no reasons to be given for there are no sins the Jews and many others have committed that call for the punishment being inflicted upon them. Levi’s references to Dante, in If This is a Man and elsewhere, are not an act of literary boasting. It is simply a matter of Levi finding in Dante a metaphorical closeness to his own predicament and, consequently, of adopting verbal expressions that reflect adequately that experience. In the first canto of Paradiso (vs. 70–71), Dante makes known his difficulty to find words that adequately describe the beauty of Paradise that he is about to witness. He writes: “trasumanar significar per verba / non si porìa” (that which transcends humanity cannot be described in human terms). Levi too will admit, but for the opposite reason, that his language and ours may be too limited to describe adequately the “offence, the demolition of a man” (22). By changing one single word, a parallel may be drawn, in fact, between Dante’s quotation and Levi’s effort to express in human terms that which is inhuman. “Trasumanar,” intended by Dante in the positive meaning of transcending human boundaries can be replaced, in Levi’s case, by the term subumanar, to convey going beneath the boundaries of human recognition. Levi, however, turns to Dante not only for help in articulating the depraved actions and the vulgarities of the Lager but also for help in expressing the little that exists in the camp that is good and decent. This is illustrated best in the case of Jean Samuel whom, in the chapter “The Canto of Ulysses” of If This is a Man, Levi presents as Jean the Pikolo. In this chapter, in answer to Jean’s desire to learn Italian, Levi recites, as best as he can remember, the main part of canto XXVI of the “Inferno,” the canto of Ulysses. To put this episode with Jean in a clearer perspective it is helpful to recall that in the preceding chapter, “Chemical Examination,” Levi submits to a personal interview to test his competence as chemist. It is an unpleasant, unnerving, and altogether bizarre experience, which turns into a kind of confrontation with the prototypical Aryan nemesis in the person of tall, thin, blond Dr. Pannwitz. The outcome of this interview assures Levi that

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he is still an intellectually alert and functional human being. In addition to being a test of professional competence, the successful interview with Dr. Pannwitz may be seen as the vindication of the so-called inferior Jew. As he is painfully aware of the absolute control Dr. Pannwitz holds over his very existence, Levi confronts his enemy timidly at first and then with more confidence, and makes the German aware of his professional merit. He does not hesitate to point out that he received his degree summa cum laude (97) and has mastered his profession by studying and toiling over those same German texts—and in their original language—that are indispensable to anyone who is serious about chemistry, the same sources that Pannwitz too must have undoubtedly studied. Furthermore, Levi is able to convey all the information in German, albeit in a somewhat distorted form, in part because of his limited ability to speak that language and partly as a sign of protest and resentment. As the interview progresses, Levi is surprised to discover that in spite of all that he has gone through, he is still able to remember and to think. Merely talking about something he loves, excites him, and by the very act of remembering he is able to reenter into the world of civility. He is once again, if only for a very brief period, in possession of his faculties, those same faculties that made him the envy of his classmates. He grows in stature as he rises to the challenge, holding his own and proving himself to the opposition, who now addresses him politely. Granted, on the human level it is politeness of distance rather than of respect. From a professional point of view, however, Dr. Pannwitz cannot ignore Levi’s impressive qualifications. More significant than the impression Levi makes on the Aryan is the psychological uplift he gets from this experience. In an encounter that metaphorically calls to mind the episode of David and Goliath, Levi has held his own against a member of the “superior race” and, in his own way, has prevailed. This exhilarates him, making him feel different, if not superior, as is obvious when the examination is over and he goes down the stairs with Alex, the kapo, preceding him. Alex turns to look up at him. This small, unexpected moment of deference will prove to be immensely beneficial to Levi’s psyche, even though the harsh and gloomy reality of the camp immediately resumes when Alex vulgarly wipes his greasy hand on Levi’s shoulder. Alex, nothing more than a low-life criminal, has the last say in this vile place. In his “ignorance and stupidity” (100)—as Levi writes—Alex strikes back because Levi is Italian, a Jew, and an educated man. But as suggested by that subtle scene on the stairway when Levi is looking down at him, Levi feels mostly pity for this person, who does not know that in the years ahead he as well as Pannwitz and all the others who have offended humanity will be judged, through the words of the author, by the rest of the world for their ignoble deeds.

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In the chapter that follows, Jean the Pikolo’s integrity serves to counterbalance Alex’s coarseness and vulgarity. Unlike most of the others who hold positions of privilege, Jean, a twenty-four-year-old Alsatian messenger-clerk in the camp is an anomaly from the start. Without abusing his position of privilege, and while privately conducting the fight for his own survival, this still physically robust, gentle, and friendly man is able to maintain a human relationship with the less fortunate. Thanks to his intelligence, shrewdness, and, above all, to his ability to persuade, all qualities that are a direct echo of Dante’s Ulysses, and with the support of the confidence he has gained from Alex and from other superiors, Jean, who speaks flawless French and German, puts his linguistic ability to positive use by being instrumental in saving prisoners from harsh physical punishment. Jean’s word, Levi writes, “said in the right tone of voice and at the right moment, had great power” (100). Jean will be the conduit to Levi’s recapture of the deep-seated humanism and sensitivity necessary to complete, in human terms, the scientific persona who, in the previous chapter, had stood his ground before the Aryan modern-day Minos, Dr. Pannwitz. One day, while walking to the soup kitchen, a walk that, symbolically, may be seen as going to a source of knowledge, Jean expresses to Levi his desire to learn Italian. Dante’s “The Canto of Ulysses” (Inferno, canto XXVI) comes immediately to Levi’s mind as the appropriate instructional tool. This is triggered as much by Levi’s perception of Jean in a context similar to that of the classical hero represented by Dante’s Ulysses as by the actual literary content of the canto. From a pragmatic standpoint, to choose Dante’s canto as the text on which to base a grammar lesson for a beginner is as unusual as was Jean’s request, made in a place such as the camp, where acquired language usually did not go past vulgarities and the most basic, essential terminology. However, the wish to learn a language for the mere intellectual satisfaction and certainly not for any practical application was unique, meriting a response in kind. Jean quickly grasps what Levi communicates, understanding the author’s anxiety to seize the time frame allowed by the walk to make a point, reflecting the ever-present concern not just for language and communication but for survival. In fact, Jean will understand much more than Levi will ever hope to teach him. Levi struggles and frequently fails to remember all the lines of the canto. He summarizes some and distorts others in part because he does not remember them and partly because of his limited ability to translate into Jean’s native French. Jean quickly realizes that this lesson is far more therapeutic and important to his teacher than it is instructive to him. Sensing the benefit Levi derives from this exercise, Jean displays his altruism one more time by encouraging Levi to continue reciting.

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With his reminiscence of Dante, as it was the case with the previous chapter, Levi returns once again to a state of remembrance that takes him even further back in time, since he must have studied Dante before his university days. Memory, which is both “marvelous” and “fallacious” (23), as he writes in his book The Drowned and the Saved, brings him both joy and pain. Joy for allowing him to remember, albeit not as clearly as he would have wanted, poetry that is very dear to his heart,6 and painful at the same time because of the atrocious conditions in which he finds himself. But here, perhaps even more so than in the previous chapter [“Chemical Examination”], the very act of remembering, a process that enables him to reenter for a few moments into the normal existence of the past, is what matters most to Levi. What has begun as mere recitation gains momentum and drama as Levi draws parallels between Dante’s Ulysses and his own life situation. The “mare aperto” (open sea), with its “free, straight and simple” horizon (103), makes him think of the freedom he no longer has; Ulysses’s mountain of Purgatory achingly calls to Levi’s mind the mountains surrounding his beloved Turin. And, in recalling Ulysses’s exhortation to his companions to follow him with the famous lines “Considerate la vostra semenza: / Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza” (Think of your breed: / You were not made to live like brutes, / But to pursue excellence and knowledge), Levi synthesizes his own wish to survive and to recount his tale. Jean, who senses the positive effect of these words on Levi, and perhaps on himself as well, encourages him to repeat them. But soon the brutal reality of the current situation is highlighted by the irony of the setting in which Dante’s words are recalled: the soup line. How can one think in such sublime terms while struggling for survival? The last line of the chapter replicates the closing line of Dante’s canto: “Infin che il mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso” (Until the sea closed over us). When these words are placed in juxtaposition with the pervasive hunger that is manifest on the faces of the prisoners waiting in line for the soup distribution, one can comprehend their wish to drown in that sea of soup as the only means to satisfy their most immediate need: their longing for food. They simply cannot entertain the luxury of savoring the eloquence of Ulysses’s speech. While Ulysses’s words may have meant nothing to the others, they prove to be decisive for Levi. Dante, who has supplied the author with a rendering of a hell to which he can compare his own, now provides him with a Ulysses figure who gives him the strength to resist that hell. Ulysses’s speech, coupled with Jean’s exemplary demeanor, contribute in assuring Levi that, in spite of the Nazi scheme to dehumanize and in

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clear contrast to Alex, “l’innocente bruto Alex,” (111); and to others like him, Levi was not made to be a “brute,” nor will he become one. A close reading of the book will reveal that this chapter marks the turning point in Levi’s own Auschwitz odyssey. From the primary role of the observer that Levi has played up until this point he will now emerge more as a protagonist, as more of a doer, and, in the last chapter, as a man committed to helping others. With “The Canto of Ulysses” Levi also provides a reply to Steinlauf, the obedient and decorated Austro-Hungarian ex-army sergeant who, in the chapter “Initiation,” the same chapter that was added later, insists that to keep clean is a reflection of one’s own dignity and a way to resist the Nazis’ will to turn men into beasts. Levi did not agree with Steinlauf and refused to measure his own dignity by the standard of personal hygiene. Dignity has to be measured by more profound and extraordinary standards, more akin to those that a noble language and culture such as Dante’s can instill in the individual. Notes 1. For a more detailed account of the changes made, see Giovanni Tesio’s article “Su alcune giunte e varianti di Se questo è un uomo,” Studi Piemontesi, VI, 2 (November 1977): 270–278. 2. Sh’ma Deuteronomy 6:4, 6:5–9, 11:13–21. 3. In Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), 11–76. 4. Giuliana Tedeschi, for instance, in her account of the concentration camp experience in her book C’è un punto sulla terra (Florence: Giuntina, 1988; translated as There is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau (New York: Pantheon, 1992)) also makes references to Dante. 5. Several studies have dealt with this issue; the most thorough analysis being Risa Sodi’s A Dante of Our Time (New York: Peter Lang, 1990). 6. “Ricordare,” as he tells in his essay “La rima alla riscossa” (Terza pagina, 116) etymologically means “portati in cuore” (carried in the heart).

4

The Genesis of If This is a Man Ian Thomson

his essay charts the genesis of If This is a Man and places the book within the larger frame of Italy’s turbulent postwar years. I met Levi at his home in Turin one summer afternoon in July 1986. He was in shirt sleeves for the interview, and the tattoo 174517 was visible on his left forearm (“A typical German talent for classification,” he tartly observed). Levi was then almost sixty-eight but he still had a sprightliness about him. I had seen him earlier that year at the Italian Cultural Institute in London, where he gave a talk. Afterwards I contacted him for an interview, which I hoped to publish somewhere. I had already printed in the London Magazine several interviews with Italian writers, among them Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Leonardo Sciascia, and Alberto Moravia. Levi was to be part of a set. Throughout our conversation he sat in a worn chintz armchair, smoking the occasional “Alaska” menthol cigarette. His beard was neatly clipped and he wore metal-rimmed glasses. The study, sparsely furnished, contained an angle poise lamp, a word processor, and some other basic necessities for writing. Books lined the walls, a few in English. There were framed certificates from Levi’s former profession as a chemist and, suspended above a glass-fronted bookcase, an owl, a penguin, and a giant butterfly modeled by Levi out of industrial copper wire. For thirty years Levi had managed a paint and varnish factory on the outskirts of Turin. The only other ornament in the room that I could see was a sketch of a half-destroyed wire fence: Auschwitz. In Italy, Levi is a national monument; I was twenty-four and nervous of meeting him. The Turinese, moreover, are considered by other Italians to be two-faced and frosty ( falso e cortese, they say: “false and courteous”). Yet the Levi I met was warm and engaging, a mixture of seriousness and

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sweetness. The afternoon was full of unexpected laughter, and there were moments when Levi became animated, for instance when the talk came round to mountaineering (a favorite pastime of his). I had decided to leave the question of Auschwitz until later, unsure how to approach it. Absurdly, I was fearful that it might distress Levi. Instead I asked him about his science fiction and chemistry. Listening to the tapes of the conversation today, I am struck by how stock Levi’s answers seem. Levi was a practiced interviewee by the time I met him; he could professionally field questions on the Nazi scourge. The second half of the conversation centered on If This is a Man, which is now a set text in Italian schools. No other work conveys the unique horror of the Nazi genocide more directly and profoundly, or interrogates our recent moral history so incisively. For its quiet testimony of man’s inhumanity to man, it remains one of the essential books of our age. Nine months after our meeting, Levi was dead. In February 1944 Primo Levi was deported to Auschwitz with 650 other Jews. (Only 490 have since been identified: the rest are officially classed as “persons unknown” and have vanished without trace: nobody knows who they were, or where they came from.)1 Following his return to Italy in the autumn of 1945 the need to bear witness was so intense that Levi began to record, pell-mell, thoughts and events, conversations, things heard and seen at Auschwitz, on the back of train tickets, scraps of paper, flattened cigarette packets—anything he could find. This frantic note-taking was in readiness for something extraordinary. “Probably if I’d not written my book, I’d have remained one of the damned of the earth,” Levi told me.2 He was referring to Dante, the state of souls after death. Driven to tell his story, Levi completed If This is a Man within ten months. During his year-long captivity in Auschwitz, Levi had aged appallingly. His innocence and much of his emotional life had been ripped out of him. Many did not recognize him. Malnutrition edema—swelling of the tissues caused by fluid retention from a low-protein diet—had left Levi’s face tumid and bloated. But, in spite of his swollen aspect, friends and family continued to exclaim: “How strange! You haven’t really changed.” Indeed, to judge by his fat-looking face, it was assumed he had eaten abundantly and well. More than 6,800 Italian Jews—one-fifth of the country’s Jewish community—had perished in the Nazi camps. Virtually every Jewish family in Italy had lost a relative or friend to Auschwitz. Levi’s immediate family—his mother and sister—had survived, at least, and the house was still standing. (Levi’s father, an industrial engineer, had died of cancer in 1942.) The house was scarcely habitable after the Allied bombardments, however, and much of the family furniture had to be retrieved from the cellars of the ex-Gestapo headquarters at the Albergo Nazionale in Turin. (The hotel had been requisitioned by the Germans and turned into torture

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chambers as well as a warehouse for all the loot stolen from the city’s Jews.) Thirty percent of housing in Turin was destroyed or damaged, half the streets, roads, bridges, and railways were rubble. Ester Levi, Primo’s mother, was much concerned with finances for the year ahead; but her son, hurled into the unaccustomed role of breadwinner, was too mentally distraught to look for work. He no longer had the same enthusiasm or believed in people the same way. Levi was in trauma, and disturbed in a way that only survivor friends could understand. After the nightmare intensity of Auschwitz, everything seemed colorless, futile, and false to him. “I had the sensation that I was living,” he told me, “but without being alive.” Moreover, the habit of civilization seemed very fragile in Levi. A friend was shocked to see him attack a wild persimmon bush on a walk one day, chewing on the fruit. On the first night of his homecoming, Levi had slept under an SS eiderdown purloined from the camp, a chunk of bread secreted under his pillow: his own soft bed seemed an impossibly civilized amenity after his eleven months of incarceration and railway vagabondage. Like all exiles, Levi felt that he had come back to a different world that had moved on without him. Everywhere he went, Italians spoke fearfully of Russia’s threatened atom bomb. They asked how long it would be before there was a Red Square in Rome; new class wars were prophesied with a final catastrophic crumbling of Italy’s postwar society. But Levi, having been rescued by the Red Army from the camp, was unable to share the establishment’s anti-Communism: Soviet Russia was no democracy, he could see that, yet without Stalingrad the Nazis might have won the war and all Europe would now be a vast German colony. Levi’s instinctive proSovietism only added to his feeling of loneliness and alienation. To aggravate matters, suddenly it appeared that no Italian ever had been a Fascist. As if the word “new” could expunge a newspaper’s murky Blackshirt past, Turin’s daily La Stampa was renamed La Nuova Stampa. (Such was the national genius for adapting to circumstance.) Meanwhile the deportees continued to return to Turin; photographs of lost souls appeared on the city walls: HAVE YOU SEEN THESE MEN? As well as deportees, an estimated 370,000 Italian PoWs had yet to be accounted for, dead or alive. The nation was morally and psychologically devastated. And, as autumn 1945 turned to winter, Levi steeled himself for the worst task of all: seeking out the relatives of those who had not survived. He felt morally obliged to help these kin as they searched desperately for some meaning to their shattered lives. Hunger and disease were predicted for the deepening winter of 1945, and the onus was on Levi to find work. Hoping to rebuild his career as a chemist and to reestablish links with friends, he began to journey to and

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from Milan, where he had worked briefly before his arrest. Like Turin, the Lombard capital was a wounded city full of bomb damage, but life had revived, the newspapers were coming out, the theaters had reopened. And it was about now, with his mind set on exorcizing his ordeal in a book, that Levi said he began to buttonhole passengers on the Milan–Turin express, and tell them of what he had seen and suffered. Soon he was talking to strangers in the street, on the trams and buses that were beginning to run again, reporting his story to anyone who cared to listen. The compulsion to do this was overwhelming. “But unlike the Ancient Mariner,” Primo Levi’s sister Anna Maria told me, “Primo never actually waylaid people on the street. He was far too reserved and modest for that.”3 Nevertheless Levi saw himself as a storyteller returned from the edge of civilization, with urgent counsel for his listeners. (“I come from Odessa,” he told one startled friend.)4 Levi made no apology for his compulsive talkativeness. Talking was his way of finding consolation and himself again: he felt renovated and released by it. For the moment, the moral duty to bear witness to Auschwitz was secondary, I think, to Levi’s compulsive desire to disburden himself of his story. On the crowded train between Turin and Milan, surprisingly, no one told him to lower his voice. One commuter even politely asked Levi if he could speak up as he was hard of hearing. Another asked Levi’s permission to eavesdrop on his conversation as it sounded, he said, so “incredible.”5 These must have been amazing moments for Levi, which showed him that a potentially huge audience—not just his circle of acquaintances—wished to hear his chronicle. Only once did a commuter, a priest, ask Levi why he had to address strangers with such a malignant-sounding story. Levi replied that he could not help himself. It was a sign perhaps that he was emerging from the depths. At first Anna Maria Levi could not bear to hear her brother talk, as her boyfriend had perished in the camps. But gradually she too began to listen. Primo was as a born storyteller, everyone today says as much. One friend, Mila Momigliano, was astonished by his mesmeric gift. Each day for a week in the last cold months of 1945 Levi visited Momigliano’s bedside in Via Digione, Turin, where she was recovering from bronchitis. During these visits Levi provided Mila with a detailed chronicle of his survival. Later she told me: “I’d lie in bed spellbound, without moving or uttering a word.”6 After Levi left, however, Mila had to force herself to play the piano in order to exorcize what she heard. If she was shocked, Levi wanted it that way. What he had to say was “horrible” in that archaic sense of the word (still valid in Italian) of inspiring awe. And, as he cast his narrative spell, he demanded silence from his audience and brooked no interruptions. When a friend jokingly enquired about the Auschwitz brothels, Levi turned away in disgust.

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As Levi sat by Mila Momigliano’s bedside, he was creating blow-byblow the book that was to become If This is a Man. With endless retellings he was refining the subtle plays of suspense and pacing that would hold a reader’s attention on the page. He was literally talking his masterpiece into life. Yet many found Levi’s manner of narration oddly impersonal, even chilling. He seemed to be talking about someone else’s life, not his own at all—almost as though he was making an official statement. Many wondered how he could sit there and tell his ghastly tale with such an outwardly tranquil heart. By the early spring of 1946 Levi had written fourteen poems, a considerable flurry amounting to a fifth of his entire poetic output. While he mocked the foolishness of waiting for poetic inspiration, he did have a quaint faith in the daimon—“the divine creative spark”—of the Classical Greeks. So the daimon visited Levi now and out slewed dark, angry verse. “Buna” transforms the slaves of the Auschwitz Chemical Kommando 98 into sulphurous Dantesque phantoms and legions of the damned. The verse bristles with the influence of Dante filtered through T. S. Eliot. And the more poetry Levi now wrote, the more he adapted lines from Dante’s Divine Comedy, even if only by analogy, to communicate the spiritual No-Man’s land of Auschwitz. A new mood of despair must have settled on Levi as the New Year progressed, for he now produced his bleakest and most angry poem, “Psalm.” Subsequently retitled as “Shemà,” the verse was written while the Nuremberg trials were unfolding and lays a curse on those who forget or fail to tell future generations what had happened in Occupied territories. “I command these words to you,” Levi intones with mock-biblical authority, “Repeat them to your children—or may your houses crumble.” The malediction rises to a pitch of indignation as he calls down shame and disease on the forgetful. None of this early poetry was intended for publication: it was a private ritual cleansing. Before Levi could chronicle the story of his persecution in prose, the rage had to be excised first in poetry. Far from being an afterthought to the cool analytic prose to come, the verse was a vital part of the book now incubating. On January 21, 1946, after three months of unemployment, Levi began work at a paint factory near Turin. The sixteen months he was to spend at Du Pont de Nemours & Company (DUCO) would mark the genesis of If This is a Man. DUCO was a subsidiary of the Nobel-Montecatini paint and industrial explosives company headquartered in Milan. Trains to the lakeside village of Avigliana, where the factory was situated, were so infrequent that Levi slept the week at the factory. He was assigned a room in the firm’s Bachelor House (Casa Scapoli) for single employees. With its red-painted walls the villa was sometimes also known as the Casa Rossa. Hot evening meals were served in the Nobel canteen where the cook,

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Signor De Ambrosis, was a tall solemn character thought to resemble the P. G. Wodehouse butler Jeeves. Levi’s room was spartan with a view over the mountains and a stillness that must have been wonderful after the shriek and brutality of Auschwitz. The Bachelor House had in fact been requisitioned by the SS during the war, and by occupying it now Levi felt in some measure vindicated for the offence done to him as a Jew. In their retreat from northern Italy the Germans had blown up the factory’s ammonium-nitrate plant and, along with the American bombs, this had left much of DUCO a twisted wreck. Nevertheless, Levi thought he could write here, and it suited him that the Bachelor House stood in such an extraordinary panorama. Winter sunsets of delicate glowing pink and orange were visible right across the Susa Valley. From his window Levi could make out the medieval fortress-abbey of San Michele, a view that had not changed since John Ruskin sketched it a century earlier. In later life, Levi would construct a sort of legend around If This is a Man. He claimed the book was written in furious haste immediately on his return from exile. In fact, it was not properly begun until sixteen weeks after Levi’s homecoming. The product of a gradual maturation, the book involved many different, long drawn-out phases of drafting, among them oral accounts, poems, even a science fiction. During his long nights in the Bachelor House, Levi had written a whimsical fantasy apparently unconnected to the camp. In “The Mnemogogues” a scientific researcher demonstrates uncanny, memory-stirring scents he has concocted. A glass bottle releases a flinty odor like mountain scree; another, a dusty school room aroma. As Levi was poised to transpose his impressions of Auschwitz into literature, not surprisingly he was concerned about the efficacy of his memory (mnemogogues is a word of Greek coinage, meaning the “arousers of memories”). And while Levi felt keenly the moral obligation not to forget what had happened to him, he knew too that he would have to perform an astonishing feat of recollection if he was to write the book he now had in mind. Levi only had his memory to go on, there were no other resources for him. As Levi lived his monkish life in the DUCO Casa Scappoli, working on paints by day, writing by night, he preferred not to mingle much with staff. The factory was full of its own war grief and Levi was careful not to offend sensibilities by inflicting his story on people with whom he worked. Those DUCO workers who had survived the winter retreat from Russia had suffered a far worse deprivation, they believed, than Primo Levi. It would be many years before the knowledge of Hitler’s genocide emerged in all its peculiar horror; in the meantime Levi was considered just another mishap of ordinary everyday Nazi violence. The original draft of what was to become If This is a Man was a fourteenpage typescript dated “February 1946” and entitled “The Story of Ten Days.”

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Levi had begun to write his book backward, starting with the last chapter first. Unsurprisingly, his most recent memories of Auschwitz—the flight of the Germans and the arrival of the Red Army—were the most pressing. So Levi began with these. According to one eyewitness, he had scarcely finished supper in the Nobel canteen when he would cycle back to the Bachelor House in a state of high anticipation. Instead of sleeping Levi plunged headlong into writing, and for the next ten months he worked with concentrated energy on the manuscript. And he wrote, if not in a trance-like state, then with extreme facility, the words pouring out of him ceaselessly, he said, “like a flood which has been damned up and suddenly rushes forth.”7 Though Levi claimed If This is a Man was free of consciously polished, lettered prose, it is in fact a teeming, intensely literary work of great complexity, and far more calculatedly bookish than Levi cared to admit. The chapter now unfolding in the Bachelor House was full of allusions to Italian literature, the literature that Levi claimed to have studied so unwillingly at school. Alessandro Manzoni’s early-nineteenth-century classic of famine and devastated lands, The Betrothed, is Italy’s most important novel. For the schoolboy Levi, however, it had been an “insufferably boring” costume romance.8 In fact, Manzoni was an Italian moralist in the school of Voltaire, who had tried to use reason to understand all that was unreasonable in man. The novel’s most grandly orchestrated set piece—the celebrated description of Milan’s devastation by plague in the 1600s—must have come back powerfully to Levi as “The Story of Ten Days” is strikingly like it. Devastated by German troops in the Hundred Years War, Milan is a wreck and its hospitals are empty of surgeons. For Levi, on the eve of his rescue by the Red Army, the living dead of Auschwitz grub for food amid “streaming bandages,” and drag themselves along the ground like a Manzonian “invasion of worms.” In this magnificent first chapter, which turned out to be the book’s last, Levi was reconstructing an experience he now can scarcely believe, and behind it lay Manzoni. In spite of its gruesome subject matter, “The Story of Ten Days” has flashes of quiet humor, and its affirmation of human dignity instills a kind of joy in the reader. Levi does not dwell on the mechanics of mass murder, but on what remained of the human face in the camp. And he never loses sight of a future beyond Auschwitz. Accordingly the chapter ends, not with a finite conclusion, but with a hopeful opening up to the world outside and a hint of other narratives to come. “We have exchanged long letters and I hope to see him [Charles Conreau—a French survivor colleague] again one day.” The famous concluding words of André Gide’s novel Les Faux Monnayeurs—“I am very curious to meet Caloub”—were perhaps an

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influence. Levi could not bring himself to write “The End” because he was then too full of outward-turned curiosity: his book was to have a beginning, but no end. The next morning Levi awoke in the Bachelor House with a sense of interior liberation. His writing had been a catharsis and a purging, parallel with Dante’s raising his sails on the Purgatorial migliori acque, “better waters.” On the afternoon of Thursday February 14, one week after completing “The Story of Ten Days,” Levi retrenched himself in his spartan room to write one of the greatest hymns to the human spirit. The miracle is that “The Canto of Ulysses” was almost entirely written in a single lunch break, from 12:30 p.m. to 1:00 p.m.: half an hour of hectic unbroken work, or so Levi later claimed.9 No doubt Levi was giving shape to the disordered long-hand notes he had been jotting down since his homecoming; nevertheless composition of this chapter, the eleventh in the definitive edition of If This is a Man, was astonishingly swift. Levi’s immediate subject was the French prisoner Jean Samuel, whom Levi believed had probably not survived. Levi cast his mind back to a summer’s day in 1944 when he had accompanied Jean to collect the camp’s soup ration. As they trudged through the work site Levi recalled the Ulysses canto from Dante’s Inferno. He struggled to translate the verse into French for Jean while explaining its significance. Ulysses is addressing his ship’s crew as they embark on their final voyage before a whirlpool sucks them under: Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance Your mettle was not made; you were made men, To follow after knowledge and excellence.

Considerate la vostra semenza: Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.

In the hell of Auschwitz, anus mundi, Ulysses’s words shine with a sublime humanist dignity: Levi and Jean Samuel are not beasts; they were “made men” to pursue virtue and knowledge. Many have questioned if Levi really had been overwhelmed at Auschwitz by Dante: the counterpoint of classic beauty in one of the world’s vilest places suggests the artifice of afterthought. Yet, in Levi’s Italy, Dante never suffered the fate he has in the English-speaking world, where he is often seen as a dreary exponent of medieval theology. In Victorian England, civil servants, clergyman, and other worthies attempted to translate the Divine Comedy. In the process they turned Dante (the saddest and most serious of poets) into a paragon of moral sobriety and reduced his crystalline cantos to galumphing

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fustian. This was not so in Italy, where Dante has passed from generation to generation enriched. It is hardly surprising, then, that Dante’s canto XXVI should have burned itself into Levi’s memory. Levi was anyway among the last generation of Italians to be educated in large measure by rote. Entire sections of the Divine Comedy had to be learned by heart at school. Moreover, as a teenager in his native Turin Levi had taken part in “Dante tournaments,” where boys showed off their knowledge of The Inferno, one contestant reciting a canto and his opponent scoring a point if he knew its continuation. From the moment Levi completed “The Canto of Ulysses” he was set to become one of the most Classically influenced writers in postwar Italy. Years later he told a journalist that if he had to rescue two Italian writers from a library fire, they would be “Dante and Manzoni.” Only a Classical student with an enduring humanist education could have said as much.10 As the self-exorcism continued, Levi struggled to write in a language of marvelous precision and beauty. At the end of March 1946, Levi began the chilling “Chemical Examination” chapter. He then had no idea that his pitiless German examiner, Dr. Wilhelm Pannwitz, had died, not quite forty, of a brain tumor. Here, Levi describes not only the Auschwitz Polymerization Department under Pannwitz, but all the camp, as a giant laboratory experiment designed to transform the substance of mankind. Two literary influences were at work. The first was Jean-Henri Fabre, the French entomologist, the second Aldous Huxley. In Insect Adventures, a childhood favorite of Levi’s, Fabre had described a termite society quite as ruthless and varied as that of Auschwitz, with honest toilers, free-booters, producers, and parasite ants. Accordingly, the Germans in this chapter are the “gray machine” marching like Fabre’s ants in mindless mathematical rank. The prisoners are “spiders,” the Kapo is a “hen,” while Pannwitz himself is a nameless “zoological specimen.” Huxley’s early novels had also teemed with laboratory imagery, and the English author’s biological approach to writing was of great use to Levi now as he began to classify species for the camp’s inhuman bestiary. As a boy, Primo had been tirelessly absorbed in the minutiae of insect life, and “Chemical Examination” is a showcase for that miniaturist discipline. Maxima in minimus, the smallest facts are the most significant. Levi returned to the writing table with renewed confidence to begin the “October 1944” section of If This is a Man. It was started on April 5, and completed three days later on Thursday the 8th. During this time Levi examined the Nazis’ greatest crime: the assembly-line gassings of human beings. The physical and mental effort it must have cost Levi to write it hardly bears imagining. His Dantesque language (the “naked, frightened” prisoners) suggests a state of vacuous horror. But Levi’s modern view of

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hell, in this chapter, is far more disturbing than the pitchforks and devilry of Dante’s medieval theology. In the twentieth-century inferno of Auschwitz, hell is no longer a malign external punishment for sins committed: At Auschwitz the innocent were punished, and the capacity to do evil and to create hell on earth, lay in us all. One influence runs through this chapter like the black line in a lobster, and that is Charles Darwin. The Victorian evolutionist had very precisely defined the sensory realm (sight, sound, taste, touch, smell) beyond which it was immoral for the investigator to stray. Thus “October 1944” is strictly an eyewitness report, containing nothing that Levi had not seen or heard himself. Yet the chapter’s careful objectivity collapses when Levi recalls the Jewish prisoner who loudly thanked God for saving his life from the gas chambers; swaying to and fro on his bunk. Kuhn addresses his petition to the Almighty in a Talmudic singsong. He is a selfishly blind Amen-sayer. “If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer.” Levi rarely raises his voice and is never hectoring, yet here is the anger of the outraged. For one to extol God’s glory while his companions had less than two days to live was for Levi a blasphemy. What Levi does not admit is that he too had been tempted to pray during that 1944 “selection;” but as soon as he realized that he was not going to die, he was deeply ashamed, he said in a later interview, and “held back.”11 Midway through the book’s composition, an event of great political significance took place in Italy. On May 9, 1946 the Italian king, Victor Emanuel III, abdicated. Italy now had to decide by referendum whether it was to remain a monarchy or become a republic. Levi reflected a good deal on the abdication crisis, both frightened and fascinated by it. To Jean Samuel, who had survived Auschwitz after all, he wrote: “After the long paralysis of Fascism, we’re about to be intoxicated by politics.”12 He hoped the crisis and its attendant hoopla might bring about a complete social transformation. Yet he feared a Blackshirt revival as fierce conversational exchanges flared in the streets of Turin and the old guard shook their heads and whispered secret praise of the Duce. Meanwhile in a clamor of books, films, and newspapers the Italians were exhorted to join the democratic world. This was to be their first free elections in over twenty years. Referendum Day was June 2, 1946, a Sunday. Raised under dictatorship, Levi had never seen a ballot box before. He arrived early at the polls to help count the votes. In anticipation of violence, armored cars stood outside the polling stations. With every vote that Levi counted for the Republic, it seemed to him that a new world was being created. The results came through three days later on Wednesday June 5. The country was fairly evenly split, but by twelve million to ten million the Italians had voted for a republic. Europe’s oldest ruling royal family, the House of Savoy, was

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finished. To Levi and his friends, Italy’s republican Constitution was the most wonderful political event of the age. The lawyer Bianca Guidetti Serra, perhaps Levi’s truest and oldest friend, told me that it was the defining moment of her generation’s glory. “Honestly it seemed to us that the world was on the move again and this time nobody was going to stop us.”13 Ousting the royal family from Italy meant shedding the past and the nationalist myopia of Fascism, the Duce, and his cohorts for good. Levi’s hopes for a new Italy were boundless and, as he later recalled, “almost mystical.”14 As the republican spirit spread across Italy, Rita Hayworth’s up-tempo hit, “Amado Mio,” from the Hollywood blockbuster Gilda, was heard everywhere in bars and cafés, exuding a sense of postwar sexuality and exuberance. At times it seemed to Levi that his hopes for a new Italy were crystallized by the Hayworth anthem. And this sense of elation—the refreshing feeling that something worthwhile lay ahead—was overwhelming. In cinemas across the land Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, which mocked Hitler and Mussolini, was shown to great huzzahs. In a way that is difficult to understand now, the optimism that Levi then felt about life and the outlook for human affairs impacted significantly on the writing of If This is a Man. Here was a book that harmonized with the tenor of the times, and with the happiness Levi then felt about his new life and impending marriage. It does not just record the macabre aspects of Auschwitz, but is pervaded by humanity and a sense of hope. After seven months, If This is a Man was shaping into a marvel of luminous precision and poise. All through the summer and autumn the writing continued. The book’s most wryly ironic chapter, “This Side of Good and Evil,” was begun on Sunday September 1. Here Levi analyzes the prisoners’ fox-hole barter in breadcrumbs, tobacco, and gold teeth. The SS had openly connived in this commerce, which made a mockery of their vaunted moral and racial superiority. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is archly parodied in the chapter’s title. The German philosopher’s assault on Western morality and scorning of Judaeo-Christian compassion for the weak had foreshadowed a moment in the 1940s—Auschwitz—when humanity began to die. Nietzsche had completed his crowning opus Ecce Homo in Turin in 1888, and Levi knew very well that Hitler had used his violent Social Darwinism as justification for the extermination of European Jewry. This chapter, with its communiqué style of exposition, was modeled on one of the factory reports Levi was expected to produce each week at the DUCO plant. Circulated among staff, they were to be read by everyone from the lab assistants up to the directors. One of them, “The Flooding of Enamels,” Levi published at this time in a specialist trade journal, Pitture e Vernici (Paints and Varnishes), and analyzes the mixed pigments Prussian blue and Chrome yellow. The report bears no obvious connection to

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“This Side of Good and Evil” beyond a precision and lucidity in the writing, qualities that Levi believed were the “sovereign politeness” of the writer.15 Clear prose anyway was Levi’s most effective antidote to the language anarchy—the confusio linguarum—of Auschwitz. Indeed, the book’s clean-cut narrative creates an extraordinary sense of communion and intimacy with the reader, and ensured that one day it would be read by thousands of Italians of all backgrounds. By December 1946, If This is a Man was virtually completed. Exhausted by the effort, Levi was also immensely relieved. “I’ve worked on this book with love and rage,” he wrote to Jean Samuel, adding “I believe I’ve achieved something more than just rescue my memories from oblivion.”16 In fact, writing the book had provided Levi with a path back from the dead to the living. As he told me: “It was only after my humanity had been obliterated, after I had written If This is a Man, that I felt a true ‘man’ again— a man in the sense of the title of that book.” So Levi’s ghastly tale was told—burned out of him—and the effects of the catharsis were plain to see. After eleven months at DUCO, Levi’s face had lost its unhealthy moonlike appearance; clean-shaven, his whole demeanor had improved. The book’s last completed chapter, “Die drei Leute vom Labor,” was pencilmarked “22 December 1946,” a landmark date in the history of Italian literature. The manuscript required considerable work, however. Viewed together, the chapters did not have a clear sense of direction, jumping backward and forward in time. The book, in short, was in textual disarray. Lucia Morpurgo, Levi’s fiancé, began to impose coherence on the pages by putting the sections in order. She was able to pace the manuscript better by asking Levi to read sections out loud to her, and she was an exacting critic: every word had to be aware of its own etymology, intended and considered. In many ways, Lucia was well suited to the task. Her father, Giuseppe Morpurgo, had written two prewar novels, Yom Hak-Kippurim and Beati misericordes, which were among the first in Italy to treat Jewish themes. Their D’Annunzian purple prose had not worn well, yet they have efficient and very logical narratives. Occasionally Levi’s prose was made less Classically fossilized; too great an insistence on Latinate Italian did not accord well with the book’s modernity. As soon as the work was ready, Levi wanted others to see it. Camillo Treves, a Communist whom Levi had known in wartime Milan, was astonished by the maturity of Levi’s vision. In the space of just a few years the “lad” whom Treves had known in 1942 had matured intellectually, politically, and spiritually. “If any book had a claim to the universal,” Treves told me, “it was this: all life seemed to be written in its burning pages.”17 Though Levi claimed not to know if his book was “mediocre, good or very

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good,”18 secretly he knew had had written an exceptionally powerful work, and the praise must have been wonderful for him. If This is a Man was a book that had to be written and Levi wanted it to be read by others. He needed to find a publisher. Levi had a cousin in Massachusetts, Anna Yona, who was a respected local radio journalist. Hoping to break into the American market, he sent Yona sample chapters. Yona translated “The Canto of Ulysses” into English and sent it to a junior editor, Adeline Lubell, at the Boston publisher Little, Brown. Impressed by what she read, Lubell asked to see more material. However, her superiors at Little, Brown were skeptical. In 1946 the subject of Europe’s dismal recent past did not engage, indeed it repelled, American readers. (No American Jewish writer that I can think of, with the exception of Saul Bellow, was then imaginatively touched by the Nazi genocide.) Lubell tried an august Jewish authority, Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman, for his view. Well connected in literary circles, Liebman had the power to launch Levi across the Atlantic. He was a reformed rabbi based in Massachusetts, whose self-help guide, Peace of Mind, was the American bestseller of 1946. However, the rabbi recommended Little, Brown not to publish Levi. Not that he was a suitable judge; his bestseller, a farrago of high-flown rhetoric, called for “world peace,” but made no mention either of Auschwitz or the Nuremberg trials that had just ended. Living so far from Europe, Rabbi Liebman had perhaps been unable or unwilling to countenance the tremendum of Auschwitz, and it is likely that Levi’s chapters went to the wastepaper basket largely unread. The rabbi may also have disapproved of the absence of prophecy and despair in Levi’s book. Where was the anguish, the Old Testament fierceness, in this cool document? Levi’s modest effort at description and understanding looked too tame— too polite—for its subject. He would have to wait another forty years until America took notice of him. By the New Year of 1947 Levi had begun to circulate his manuscript among Italian publishers. His first choice was Einaudi in Turin. From its humble origins in 1933, Einaudi had become the most fashionable and commercially successful publisher in Italy. Giulio Einaudi, the founder, was brimful of initiative and always in search of what he called novità—the “latest” in literature. He enjoyed a close and controversial relationship with the Italian Communist Party and was very much a part of Italian anti-Fascist culture. Dubbed “The Prince” by his circle, Einaudi had an imposingly aristocratic manner and a reputation for frivolity, but his staff were handpicked for their stringent moral seriousness. Cesare Pavese, now an immensely famous writer, was managing director. Levi hoped his manuscript would not land on the Pavese slush-pile: a lugubrious pipe-smoking character, Pavese was famous for rejecting typescripts with lightning rapidity.

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Instead Levi put his faith in Pavese’s assistant, the novelist Natalia Ginzburg. She was born to an exemplary anti-Fascist family. Her father had been arrested in Turin in 1934 on a subversion charge, while her husband Leone Ginzburg had been murdered by Germans in Rome in 1944. There is no doubt that Levi saw common ground in Natalia’s wartime suffering, and it was with high hopes that he left his manuscript with her at the Einaudi offices at 5 Corso Re Umberto, a few doors from where he lived. A week later came a devastating verdict. Natalia Ginzburg did everything to soften the blow; but the book was not “right,” she said, for Einaudi’s list. Levi was hurt and angry: why was he being turned down? His book was good, surely? As Natalia was a family friend, Levi did not insist on explanations, but retrieved the manuscript in dignified silence. It says much for his sense of loyalty to Ginzburg that he remained her close friend all his life. “She is a nice person, a fine writer, but she is not a thinker,” was his verdict.19 In fact Levi was devastated—his pride and young ambition badly dented—by Ginzburg’s rejection. The shunning of his book was like an intimation of the literary scrap heap, yet Ginzburg’s reluctance to publish Levi was part of a larger, collective reluctance among Italians in general to face their brutal and regrettable past. In 1985 when I interviewed Natalia Ginzburg she contritely acknowledged what she called her “error:”“It must have been a bleak moment in Primo’s life, but you know I was young and foolish then, and besides I was not solely responsible.”20 Cesare Pavese had also judged, correctly as it turned out, that the time was not right to publish Levi. Italians had other things to worry about, such as finding work and building a better world for their children, than to read of the German death camps. Italians wanted to say, “It’s all over. Basta! Enough of this horror!” There was another reason, perhaps, why Levi was turned down. The book’s classical allusions to Dante, the rhythmical beauty and grace of the prose, were construed as a throwback to Fascism and the regime’s harping on Roman antiquity. Levi’s marmoreal sentences betrayed the influence of the “art of beautiful speech”—l’arte di parlare bene—which had been a staple of Fascist school education. Moreover, the Latin origins of some of the phrase-making (“Dawn came on us like a betrayer”), the shards of Virgil and Cicero, gave the book an antique literary richness. Italy’s new generation of writers wanted to disavow Classical influences and embrace the gritty “newsreel-school” of realism, which aimed for an unpolished immediacy off the streets. The young Italo Calvino’s early fiction, for all that it had a fabulous Gothic undertow, was influenced by Hemingway and the anti-rhetorical films of the Resistance such as Rossellini’s Rome Open City. Levi belonged to no literary coterie or salon. Oddly exiled from the center of things in the DUCO paint factory, he had ploughed his own literary furrow. His only concession to the fashion for documentary

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verismo occurs in the preface to his book, and even then I think it is half-ironic: “It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.” Levi’s book was rejected by five other Italian publishers, among them Edizioni di Comunità, owned by the Jewish Protestant company Olivetti. The book was “quite interesting,” declared the Comunità editor, Professor Doriguzzi, but the moment was not right to publish it.21 An element of snobbishness may also have counted against Levi. Where was the luster to his name? Among the crown royalty of Italy’s new literary talent, Pavese, Calvino, Elio Vittorini, Levi had no standing. Eventually Levi’s book was taken on by an obscure publishing house in Turin, run by the dandified man of letters, Franco Antonicelli. Handsome and trim for his forty-five years, Antonicelli was an altogether striking creature, rumored (so his widow Renata told me) to dab eau-de-cologne behind his ears. But beneath the foppish exterior was a man of great moral probity, who had shown tremendous physical courage during the Resistance. Levi had found his man. Meanwhile, the book had changed its title from In the Abyss (an H. G. Wells story) to The Drowned and the Saved, and then to If This is a Man. Antonicelli took the definitive title from Levi’s poem, “Psalm” (“Shemà”) in describing the destruction of man at Auschwitz, the poem had asked the reader to “Consider if this is a man.” Antonicelli’s was a brilliantly ambivalent choice, for the Nazis as well as their prisoners had been dehumanized by their work in the camp. And Levi, by including both victim and aggressor in the title, reinforced the book’s objectivity and moral authority. The line carried an echo of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s astonished question to the Ancient Mariner, “What manner of man art thou?” as well as an allusion to Elio Vittorini’s famous novel of the Resistance, Uomini e no (Men and Non-Men), which had deluged Italian bookshops after the Liberation. But a more intriguing source for the line in the poem may have been the season’s most popular film, Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Shown to spellbound audiences in Turin, in the movie the monster says to himself sorrowfully: “If only I was a man.” On October 11, 1947, one month after Levi married Lucia Morpurgo, If This is a Man was published. On a pale background the words Se questo è un uomo stood out in red; beneath them was a Goya etching of a dead man prone on his stomach, arms outstretched in blood. It was a draft sketch for Goya’s famous canvas “The Execution of 3 May.” In those days, books were expected to make their own way. There were no author interviews with Levi, no magazine profiles, no launch parties. And the book’s cheap postwar paper was virtually newsprint. Yet Antonicelli had made an effort. Publicity photographs of the twenty-eight-year-old author were distributed in bookshops, his face in moody half-shadow. To drum up

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nationwide interest, Antonicelli’s sales director Luigi (“Gigi”) Ventre embarked on a two-week publicity tour of Lombardy, Emilia, the Veneto, and Rome, the trunk of his FIAT “Topolinio” (Little Mouse, then the smallest car in Italy) crammed with flyers and review copies. Unfortunately, word had got round Turin of Einaudi’s previous rejection and this was to influence sales negatively. Between November 1947 and the following spring no more than twelve reviews of If This is a Man appeared in Italy. Most critics gave measured, very conventional assessments, praising Levi’s “morality” while being uncertain what sort of book they were dealing with. In a long and immensely detailed review, the leftist periodical Il Ponte lamely welcomed the presence of a “new writer,” but no word was forthcoming from Italy’s so-called grandi firme— “big names”—such as Alberto Moravia or Elio Vittorini. Most galling were those critics who pigeonholed Levi as a “witness.” This word—in Italian, testimone—would settle on Levi like an albatross, and he came to resent it thoroughly. It seemed the most backhanded praise: Levi thought of himself as a writer first, and a witness second. Amid the indifferent reviews, two stood out. One was by the great Piedmontese critic Arrigo Cajumi, the other by Italo Calvino. It would take a maverick like Cajumi to recognize Levi’s greatness. Cajumi famously scorned Italy’s cultural movers and shakers, and his review of Levi, on the front page of La Stampa (now no longer La Nuova Stampa) for November 26, 1947, was aimed partly at Italy’s literati, most of whom were in thrall to party politics or the Church. “Ignoring political parties, Levi arrives naturally at art.” Alone among Italian critics, Cajumi identified a Darwinist undertow in the narrative. He said that Levi had written of the central event of his life (which happens now to be the central event of the twentieth century) like a “born writer.” No other review would give Levi such intense pleasure; Cajumi had salvaged his literary self-respect and read him as the writer he wanted to be. Italo Calvino’s review for Italy’s Communist daily L’Unità (May 6, 1948) hailed a “magnificent new book.” Levi’s portrayal of the “icy” Dr. Pannwitz alone was evidence of an extraordinary gift for characterization, said Calvino, and a “genuine narrative power.” Four years younger than Levi, Calvino had just published his extrovert first novel The Path to the Nest of Spiders, born directly out of his experience as a partisan in the Italian Resistance. With its triumphalist message of partisan revolt, Calvino’s was a very different sort of book from Levi’s. Yet Calvino was twinned with Levi (by Cajumi) as a “promising” new Italian writer. By the year’s end Levi learned the sad truth that If This is a Man had scarcely been read outside of Turin, and then only by a phalanx of

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middle-class intelligentsia: doctors, schoolteachers, partisan diehards. The sales figures speak for themselves: 6,000 copies of Calvino’s Resistance novel had sold immediately on publication, while Levi’s book shifted no more than 1,500 copies. The disappointing sales—by no means a catastrophe—amounted to little over half the book’s print run. Italians, in their rush to find a new national consciousness, had preferred Calvino’s jaunty partisan fantasy with its black and white world of victor and vanquished, to Levi’s disturbing moral treatise. With such mediocre sales Levi believed there could be no sequel to If This is a Man, no second act. He had fulfilled his civic duty to testify and felt he could do no more. So in early 1948, with his wife pregnant, he abandoned his plans to become a professional writer and returned fulltime to chemistry. * * * Toward the end of his life Levi was depressed and weighed down by domestic problems. He was working on a collection of imaginary letters from a scientist to a wealthy Turinese patron (the letters explained various scientific and chemical phenomena) but the writing was blocked. Levi was troubled by other matters. Almost the last newspaper article he wrote, “The Black Hole of Auschwitz,” bitterly indicted the new generation of German historians who contended that the Nazi genocide was not a unique instance of human infamy but just one link in a chain reaction that started with the Soviet Gulag and went on to Vietnam and beyond. Levi was clearly horrified by this move to diminish what he saw as man’s defining atrocity. Elsewhere he spoke of the “laido conato” (loathsome effort) of so-called revisionist historians.22 For a man who rarely raised his voice, those were strong words. Auschwitz was the catalyst that turned Levi into a writer. But whether the depression that enveloped him in the final months was compounded by his terrible past can only be speculation. The books remain, and those show what a genius was lost to the literary world. Like Dante before him, Levi had brought gold back out of hell. Levi had said that he wanted as his epitaph the Greek words that Homer used of his voyager Ulysses, “pollà plankte.”23 They mean “much erring” or “driven to wander far and wide”; in his homesick exile, separated from his friends and home, the longenduring Ulysses was a kind of Everyman. And so was Primo Levi, which is why he still feels so close to us in the twenty-first century. Notes 1. According to Liliana Picciotto Fargion’s vital record, Il libro della memoria: gli ebrei deportati dall’italia (1934–1945), of the 489 Jews accountable on Primo

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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Levi’s transport (February 22, 1944), an estimated 296 entered the various camps of Auschwitz alive. (That is, 151 men and 145 women.) The rest of the transport, a total of 193, were gassed immediately. Most of the 296 Jews who survived the first selection subsequently died through exhaustion and hunger. In all, only sixteen men and eight women that we know returned alive to Italy: twenty-four Italian survivors. My interview with Primo Levi took place on July 10, 1986. Parts of it appeared in PN Review, 14, 2 (1987). Anna Maria Levi to author, March 30, 1993. Vanna Rava to author, March 27, 1993. From the transcript of an unpublished interview with Levi by the Dutch filmmaker Rolf Orthel, 1974. Mila Momigliano to author, March 29, 1995 (Momigliano was the sister-in-law of Luciana Nissim, who was deported with Levi to Auschwitz). Primo Levi to author. Ibid. From “Primo Levi,” interviewed by Rita Caccamo De Luca and Manuela Olagnero, in Mondoperaio, March 1984. Levi interviewed by Vanna Nocerino, in L’Ospite 1979. Levi interviewed by Paola Valabrega, in “Primo Levi,” Riga, 13 (1997). Levi to Jean Samuel, May 25, 1946. Bianca Guidetti Serra to author, April 7, 1995. Levi interviewed by Neliana Tersigni, Paese Sera, June 1986. Primo Levi to author. Levi to Jean Samuel, May 25, 1946. Camillo Treves to author, May 15, 1993. Levi to Jean Samuel, July 16, 1947. Levi interviewed by Anthony Rudolf, London Magazine, October 1986. Ginzburg interviewed by author, January 12, 1985; sections of the interview appeared in the London Magazine (December 1984–January 1985). Doriguzzi’s words were reported to the author by Giorgio Diena, September 12, 1992. Primo Levi, in the preface to La vita offesa: storia e memoria dei Lager nazisti nei racconti di duecento sopravvissuti, ed. Anna Bravo and Daniele Jalla (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1986). Primo Levi quoted in transcript of radio interview by Alberto Gozzi,“Lo specchio del cielo” (RAI 2), January 7, 1985.

Judaism Ostjuden Our fathers of this earth, Merchants of multiple skills, Shrewd sages of the numerous progeny God sowed across the world As mad Ulysses sowed salt in the furrows: I’ve found you everywhere, Countless as the sea’s sands, You stiff-necked ones, Poor tenacious human seed. February 7, 1946

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Figure 5.1 Watercolor and ink on paper, 1973. “I became a Jew in Auschwitz.” “There is Auschwitz, and so there can be no God.”

5

Primo Levi and the Jews David Mendel

n 1938, Primo Levi was nineteen years old when, in imitation of his German counterpart, Mussolini enacted his Race Laws. After the Second World War, Levi wrote that he was unaware that he was a Jew until then; he repeated this statement many times, and added that until the Race Laws he thought that Jews were Italians without Christmas trees. I couldn’t believe that Primo thought he was an ordinary Italian before the Race Laws; I certainly have never felt that I was an ordinary Englishman. He and I were of an age and had similar backgrounds; both our families paid lip service to the religion. He knew a lot about Judaism, but he learned it backwards, in and after the camps. He wrote, “I became a Jew at Auschwitz. Awareness of my difference was forced upon me. Someone, for no earthly reason had established that I was different and inferior . . . In making me feel a Jew, it helped me to recover a cultural inheritance which I previously did not possess.” Although he became an expert on the subject, he remained—as I do—agnostic. But there are differences between the communities which may have determined our attitudes. The majority of Italian Jews arrived there from Spain after the Inquisition around the year 1500. They introduced the technology of making silk to Italy. They called themselves in dialect “il popolo d’Israel.” They were never much loved or much hated, except perhaps by the Church. Jews come in all shades from Rabbis to converts to Christianity, but I’m not sure that even a converted Jew in England could have been unaware as Primo said he was. He had not distanced himself from Judaism to any great extent. The Race Laws came in only six years after his Bar mitzvah, and his grandparents, who he visited every week with his father, spoke the Piedmontese Jewish dialect. He was mocked by his schoolmates because he was a Jew. Even Germany’s active and obvious anti-Semitism seems not to have made him aware of his Jewishness. He said his unawareness was

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widely shared by Italian Jews. This was confirmed by Rita Levi-Montalcini, the Italian Nobel Prize winner who used the same words in her autobiography: “I became aware of being Jewish,” she wrote, “only with the Race Laws.”1 But Giacomo Debenedetti, a distinguished writer and literary critic left Turin before the war, and one of his stated reasons for doing so was the suffocating atmosphere of the Jewish community in which he lived. Cesare Cases, the leading Germanist—also Torinese—said much the same to me in an interview, and if there is and was a suffocating atmosphere of Jewishness, how could there not have been an awareness of one’s Jewishness, even for the assimilated? But these were all secular Jews. Surely religious Italian Jews must have felt like Jews. Secular and assimilated are broad terms. A Godless Jew may be aware of his Jewishness in a way which a converted Jew may not. Even the secular Jews were often Bar mitzvahed—as Primo was—and usually married within the faith—as he did. That doesn’t sound like being “barely aware.” Levi said that Italian Jews sent their children to Hebrew classes, but they wanted them to pursue their education in state schools. I said to him that it was odd that I felt entirely Jewish and had married an agnostic, of Christian descent, whereas he had felt unaware of his Jewishness and had married a Jewess. As there were only 30,000 Jews in Italy when he came back from Auschwitz, was not his having married one evidence that he was a racist?—incredible chutzpah, accusing him of racism! He smiled— rather sheepishly—and said that fresh from the camps he could do no other. It’s difficult for us to understand the attitude of Italian Jews without some knowledge of the history of the Jewish community in Italy—the oldest in Europe—which is very different from ours. There was a substantial Jewish community in Rome—as slaves—in the emperor Nero’s day, fifty years before the birth of Christ. There was, even then, a small community of free Jews, mainly rich merchants, doctors or bankers from the East. It’s odd that from time immemorial in most places where the majority of the Jews were kept in ghettoes there was also a community of privileged free Jews outside the ghetto. The size of the Jewish community in Italy increased slowly until 1492, when there was the major influx of Jews from Spain. There has been a constant stream of refugees later on, but just as the majority of Jews in England are Ashkenazi, the majority in Italy are of Spanish descent. Until 1861, Italy was not united; it was a mosaic of dukedoms, small kingdoms and the so-called Papal States, often at war with each other. The rulers of the various states were not uniform in their attitude to Jews. Some, particularly the Papal States were virulently anti-Semitic. Others,

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like Venice and Livorno, with their eye more on banking were often welcoming. The welcome varied with time; sometimes the son of a ruler who had welcomed the Jews, would chase them out. Turin, capital of Piedmont was one of the most anti-Semitic of the Italian states. It has the oldest ghetto in Italy. Levi’s ancestors had settled outside Turin on account of the anti-Semitism. The antiquity of their stay in Italy does not mean that Italian Jews had equal rights. In most large Italian cities, they were forced to live in ghettoes which were locked at night. The gates of the ghettoes were removed by Napoleon in 1801 and when he was defeated in 1813 the Italians promptly put them back on again. They were finally removed after the unification of Italy in 1861. This means that Levi’s grandfather had been born and lived his whole life in a ghetto whose gates were locked at night. Inside the ghettoes, which were overcrowded, shoddy, and dirty, the Jews were treated like cattle. They had no rights, they couldn’t attend Italian schools or universities, they had to pay taxes for the slightest requirements, they lived on rag collection, sewing, money lending, and prostitution. The Jews were bullied and forced to listen to sermons on conversion. Jewish children were abducted, forcibly baptized, and never saw their parents again. This happened in the Mortara case as late as 1858, the year my grandfather was born. The boy was very ill and his nurse who loved him, had him baptized, and the church confiscated him. The Mortara parents moved heaven and earth to get him back, but no power in Italy could procure his release. Young Mortara changed his name and became a Catholic priest. He seems to have led a somewhat shadowy, unhappy life.2 Until the nineteenth century, there was an annual Roman game in which a Jew was placed in a barrel and rolled down a hill for the entertainment of the populace. If they were old they were unlikely to survive this “sport.” Roman Jews had to tolerate the Ceremony of the Kick. Each year the head of the Roman Jewish community had to present a bouquet of flowers to the pope. A great deal of money was hidden in the flowers. The pope would accept the flowers and would then physically kick the Jew out. Over the centuries, the kick became symbolic, but the ceremony of the freshened-up flowers continued until quite recently. In 1860, the Rev. William Wetmore Story, an American Protestant from whose description of the ghetto I have drawn, ends his description with the words “Look round” (i.e., away from the Ghetto), “There, trembling beneath its opal veil of air rises the Alban Hill . . . and a soft delicate air comes breathing over the Campagna and rushes through the trees that cluster at our feet, and bears its blessing, too, up through the Ghetto streets, where the breath of Christian charity is too dainty to enter.”3

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Italians—and Italian Jews—always claim that there has never been anti-Semitism in Italy. Twice I have been told by Italian Catholics that the Jews were kept in ghettoes for their own protection! This is a nice conceit in itself, and would have come as news to most Italian Jews, but protection from what in a country without anti-Semitism? And as recently as 1890, an article in La Civiltà Cattolica, a Catholic intellectual paper, stated “since 1859 Italy has become the Kingdom of the Jews.” The existence of anti-Semitism, both in Italy and elsewhere needs explaining. My wife has asked me many times over the years, what were the causes of anti-Semitism. At first I thought it was due to the theory that many of us are born with or develop inferiority feelings. That we band together for strength and that we then compare ourselves favorably with other groups, and feel that they are inferior, perhaps evil, and we are against them. The Jews are a good scapegoat; few in number, not well loved, self-proclaimed Chosen people, and a soft target, without anybody to protect them until the creation of the Israel Defense Forces. But in recent years, I have become more and more impressed with the role of the Church. To start from the beginning, there is the question of deicide. Christians claim that the Jews killed Jesus, and clearly if he was God, that may have been regarded in those vengeful days as a crime, which should be visited on the umpteenth generation, and there is plenty of support for that mode of punishment in the Old Testament. I can’t say I have ever gone into the matter of who killed Christ, but it does seem unlikely that the Romans would have been persuaded to crucify him because the Jews wanted it. The Jews may well have wanted it, but in over five thousand years we have never had much influence on what the powerful did. I think that they both wanted it, and when, years later, the Romans converted to Christianity, it became politically correct to blame it on the Jews alone. When I said that to my wife, she would say that was 2,000 years ago, and surely there must be a statute of limitations. Some years ago I was listening to Radio 3 on a Wednesday afternoon when they broadcast a service. They read a lesson about 200 Jews who plotted against Caesar. Someone found out, and Caesar sent 400 legionaries to massacre them. End of story. No moral was drawn from it. So I wrote to the head of Religious Broadcasting asking what was the point of reading out a story like that at a time when no less a person than the Pope himself was bending over backwards to remove anti-Semitism from the services. He replied that he agreed that some of the lessons were antiSemitic, and that the Church was forced to read them in a set order, just as the sections of the Torah were read out one after the other, and that it was not within anyone’s power to stop it without a dictat from the Church of England authorities. He turned out to be a Primo Levi fan.

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Primo wrote: “whatever else one writes about this period which ended with the Nazis and the Fascists collaborating in sending millions of Jews to death camps, one thing must be said: This bestial massacre would never have happened in Italy, France and Germany if there had not been an indifference nurtured over the centuries to their Jewish fellow citizens. This indifference was the end product of the hostility of the church for whom conversion was the unique solution to the Jewish problem.” And the Pope himself, in 1994 accepted this assessment. It has been suggested that anti-Semitism results from the fact that Christ was born a Jew, an idea which some Christians cannot tolerate. In Italy, the Jews played a disproportionately large role in Garibaldi’s wars to liberate and unite Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century. They were regarded and regarded themselves as co-founders of modern Italy. They felt that they had participated in the struggles to free Italy, and in so doing they were helping to free themselves. In Paris recently, at a symposium on Primo Levi, I listened to a suave Italian, Dan Vittorio Segre, who had worked out the percentage of Jews in the Italian services in the First World War: there were 150 per 1,000. Only two other categories served their country in such a high ratio, prostitutes and common criminals. In Garibaldi’s day, there was an optimistic feeling that the new Italy had entered its belle epoque, and everything was going to be liberal and enlightened. All this helped the Jews feel as if they belonged. They had penetrated all branches of Italian life. They were landowners—which was forbidden to them elsewhere. Napoleon had confiscated Church lands and Christians felt that it was disloyal to the Church to buy them. So they were sold to Jews. There were some 40 high-ranking Jewish officers in the armed forces in the 1930s; there was even a battleship, the Finzi, named after a Jew. I don’t suppose there were any high-ranking Jewish officers in the British Forces before the war, and that fact alone points to a different situation. There was a Jewish Prime Minister in Italy at the turn of the century. But of course there was Disraeli in Britain. There were 50,000 Jews in Italy in Napoleon’s day. The period 1848–1938 was a time of increasing assimilation, emigration, and conversion and the community continued to shrink in spite of the arrival of refugees from Hitler’s Germany. In Hitler’s day, Italian Jewry had shrunk to 30,000, during which time, the communities here and in America were getting larger. When Mussolini brought in the Race Laws, all the military, academic, and professional Jews lost their jobs; only fourteen professors in the whole of Italy added their names to a protest against this. After the Battle of Taranto in 1940, in which the British sank the Italian fleet in harbor, there was only one man who could raise it, the Jew, Admiral Pugliese, who had been forced into retirement by the Race Laws.

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Mussolini had no option but to ask him to re-float the fleet, and offered him a substantial bribe. The Admiral replied that he would not accept payment and would take the job on if they paid his return fare and allowed him to wear his uniform and medals. The Race Laws of 1938 came as a terrible uprooting to Italian Jews who felt so Italian. Primo Levi wrote: “the race laws have stamped me like you stamp sheet steel; now I’m a Jew. They’ve sewn the Star of David on me and not only on my clothes.” A Jewish colonel in the Italian army fighting in the war against Abyssinia, left his trench and walked unarmed toward the enemy crying Viva Italia!; this was clearly suicide. Another Italian Jew, founder of the successful publishing house Roma was a native of Bologna and he went back home. He met a friend just outside one of those famous Bolognese leaning towers and the friend asked him what he was doing. He said that he was going to walk up the tower for exercise and was coming down the quick way, which he did. It’s a terrible story, but all three stories show how the Italian Jews felt. That last story also demonstrates the strength of the Jewish Witz even in extremis. Italian Jews demonstrate in their ways of thinking interesting differences from us British Jews. Rita Levi-Montalcini was ten years older than Primo and born on the same street in Turin. She is now over 100 years old. I’d gone to interview her about Primo Levi and we dined in a splendid room in solitary state. After twenty minutes the phone rang, and she said: “Can I ring you back? I’m speaking to an old friend. We met only twenty minutes ago but he seems like an old friend.” Rita’s nephew committed suicide long after the war and in a moving chapter in her book, Senz’olio contro vento, which is an old sea-faring phrase meaning to run out of oil to pour on troubled waters in a high wind. The boy, through schizophrenia, had had a dreadful life and his mother wrote to Rita: “the great suffering of that man who lived almost two thousand years ago, which has always moved me so much, I have re-lived moment by moment in my son, in that poor child who suffered a no lesser Calvary.” The boy’s suffering was appalling, but I cannot imagine an English Jewish mother making that analogy. Italians, including Italian Jews, are tremendous nationalists even if they can’t be persuaded to pay their taxes or obey the laws. In 1976 Primo himself said that anti-Semitism in Italy was negligible. On the day Primo died, I visited the Padua Synagogue; I couldn’t make out the Hebrew accent. I asked the Chazan whether the way they pronounced Hebrew was Askenazi or Sephardi. He replied—typically—that it was Italian. George Eliot called it “Hebrew dyed Italian.” It’s a Spanish-derived pronunciation which they have made their own. They also speak—or spoke—an Italianized Spanish equivalent of Yiddish. Primo himself wrote about Ashkenazi Jews being so different from Italian Jews.

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The former president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy, Tullia Zevi, said to me that there was no anti-Semitism in Italy, and when I cited past and present anti-Semitism, she said “I have never been able to make an Askenazi understand this.” I have seen anti-Jewish slogans on the walls in Padua, and there have been bombings of synagogues and Jewishowned shops in the last ten years. To be fair, some of the bombings have been by Arabs or pro-Arab groups, and could be ascribed to anti-Zionism rather than anti-Semitism, which is a dodgy conclusion. I would say that anti-Semitism in Italy is much like it is in Britain; probably more, certainly no less. In view of all this, it strikes me as odd that Primo felt like an ordinary Italian in 1937, especially since in order to get the Italians conditioned, there was a lot of anti-Semitic propaganda before the Race Laws in 1938. Anti-Semitism is usually directly related to the percentage of Jews in a population. Bernard Shaw asked rhetorically, “Why is there no antiSemitism in Ireland?” He answered himself, “Because there are no Jews.” As usual, he sacrificed accuracy for wit. In the twentieth century, Italian Jews made up roughly one in a thousand of the population. In Poland, which is probably the most anti-Semitic place on earth, Jews formed about 10 percent of the population before Hitler. Levi’s Jewishness must be considered with respect to Italian Jewishness and Italian Catholicism. Italians are a very divided people, but they’re united about one thing; they’re against the government, regardless of what government it is. In true Italian fashion, the degree of opposition varies from one state to another. A priest, Umberto Benigni, in 1906 published anti-Semitic polemics. He founded, with Giovanni Preziosi, the conditions for the Race Laws. And in the end, there were fifty-one concentration camps in Italy. But there was also a fascist emissary in Nice, which had been occupied by Italy, who would produce forged papers for Jews. There was a special Department for it. The Italian Consul in Nice Gustavo Orlandini, would wait outside French Police headquarters and watch for a French policeman to emerge with a Jew who was to be handed over to the Germans. In the name of the Italian occupying power he would take charge of the Jew, put him in custody for a while, and then release him. So in assessing the performance of the Italians, you have to separate off the Catholic anti-Semitic element from the non-catholic tolerance. Primo wrote of “this mixture of piety, tolerance and cynicism which is typically Italian.” This Italian character accounts for the relatively small proportion of Italian Jews who were sent to the camps; for the Italian army’s refusal to hand over Jews to the Germans, for the hiding of Jews in monasteries, and after the war for the refusal of the dock-workers in Genoa to load and unload English ships when we restricted immigration to Israel.

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I stayed in a convent in Italy, now given over to tourism, and a very old nun, who had spent her whole life there told me that at the beginning of the war, they had taken in the family of the pope’s Jewish physician who had spent the war with them and Jews on the run, then Resistance fighters on the run, then Fascists on the run. She showed me the concealed entrance to the roof space that each of these fugitives had occupied in turn. She said that they gave sanctuary to anyone in need. It was not until I read a book called Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew4 that I got some insight into why Levi and I felt differently about our histories. The author, Dan Vittorio Segre, mentioned earlier, is the scion of a distinguished Italian Jewish family, and is the same age as Levi and myself. Until 1938, he was, like his father, a Fascist. Many decent, intelligent, and patriotic Italians were Fascists in the early days, because Fascism seemed to offer a solution to the country’s law and order problems. So the percentage of Fascists—like the percentage of winners of the Medaglia al Valore Militare— was similar in Jews and Christians. There’s even a photo of Primo Levi himself, in the uniform of the Balilla, the Fascist Youth Organization. But to be fair, membership in the Balilla was obligatory, whilst membership in the Fascist Party was not. To be fair again, membership in the Fascist Party was obligatory for certain jobs, and there were thus more members than there were Fascists. It wasn’t only Italians who admired Mussolini. Who do you think said of him: “I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by his gentle and simple bearing and by his calm detached power in spite of so many burdens and dangers.” After having observed the man for ten more years, he called him “The greatest law-giver among living men. If I had been an Italian,” he said, “I’m sure I should have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish” and he praised what he described as the man’s Roman genius. It was none other than Winston Churchill. But when the Italians brought in their Race Laws, Segre’s cousin set fire to the office of a Jewish newspaper in order to prove that a Jew could be a good Fascist. Segre weighed things in the balance and found himself wanting to emigrate to Palestine. When war broke out, he joined the British Army and took part in the invasion of Italy. Primo Levi had his great change in awareness of his Jewishness in Auschwitz. He came to feel, as I do, Jewish in the way that I feel I am male. He said that he was three-fourths Italian but gave great importance to the other one-fourth. He said he was in favor of mixtures and impurities. He wrote in The Periodic Table of “The grain of impurity which makes the reaction go.” Who says he wasn’t aware of his Jewishness? Primo had another reason for favoring impurity. He wrote: “for a country to become racist, it must be compact, tend to make a massive

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block of itself, uniform, manoeuvrable.” That happened in Germany with Hitler, but it didn’t happen in Italy, for the sole reason that the difference between a Piedmontese and a Calabrese is too great. So what sort of a Jew did he end up being? He said “I adapted myself to a Jewish condition only after and as an effect of the Race Laws. Auschwitz gave me something new. It made me become a Jew, and so I discovered a cultural heritage that I did not have earlier.” Levi believed in freedom of conscience, which in Catholic Italy was not recognized until the Second Vatican Council in 1965. For Primo being a Jew meant being a pioneer of freedom of conscience. Hitler said: “conscience is a Jewish invention.” Levi frequently quotes from Jewish sources and symbolism. Of the Talmud he said “It must be said that it contains everything and the opposite of everything: it simply depends on the filter you use.” He believed that God created the world—not religion. He was deeply upset by the way At an Uncertain Hour, his collection of poetry was received by ultrareligious groups. This occurred specially in America where his yiddischkeit was recognized as secondhand. He wrote a book largely to demonstrate that a lot of Jews had been in the Resistance. “Tens of thousands,” he said. The title If Not Now, When? comes from the Pirque Avoth and in the book he described Jewish courage and Jewish reasons for fighting. The attitude of nonreligious Italian Jews is much influenced by Italian culture and they don’t feel in conflict with the locals. In If Not Now, When? his hero— Mendel—goes to a rich bourgeois Milanese Jewish party and Mendel says that he feels very different from these people. Levi said: “I too felt myself different from those people, who haven’t understood anything.” In an interview, Levi said that the character Mendel contained much of himself. He also said “I take no pride in being Jewish. I have never felt myself to be a member of a Chosen People, who have concluded a pact with God. I am a Jew because I happened to be born Jewish. I am not ashamed of it nor do I brag about it. For me, being a Jew is a question of identity; an identity about which I must however say this: I do not intend to divest myself of it.” When asked “What is the basis for your feeling Jewish?” he replied “It is a cultural matter. I cannot say that Judaism has been my Polar Star; I am also a chemist and a writer; many things interest me and Judaism is only one of them.” He goes on: “I have never concerned myself with questions of racial allegiance. My book, If This is a Man, has been read as a book written by a Jewish author—this happened abroad, more than in Italy—and as a result of having been defined a Jewish writer, I actually became one!” He wrote: “In my case it was the Americans who used the phrase for the first time. In Italy I’m known as a writer who, incidentally is also a Jew.” I wonder if he’s right about that. He goes on: “In the States it’s not like that. The last time I went to America, in 1985, it seemed

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as if they’d sewed the star of David on me again. But it doesn’t matter . . . I accept, willingly, description as a Jewish writer.” He continued: “It’s easy to define me in this way because almost all my works have to do in one way or another with Jewishness, and furthermore it was as a Jew that I had to live the experience of Auschwitz.” Lia Montel Tagliacozzo, president of the Jewish community in Turin says that Levi often said noi ebrei piemontese (we Piedmontese Jews). Though not religious, he was on the fringe of the Jewish community through his family and his wife’s family. In reply to a question about his being a fully paid-up member of the Turin Jewish community he said “To tell the truth, for some months I was worried about it, but I put that behind me. I had even sought to bring myself into contact with God, without any success. I had been presented with a God the Master, a Punitive God, to whom I felt indifferent.” He goes on: “After a short period of perplexity, I detached myself totally from him, keeping him at a distance as something from childhood which no longer concerned me. Not having ever interiorized God, I had no need to detach him from my mind nor to withdraw myself from his ambit.” He goes on to explain that most of his friends, mainly Christian but also Jewish, were agnostic. He speaks of the ease of making friends with other Jews. He said that once in Auschwitz, during selections, he had been tempted to pray. “I said to myself ‘no, you can’t do this, you have no right, firstly because you don’t believe in God; and in the second place, to ask a favor without feeling yourself privileged is immoral.’ The moral is; I renounced the indubitable comfort of prayer and I left it to Chance, or whoever acted for Chance, to decide my destiny.” What a stern moralist he was even in extremis. When he reached home, he met a friend who was a believer. It was Nicola Dallaporta, a devout Catholic, who had supported Levi before Auschwitz by giving him a job to enable him to get his degree. Dallaporta had said: “It is clear that you were saved because God protected you.” This remark angered Levi because he had seen around him thousands who he judged more worthy than he, and innocent children dying and some awful people saved. So life or death were not determined by God but by Chance. Levi was unable to accept either the idea that the Shoah was all in God’s plan, or that he ought to thank God for having been saved, or that God spared a few Jews to carry on the race. He felt that all these views were blasphemous. He felt he survived by Chance, luck, Muzzel. “This view excludes any Divine complicity or intervention. God had nothing to do with it. A god who decides who goes into the Gas Chamber is a monster. If Hitler hadn’t lost the war, Jewry would no longer exist. You could have given a non-survivor some of your food, and you rejoiced when he went to the gas instead of you. I eat ⫽ you starve, you are selected ⫽ I am spared. But they were spared because they still had some work in them. It was all chance.

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Chance may save a wicked person or sentence an innocent child.” Eli Wiesel who was a believer observing the triumph of Evil in the camps came to accuse God for having permitted it, to not have intervened to stop the butchers. Levi said: “I on the other hand limited myself to conclude ‘So, it really is true; there is no God.’ ” But with his usual ambivalence he added: I must confess that I feel a certain curiosity; a certain dissatisfaction comes to me from a different order of thoughts, for example the thoughts which rise inside me about the cosmos, the universe. In other words I have a suspicion that behind this enormous machine, the universe, there might be a driver who controls the motor, if he didn’t actually invent it. But such a suspicion, though very clear, does not relieve me from the belief that this driver, if there is one, is indifferent to man’s affairs. In sum, he is not someone one can turn to with a prayer. I have some regrets about this. It would please me if there was a driver, and it would please me even more if it were a God-Driver. To have a Father, a Judge, a Teacher, would be a wonderful thing, a calming thing. But this desire within me does not authorize me to construct a made to measure God for myself; it isn’t a strong enough desire to push me to invent a God for myself in order that we might converse with each other.

He had no time for religious extremism. He often expressed an objection to any religious hegemony or fanaticism. Or any extremism. He wrote “I am irritated by the attempts of some religious extremists to interpret the extermination in the manner of the prophets; as a punishment for our sins. No, this I don’t accept.” He regarded anti-Semitism as an animalistic regression. I asked him how he got on in the camps with the Jews from the Eastern European ghettoes. I was really asking how did an Italian intellectual who felt that he was an Italian get on with emarginated peasants, and he replied that being an Italian Jew in Auschwitz was not the best thing to be. First Italy was Germany’s ally, and second the Eastern European Jews could not believe that a person who couldn’t speak Yiddish was a real Jew. Even in Auschwitz he was marginalized. He was no racist, so he took the Jews of various origins as he found them, but he particularly admired the Jews from Salonika. Salonika had a huge percentage of Jews, most of whom wound up in the camps, and Levi said that in Auschwitz they were the most admirable subset. They stuck together, were most successful at surviving, and maintained their human dignity better than any other group. Very few of them became Kapos, the Jews who assisted the Germans in their work. Levi said “When I came into contact with the Jews in the camps, I discovered, with surprise that they were full time Jews while I was only registered as a Jew.”

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After Primo became famous, he did a great deal of traveling, and the place that upset him the most was America. This isn’t too surprising: he thought that the Diaspora was the center of Jewishness, and not Israel. “The barocenter of Judaism,” he said “returns to the diaspora. I am a diaspora Jew—more Italian than Jew—and I would prefer that such a barocenter would remain outside Israel.” He thought that although Judaism was born in Israel, it evolved in the Diaspora, so that there were two centers, Israel and not Israel, and when he told an American audience that he thought Israel was an error in historical terms, the chairman had to clear the room. The average American is much like the average European when he is born, but he is marinated in a very different culture that makes him more extremist and thereby more vociferous. Levi met an atypical cross-section of the American population; he said: “I began to ask myself if any Goys lived in the United States. I didn’t meet even one when I was there. My wife and I started to ask ourselves where all the others were.” Levi enjoyed a marvelous reception in universities and amongst the intelligentsia, but the extremists found him either too Jewish or not Jewish enough. Some didn’t like the fact that he was not religious, and others didn’t like his attitude to Israel. During questioning at various meetings they asked him the most impertinent questions—why didn’t he emigrate to Israel, why had he joined the partisans so late, why had he survived when others hadn’t. All this from Americans who didn’t join in the war which began in 1939 until late 1941, when they were forced into it by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Perhaps worst of all, he was snubbed by Saul Bellow whom he admired. Bellow’s enthusiastic review of The Periodic Table had initiated Primo’s popularity in America and in the whole of Europe, including Italy. His trip to the States left a permanent scar. As to Israel, his early attitude, before Hitler, was like that of most diaspora Jews. Levi was fascinated by Zionism. He made a visit to Israel soon after the war and spoke of what he saw with great enthusiasm. He wrote enthusiastically about the Kibbutzim. He thought that Zionism was the solution for those Jews who had no homeland, among whom he did not include Italian Jews. He felt a lack of roots in Israel, which Italy supplied. He felt no desire to settle there. But he said that these thoughts caused a civil war in his body. “In Italy, Zionism did not evoke much interest; those rites, those collective dances, that doing everything together, didn’t make much impression on us.” Levi felt that he was an Italian Jew, and by the mid-1970s he became disillusioned with the State of Israel. Until the 1980s, Western Jews were irrationally pro-Israel; a Jewish academic friend of mine left my dinner table after I had said that the Arabs

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too had a case, that it was a matter of two rights rather than of right or wrong. Levi—and I too for that matter—found we couldn’t go along with Greater Israel and the Lebanon invasion. He signed a letter against the Lebanese War and supported the withdrawal of Israel from the West Bank. “The Promised Land of my Jews” he wrote in an article in the Turin newspaper La Stampa, “is not a military power.” Speaking for myself, I had always thought that two thousand years of persecution would have given us Jews more sense of justice, and I was bitterly disappointed to find we were really no better than anyone else. And I suppose if you maintain that Jews are no different from the others, it must follow that we’re no better. One’s awareness of one’s Jewishness varies with time and with place. In my view, the facts I have cited do not provide a convincing explanation of Levi’s unawareness of his Jewishness. Was Levi a good Jew? I suppose the answer to that depends on your own attitude to Judaism. But he was an exceptionally good man. We don’t have saints in our religion, but he was as near to one as we do have. Notes 1. Rita Levi-Montalcini, In Praise of Imperfection (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 2. On the Mortara affair, see David I. Kertzer, The Kidnaping of Edgardo Mortara (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1997). 3. William Wetmore Story, Roba di Roma (London: Chapman & Hall, 1864). 4. Dan Vittorio Segre, Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew (Bethesda, MD: Adler & Adler, 1987).

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6

The Jewishness of Primo Levi Joseph Sungolowsky

rimo Levi repeatedly stated that he never intended to be a writer. He had studied to be a chemist and indeed became one by profession. It was as a result of his concentration camp experience that he began to write. But even then he did not do so in a literary sense. He stated that when he wrote his first book If This is a Man, he did not look to create “a beautiful book” or achieve “literary success” (VM, 224).1 He simply felt compelled to be at peace with himself, to fulfill an obligation toward his dead companions, and to testify for posterity. Ironically as it may sound, Levi said that Auschwitz was for him a “university” (VM, 234). He came in contact with people coming from a world different than his and had a variety of experiences that caused him to reflect upon his Jewishness, upon the world of Eastern European Jewry, which had been unknown to him heretofore, upon Jewish tradition and culture, and, after his liberation, upon the mentality of the post-Holocaust Jew. These themes became an integral part of his writing when he eventually evolved into a full-fledged writer. Even though Levi did not consider himself to be necessarily a “Jewish writer,” he accepted that label.2 Levi rarely missed an opportunity to identify himself as a Jew throughout his writings. The son of a family that became gradually assimilated during the Emancipation, which took place in Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century, he became aware of his Jewishness when the Racial Laws were instituted in 1938. He writes that when the magazine Defense of the Race began to be published and extolled ethnic purity, he felt “proud of being impure” (PT, 35). He did not mind that his diploma of doctor of chemistry mentioned that he was a member of the Jewish race.3 Upon his arrest as a partisan, he declares that he is Jewish “partly out of an irrational digging of pride” (PT, 135). Passing through Poland after his liberation from Auschwitz and still wearing his striped uniform, he is eager to tell a crowd of onlookers what he had just been through but he becomes

P

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incensed at a translator who tells them that he was an “Italian political prisoner” rather than a Jew (R, 41). When he was invited to visit a German pharmaceutical plant in 1986 and was asked on that occasion where he had learned to speak German, he replied: “My name is Levi. I’m a Jew and I learned your language in Auschwitz” (VM, 41). In 1983, he tells an interviewer: “Being Jewish for me is a matter of identity . . . that I have no intention of discarding” (VM, 274). Upon the occasion of the centenary celebration of the Turin synagogue, Levi was asked to write a preface to the commemorative book entitled The Jews of Turin. In this book he stresses the unassuming attitude the Jews of Turin had displayed throughout their history. Yet, he is proud to be one of them and concludes by writing: “With this exhibition, we mean to perform an act of filial piety, to enable our Turinese friends and our children to see who we are and where we come from.”4 Levi was so mindful of his Jewish identity that he devoted the first chapter of The Periodic Table, an autobiographical work, to describing members of his family going back to the sixteenth century. As they were not particularly welcomed by the people of Piedmont where they chose to settle, he compares them to “Argon,” a gas that does not mix well with other gases. He humorously presents a parade of picturesque characters with traits of piety or impiety and whimsical temperaments. Among them is a rabbi who is terrified when he realized that he became impure by accepting a ride in a cart that was carrying a corpse. There is an uncle who decides to lie in bed for twenty-two years after his parents forbade him to marry a Gentile maid with whom he fell in love. There is a grandmother who surreptitiously served pork to a rabbi as she did not have anything else to offer him. There is his own father who, while faithful to tradition, can hardly resist the temptation to eat pork. Along with such portraits, Levi recreates their jargon made up of Hebrew “inlays,” which found their way in the Piedmontese dialect. Such are Cadoss Barôkhu, for the Lord, morenô, our teacher, khakhàm, a wise man, barakhà, a blessing, medià meshôna, a strange death, pegartà, a female corpse.5 Levi harbored a genuine feeling about sharing the Jewish destiny. When he witnesses the ritual lamentations of the Gattegno family on the eve of their departure and his own for Auschwitz, he feels “the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed every century” (S, 15–16). Upon stopping in a Romanian town upon his return home from the camp, he is moved by the warm welcome extended to him by two elderly Jews who recount their own sufferings (R, 175–176). When he discusses the Hebrew “imports” in the Piedmontese dialect, he writes that it reflects “the essential conflict of the Judaism of the Diaspora, scattered among the Gentiles . . . torn between

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their divine vocation and the daily misery of their existence” (PT, 9). When asked by his publisher to translate Kafka’s Trial, he experiences hostility toward that author, a hostility, however, which is nothing else but a form of defense born out of fear since both of them were Jewish and lived the Jewish fate each in their own way. For “The Trial,” as he explains, “opens with a surprise and unjustified arrest and my career, too, opened with a surprise and unjustified arrest” (VM, 156). The world of European Jewry and Yiddish and its language are essential themes in Levi’s writings; he discovered them upon arriving in Auschwitz. Despite the fact that he does not know Yiddish, he is greeted by Schlome who is surprised to learn that there are Jews in Italy. Chajim, his bed companion, who is knowledgeable about camp practices, tries to reassure him. When Schmulek sees that Levi does not readily understand the reality of the crematoria, he somewhat despairs by saying: “Der Italiener will nicht verstayen” (“This Italian refuses to understand”; SA, 31, 47). Levi is sorry that he is unable to understand Tischler when he comes to entertain his fellow inmates in Yiddish in the evenings (MR, 19). Reflecting upon that period, he writes that Yiddish was the camp’s second language. Not understanding it and even vaguely knowing about its existence made him and his fellow Jewish Italian inmates “suspects” in the eyes of the East European Jews (DS, 100). He relates a similar incident that occurred upon his return home. During a stop in a Polish town, he meets two Jewish girls and engages them in a conversation in German trying to imitate their pronunciation. They immediately burst out laughing and tell him: “Ihr sprecht keyn Jiddish; ihr seyt ja keyne jiden!” (“You do not speak Yiddish, so you cannot be Jewish!” R, 99). Levi experienced a more intense feeling about East European Jewry when, in the course of his repatriation, he traveled through Russia and Poland where millions of Jews had lived before they were exterminated by the Nazis. He becomes conscious of the hostility they had to face on the part of their non-Jewish neighbors. He is deeply moved when he meets remnants of those Jews who, as he writes, “had fled before the Einsatzkommandos, seeking refuge in distant regions, and were now returning home to their lands . . . the fragments of an exploded Jewish world, mortally wounded.”6 It is to that lost world that Levi dedicated his poem entitled Ostjuden (“East European Jews”) where he writes: Our fathers of this earth Merchants of multiple skills Shrewd sages of the numerous progeny God sowed across the world …

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I have found you everywhere … Poor tenacious human seed. (CP, 14)

Representing the world of East European Jewry was so close to Levi’s heart that he devoted to it his historical novel If Not Now, When? Writing about a subject that was not part of his own Jewish heritage, he actually indicates the list of sources he consulted on the resistance against the Nazis in Eastern Europe, on the Yiddish language, and on Jewish humor in order to document himself (INNW, 348–349). In his well-known interview with Philip Roth, he said: I cherished the ambition to be the first (perhaps only) Italian writer to describe the Yiddish world. I intended to impose upon my readers a book centered on the Ashkenazi civilization, history, language and frame of mind, all of which are virtually unknown in Italy . . . For the first time and only time in my life as a writer, I had the impression (almost an hallucination) that my characters were alive, around me, behind my back, suggesting spontaneously their feats and their dialogues. (VM, 21)

If Not Now, When? centers around the picaresque adventures of Jewish partisans desperately mounting sabotage activities against the Nazis in Poland and Russia. Many of them escaped from massacres in their own towns. Some of them are killed in the course of attacks and those who escape regroup by joining the partisan groups that are willing to accept them. Eventually, the few who survive after the liberation seek to make their way to Palestine. Levi utilizes a variety of Jewish themes such as the relationship between Jews and Gentiles, references to Jewish tradition, and especially the Yiddish language and culture. The novel opens with the evocation of an imaginary “shtetl” whose rabbi is the only one to own a clock in order to announce the arrival of the Sabbath. The male and female characters have Yiddish names such as Mendel, Gedaleh, Mottel, a former “shockhet” (ritual slaughterer), Ber, a former yeshiva student, Rivke, Rockhele, Sissl. Levi introduces Yiddish terms such as meshuggener, Lkhayim, balebusteh, shiksa, narishkeit, meidl, as well as the famous song Tumbalala describing the hesitations of the narisher bucher (“the foolish young man”) who wonders whether he should marry a certain girl and therefore loses her. Occasionally, Levi defines some Yiddish words. Meshuge is “a Hebrew word which has survived in Yiddish, and as such is universally understood in all Central and Eastern Europe: it means ‘mad’ but it carries the additional idea of an empty, melancholic, doltish and lunar folly” (R, 69).

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He is fond of two proverbs: Redest keyn jiddish, bist nit kejn jid (“Anyone who doesn’t speak Yiddish is not a Jew”) reappears in If Not Now, When? and is told by the Jewish partisans to a young Georgian Jew who does not speak Yiddish (INNW, 200); Ibergekumene tsores iz gut tsu dertseylen (“Troubles overcome are good to tell”) also appears in the novel (p. 300) when the Jewish partisans tell their story to a Russian captain after their liberation. It is by virtue of that proverb that survivors tell their stories as opposed to those who prefer to keep silent (DS, 149). Levi himself uses it as an epigraph for his Periodic Table. Levi has paid a touching tribute to Yiddish. He calls it by its affectionate name, the Mama-Loshen (“Mama’s language”), which unified the Jewish people of Eastern Europe “until the Hitler storm.” He considers it the “fascinating language of a wandering people, driven by history from country to country,” and he sees it evolving even in the United States “being enriched with English terms.” He celebrates it as a language “essentially spoken, eminently flexible and permeable . . . an instrument for mental gymnastics both for the person who speaks it and for the person who tries to understand it and reconstruct its origins” (OPT, 84–85).7 The universe of Levi’s writings is filled with the characters he met in Auschwitz and those he created as a writer. He explains that when he was portraying them in Survival in Auschwitz, he tried not to turn them into “literary characters” although he also admitted that he must have “reshaped them even unconsciously”(VM, 149, 223). He draws physical and moral portraits of them. Among them are the fleeting silhouettes who “welcomed” him in Auschwitz. Chajim is “a religious Jew, learned in rabbinical law” (SA, 47) whose death Levi is unable to justify for himself metaphysically (DS, 83). He will never forget the “gentle face of a child” (SA, 31) of Schlome who had befriended him despite the language barrier. Schmulek is among those chosen for the gas chamber in the first selection witnessed by Levi. He gives him his spoon and his knife before leaving (SA, 53). When assigned to a unit that must unload heavy cast iron pipes, Levi places himself next to Resnyk a “good worker” who is taller than him. At first, he thought that Resnyk would want to pair up with a “more robust individual.” Surprisingly, Resnyk accepts and even carries the bulk of the load (SA, 66–69).8 Wachsmann, the “toilet companion,” is “a rabbi” and “a miracle worker,” which does not surprise Levi since despite his “thin, fragile and soft figure,” he has managed to work for two years without falling ill and without dying. In the evening, he discusses Talmud with Mendi, a modernist rabbi, “a stubborn, courageous, keen little man” (SA, 104). Levi also portrays “groups” of inmates. The Greek Jews are “the most coherent national nucleus, the most civilized” because of “their amazing consciousness of survival” (SA, 79). On the other hand, the “Jewish

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prominents” who were given positions of responsibility “form a sad and notable phenomenon.” They are “monsters of asociality and insensitivity” and they are ready to betray “a natural solidarity with their comrades” (SA, 91). In the chapter of Survival in Auschwitz entitled “The Drowned and the Saved,” Levi draws portraits of Jewish inmates who seem exceptionally motivated to survive. Schepschel lost his entire family and saw the death of thousands of Jews. He “is not very robust, not very courageous, nor very wicked” and “not even particularly astute.” He works on his own account and dances for inmates who sometimes reward him with some soup. But one cannot feel sorry for Schepschel for he does not hesitate to have Moischl, “his accomplice in theft, condemned to a flogging” hoping to gain future favors. Alfred is a former executive of a chemical plant. Levi remembers him as “very wasted away” but still showing signs “of a disciplined and methodical energy.” He always keeps a respectable appearance even in his striped suit. Indeed, he has gained a position as an analyst in a chemical laboratory in the camp. Levi has reason to believe that he survived. Elias is a dwarf of Herculean strength. He makes people laugh but can also provoke and pick a fight for little or no reason. He “has survived the destruction from outside for he is physically indestructible.”9 Henri has “the delicate and subtle perverse body of Sodoma’s San Sebastian . . . he moves with a natural ‘languid elegance.’ ” He has succeeded in gaining protection even from an SS officer. Speaking to him, one comes away “with a slight taste of defeat.” Although Levi knows that he has survived, he would not want to see him again.10 Moments of Reprieve is devoted to more detailed portraits of fellow inmates. Levi explained that in Moments of Reprieve he gave in to the temptation of “making a character” because by then he had “become a writer” (VM, 224). Leon Rappoport is an energetic Jew who writes a testament where he says that he has no regrets about his life, yet intends to spit on Hitler’s face should he meet him in the next world. He bids Levi to publicize it should he survive him. Indeed, Rappoport perished and Levi considers that he fulfilled his duty toward him. Wolf ’s Jewish nose cleaves the air “like a ship’s prow.” He calls it hutménu, the Hebrew word for “Our Seal,” which is indeed the title of the portrait. Wolf lives for music and can imitate a violin, a flute, and a conductor. On a work-free day, he is discovered by his comrades playing a violin that he was mysteriously able to procure for himself. Avrom refused to share the fate of his parents who were killed. He succeeded in making his way to Italy where he became a partisan. After the Liberation, he joined a kibbutz in Israel. Levi developed characters for “conceptual” reasons. Such is Chaïm Rumkowski, the Jewish head of the Lodz ghetto, a megalomaniac who had

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currency minted in his name and had famished children sing songs in his praise. On the basis of such a coin, which he found in Auschwitz, Levi reconstructs Rumkowski’s personality who contended that he was saving lives while ceaselessly handing over contingents of Jews exacted from him by the Nazis for deportation. Yet, eventually, his “prestigious” position did not keep him from sharing their fate. According to Levi, Rumkowski exemplifies other individuals who accepted positions offered to them by the Nazis. They belong to a “Gray Zone” that includes people we must not judge since they lacked the stamina to resist. For, after all, “ how strong is ours?” asks Levi (DS, 68). In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi devotes the chapter entitled “The Intellectual in Auschwitz” to the philosopher Jean Améry, an Austrian writer and an assimilated Jew whose real name was Hans Mayer. If Levi has chosen to reconstruct Améry’s personality, it is more to compare his reaction to concentrationary life with his own. Unlike Levi, Améry assumes his Jewishness begrudgingly when he reaches Auschwitz. Unlike Améry, Levi does not allow his condition as an “intellectual” to interfere with the daily manual labor imposed upon them. Levi does not find particularly meaningful the fact that, in order to save his dignity, Améry returned the blow to a fellow inmate who had assailed him. Améry pretends that culture helped him survive. Although culture might have been useful to both Améry and himself in order to resist spiritually, Levi feels that it happened rarely for, as he writes, “in the face of death . . . the frontier between culture and lack of culture disappeared” (DS, 138–139, 141). As an author of fiction, Levi created characters. In If Not Now, When?, characterization occupies a second place as the novel deals essentially with the experiences of the Jewish partisans he invented. Most of them are once again silhouettes endowed with more or less personality. However, some figures stand out in the group. Mendel, who is the narrator as the novel opens, is the “shtetl” Jew. He became a partisan and, of all the characters in the novel, he is the most acquainted with Jewish tradition even though he is an unbeliever. Although Gedaleh is a leader of a group of partisans, he is a poet who is very attached to his violin. He composed the music for the “If Not Now, When?” song. The words were written by Martin Fontasch, a Jew from Galicia, at the bidding of a German officer who eventually killed him. Line is the daughter of socialist parents who was exposed to Zionism and communism. She is a coquettish young woman who is involved in several liaisons. However, she convinces the mayor of a Polish village that Jews are not mere “hunted animals” as he thought they were but valiant fighters unafraid of death (INNW, 212). In the short story entitled The Servant, written with humor and a subtle irony, Levi portrays the legendary figure of Rabbi Judah Loew (1512–1609),

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the creator of the Golem whom he entrusted with the mission of protecting the Jews of Prague against their oppressors. When Rabbi Arié-Lion, as Levi calls him, built the Golem, he gave him a “leonine” face for he “wanted to sign his name . . . He endowed him with the ire of Moses and the Prophets, the obedience of Abraham, the arrogance of Cain, the courage of Joshua, and even with a bit of Ahab’s madness; but not with Jacob’s holy astuteness nor Solomon’s wisdom nor Isaiah’s light because he did not want to create a rival for himself ” (SDOS, 206). The Golem obediently performs his duties when his master places a parchment inscribed with the name of God between his teeth. That parchment is removed on Friday evenings before sunset so that the Golem may rest on the Sabbath. Once when Rabbi Arié forgot to remove the parchment on a Friday, the Golem wrecked his entire house. Terrified, the rabbi removes the parchment. The Golem remains lifeless. When Rabbi Arié touches him with one finger, he shatters. All the rabbi could do was to collect the fragments and store them in the attic of his house where, according to the legend, they still remain. For his personal anthology The Search for Roots, Levi has selected excerpts from Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman. In the caption that precedes the text, Levi presents Tevye as resigned to the sufferings incurred by the Jews in Tsarist Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century. He sees him as a “simple man” who “has a high and noble ideal of the life of man on earth” but nonetheless as a “divided character” torn between his allegiance to the Jewish tradition and the lifestyle of a peasant of the Russian countryside. According to Levi, Tevye “lives the contradictions in his own flesh” and “does his utmost to resolve them.” He concludes this vignette by writing: “Tevye exists no longer: the gas of Auschwitz and Stalin’s camps have destroyed him” (SR, 147–148). Primo Levi’s attitude toward the Jewish tradition is complex. He received a basic Jewish education, had a barmitzvah, which he went through “passively” (VM, 275), and soon became an agnostic, even more so as a result of his camp experience. As he writes: “I entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day” (DS, 145). He states that unlike Elie Wiesel who is “obsessed” with God and blames Him “for not intervening to stop the massacres,” he stuck to his “non-faith” (VM, 273–274). Such agnosticism on the part of Levi is accompanied by “metaphysical rebellion.” Noticing Kuhn, a fellow inmate, offering a thanksgiving prayer to God for not having been selected to be gassed, he writes: “If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn’s prayer” (SA, 130). In the short story entitled Lilith, he relates the blasphemous tale told to him by Tischler, another fellow inmate, where Lilith, the She-devil, has become the mistress of God since the destruction of the Temple and “as long as God continues to sin with Lilith, there will be blood and trouble

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on Earth” (MR, 24). According to Levi, “no one in our age should speak of Providence” (SA, 158). And when a friend suggests to Levi that he has escaped death by the grace of God, he finds that idea “monstrous” (DS, 82). Yet, Levi does not seem to have unequivocally excluded God from his thought. He admits to have been tempted by prayer upon the occasion of a selection soon realizing that “a prayer under those conditions would have been . . . laden with the greatest impiety” (DS, 146). To a critic who accused him of having “a tin ear for religion,” he replies that he profoundly respects and sometimes envies “those who have the support of a faith.”11 Indeed, he professes admiration for rabbis who, in the camp, practiced their religious ceremonies in hiding, “even praying in public, which drew large numbers, even non-believers” (VM, 229). While rejecting the notion of a Providence after Auschwitz, he admits that, along with fellow inmates, he felt that their liberation might have been of the order of “Biblical salvations” (SA, 158). Shortly before his death, he begins to suspect “that behind the enormous machine of the universe, there might be a driver who controls its movements, maybe even built the machine itself.” Yet, he remains convinced that such driver “is indifferent to mankind” (VM, 276). Upon his return home, Levi began to study Hebraic culture for he became convinced “that many principles of liberty are rooted within the core of Jewish tradition” (VM, 85). Such interest accounts for the fact that one finds in his works a meaningful sensitivity toward the Bible, rabbinical literature and matters of Jewish ritual. The Sixth Day is a parody of the Creation of Man where Levi remained faithful to the Biblical framework. In The Search for Roots, Levi’s personal anthology, he has included selections from the book of Job whom he defines as “the just man oppressed by injustice.” The title of his novel If Not Now, When? is taken from The Maxims of the Fathers edited in the second century A.D. In Survival in Auschwitz, he relates with admiration how his two comrades Wachsmann and Mendi spent “long evenings discussing Talmudic questions” (SA, 68). In Moments of Reprieve, Ezra, a cantor from a Lithuanian village, convinces a barracks chief on Yom Kippur evening to save his soup for the next evening for he intends to observe the fast. He also explains to him that on that day the book of Jonah, which deals with the concept of repentance, is read as part of the ritual. Joel König is taught by his father, a rabbi, that on the Sabbath God grants every Jew an extra soul, that one must not touch tools and that one must not catch butterflies for it comes under the larger concept of labor (MR, 90). In If Not Now, When?, Mendel is well acquainted with the blessings that must be pronounced on various occasions. Survival in Auschwitz opens with a poem that is a paraphrase of the Shema, the Jewish profession of faith, and his poem Passover is

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beautiful and succinct description of the ritual of the Seder. To a friend who had asked him to explain Jewish ritual, Levi sends excerpts of the Shulkhàn Arùkh (the book of Jewish Law) dealing with suicide and feminine modesty. Three days before his death, which occurred before Passover, Levi called the office of the Jewish community in Turin to inquire whether the Matzot (unleavened bread) had arrived. On the day of his death, he called Elio Toaff, the chief rabbi of Italy, to confide in him about his state of depression.12 Levi was fully aware of the essential problems that confronted contemporary Jewry and he developed a significant consciousness for the post-Holocaust Jew. He imposed upon himself what he called “The Duty of Memory.” His compulsion to testify was born in the camp where he began to scribble notes that led eventually to his Survival in Auschwitz. He feared that, as years passed by and as younger generations would be beset by more urgent problems, survivors ran the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to (DS, 199). He concludes, therefore, that to deny or to forget Auschwitz is “to be ready to rebuild it” (VM, 217). He concludes a brief survey of anti-Semitism (VM, 198–205) by writing that one can hardly find a rational explanation for the hatred that was shown to Jews throughout history. It is therefore important to be on guard against it and resist it whenever and wherever it might reappear. Levi also understood the importance of the Jewish homeland, especially as the logical destination for the Jews of eastern Europe who had survived and could not return to their former homes. He disagreed with his friend Natalia Ginzburg who had written at the time of the Yom Kippur war that she preferred the old type of Jew “weaponless, humiliated” as opposed to the new one “proud, strong, ready to fight.” Levi stated that history had just shown how erroneous such a judgment was (VM, 31–32). While he does not trust Arafat, he feels that one should beware of the militancy of leaders such as Begin and Sharon lest Israel be “rapidly heading towards isolation” (VM, 280–281). He is not in favor of assimilation but thinks that the center of gravity of Judaism should stay “outside of Israel . . . for the best of Jewish culture is bound to the fact of being dispersed, polycentric” (VM, 291). Levi praises the role Jewish education and learning play in shaping the Jewish mind and destiny. He even made sure that his own children received a Jewish education “on the elementary level” with the view “that they might be drawn back to an interest in Judaism” as happened to him (VM, 263–264). He believed that the traditional education given to children in Bible and Talmud in eastern Europe contributed to the “flowering of Ashkenazic Judaism” and insured “the conservation of the Jewish people throughout millennia of trials, emigrations and metamorphosis.”

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He also regrets that modernity has weakened it (OPT, 82–86). Even if he subtly derides the intricacies and casuistry of The Shulkhàn Arùkh, he sees in it “an intellectual flexibility that does not fear contradictions, indeed welcomes them as an inevitable ingredient of life” (OPT, 212). Primo Levi did not necessarily consider himself a Jewish writer for he devoted much of his writing to non-Jewish subjects and themes. Yet, Jewishness occupies a central place in his work. His Auschwitz experience emboldened his rather dormant Jewish identity to the extent that upon his return home he felt it necessary to trace it in his ancestry. If, in the camp, he felt estranged from his fellow inmates who were predominantly east European Jews, he undertook to give a literary expression to Yiddish, their language, and to their world. He also portrayed them for their humaneness even as their humanity was being denied to them. Up to the end of his life, he was sensitive to the values of Jewish culture and learning. He was convinced that it was essential to preserve Jewishness both in Israel and the Diaspora by resisting the forces that seek to eliminate it. For these reasons, Primo Levi remains an eloquent voice in the consciousness of contemporary Jewry.

Notes 1. Throughout this essay and unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Levi’s works refer to the following editions represented by the following symbols: Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone, 1996), SA; The Reawakening (New York: Collier Books, 1965), R; The Sixth Day and Other Stories (New York: Summit Books, 1990), SDOS; Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), CP; The Periodic Table (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), PT; Moments of Reprieve (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), MR; The Search for Roots (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), SR; If Not Now, When? (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), INNW; Other People’s Trades (New York: Summit Books, 1989), OPT; The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), DS; The Voice of Memory (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2001), VM. 2. Primo Levi, “Beyond Survival,” Prooftexts, 4, 1 (1984): 9. 3. Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi ou la tragédie d’un optimiste (Paris: Editions Jean-Claude Lattès, 1996) 128. 4. Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist, trans. Steve Cox (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2000), 412. 5. For a full analysis of Primo Levi’s attempt to recapture the Hebraicized version of the Piedmontese dialect spoken by his ancestors, see Wiley Feinstein, “Primo Levi and Jewish Identity: The Question of Jewish Languages,” ed. A. N. Mancini et al., Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Italian (1988): 189–202. 6. “Beyond Survival,” 16.

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7. For the problematic aspect of Yiddish as it confronted Primo Levi see Sander L. Gilman, “To Quote Primo Levi: ‘Redest keyn jiddisch, bist nit keyn jid’ [‘If you don’t speak Yiddish, you’re not a Jew’],” Prooftexts, 9, 2 (1989): 139–160. 8. Maurice Resnik had survived and, was located and interviewed in Paris in 1993. He confirmed Levi’s testimony and, in turn, draws an interesting portrait of Primo Levi as he remembered him in Auschwitz. He was convinced that Levi had perished and learned that he had survived when If This is a Man was published in France in 1987, namely after Levi’s death. See Les Nouveaux cahiers, 114 (1993): 47–49. 9. Levi relates elsewhere that Elias once nearly killed him in the course of a brawl (DS, 137). 10. In his own account, Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), Paul Steinberg, named “Henri” by Levi, describes in detail his share of sufferings as an Auschwitz inmate who was able to survive thanks to extraordinary good fortune throughout his detention. He does not disagree with the rather unflattering portrait Levi draws of him but asks the ultimate question: “Can one be so guilty of surviving?” 11. Commentary, October 1985, 45; February 1986, 7. 12. Anissimov, 673–674; 734–735.

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A Hybridism of Sounds: Primo Levi between Judaism and Literature Sergio Parussa

he Hebrew word teshuva, which is usually rendered in English with the terms “return” or “repentance,” describes a moral practice of acknowledgment, reparation, and healing for wrongful acts that have been committed in the past. As a process that leads to a reviving of the ethical foundations of Judaism, teshuva is also a way of regaining the notion of one’s own Jewish identity, of the individual and collective sense of belonging to a tradition that may have been previously forsaken. This concept of teshuva corresponds to Primo Levi’s meaning when he described himself as “un ebreo di ritorno” (a returning Jew) as someone who had renewed his interest in Judaism only after the promulgation of the Fascist racial laws and the deportation to the concentration camp. His path of return to Judaism, his literary meditations on Jewish culture, may be described as a secular work of teshuva. But Primo Levi was not alone in his delayed return to Judaism. Other Jewish intellectuals too, cultured and well integrated in European society, developed religious, political, philosophical, or cultural interests in Judaism at different stages of their lives and have also been described as ba’al teshuva (ebrei di ritorno).1 Among such figures are, for instance, Heinrich Heine, Bernard Lazare, and Franz Rosenzweig; from an artistic point of view a particularly interesting example is Arnold Schönberg’s return to Judaism. On July 24, 1933, in flight from the barbarism that would lead to the collapse of European civilization, Schönberg reconverted to Judaism in the Synagogue of rue Copernic in Paris. Passing through France on his way to America, the Viennese composer reestablished a link with the religious and cultural tradition abandoned several years before

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when he converted to Protestantism. Both Schönberg’s and Primo Levi’s lives, in fact, as well as their works, testify to the renewed interest in Jewish cultural traditions that had developed among European intellectuals and artists resisting or fleeing Nazi persecution. And they may also testify to an attempt to translate into artistic form, in musical or literary terms, new ways of living and conceiving Judaism. Like many other artists during the first half of the twentieth century, who—witnessing the rapid disintegration of all the values of European civilization—were turning away from Romantic sensibility, Schönberg gradually sought a form of art devoid of such traditional Romantic elements as illusion, sensuality, aesthetization. In his search for an alternative form of art—an ethical art—Schönberg began composing music inspired by traditional Jewish themes. Several works that coincide with the musical quest that led to the birth and development of dodecaphony, from Die Jacobsleiter to Moses und Aron, were inspired by episodes from the Bible. A few years later, from a need to testify to the horror he had experienced in concentration camps, Primo Levi likewise distanced himself and his works from the high level of aesthetization that had characterized the Italian literary tradition during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and made clarity of thought and expression the core of his poetics. Scholars have wondered whether one could establish a relationship between the twelve-tone technique and Judaism. Similarly, one could ask whether one can establish links, or simply consonances, between Primo Levi’s way of writing, his ethical claim to clarity, and Jewish culture; or, more in general, whether Judaism can find artistic expression. And if it can, whether there is a relation between the Jewish musical and literary traditions of the past, mostly written in Hebrew for religious purposes, and the works by those contemporary Jewish artists whose interest in Jewish culture was renewed at the time of the deepest crisis of European civilization. In the context of the Italian literary tradition, it is no easy matter to establish a coherent historical continuity between Italian Jewish writers who lived and wrote in different periods of Italian history simply on account of their being born Jewish or because they included Jewish themes in their works. The medieval and early modern poetry in Hebrew and the novels written in Italian between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries speak of very different experiences of Judaism. The sixteenth-century Jewish Italian philosopher Jehuda Abravanel was commonly referred to as Leone Ebreo: a name that tells us the story of the marginalization of the Jewish intellectual in Renaissance Italy, forced to live in a ghetto and to wear his name like an identification badge, almost a yellow star. Three hundred years later, in the period following the

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emancipation of the Jewish Italian community, Ettore Schmidt chose to publish his novels under the literary pseudonym Italo Svevo: a choice which may suggest his indifference toward Jewish cultural and religious background and the desire to integrate into mainstream society. Less than a hundred years later, after the Shoah, the situation has changed again: Primo Levi wrote extensively about Auschwitz and anti-Semitism using his first and last name, that is, reclaiming the Jewish cultural heritage that somehow had been neglected by writers of the previous generation. The very names of these three writers, as well as their lives and works, speak of the existence of a historical discontinuity in the way Jewish identity has been perceived throughout the centuries, both by Jews and non-Jews, within Italian society. Nonetheless, when Primo Levi described himself as “un esempio tipico di ebreo di ritorno,” when he spoke of Jewish identity as a condition of “imperfection,” as “the grain of salt which makes the Zinc react,”2 when he wrote of the historical, geographical, and cultural multiplicity that constitute the Jewish experience, it was to a form of cultural continuity that he was referring. He spoke of a historical condition of “imperfection” shared by all Jews who lived and still live in Diaspora and of the possibility, from that point of view, to reclaim a cultural Jewish heritage that had been neglected. In other words, in spite of the absence of a visible and coherent continuity, works by writers like Primo Levi may tell us that, by reworking in artistic forms themes and categories of Jewish culture or by adapting to the present the intellectual structures of Jewish thought, Jewish culture survives. On the one hand, what emerges is the hybrid character that results from the conditions in which Jews of the Diaspora have lived for centuries; on the other hand, what also becomes evident is the cultural heritage, the ethical frame that derives from the biblical tradition; or, in other terms, on the one hand the people, on the other hand the book. On more than one occasion, whenever he was asked about his attitude toward Judaism, Levi said that, before being deported to Auschwitz, he was just an Italian boy who had grown up in a secular and integrated Turinese Jewish family. For him, Jewish identity was something that was defined mostly from without: it was, first, the result of the promulgation of the 1938 Racial Laws and then of his deportation to the concentration camp, an identity that was born out of the response of an integrated, but not assimilated, and not religious Judaism to anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, his interest in Jewish culture and thought grew steadily over the years. After the Second World War, Levi’s interest in several aspects of Jewish tradition and culture is evident in his many poems and tales published in Lilít, as well as in the novel If Not Now, When?. Similarly, when asked about the source of his writing, he often traced it back to the experience of the

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concentration camps and said that without Auschwitz he would have never become a writer. I think that a subtle but important distinction should be made on this point. Even though Primo Levi’s notion of Jewish identity intertwines with his notion of writing, and even though one seems to mirror the other and both are linked to the experience of the Shoah, drawing a straight line between them could lead to dangerous simplifications. First, from such a perspective, consonances between Primo Levi’s writing and the renewed interests in Jewish cultural traditions that characterize his works, as well as the works of other European intellectuals throughout the twentieth century, would be reduced just to direct and passive responses to persecution and horror. In other words, by describing Primo Levi’s work and his interest in Jewish identity as consequences of Auschwitz, by tying the Jewish literary and artistic experience exclusively to the Shoah, Western culture risks reducing the renewal of Jewish culture in the twentieth century, and Jewish culture as a whole, to experiences in negativo, that is, shaped, kept alive, and made possible only by the external force of persecution. In this perspective, the growing bibliography on the Shoah, the tendency to turn it into a sanctuary of collective martyrdom, or the willingness to make room for Primo Levi within the pantheon of canonical writers, would be nothing but another way of appropriating, and hence neutralizing, the relevance of the Jewish cultural experience in our time. More generally, such a perspective could imply, intentionally or not, that traumatic experiences are the necessary sources of creativity, that is, that the act of writing, the building of consciousness, and even the shaping of Jewish identity, spring necessarily out of trauma. On the contrary, just the opposite should be kept in focus, that is, for Levi, both the act of writing and Judaism work as active and alternative responses to Auschwitz. Precisely by means of their hybrid character and by their ethical claim to clarity, both his writing and his Judaism are ways of responding to the horror of the camps, to the complicity of Italian Fascism, and to the silence of the Roman Catholic Church. The desert is not so much the scenery of an escape from Egypt, as it is an alternative response to slavery. From a literary point of view this has several implications. If writing is born out of a need to testify, if creativity is a response to ethical urgency, then a tension between witnessing the truth and telling stories, between the work of the witness and that of the fiction writer, between a notion of writing as a purely aesthetic use of language and writing as the site where ethics and aesthetics meet, becomes unavoidable. The inclusion of ethics within the literary discourse, in fact, opens up the literary text to the rhetorical needs of the witness and sets it free from all the strict rules that tend to confine writing to a purely aesthetic and self-referential work on

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language. Consequently, the act of writing will be characterized by the imperfection, by the multiplicity, or—to follow the parallel with Schönberg—by the same hybridism of sounds that characterize Jewish identity. Therefore, when one talks of Judaism and Jewish identity in Primo Levi’s work, one talks of a subject that is wider and more complex than a mere matter of inclusion and treatment of Jewish themes in a literary work. What matters is not only the critical reappropriation of a cultural tradition, or the references to Jewish culture that may be scattered throughout his works; rather, it is the hybrid character of Levi’s writing, its imperfection, its tension between testimony and narrative that reveals deep consonances between his writing and his Jewish background. For Levi, Judaism and writing are both experiences of hybridism: they both speak of a subject divided between belonging to the religion of his ancestors and to the identity of the place in which he lives, between Hebrew and Piedmontese dialect, between testifying to a historical truth in a certain language and the narrative modes, the literary codes, offered by that same language. It is precisely through this hybrid character that Primo Levi’s works reawaken the ethical dimension of writing and challenge consolidated notions about literature. If writing is primarily an act of testimony, the very act of writing becomes, in fact, a way of bringing to light the limits of a practice that goes under the name of Literature. From this focus on the ethical dimension of writing, in fact, comes Primo Levi’s indirect criticism of a traditional notion of literature and his most interesting observations about writing. I will limit myself to three examples. As we have said, in reading Levi’s works, one has the impression that literature does not consist only in the aesthetic use of language, but in a broader search for the resources that language makes available to attain ethical goals. In Levi’s works, the perlocutionary use of language, that is, the attempt to produce an effect upon the listener, which would cause the listener to act, prevails over elocutio, that is, the search for beautiful words. In both his memoirs and prose, as well as in his poetry, words are not pure ornaments, but tools not only to attain clarity of expression, but also, and more importantly, a call to engage the reader in an ethical response. Writing, in other words, is also a way of expanding consciousness. Moreover, Levi’s style questions writing as we know it, or, at least as we have learned to consider it: its strict hierarchy of literary genres, its careful distinction between what can be considered literature and what cannot, its privilege of form over content, and of aesthetics over ethics. Let me give some more concrete examples. First, Primo Levi’s work invites its readers to put into discussion the rigid classification of texts in literary genres. If This is a Man, The Periodic

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Table, Lilít are literary works that can hardly be ascribed to a traditional literary genre. They are halfway between narrative and philosophy, science and literature, history and fiction; and, as such, seem to set up a new literary form that almost constitutes a genre in itself. Precisely because of their hybrid character, their unclassifiable nature, these books unhinge the rigid taxonomy of literary texts that has characterized Italian literature for centuries and invite us to ask what is literature and, consequently, what is the meaning of writing. In a certain way, Primo Levi’s works take us back to the boundary line between writing and literature, between the free act of writing and its codification in a genre: it takes us precisely to the moment in which writing becomes an artistic form, to the place where one may start questioning the balance between ethics and aesthetics. Second, if inspiration is born out of a need to testify, if creativity is a response to an ethical urgency, then literature cannot be a self-referential act that feeds itself only on other literary texts. “The essence of my writing,” notes Primo Levi in the preface to Ricerca delle radici, “is not constituted only by what I have read.”3 Third, from a historical point of view, Levi’s critique also means distancing oneself from both the Romantic and the Decadent literary traditions, from those writers who have favored the use of aestheticisms, stylizations, literary topoi, such as love and death, and all those shortcuts of thought that can easily turn into falsifications of the truth. The experience of the concentration camps, the urgency to recount events as they happened and to analyze their meaning, or their absence of meaning, transfer themselves directly onto the page and take on concrete form in new modes of writing that unveil the deceits and the traps of literature. Levi offers us an outline of what some of these traps might be in his Other People’s Trades, where he comments on some of the classics of Italian literature. In Manzoni’s Promessi sposi the description of Renzo, as he attempts to defend himself from the city crowd, for Levi, seems to be modeled on “an example of the taste of the era,”4 a stylized image that would reveal Manzoni’s uneasiness about the representation of gestures and the human body. Similarly, in Leopardi’s Elogio degli uccelli, Levi sees a romantic falsification of the natural world.5 The happiness of birds, “the happiest creatures of the world,” is nothing other than the effect of a poetic look on the world, a look that mediates between the world and the subject through distortion and deceit. Such a taste for literary conventions, cliches, stylizations, and aestheticisms, in fact, is the result of a notion of literature that valorizes the primacy of emotions over other human faculties and makes of the heart the site where truth resides. “It is not true,” writes Primo Levi, “that the only authentic writing is that which comes from the heart.”6 Contrary to what is

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commonly believed, the language of the heart is far from being the noblest and is certainly not the same for everybody. To put into discussion the authentic and universal character of the heart means to remember that the heart, that is, our emotional experience, is not necessarily part of our consciousness; it means also to question those writers who make of the emotions and of “all the distinct ingredients of their conscience”7 their favorite theme, their privileged means of expression, as well as the foundation of their works. The witness knows that, after Auschwitz, every virtue is questionable, particularly the virtues of the heart. Knowing that, in the Nazi criminal, the love for his family or the passion for good classical music can live without contradictions alongside the horror of the concentration camps means wondering what words like “love” and “beauty” really mean, what is the meaning of emotional and aesthetic virtues. The heart and beauty are not exempt from an ethics that is more Auschwitz demonstrata. Neither do they testify to the humanity of a human being, nor to his or her sense of justice, nor to the humanity and the sense of justice of a writer and his works. Moreover, because the heart is anchored to the past, its politics may also be regressive. “The heart,” as the American playwright Tony Kushner has written, “is not progressive. The heart is conservative. No matter what the mind may be, Love is profoundly reactionary; you fall in love and that instant is fixed, love is always fixed on the past.”8 In Judaism the heart cannot be the foundation of religion and ethics. Emotions are subjective experiences that are neither the origin nor the foundation of religious and ethical life. They are, instead, the consequence of an ethical action. In Judaism, emotions do not precede the mitzvah, they follow it. To conclude, I return to where I began, to Schonberg’s twelve-tone technique. If dodecaphony has been described as an attempt at a metaphorical translation of Jewish ethics, maybe Primo Levi’s imperfection of identity and writing, his hybridism of sounds, can be read as a metaphor for the hybrid historical condition in which Jews have been living; and, consequently, as a recovery of the Jewish ethical experience and as an emphasis on its importance in any literary discourse. There could be no art, claimed Schönberg, that is not inspired by ethics. After all, the history of Jewish culture is also that of the rewriting of an ethical tradition by means of adaptation to all the different lands and cultures in which Jews have lived and live. “The old man,” as Vittorio Foa has written, “finds himself becoming someone else.”9 Notes 1. See André Neher, They Made Their Souls Anew, translation of Ils ont refait leur âme, trans. David Maisel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).

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2. Primo Levi, Il sistema periodico (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). 3. “Il nocciolo del mio scrivere non è costituito solo da quanto ho letto.” Primo Levi, Ricerca delle radici (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), viii. 4. Primo Levi, Opere III (Turin: Einaudi, 1990), 661. 5. Levi, Opere III, 773. 6. Levi, Opere III, 634. 7. Ibid. 8. Tony Kushner, Slavs! in Thinking About Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 109. 9. Vittorio Foa, Il cavallo e la torre (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 326.

Memory Reveille In the brutal nights we used to dream Dense violent dreams, Dreamed with soul and body: To return; to eat; to tell the story. Until the dawn command Sounded brief, low: “Wstawa´c”: And the heart cracked in the breast. Now we have found our homes again, Or bellies are full, We’re through telling the story. It’s time. Soon we’ll hear again The strange command: “Wstawa´c .” January 11, 1946

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Figure 8.1 Watercolor and ink on paper, 1971. “. . . the curved and distorted profile of the monsters generated by the twilight of reason.”

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The Object(s) of Memory: Models of Remembering in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo Timothy C. Campbell

his essay examines, with a minimal amount of abstraction, Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo in light of contemporary work being done on communication theory and memory studies. In asking how Primo Levi articulates memory in his chronicle of the Shoah, it addresses the region in which contemporary models of remembering and Levi’s own abbreviations for memory overlap.1 Specifically considered here is the relation between the conditions that structure memory for the musulmani [the drowned] and the salvati [saved] in communicative terms, and in so doing provides possible coordinates for mapping two fields that continue to maintain a discrete distance from one another. Much of my attention will therefore fall on two principal models for remembering in Se questo è un uomo: memory as the organization of access to information and memory as prosthesis. Undoubtedly, these models are by no means exhaustive, for Levi presents others in the first pages of Se questo è un uomo (collective memory, traumatic memory). Yet it seems to me that they, more than the others, echo themes taken up by communication and media theory. Rather than simply commencing with selections that depict memory’s processes in Se questo è un uomo, I want to first delimit memory’s object. Here Levi himself in his last published work, The Drowned and the Saved, provides us with as succinct an identification as one is likely to find, though it is by no means unproblematic. In his “non-retroactive chronicle” of the Shoah, the form of memory is signaled variously as an unreliable yet marvelous instrument that makes us fully human; a muscle that when exercised guarantees a certain efficiency in the retelling of traumatic

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experiences; and a defense against those who would conveniently reconstruct their own truths. In the chapter entitled “Memory of the Offense,” Levi associates memory to a technology of the letter whose workings continue to elude us. “This scant reliability of our memories,” he writes, “will be satisfactorily explained only when we know in what language, in what alphabet they are written, on what surface, and with what pen; to this day we are still far from this goal.”2 Memory is linked to remembering the past thanks to a mysterious writing inscribed on uncertain surfaces; the implicit recognition being that memory depends upon the observer who remembers and the selections that are inscribed. Yet the form of this memory (some will call it traumatic) is not as easily abbreviated as Levi’s straightforward metaphors might suggest, and as he soon admits. In the first instance, memory is subject to entropy—few memories resist the ineluctable move to disorder and to forgetting. In the second instance, the material means of memory, its means of storage and retrieval remain unknown to us. Paradoxically then, because memory is a mode of inscription, it can be forgotten. For this reason, human memory is a “suspect source,” as Levi calls it, and must be protected from itself. According to Levi, one of the principal modes of protecting memory from its status as inscription is supplementing it with an utterly invaluable, artificial creation: the printed record. Printing serves a number of purposes, but primarily it guarantees the coherence of individual memories, allowing correspondences among accounts to be recorded and discrepancies registered. The truth of the memory of the offense is archived, transmitted, and amplified by a media system based primarily on print technology. Thus the historical importance Levi claims for all documents of the period, the depositions and admissions of the oppressors, though he quickly notes that “in general, the descriptions of the things seen and the acts are of little interest; they amply coincide with what victims have recounted; very rarely are they contested; judgments have been handed down and they are by now part of history” (Drowned, 25–26). Essentially, Levi fortifies memory against forgetting through a recourse to the intertextuality provided by print culture: Print provides a “textual organization of experience” that offers the sense of closure necessary for registering correspondences.3 This move should not be minimized since it shifts the trajectory of his reflections on to the social: Levi casts the memory of the Shoah as one based upon a model of print-based communication. The writer/victim embodies a process of memory when he diligently compares the written record with his own and other fallible memories. In a suggestive reading of social memory, Elena Esposito terms the move from memorization, in lieu of no books, to relay the epochal shift from a rhetorical memory to memory as culture. In a memory as culture

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model, writing, she argues, privileges forgetting with respect to remembering, paradoxically allowing one to forget more when remembering.4 In Levi’s case, one unreliable inscription calls forth another more trustworthy, though we do well to recall how unstable the notion of archivization provided by print actually is. As Jacques Derrida has recently remarked, “right on that which permits and conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than that which exposes to destruction, and in truth menaces with destruction, introducing a priori, forgetfulness … into the heart of the monument.”5 This may account for Levi’s defense of his own memory against the “drifting” he deplores in many of the memoirs and anecdotes (Drowned, 35). The concordances in the corpus of the offense are so abundant as to defend Levi’s own memory of the offense from the self-same drift. What is striking therefore about the actualization of memory in Levi’s later thought is how imbricated it is in the correspondence of memory with the specific technology of writing and print. The psychic apparatus that remembers works upon a conception of memory represented and affected by a technology of communication based in print. This is not to argue, incidentally, for a direct correlation between media and the development of a semantics as many did in the 1990s, which would guide Levi’s observations. This is because transformations of concepts, say trauma, can also precede technological upheavals. Interestingly, the same holds true for Levi’s earlier account of the Lager, Se questo è un uomo, where forms of memory are seen as the precondition for survival. The two forms I want to examine here, memory as the organization of access to information and memory as prosthesis, deserve our attention primarily for the surprising ways they anticipate and amplify different models of memory, as well as the kind of order they project onto events. In the first instance, memory will be seen as preliminary to information for the saved in what Levi calls the “gigantic biological and social experience” that was the Lager.6 In one of the most cited passages of thebook, Levi systematically lays out the chief characteristics of those destined for selection. It is surely familiar to all of us, and so I will quote only the most relevant selection. “All the musulmani that went into the gas chambers have the same history, or better said, they have no history.” “They were beaten,” he continues, “before they could adapt; they were beaten in terms of time (sul tempo). This is because they failed to discern something in the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions of the camps” (Se questo, 81). The context for the analysis is of course the figure of Null Achtzehn, one of the few Häftlinge to populate Levi’s memory of musulmani without faces. The question of the missing name is significant for only a man who is worthy of having a name: “I believe he himself forgot his name, certainly he behaved as if he had.

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When he speaks, when he looks, he gives the impression of being empty inside” (Se questo, 37). Some pages earlier Levi localizes Null Achtzehn’s primary defect in his youth, not only because adults bear up better under fatigue and hunger, but because “to survive here one needs a long training in the struggle of everyone against everyone, which young people rarely possess” (Se questo, 37). Levi’s analysis of musulmano Null Achtzehn is invaluable for the distinctions he draws between memory/forgetting. It isn’t simply a question of the most lethal learning curve imaginable (though it is also that). Instead Levi asks his readers to examine the conditions necessary for demolishing a man. The question is taken up repeatedly in all of Levi’s works, and his answer never varies: the “millennial Reich” practiced a war against memory, not only in its “Orwellian falsification of memory,” and “falsification of reality,” but critically in the mode by which Null Achtzehn is forced to forget his name (Drowned, 30). The assumption is that Null Achtzehn’s memory of the past does not coincide with the information the insane geometry of the camp provides: his capacity to select or to remain indifferent with regard to the majority of environmental data he receives has been impaired or worse dismantled. He fails to do what the salvati do: individuate out of the data those that produce enough difference for survival. In the case of the drowned and the saved, therefore, memory has less to do with a reconstruction of the past, but instead centers on the question of the relevance and irrelevance of data. Where such a form differs from its predecessors is precisely in the importance given to the temporal index. On the one hand, there isn’t enough time for repetitions to create redundancy by which the musulmano can judge the informativity of data when compared with the multiplicity of others that are forgotten. On the other, memory for the saved is a way of gaining control, albeit limited, over events, so that these same events “do not present themselves every time as an absolute surprise.” Memory is necessary so as “not to be exposed in an inert manner to the environment.”7 Thus, when Levi describes the Lager’s demolition of man, he locates the process in a system that makes it impossible for individuals to verify the coherence of their observations, and thus to create an order in the events of their environment. Memory’s established task of coordinating events by setting up a series of relations between them is blocked through a variety of means: the insane prohibitions that greet the Zugang, the “Hier ist kein Warum” [here there is no why]; the system of noncommunication deployed in the camps to hamper the possibility of repetition; and the diabolical reinforcement of past events inscribed in the Häftlinge’s memory to amplify the expectations for a possible future. Levi’s collection of stories, Lilít, indexes the orders of difficulty a victim faces while a reconfiguring of

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the spatial architecture of memory takes place, especially in the figures of Valerio, the man of mud, and Andrea, the disciple. Under such an optic, the Italian lesson Levi gives to Jean in “Canto di Ulisse” will be seen as the struggle a traditional form of memory (memorization) faces when the conditions for abbreviating operations are hindered. Or in different words, recalling Dante’s canto allows Levi to recognize what is the same in different situations, between the moment of inscription and its “ricordo,” which in information theory is termed “identity.” Not coincidentally, identity serves to organize and orient recursive action, allowing an individual or system to recognize repetitions. The Lager, by attempting to deprive the Häftlinge of memory, attacks a conception of identity by which he or she can recognize what is unaltered when a drastic shift in environments has occurred. Levi signals the attack on a preceding form of memory that provides identity in extreme situations as central to the experience of the camps. The removal of names in this light is the most important step when dismantling the memory of identity. “They will also take our names: and if we were to preserve them, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do it, to make sure that behind the name, something of us might remain of us as we were” (Se questo, 23). The paradoxical nature of survival at Auschwitz is located in the necessity of preserving memory contents while the camps violently negate its very conditions. Levi outlines the second model of memory in the paragraph that immediately follows his reflections on names and the power of naming. But each should consider, how much value, how much meaning is enclosed in the smallest of our daily habits, in the hundred objects that the most humble beggar possesses: a handkerchief, an old letter, the photograph of a dear one. These things are part of us, almost like a member of our body: nor is it possible to be deprived of them in our world that soon after we would find others to substitute the old ones, other objects that are ours in as much they are custodians (custodi) and provokers (suscitatori) of our memory. (Se questo, 23)

In this startling passage, Levi proposes that memories are not localized in the brain, so much as produced in conjunction with objects. The passage begins with a slippage of sorts, for Levi moves from “abitudini,” [habits] which implies only a general relation to objects as opposed to repeated behavior, to a beggar’s personal effects, to the substitution of objects for body members when one is in danger of losing them. The notion of memory as a form of prosthesis or as an extension of the body via a relation to intimate objects has a history as long as mankind itself (and not only mankind considering how dogs and cats interact with their favorite things). Yet what is peculiar to Levi’s analysis is not so much the traditional

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metaphor of prosthesis as it is the locale of memory and the significance awarded to objects in a world far different from the Lager. Of importance here is Levi’s choice of “custodi” and “suscitatori” in elaborating the relation that objects maintain with memory. “Custodi” presupposes a place in which memories are protected from discoloration, a neat play on one of the meanings of “custodi” as an “astuccio per custodire oggetti.”8 Levi substitutes memories for objects, elaborating a spatial arrangement for memories within the guarded boundaries that the “custodi” provide. Memory, according to Levi, does not reside in some dark recess of the mind nor even in our hearts (captured in the difference between memoria and ricordare in Italian), but rather in the spatial arrangement objects offer the contents of memory. Although Levi never spells out the process by which memories give themselves over to objects, the passage does tally for instance with what we know about the relation between memory and objects in memory studies. Objects are never given per se to the individual, but instead require a spatial elaboration that orders them according to a recognizable pattern. Jean Piaget rehearsed the relation in infants more than thirty years ago. In order that things really become objects, the awareness of relations of position and displacement must be acquired. The child will have to understand the “how” of the disappearance of these objects and thus will have to abandon belief in the possibility of their mysterious reappearance … The object is not a thing which is displaced and is independent of those displacements; it is a reality at disposal in a certain context, itself related to action.9

Piaget focuses our attention on the fundamental relation between memories of objects and their continued displacement. An object’s reality is anchored to the “feeling of efficacy” that results when the subject finds the object over and over (Construction, 65). The object’s permanence remains joined to the notion of activity—a change in objects (say a photo for a book) does not alter memory’s continually availing itself of the object’s custodian function. Levi presents a limit case for Piaget’s experiments. What happens when objects crucial for identity formation are no longer available and their substitution with other objects is blocked? Levi’s description of the musulmano generally and himself in particular provides a clue. They attribute to the vanished images of the objects a greater degree of permanence in order to compensate for the loss of the objects’ memory function. They continually expect to find these objects, assisted by their oppressors who offer assurances of a replacement that awaits them. When these

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objects, familiar and otherwise, are found wanting, the musulmano is unable to construct a relation with his displaced objects. His universe is one that remains closed off to objectively organized space. Levi uses another term when illustrating the relation between objects and memory. Objects are also “suscitatori” of memory. Etymologically, “suscitatore” derives from the Latin, “suscitare,” which means to arise, to awaken.10 Memory results in the interplay between objects and consciousness to the degree that they prompt us to remember. The sense is that in our daily commerce with these objects, the touching, looking, hearing with which objects present themselves to our senses, memory is a form of exercise that takes account of the object being handled. Memory is practiced in our quotidian interaction with objects—each day brings with it new opportunities to drill our memory given the general state of entropy to which objects must fall—objects are unavoidably substituted with others. Obviously, when substitution no longer occurs, so too do these promptings end. Primo Levi is unambiguous on the consequences of such a process. It is a central part of what the camps were intended to accomplish—by depriving the victims of objects of memory, the Nazis created conditions that undermined the very basis of memory itself, not just in the necessary interplay between internal and external, but by making impossible the promptings memory requires in order to function properly. When Levi writes that the history of the musulmani was all the same—that they had no history—he bears witness to a diabolical process whereby memory is disassembled. One wonders if the word “forgetting” is appropriate in such a setting since it always implies the other side of the distinction in remembering: one always forgets against a background of remembering. One of the truly terrorizing characteristics of the musulmano is unmistakably found in the absent side of the distinction remembering/forgetting. Why can a turn to communication theory be useful when reading Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo? It seems that too often studies of memory in Levi focus on a specific type that for better or for worse goes by the name traumatic. The emphasis naturally falls on the survivor and on his or her daily battle to escape the literariness of the trauma itself. The reasons are understandable since Levi himself in his interviews and in The Drowned and the Saved, particularly in the chapters that treat Améry and violenza inutile, [useless violence] takes as his subject precisely the long-lasting repercussions of extreme violence on the survivor. When the discussion shifts to individual memory and its relation to objects, however, elaborating Levi’s insights with terms borrowed from communication theory can help us mark more carefully the means by which memory was assaulted in the Lager.

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Notes 1. “Si puó partire allora affermando, con Luhmann, che la memoria è un’espressione abbreviata per la ricorsivitá delle operazioni, che consente di fissare, al di lá del continuo fluire di operazioni sempre diverse, qualcosa che si ripete e in quanto tale viene ricordato, mentre il resto si abbandona alla dimenticanza.” Elena Esposito, La memoria sociale: Mezzi per comunicare e modi di dimenticare (Roma: Laterza, 2001), 10. 2. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage International, 1988), 23. All subsequent references cited as Drowned. 3. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Methuen, 1982), 133. 4. “La memoria non racccoglie le informazioni in quanto tali (che vengono appunto in gran parte dimenticate), ma procedure per trovare le informazioni all’interno dei libri.” Esposito, La memoria sociale, 153. See in this regard the twentieth century’s most famous mnemonist A. R. Luria. “Why he reasoned, couldn’t he use some external means to help him forget-write down what he no longer wished to remember. People jot things down so they’ll remember them, he said. This seemed ridiculous to me, so I decided to tackle the problem my own way. As he saw it, once he had written a thing down, he would have no need to remember it, but if he were without means of writing it down, he’d commit it to memory.” A. R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory, trans. Lynn Solotaroff (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 69–70. 5. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 15. 6. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo/La tregua (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), 79. All subsequent references cited as Se questo. 7. Esposito, La memoria sociale, 11. 8. Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana (1985), s.v. “custodi.” 9. J. Piaget, The Construction of Reality in the Child, trans. Margaret Cook (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 65. 10. Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana (1985), s.v. “suscitatore.”

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Primo Levi’s Odyssey: The Drowned and the Saved Isabella Bertoletti n February 1944, Primo Levi, together with 650 other prisoners, was deported to Auschwitz on a freight train. He survived Hitler’s most lethal death camp, until the Germans hastily surrendered the camp in January 1945 to the advancing Red Army. After a long and adventurous detour through war-torn Europe, Levi finally returned to his family apartment on the third floor of the Art Nouveau building on the Corso Re Umberto in Turin, the place where, except for the previous twenty months, he would live his entire life (and fall to his death on April 11, 1987). He was dressed in rags and changed beyond recognition. Of the 650 prisoners who were deported with Levi, only three (including the author) returned home (La tregua, 252).1 In Turin Levi got married and resumed his career as chemist. Yet he felt driven to record his wartime ordeal, and in spare time he composed his memoir Se questo è un uomo, seized by a “primordial” need (La tregua, 56) to make his story heard. Deplorably enough, Natalia Ginzburg, then reading manuscripts for Einaudi turned down his memoir.2 A small press brought it out in 1947 in limited edition (2,500 copies). The book then disappeared without a trace until 1958, when it was reissued by Einaudi and found a wide audience. It was originally called I sommersi e i salvati (“The drowned and the saved”), the Dantean terms for victims and survivors which would remain part of Levi’s idiosyncratic terminology long after he changed the title. Thirty years after his first effort as a writer, Levi recalled those days of feverish artistic activity in Il sistema periodico, and, revealingly, depicted himself in a comparison to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: “[…] I felt like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, who ambushes in the street wedding guests on their way to the celebration, inflicting on them his tale of woe” (Il sistema periodico, 155).3

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Levi attributed his survival to luck and to his skills as a chemist (which the Germans utilized in the synthetic-rubber factory that was attached to the camp and operated by the German industrial giant I. G. Farben). Se questo è un uomo, symbolically, was conceived in this chemistry lab, where Levi would gamble his safety in order to jot down on scraps of paper “that which I would not be able to tell anybody” (Se questo è un uomo, 178).4 In a 1986 interview with Philip Roth, Levi explicitly commented on his “two souls” (that of the writer and that of the scientist) and maintained that, in drafting his first book he had not been preoccupied with “definite literary intentions.” Its chapters, he added, did not follow the chronology in which the events took place but poured out according to the logic of an overwhelming inner urgency. Levi’s sole acknowledged stylistic model is that of “the ‘weekly report’ used in factories: it must be precise, concise and written in a language comprehensible to everybody.”5 In the same interview, though, he conceded that his second book, La tregua, was “self-conscious,” “literary,” and “more profoundly elaborated.”6 Levi’s explanation, at least provisionally, gives us a rationale for the sober and scientific clarity of his prose. Even in Se questo è un uomo, however, it is difficult to ignore Levi’s propensity to dissect life with Darwinian precision and then report it with Dantean lyricism. Critics have repeatedly identified the many references to Dante’s Inferno and variously interpreted his explicit references to Canto XXVI, the canto of Ulysses.7 Ulysses, a point of reference throughout Levi’s literary career, poignantly appears in the title of his last literary effort, I sommersi e i salvati. The Italian conventional use of Ulisse for all literary incarnations of Odysseus (Homeric, Latin, and Italian ones) suggests that Levi’s debt to Dante is only one facet of a broader network of literary allusions. This process is fully dramatized in La tregua, Levi’s second book, which is devoted to his own homecoming.8 In 1980, Levi was asked by Einaudi to compile an anthology of his favorite readings. In record time he published La ricerca delle radici (1981) a project, he tells us in the book’s introduction, through which he unwittingly brought about his most revealing self-portrait: “I felt more exposed to the public, more laid bare, in making this choice than I did in writing books in the first person” (La ricerca delle radici, xxi). Dante is missing from this compilation. Levi, instead, includes a selection from the Odyssey, ranking it second only to a passage from the Book of Job, the first entry. Darwin and William Bragg, the recipient of the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics, follow Homer. In the preface to the Homeric citation, Levi confesses his aversion to the Iliad and his attraction to the human dimension and “reasonable hope of the epic that chronicles “[. . .] the end of war and exile, a world

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reconstructed upon peace and conquered through justice” (La ricerca delle radici, 19). Levi’s Odyssean extract comes from Book XI. The gods have abandoned Odysseus and he is trapped in the cave of Polyphemos; he must extricate himself (and save his men) with his human means. Levi chooses the moment when Odysseus is already leaving, triumphant, and feels compelled to look back and cry out his name to his defeated enemy. His companions cannot understand his need to say it, but Odysseus, who has had to obliterate his identity to secure his (and their) physical survival, must claim the victory to his own name, so that his escapade shall not remain the nameless achievement of a “nobody.” It is important that he recover his pride of name, feeling as he does now, that he has earned it, that he is somebody. In the last book before his death, revisiting the motivations of his enduring drive to write about Auschwitz, Levi restates his affinity with Odysseus and paints an archetypal scene of storytelling from the Homeric epic: It is beautiful to sit in warmth, with food and wine, and remind oneself and others of toil, cold, hunger; this is the way Ulysses, in front of a table set for a banquet at the court of the Phaeacians, yields to his deep inner longing to tell his story. (I sommersi e i salvati, 120)

In the Odyssey the central stories about Odysseus’s adventures are not told by an external narrator but by Odysseus himself as a kind of autobiography, which he tells to the Phaeacians. In this epic of storytelling, the story one tells about one’s life seems to give meaning to life itself.9 Its narrative structure, so often articulated in the form of recollection, demonstrates the need and importance of memory in this process. Odysseus survives manifold threats to his physical integrity; his hardest battle, however, is against the insidious menace of his own beclouded mind. Italo Calvino has noted the epic significance of Odysseus’s psychological challenge: “the return must be discerned and thought about and remembered. The danger is that it may be forgotten about before it has happened. [. . .] Indeed, [Odysseus] must not forget the Odyssey.”10 The protagonist of the Odyssey is, in fact, first introduced to us at a pivotal point on the ten-year trajectory that takes him from Troy back to Ithaca. Many years spent away from home and family have taken a toll on the clarity of his recollections and his journey back is voluntarily deferred. Calypso, an enticing nymph on a remote paradisiacal island, offers him immortality on the condition that he renounce leaving her. By accepting, Odysseus would exist in obscurity, casting himself away into an everlasting but meaningless present. If he chooses to return, on the other hand, Odysseus reclaims his epic identity,

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but he must also face a reality in which suffering, decay, and death are the privileged passport to being human. In the opening pages of Se questo è un uomo Levi explains the perverted logic of Auschwitz, a universe where “every outsider [was] an enemy” (Se questo è un uomo, 7) and life endlessly reiterated the moment when the world was turned upside down by war, the first indication of a total breakdown in the fabric of civilized life: the world of the concentration camp was nothing but a version, an adaptation of German military praxis . . . one had the impression that throughout Hitler’s Germany the codes and manners of the barracks had to replace traditional and “bourgeois” ways. (I sommersi e i salvati, 92–94)

In the culture represented in the Odyssey, hospitality is the essential social virtue of the world at peace, creating an atmosphere of reciprocal security for the occasion when strangers meet, a fundamental social experience among civilized human beings. The Trojan War, let us recall, has its roots in a gross violation of hospitality, the seduction by Paris of Helen, the wife of his host. At the barbaric edges of humanity, all of Odysseus’s adventures become instances of gross violation of guest–host protocol. In this realm monsters and humans have no laws nor manners: the Cyclops devour their guests, Scylla and Charybdis destroy human life for the sake of doing so, Calypso and Circe distort humanity in order to achieve sexual conquest, the Suitors ransack the house of their host. There is a significant moment, at the beginning of Se questo è un uomo, where Levi pauses at the threshold of his camp experience to describe his spiritual universe at the time of his arrest as “a barely real world inhabited by civilized Cartesian phantoms” (11). Within days this Cartesian man is metamorphosed into a nameless Häftling, # 174517, stripped, shaved, and tattooed in a bizarre ritual aimed at the systematic destruction of the individual until he is nothing more than flesh, mere matter. Crossing the gate, marked by the infamous formula Arbeit macht frei, sets into motion a sudden reversal of the implacable gesture performed by Descartes to inaugurate modern thought, the cogito, and to eclipse the body. On arrival, the deportees had to submit to the ritual of shower and shave, which canceled the last exterior sign of individuality. The first, unexpected, cruel beating (“kicks and blows immediately, often striking our faces;” [I sommersi e i salvati, 27]) further forces the prisoners to recognize their own physical existence through a novel awareness of their corporeal vulnerability. From this point on life in the camp was orchestrated according to a sinister perversion of the protocols of civilized life. Individuals of diverse origins, ages, languages, and traditions were thrown together inside the

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confines of barbed wire. Upon every inhabitant the Germans imposed one constant, controlled (but substandard) system attempting to single out what was indispensable and what “acquired in the behavior of the animal–man faced with the struggle for survival” (Se questo è un uomo, 109). The constant violation of that intimate, private sphere literally divested of all traces of civilization. Levi describes the many abominable rituals connected with attempting to maintain “proper” hygiene. Didactic frescos on washroom walls painfully, mockingly reminded the prisoners of outdated “civilized” norms. They depicted a good Häftling stripped to his waist, vigorously soaping up and getting washed, and a bad Häftling, with strong Semitic features, fully clothed in dirty rags, timidly dipping the tip of his fingers in water. Underneath, ominous captions reminded the prisoners that dirtiness, too, is a sign of inexorable decline (Se questo è un uomo, 46). Getting washed in filthy water, Levi knew, was pointless. It was important, on the other hand, as a sign of the prisoner’s willingness to remember and preserve the “skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civility” (Se questo è un uomo, 48). A sense of shame meant respect for oneself that is maintained by preserving one’s decency. In the Odyssey the voyage home depends on the availability of memories of home, which allow Odysseus to maintain focus while he sails from coast to coast and copes with landscapes and situations that change at a vertiginous speed. At every stage of the epic, while Odysseus’s physiology is always on the verge of being distorted (in deliberate disguise through involuntary metamorphoses to animal forms willed by superhuman forces) or disappearing, the hero must remember who he is or subside into oblivion; and he must prove his identity by articulating it. On the island of the Phaeacians, his last stop, Odysseus lives up to his obligation more than in any other episode. Here, on the eve of his homecoming, the poem celebrates civilized life and turns more self-reflectively on matters of form. Odysseus has just nearly drowned at sea. As he staggers out of the bushes before the astonished eyes of Princess Nausicaa he is naked, frightened, nameless; the epic tells us that he appears to her as a wild lion. And yet, with his speech, Odysseus proves that he is human and, what is more, wins the respect of the girl, even her love, and later the admiration of her royal parents. In ten years of travels and constant struggle he cannot get to Ithaca; but after telling the entire story of his life to the Phaeacians his impossible journey is accomplished in a single night and in his sleep. Levi describes Auschwitz as a modern-day Babel where inmates and their jailers spoke a dozen languages, permanently distorting them and undermining their communicative properties (I sommersi e i salvati, 70–71). And yet Levi, like Odysseus, had to rely on language and rescue it, whatever its inadequacies, as the medium that makes possible the

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negotiations that sustain life in the social world, among thinking human beings. Of the seventeen chapters that make up Se questo è un uomo, the ninth and central one has the highly evocative title, “I sommersi e i salvati.” It is followed by “Esame di chimica” and “Il canto di Ulisse,” chapters that chronicle a turning point in Levi’s struggle to cross the threshold that separates the hopeless (the “drowned”) from the survivors (the “saved”). In these two chapters, strategically lodged at the heart of the book, Levi explicitly links this process of salvation to his renewed capacity to communicate his thoughts. The following chapter “I fatti dell’estate” (“The events of summer”) chronicles the first premonitory signs of change. The inmates lived from hour to hour, meal to meal, the normal rhythm of temporal existence having been upset by the demands of keeping the body functioning. The end of Auschwitz, appropriately, is announced by the progressive reappearance of chronology. The text returns to the daily flow of time, first with a solitary, but specific temporal reference (“Ottobre 1944”), and then assumes the format of a daily log. Levi dates his entries and vividly describes the last ten days of the camp, from January 18 to 27, 1945, when he was among a small remnant of sick and dying patients in the camp’s makeshift infirmity, after the Nazis had fled westward with some twenty thousand healthy prisoners. “I sommersi e i salvati” and “I fatti dell’estate” are extremes of this process of rehabilitation to life. Against the human backdrop of the “drowned,” nameless, voiceless prisoners that inhabit the early chapters of the book, “I sommersi e i salvati” paints individual portraits who become named characters in literature. We meet the “saved,” Schepsel, a four-year resident, who feeds himself trading little creations made with makeshift tools and turns in an accomplice to save his skin; Alfred L., an engineer, once a CEO of an important chemical plant, who preserves the accruements of culture with his proper manners and clean shirt; Elias Lindzin, a man of super human strength; Henri, an ultracivilized con artist with a facility at conjuring power out of powerlessness.11 The “saved,” Levi warns us, were often the “worst, the selfish types, violent, indifferent, the collaborators of a ‘gray zone,’ spies” (I sommersi e i salvati, 63). At the opposite pole, “I fatti dell’estate” is the chapter that introduces us to Lorenzo, the “free” Italian bricklayer, who for months sneaked Levi an extra portion of soup providing him with both concrete and spiritual nourishment, reminding him to be a man (Se questo è un uomo, 154). It would be a mistake to examine, as some critics have, “Il canto di Ulisse” as an independent entity. The chapter that precedes it, “Esame di chimica,” equally partakes in the process whereby Levi, at the camp, reclaimed his humanity, a process that depended on the availability of

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both scientific and literary memories, the two anchors of his identity, memories that, in equal measure, “allowed [Levi] to reestablish a connection to the past, rescuing it from oblivion” (I sommersi e i salvati, 112). “Esame di chimica” describes an examination Levi had to pass in order to accede to a professional department designed to research the possibilities of the production of synthetic rubber in Auschwitz—a position that would move him into a lab and spare him from forced labor. “Il canto di Ulisse” recounts an emotional conversation between Levi and a fellow prisoner, Jean, on their way to a soup kitchen. Levi was seized by memories of Dante’s Inferno, and canto XXVI mediates the connection between the two men. This is the first time Häftling 174517 is addressed by his real name, Primo. These episodes, seemingly unrelated, dramatize one essential challenge. Levi, like Odysseus, was forced to dig into a past that seemed remote, illusory, faded, and painstakingly reclaim it. Furthermore, he had to be able to articulate it convincingly to his interlocutors. As he journeys in the Odyssey, Odysseus is torn between his past self as a hero and his present one as an isolated wanderer. The story of his travels at the limits of human experience and at the edge of nature becomes a second heroic past when his own telling of the story makes it the object of fame and glory. In the scene of the exam the tension between Levi’s past, his lamentable condition as a prisoner and his present as a writer is palpable, seriously challenging his ability to articulate his story as a coherent narrative.12 We see Levi as he struggles to reconcile the man inside and outside of the camp: student, Häftling and survivor. The struggle repeats itself in the following chapter, when Levi begins his recitation of Dante to Jean at a particular juncture in canto XXVI, the point where Ulysses’s efforts to remember and recite his own tale to Dante are so great that he is seized by convulsions. And here, again, we have a doubling of the situation; just as Ulysses struggles to speak to Dante in the Inferno, Levi is frustrated in his attempts to recite the lines of the epic to Jean. The first episode allows Levi to reestablish a connection to his narrowly personal and professional past, the second to his cultural background in a broader concatenation of events that seem to unite Troy, Rome, the Inferno, and Turin.13 Levi clings to his tradition to prevail against the onslaught of Nazi evil, of the irrational forces that have so profoundly shaken the human values on which civilization is supposed to be based. Both episodes dramatize moments of respite from the habitually gritty material conditions of camp life: as toil and pain were momentarily interrupted, Levi resumed, though with difficulty, to think and articulate his thoughts. Returning home, Odysseus goes back to being human and accepting pain, suffering, and death as the price of his humanity. In Ithaca everything and everyone have changed: he is not who he was, his house and its people,

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especially Penelope, are not what or who they were. Once again, Odysseus arrives on an island as a poor beggar clad in rags and must face a new siege, this time in his own home, in order to earn his identity. Odysseus assumes nonexistence to prove who he is, as he has had to do time and time again on his odyssey. For the survivors, Levi tells us, liberation was not a time of celebration; it came with the hazards and sorrows of human life: The hour of liberation was neither happy nor carefree . . . at the moment when we felt we were returning to be human, that is, responsible human beings, we began to relive the sorrows of human beings: grief for our lost or dispersed families, for the universal suffering around us . . . a life in the midst of ruins, often alone. (I sommersi e i salvati, 53)

The journey chronicled in La tregua, a book that does not address the Holocaust as such but its consequences, was for Levi, as the Odyssey for the Greek hero, a period of truce between war and the struggle of human existence, a therapeutic necessity that prepared him to face the hazards of a future: Though these past months were hard months of wandering at the margins of civilization, they appeared now to us as a truce, a parenthesis of unlimited possibilities, a providential but unrepeatable gift of destiny. (La tregua, 253)

An extended voyage through a geography that frequently assumes mythical and fairy tale qualities mediates Levi’s return to reality. A long pilgrimage takes him from Auschwitz back to Italy by way of Russia, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Germany. The infernal sorrows of the Lager are replaced in La tregua by a mood of exuberance, a magical time when the world seemed to have returned to a primordial chaos (La tregua, 36), pregnant with possibilities, a period of personal and historical respite, a universal truce between the horrors of one war and the beginning of a new, nefarious conflict (the “cold war” [La tregua, 66]). The journey exposes Levi to types of life he had never known before, adding novelty to his own rediscovery of life after the Lager. For this book, saturated with colorful and memorable encounters (and the rediscovery of women), Levi prefers the dialogical form. Languages in the Lager reenact the terrifying confusion of Babel, in the free world Levi depicts their joyful use as necessary tools to reacquaint himself with the world; even Latin, a dead language, is resuscitated when Levi endeavored to communicate with a young Polish priest. Two characters, Mordo Nahum and Cesare, stand out in the vertiginous variety of the many others. A Greek and a Roman, emblematically, guide

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Levi on a process of rehabilitation to life. With Mordo Nahum, a Greek Jew from Salonika, Levi crosses paths three times. He is Odysseus-like, a man of concrete wisdom and practical intelligence (La tregua, 45), equipped for the road with shoes (“of leather, almost new, of elegant design: a true portent given the time and the place” [La tregua, 38]). He is also a polyglot, who can switch with ease between “Spanish . . . French, a broken but well accented Italian and . . . Turkish, Bulgarian and a bit of Albanian” (La tregua, 38). Nahum tells Levi that he is a fool because he has no shoes, and only fools have no shoes (La tregua, 45). Levi learns to appreciate Nahum’s energy, his incredible strength and work ethic (by legal or illegal means) and sense of independence, though Nahum carries them to an extreme, convinced, as he is, that life in the Lager is not an exceptional overthrowing of the norms of civilized life, but rather a confirmation of his philosophy that “war is always” (La tregua, 57). Cesare, the Roman charlatan, believes in the opposite. He is as lively as “a grasshopper,” pleasure seeking, “a child of the sun, everybody’s friend, he knew no hatred nor contempt, he was as fickle as the sky, cheerful . . . very ignorant, very innocent and very civilized” (La tregua, 92). Levi’s picaresque adventures with this man are described in memorable pages where Levi reproduces the magic of his Roman dialect and body language as he learns to experience, once again, the joy of being alive, young, and carefree. There is a legendary dimension to Levi’s tortuous journey, especially in the long gestation period in the Soviet Union, while he was waiting to be repatriated. Levi was stranded for two months, from the middle of July to the middle of August 1945, in White Russia, in Staryje Doroghi (literally “old roads”), a village that did not appear on any geographical map (La tregua, 150). In the Red House, where Levi and many others found shelter, a house “full of mysteries and tricks like the castle of fairies” (La tregua, 174), Levi was overcome, for the first time since his arrest, by a new and greater pain born of tedium, the pain of exile: the heavy breath of a collective dream, the dream emanating from exile and idleness, when work and pain have subsided, and no obstruction is left between man and himself; in it we perceive the impotence and emptiness of our life, and the curved and distorted profile of the monsters generated by the twilight of reason. (La tregua, 211)

Fed, clothed, and reasonably comfortable, Levi finds himself stranded like Odysseus on the island of Calypso, and like his Greek predecessor, he experiences the pangs of a deeper longing, a nostalgia, which is not an ordinary desire for home, “but a more immediate and urgent need to experience human contacts, mental and physical work, novelty and

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variety” (La tregua, 189). This is the reason, perhaps, why as soon as Odysseus regains what is rightfully his, his throne, his wife, his epic identity, it is assumed that he will start experiencing the languid boredom that he has already known on the island of Calypso. Having assumed his role as a fixed character in literature he finds himself, again, immortal but dead and the Odyssey alludes to a new departure for its protagonist, a journey to a land so remote that its natives have no knowledge of the sea, the principal element of the epic. Odysseus’s refusal to settle down (and to end his epic life properly) is perhaps the source of his adaptability as a literary character and of the enduring fascination of readers with his antics. Symbolically, his restlessness sets into motion a chain of incarnations, even antithetical ones. Dante, let us recall, distances himself from him. Dante makes Odysseus’s restlessness a central feature of his character and for this he eternally condemns Ulysses to the eighth circle of hell; yet Dante begins his journey with a metaphoric survival of shipwreck in canto I at the precise point (we learn in canto XXVI) where the pagan hero’s audacious crossing of the boundary of the dead was blocked by the appearance of a ghostly mountain: quando m’apparve una montagna, bruna per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto quanto veduta non aveva alcuna. (Inferno XXVI, 133–135)14 [when there, before us rose a mountain, dark because of distance, and it seemed to me the highest mountain I had ever seen.]

Ulysses and his men die in shipwreck, swallowed by an infernal “whirlwind” (Inferno, XXVI, 137). At the outset of the Commedia, faced by a similar mountain (“al pie d’un colle giunto”—“I’d reached the bottom of a hill” [I, 13]) Dante survives death (claiming to be the first to do so) because he accepts to proceed through a different terrain: E come quei che con la lena affanna, uscito fuor del pelago a la riva, si volge a l’acqua perigliosa e guata, così l’animo mio, ch’ancor fuggiva, si volsa a retro a rimirar lo passo che non lasciò già mai persona viva. (Inferno, I, 22–27) [And just as he who, with exhausted breath, having escaped from sea to shore, turns back to watch the dangerous waters he has quit,

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so did my spirit, still a fugitive, turn back to look intently at the pass that never has let any man survive.]

The Odyssey unmasks an important truth about human existance: life is uncertain until its ends and depends for its meaning upon what happens at the end. This is what Odysseus learns in the Land of the Dead. The most obvious case is Agamemnon, to whom he is compared throughout the whole epic. The effect of Agamemnon’s ending is to obliterate the achievements of his heroic past. The author of the Commedia broadly assimilates the lesson of the Odyssey, knowing that the end grants the ultimate retrospective illumination to a narrative. Ulysses is forever condemned for his final action. By contrast, the doubts and tribulations of the pilgrim, of Dante as he is still a sinner, are accidental and point toward his symbolic death and conversion, after which he is born again a saved man. Dante looks back once, at the beginning of his infernal journey, and then never again. To the Dantean “drowned,” even the act of speaking their sins doubles the bitter sting of the infernal punishment; on the summit of Purgatory the “saved” bathe in the waters of Lethe, which takes away the memory of sinful deeds. La tregua poignantly underscores the mixed emotions of the liberated prisoners—the joy of liberation, the pain of not being able to cleanse oneself of the horrible experience, the dawning awareness that the violence they suffered will remain forever within them and in their stories. The reality of home becomes haunted and perverted by the memory of the offense. Levi’s account of his journey back from the camp to his place of birth does not end with a celebration of reunion but with a “dream full of horror.” In that dream, amidst family and friends in a peaceful environment where everything collapses, Auschwitz is the only reality. In his final book, four decades after Auschwitz, Levi chooses to look back. For the audience of his first book, the events recounted were within living memory. In the 1980s, Levi tells us, the same events seem faded, and the stuff of a distant history. Levi has become increasingly aware of the sense of boredom and staleness all too often occasioned by the recalling of the memory of Auschwitz, of the increasing emotional distance of ordinary people. Levi’s mood swings between the need to be relieved of an unbearable burden by telling his story (and impersonating a sinister storyteller, like the Ancient Mariner) and the despair of his own failing memory (“Human memory is an extraordinary but fallacious instrument” [I sommersi e i salvati, 13]).

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Levi lucidly articulated the dangers of Dante’s gesture if it is repeated outside of the context of Dante’s spiritual experience: I think that it was this turning back to look at the “dangerous waters” that caused many suicides after (at times immediately following) the liberation . . . On the other hand . . . suicides during our captivity were rare. (I sommersi e i salvati, 57)

The question is how to connect tradition and innovation, past with present. Unfortunately, it is the one to which life cannot offer a permanent solution until it ends. Odysseus embraces the hazards of future adventures, reinvents himself and reenters history. The Odyssey postpones its conclusion allowing its protagonist, who longs for action, to escape the Sirens who offer him to sing the heroic exploits of the war in Troy imprisoning him into memory. Dante condemns Ulysses and makes his restlessness antithetical to the impetus of his conversional narrative: his identity as a Christian hero is set once and for all, so is the ending of the Commedia. Levi, at the end of his life, admits defeat. He is neither Odysseus nor Dante; he perceives that his story has become formulaic and exhausted: a memory that is evoked too frequently, and expressed as a narrative, tends to become as fixed as a stereotype, in a form that is tested by experience, crystallized, perfected, ornamented, which takes root in place of the raw memory and grows at its expense. (I sommersi e i salvati, 14)

For Levi, this is when history comes to an end. Notes 1. Between September 1943 and April 1945, 303 Italian Jews were killed in Italy and 6,746 were deported. Of the latter, 830 survived and 5,916 perished (either during the journey or in death camps). For data and names see: Liliana Picciotto Fargion, Il libro della memoria. Gli Ebrei deportati dall’Italia (1943–1945) (Milan: Mursia, 1991). Picciotto reminds us that the final body count does not include 900–1,100 deported prisoners whose identity has not been established. On the Italian Shoah, see Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, 4th ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1988) The Jews in Fascist Italy, trans. Robert L. Miller, ed. Stanislao G. Pugliese (New York: Enigma Books, 2001) and Klaus Voigt, Il rifugio precario. Gli esuli in Italia dal 1943 al 1945, Vol. II (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996). All references to Primo Levi’s texts are from the following editions: La tregua (Turin: Einaudi, 1971); Il sistema periodico (Turin: Einaudi, 1975); Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 1976); I sommersi e i salvati (Turin: Einaudi, 1993); La ricerca delle radici (Turin: Einaudi, 1981). All English translations are my own.

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2. During his captivity Levi was haunted by a nightmare in which his immediate family would appear to him but remain indifferent to his story: “they are totally indifferent: they speak confusedly about other matters among themselves, as if I were not there. My sister looks at me, gets up and leaves without uttering a word.” In an interview with Ferdinando Camon, Levi comments on this haunting nightmare. See F. Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, trans. John Shepley (Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1989). On Ginzburg, see Claudio Toscani, Come leggere Se questo è un uomo di Primo Levi (Milan: Mursia, 1990), 28. 3. The suggestive image of the Ancient Mariner appears, again, in the epigraph that introduces I sommersi e i salvati, Levi’s final book, which bears the original title of his first literary effort: “Since then, at an uncertain hour / That agony returns: / And till my ghastly tale is told / This heart within me burns.” 4. “the need to communicate was so powerful in us that I had begun to write the book there, in that German lab.” Primo Levi, “Appendice,” Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), 221. 5. “A conversation with Philip Roth” in Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Collier Books, 1993), 181. 6. “A conversation with Philip Roth” 183. 7. Pietro Boitani, L’ombra di Ulisse (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992), 183–189; Giuseppe Grassano, Primo Levi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1981), 12; Zvi Jagendorf, “Primo Levi Goes for Soup and Remembers Dante,” Raritan, XII, 4 (Spring 1993): 31–51; Lynn M. Gunzberg, “Down Among the Dead Men: Levi and Dante in Hell,” Modern Language Studies, 16 (Winter 1986): 10–28. 8. See Gian Paolo Biasin, “The Haunted Journey of Primo Levi,” in Roberta S. Kremer, ed., Memory and Mastery. Primo Levi as Writer and Witness (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 3–20. 9. A perceptive reader of literature, Levi certainly does not ignore that Odysseus is also an embodiment of self-conscious literary creation. When Homer describes him as a man capable of conceiving “winged words,” he implicitly connects Odysseus’s wanderings and his masterful use of rhetoric. This connection reverberates any time the Western literary imagination has likened literary composition to a sea voyage. See Ernst Robert Curtius’s discussion of metaphor (“the most important ‘figure’ ”) in his classic study European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1953). The chapter opens with a section on nautical metaphor in which literary composition is compared to a sea voyage. 10. Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature: Essays, trans. Patrick Creagh (San Diego: HBJ, 1986), 136–137. 11. Henri, whose real name was Paul Steinberg, survived and returned to Paris. His memoir was written nearly ten years after Levi’s death and fifty years after Auschwitz. See: Paul Steinberg, A Survivor’s Reckoning (New York: Metropolitan, 2000). 12. In his epistolary exchanges with his German translator and friend Heinz Riedt, Levi explains that he wanted to convey the discontinuities in his inner sense of self. In one instance, he regretted that the German version of Se questo è un

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uomo had flattened the original shifts in verbal tenses, unifying the whole book into the present tense. This, in Levi’s view, would result in the obliteration of the important distinction between the narration and his general remarks on the behavior of man in the Lager. See Giovanni Tesio, “Ritratti critici di contemporanei,” Belfagor, 6 (1979): 668. 13. Jagendorf has suggested that Levi inscribes his identity within a narrative that unites Troy, Rome, Dante’s Hell, and Turin. See Jagendorf, “Primo Levi Goes for Soup and Remembers Dante,” Raritan, XII, 4 (Spring 1993): 44. 14. Dante Alighieri, Commedia: Inferno, eds. Emilio Pasqualini and Antonio Quaglio (Milan: Garzanti, 1982). Translations are from The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1988). On the connection between Dante the infernal pilgrim and Ulysses in canto XXVI, see: John Freccero, The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 136–152 where he connects the two episodes in terms of the renunciation of a circular narrative for a linear narrative of salvation.

10

“The Pain of Remembering”: Primo Levi’s Poetry and the Function of Memory Jay Losey

n The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi makes a claim that distinguishes all his work: “And finally, among the testimonies, written or spoken, some are unconsciously stylized, in which convention prevails over genuine memory.”1 Levi’s greatness as a Holocaust memoirist rests precisely on his ability to convey accurately his experience at Auschwitz III (BunaMonowitz). But such testimony has serious consequences, as Levi acknowledges: “In this case, all or almost all the factors that can obliterate or deform the mnemonic record are at work: the memory of a trauma suffered or inflicted is itself traumatic because recalling it is painful or at least disturbing.”2 As time passes and memory diminishes, the very act of writing about his concentration camp experience causes Levi “trauma.” Perhaps this tension between “genuine memory” and “the memory of a trauma” is most succinctly revealed in his poetry, first in L’osteria di Brema (later titled Shemà), a volume of twenty-seven poems written between June 1946 and December 1974, and then in Ad ora incerta (Coleridge’s At an Uncertain Hour), a volume of thirty-four poems written between May 1978 and June 1984.3 These two volumes contain a total of sixty-one poems. A majority of the poems in L’osteria di Brema (sixteen) were written between February 1943 and June 1946 and reveal the immediacy, anger, and emotional trauma Levi felt upon his return to Turin. In Ad ora incerta, Levi displays a similar immediacy and emotion in his rendering of his imprisonment at Auschwitz. However, some critics of Levi’s poetry argue that he is detached, formal, and tentative in Ad ora incerta. Ross Feld, for example, argues that “[y]et for all this grace, Levi’s poems still feel to me like a personal

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indignity he suffered—or at least a dubiety [uncertainty], an unnatural struggle.”4 And responding to Levi’s self-professed diminishment of his poetic achievement, Nicholas Patruno asserts, “more likely, in fear of tarnishing the ‘rational’ aspect of his persona, which is now his trademark, Levi seems reluctant to expose his ‘emotional’ side to the world.”5 And Levi himself offers a humorous assessment about the value of his poems: “In my view, their value is minimal. My natural state is that of not writing poetry, but every now and then I get this curious infection, like an exanthematic illness that gives you a rash.”6 But, despite this assessment, Levi penetrates the surface of his poems. Levi’s immediacy and emotional involvement are as palpable in Ad ora incerta as they are in L’osteria di Brema because Levi displays “genuine memory” and because “the memory of the trauma” remains “traumatic,” “painful,” and “disturbing.” In Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table), Levi recalls writing many of the L’osteria di Brema poems during and immediately after his concentration camp experience: “I was writing concise and bloody poems, telling the story at breakneck speed.”7 In “Reveille,” he conveys the anguished trauma of the moments just prior to the camp dawn command: “In the brutal nights we used to dream / Dense violent dreams, / Dreamed with soul and body: / To return; to eat; to tell the story.”8 The structure of these opening lines reenacts the trauma of their waking and realizing that momentarily someone will say, “Wstawa´c ” (the Polish word for “Get up”).9 They move from dreams to waking, from escape to reality. “Buna” powerfully conveys in its structure the two primary impulses of Levi’s memory: to render the experience and to protect himself from the trauma. Addressing the muselmannër, the speaker says, “You multitudes with dead faces, / On the monotonous horror of the mud / Another day of suffering is born.” As if the memory of the muselmannër is too much, the speaker escapes into a literary world, that of Dante: “If we were to meet again / Up there in the world, sweet beneath the sun, / With what kind of face would we confront each other?”10 In Inferno, Canto VII, these damned souls, gurgling mud, say, “Sluggish we were / in the sweet air made happy by the sun.”11 Of course Levi does something similar in “The Canto of Ulysses” episode in Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man) but the compression of “Buna” conveys an unforgettable image of suffering and death. The brief duration from the original experience and Levi’s poetic rendering of it not only in “Reveille” and “Buna,” but also in “Monday,” “Ostjuden,” “Sunset at Fossili,” and “11 February 1946” enables Levi to synthesize “genuine memory” and “the memory of a trauma.” Paradoxically, perhaps to stress a need to contain his emotion or formalize his response to it, in “Sunset at Fossoli,” the detention camp near Carpo, Levi quotes Catullus: “I felt the words of the old poet / Tear at my

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flesh: ‘Suns can go down and return. For us, when the brief light is spent, / There is an unending night to be slept.’ ”12 Much as he does in “The Canto of Ulysses” episode, Levi affirms the importance of a Latin and Italian literary tradition; he also uses Catullus’ words to convey not only a literary meaning but also a personal meaning. In “The Canto of Ulysses” episode, he stresses “excellence” and “knowledge” in Inferno XXVI; here, he stresses the brevity of life and the imminence of death for Italian Jews at Fossoli, the devastating consequence which he records factually in both Se questo è un uomo and La tregua (The Truce). If in “Sunset at Fossoli” Levi staves off “the memory of the trauma” by quoting Catullus, in “February 11, 1946,” the poem written exactly two years after his deportation to Auschwitz, no such classical references can soften the trauma of Auschwitz. This poem has an autobiographical quality, compressing into seventeen lines the poet’s life before, during, and after an unnamed crisis, but one that clearly refers to Auschwitz: “And when I was face to face with death—/ No, I shouted from every fibre.”13 What preserves the poet is an unnamed woman, the “you” he repeats five times. Whether real or imagined, literal or figurative, Levi finds strength in a human relationship—the antithesis of the Nazis’ attempts to erase human bonds. Although the poems in Ad ora incerta were written decades after the Holocaust, they convey the immediacy and emotional involvement of the earlier poems. While it is true that Levi composes these poems using analogies, conceits, juxtapositions—the very poetic devices that create aesthetic effects not as apparent in the Shemà volume. Still, the anguish is palpable. In “Dark Band,” the speaker watches black ants build their city on top of another city, just as the Jews had to build a city at Auschwitz on top of Oswiecim: “They scurry about there, unsuspecting, / Tireless in their tenuous affairs, / Paying no heed to / I don’t want to write it, / I don’t want to write about this band, / Don’t want to write about any dark band” (Non lo voglio scrivere, / Non voglio scrivere de questa schiera, / Non voglio scrivere di nessuna schiera bruna).14 The sight of the ants working tirelessly causes the speaker to recall the concentration camp, the muselmannër, himself—and to break off the trauma by refusing to complete the poem. The repetitive “Non voglio scrivere” (“I don’t want to write”) becomes an antidote to the memory of the offense, but the speaker reveals enough to enable readers to draw their own conclusions. “Nachtwache” deals with Levi’s deportation to Auschwitz and is an incredible poetic retelling of “The Journey” in If This is a Man: “I have heard lovers’ whispers, laughter, / And the labored breathing of absolved longings, / Adolescents murmuring in their dreams, / Others tossing, sleepless from desire.”15 To the speaker’s question, “Watchman, what of the night?,” the German guard replies,

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“Everything is in order.” The train, in this instance, will go unimpeded to its destination: Auschwitz. “The Survivor,” a later poem (February 1984), poetically synthesizes “Reveille” and “Buna” from the Shemà collection. In this nightmarish poem, the speaker feels the ghostly presence of the muselmannër: “Once more he sees his companions’ faces / Livid in the first faint light, / Gray with cement dust, / Nebulous in the mist, / Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep.”16 Written at the same time as The Drowned and the Saved, Levi conveys “the memory of a trauma” forty years old. The poem is unrelenting in its horrific intensity and also contextualizes the trauma he suffered while writing The Drowned and the Saved.17 The long duration from the original experience and Levi’s rendering of it not only in these poems but also in “Voices,” “Unfinished Business,” “Passover,” and “A Mouse” does not free Levi from “the pain of remembering” (la pena del ricordarsi), as he says in If This is a Man.18 Several prominent commentators—for example, Cynthia Ozick and Alexander Stille—have argued that Levi, among many other possible causes, committed suicide because he feared he was losing his memory. On this point, I do find an intersection between the artist and the art. The poem “Unfinished Business,” dated April 19, 1981, chronicles the speaker’s desire—conveyed in a letter to his boss—to quit his job (perhaps as a writer) because he has left “uncompleted work.” He blames his “uncompleted work” on “laziness or practical problems” and then provides a catalog of activities—such as communicating with clients and traveling—he should have completed. But the worst and most painful omission—writing “a fundamental work”—obliquely refers, perhaps, to Levi’s fear about his memory loss. The poem ends as follows: Above all, dear sir, I had in mind A marvelous book that would have Revealed innumerable secrets, Alleviated pain and fear, Dissolved doubts, given to many people The boon of tears and laughter. You’ll find the outline in my drawer, In back, with the unfinished business. I haven’t had time to see it through. Too bad. It would have been a fundamental work.19

Levi was extremely productive in the 1980s, publishing Lilít e altri racconti (Moments of Reprieve), Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?), L’altrui mestiere (Other People’s Trades), and I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved) along with poems, short stories, and essays. But the fear that he might not have produced “a fundamental work” haunts him in the poem. Will he have enough time?

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In “A Mouse,” written on January 15, 1983, the speaker laments that he may not have enough time left to dredge up all the memories. A talkative, nimble mouse—the passage is very humorous—sternly preaches to the speaker: A talky sententious equestrian, It climbed to my bookcase top And preached to me, Quoting Plutarch, Nietzsche and Dante: That I must not waste time, Blah, blah, that time is growing short, Lost time never comes back, And time is money.20

“Unfinished Business” and “A Mouse” convey the twin anxieties Levi felt he was facing: memory loss and time. These anxieties are central features in Levi’s “pain of remembering.” An anecdote may illustrate precisely why Levi worried over memory loss and time. In his recent memoir, published in English as Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning, Paul Steinberg—the cold, calculating “Henri” in If This is a Man—is astounded by the accuracy of Levi’s memory of him. He notes, “How strange it is to see oneself at a distance of fifty years through the eyes of a neutral and surely objective observer, with whom I would have had no special relationship.”21 One might even assert that Steinberg wanted to publish his memoir—he repeatedly mentions the prolonged difficulty in completing it—to contextualize Levi’s rendering of him. Whatever his motive, Steinberg acknowledges the clarity and accuracy of Levi’s memory by subjecting himself to “the pain of remembering”: “The strangest thing about this acquaintance that seems to have left such precise traces in his memory is that I do not remember him at all. Perhaps because I hadn’t felt he could be useful to me? Which would confirm his judgment.”22 In his poetry, Levi turns his gaze inward and relentlessly subjects his memory to judgments both “genuine” and “traumatic.” And in this creative, if painful, process, he surpasses memoirists like Steinberg, who, for whatever reason, cannot record with such precision and accuracy the events that occurred inside the barbed wire. Notes 1. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 71. 2. Ibid., 24.

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3. Levi also translated ten additional poems, mostly by Heine. My focus is exclusively on the poems in the two volumes. 4. Ross Feld, “Taking Time,” Parnassus, 16, 1 (1990): 9. 5. Nicholas Patruno, “At an Uncertain Hour,” Memory and Mastery: Primo Levi as Writer and Witness, ed. Roberta S. Kremer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 95. Patruno has in mind the following statement by Levi in his conversation with Tullio Regge: “[N]ow I have the impression that I have exhausted the reservoir. I write poetry, without much believing in it; as for prose, it seems to me the time has come to go up a new path, both in terms of theme and language.” Primo Levi and Tullio Regge, Dialago, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 63. 6. Primo Levi, The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987, ed. and trans. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 132. The word “rash” appears in English in the original. 7. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 151. 8. Primo Levi, Collected Poems, trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), 10. 9. See “Our Nights” in Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) and the ending of La tregua (The Truce) for Levi’s further elaboration on the dawn command. “Reveille” is also the epigraph to La tregua. 10. Levi, Collected Poems, 5. 11. See Dante, Inferno, VII. The complete statement is as follows: “Bogged in this slime they [sighing souls] say, ‘Sluggish we were / in the sweet air made happy by the sun, / and the smoke of sloth was smoldering in our hearts; // now we lie sluggish here in this black muck!’ ” (ll., 121–124). Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin Books, 1984). 12. Levi, Collected Poems, 15. 13. Ibid., 16. 14. Ibid., 43. 15. Ibid., 58. 16. Ibid., 64. 17. What Clive James says of I sommersi e i salvati can be said of Ad ora incerta: “Levi is trying to make us see something that didn’t happen to us as if we remembered it.” The New Yorker (May 23, 1988), 86. 18. Levi, If This is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz), 142. 19. Collected Poems, 47. 20. Ibid., 57. 21. Paul Steinberg, Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning, trans. Linda Coverdale (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 130. 22. Ibid.

11

The Drowned as Saviors of Humanity:The Anthropological Value of Se questo è un uomo Antoine Philippe

n the preface to his masterpiece, Se questo è un uomo, Primo Levi warns the reader that his book will not reveal anything new about death camps, but that it should “furnish documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind.”1 Levi hopes that his writing can be a source of valuable knowledge despite what he claims to be its obvious flaw, namely, its lack of systematicity. He apologizes by explaining that although his writing did intend to help establish objective knowledge for the future, it also served the short-term and subjective purpose of “internal liberation” (liberazione interiore): it has been written “in order of urgency” (per ordine di urgenza) rather than according to logic (non in successione logica), hence its fragmentary character (carattere frammentario). However, his book was praised for this very failure to achieve systematicity. Daniel R. Schwarz, for example, ranks Levi as one of the “most effective” narrators of the Holocaust because, he says, “[Levi] observes human behavior not as a part of general rules but of wondrous particulars to be observed. . . . [H]e is an Aristotelian who lives in the ineluctable modality of the visible; generalizations are based on what he has observed.”2 Bryan Cheyette also shows that Levi had “an agonizing sense of the limitations of unproblematically turning experience into knowledge.”3 Because of his aversion for stereotyping and of his preference for what he calls in The Periodic Table a “typically grey human specimen,” Levi “is not contained by any system—moral, linguistic, scientific” (279). Patricia Sayre and Linnea Vacca, furthermore, believe that “Levi’s attention to complexity, particularity, and unpredictability also . . . keeps his readers from slipping into the very abstractions that turned persons and cultures into problems to be solved and thus made the camps possible in the first place.”4

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All these critics seem to agree that Levi’s insights about humanity should not be generalized further because their value lies in their nonsystematicity. They perceive systematicity as the “enemy” because it would not allow a faithful account of the Auschwitz experience and because it would replicate the organization of death in concentration camps. Were Levi’s hopes of contributing to the establishment of a more systematic anthropology misplaced? Did he underestimate the difficulty and also the dangers involved in systematicity? Levi, who was a very rigorous scientist, was not resistant to all kinds of systematic thinking. On the contrary, he emphasized how much he suffered from the lack of real logic in the camp. Also, he believed in the creative value of systemic constraints, even using the periodic table as a metaphor to shape his testimonial writing. In his preface, Levi tells us that the problem with a logical system is not its logic, but the premise on which this logic is based. What is the major premise of Auschwitz as an anthropological system? It is that “every stranger is an enemy” (ogni straniero è nemico). Auschwitz is almost entirely deductible from the application of this premise to its most radical consequences.5 Hence, the problem is not the systematicity of reason, but the irrational premise from which reason would build a system, and the belief in man’s natural hostility to man is irrational for Levi. Not that he could, after his scathing experience, believe that man is naturally good to man.6 But the conception that he sees at the origin of Nazism is for him wrong in a double sense: because it originates in irrationality, it is false; and because it achieves only destruction, it is morally dangerous. Since Levi aims at a new Kantian moral imperative, the Hobbesian conception of the human is what we should now absolutely reject: “[S]o long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us. The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal.”7 Levi’s book, in effect, turns out to be more than just raw material waiting for other thinkers to organize in an anthropological theory. At the same time an abstract, universal study of the human mind and a sociology of an extreme situation, what Levi gives us is an essay in general anthropology. Looking at his experience through his scientific mind, he sees a systematic, organized, and isolated experiment that respects all the criteria for scientific rigor, as rigorous as it can be when involving human subjects. It is like a gigantic Hobbesian experiment, a testing of the law of the war of everyone against everyone, an absolute reduction of man to his most primitive state that literally sets all culture aside, making man a mere object, ready to be observed objectively. In this essay we analyze first Levi’s anthropological insights as they appear to us from reading If This is a Man; we will then see how two other thinkers, Dalya M. Sachs and Giorgio

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Agamben, have further reflected on his observations; finally, we will show how another anthropological theory, that of Eric Gans, can help us make one more step forward in understanding Levi’s. For Levi, the main effect of the ruthlessness of concentration camp life is that it makes all shades of behavior disappear; it splits humanity into two “species,” those of the Drowned and those of the Saved, that is, those who are not fit for survival and those who are ready to use any means necessary to survive—including abusing, deceiving, exploiting, or ignoring the Drowned. Levi draws different portraits of the Saved in order to establish a characterology, a scientific description of the manifold ways through which one can save one’s life in a camp: craftiness, will, strength, and seduction are the respective ways of Schepschel, Alfred L., Elias, and Henri. However, as shown by the simplistic and animalistic language they use in the camp, the survival strategies of the Saved appear to be known also to animals; therefore, the survival skills displayed by the Saved do not constitute a sufficient basis for an anthropology. This is why Dalya M. Sachs says that although Levi’s book might “sound virtually like a handbook to survival in Auschwitz,” it turns out to be, through the multiple shifts in the use of pronouns, “a forum in which to speculate and search for theorems not only of survival, but of human nature in general, and his own being in particular.” Sachs notes especially that even when Levi says that the Drowned have reached the absolute bottom, he “still refers to this as a human condition.”8 Hence the anthropological value of Levi’s work is to be found in the depiction of the dehumanized Drowned rather than in the characterology of the Saved. This is why Sachs looks for those passages in the book where the Drowned can recover some glimpse of humanity, like when, toward the end, the camp is left unguarded and some of the prisoners start to recreate around Levi a microsociety that respects some basic rules and makes an improvised new social “contract.” The problem with Sachs’ reading, however, is that he analyzes the Drowned when they are not drowned anymore, when they have emerged from the bottom. Because the Drowned all look alike, being all reduced to their most basic animal needs, it probably seems to him that no positive knowledge of humanity could stem from those who are absolutely bereft of it. But perhaps the condition of the Drowned can provide the model for humanity a contrario. The theory of a war pitting everyone against everyone does not reflect the human condition but rather its destruction. Thus death camps can be seen as the negative from which a picture of humanity outside the camp can be developed, the negativity that provides the true basis for positive knowledge. Wolfgang Sofsky, for example, observes that a new anthropological phenomenon has appeared

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in death camps: The Muselmann embodies the anthropological meaning of absolute power in an especially radical form. Power abrogates itself in the act of killing. . . . But by starving the other, it gains time. It erects a third realm, a limbo between life and death. Like the pile of corpses, the Muselmänner document the total triumph of power over the human being.9

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben emphasizes that this new form of dehumanized existence should be acknowledged as still human.10 For Agamben, saying, as Bruno Betteheim did, that the Muselmann has lost all the decency of a normal human being; or saying, as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno did (after Heidegger), that the Muselmann could not die humanly, that is, of a “proper” death, is paramount “to accept the verdict of the SS and to repeat their gesture.” Agamben explains that “[t]he Muselmann has, instead, moved into a zone of the human where not only help but also dignity and self-respect have become useless.” So, he adds, “if there is a zone of the human in which these concepts make no sense, then they are not genuine ethical concepts” (63–64). This is why he sees in the title If This is a Man a challenge to our very notion of humanity. As Levi does, Agamben situates in ethics rather than in traditional humanism the possibility of defining the human. Ethics commands us to accept the dehumanized Muselmann as human, to see his travel in inhumanity as paradoxically remaining within the realm of the human, which implies that we should redefine the human. Unlike humanistic concepts, inhumanity appears to be a common denominator of humans, what remains when all else has vanished. It is therefore humanity’s defining characteristic: “The human being, Levi’s title implies, is the one who can survive the human being” (82). In this perspective, the Muselmänner are the true survivors, the ones who did not simply survive death, but who survived the loss of their humanity. One could object that the Muselmänner did not survive, that they eventually died. Does that mean that humanity died at Auschwitz? What saved humanity for Agamben is what was for Levi a reason to survive: the will, the hope, the ethical command to bear witness, even if Levi knew that he was not the real witness, that only the Muselmann, the Drowned, could say what humanity is in its inhuman form. Agamben concludes that “the human is nothing other than the agent of the inhuman, the one who lends the inhuman a voice. . . . [H]uman beings are human insofar as they are not human . . . as they bear witness to the inhuman” (120–121). Agamben is, in our opinion, the one who reflected most deeply on what he calls “Levi’s paradox,” namely, the necessity and impossibility of the

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witness to speak for the Drowned and how this paradox challenges all received definitions of the human. But, if Agamben relentlessly stripped traditional humanism of all the human characteristics that many took for granted, didn’t he take the ethical language of witnessing for granted? He considers it to be what eventually allows us to judge the humanity of humans. But why is that so? If inhumanity really is the hidden foundation of human characteristics, how could we find ethics at the foundation of this inhumanity? Maybe we should examine what Levi and Agamben say about the destruction of humanity in Auschwitz in parallel with what Eric Gans says about the origin of humanity in Originary Thinking.11 A disciple of René Girard, Gans poses mimesis, that is, the capacity for imitation, as the characteristic of the ancestors of humanity, whom he calls protohumans. The unfortunate consequence of protohumans’ mimetic drive is that it made them all desire the same objects and thus it heightened conflict over desirable objects. Gans thinks that humanity was born when those protohumans faced a mimetic crisis, an irresistible convergence of all desires, so threatening to their very survival that a new solution had to be found, and that this solution was language. Unlike objects, language can be infinitely shared by all; therefore it allows us to defer violence by designating the objects to be shared instead of simply appropriating them. This is why, for Gans, we should not assume that humanity has language, or even is language, for the minimal act of humanity is best described not as “humans using language, but as a prehuman creature becoming human by using language in a situation where this use is inevitable” (2). Thus the fundamental purpose of language is ethical, or rather, language is the invention of ethics, the reconfiguration of a hierarchical protohuman society where an alpha male could impose his will on subjected rivals to “a human community defined by the symmetrical and reciprocal conditions of the sign’s emission” (9). The boldest aspect of Gans’s hypothesis is that since language allowed just-born humans to contain forces of selfdestruction better than protohumans could, language—and thus ethics— became from then on a distinct advantage for the survival of the group; it thus became the chief criterion of human evolution, which means that the potential for ethics eventually became part of our genetic makeup. Thus, Levi can reject the Hobbesian scenario as being anthropologically wrong. When Hobbes says, “[D]uring the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man,”12 we think that he does not actually describe humans before the invention of society, but protohumans at their moment of crisis, before they invented language. So, unlike what Hobbes thought, there is no need for hierarchical authority to keep humanity “in awe.” On the contrary, language eliminates

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the need for traditional hierarchical structures. This is why the Nazis could not simply recreate with death camps the very conditions of protohumans before the invention of language by rarefying resources—thereby forcing constant conflict on its prisoners; they also had to make communication impossible, to prevent any ethical use of language. Levi made clear that slavery, starvation, and all forms of physical abuse were not actually the worst aspects of the camp, but lack of understanding was. By comparing the camp to Babel, where the multiplicity of languages prevented any communication to occur, Levi shows that language is the first and foremost feature of humanity, and therefore the one to destroy if one wants to destroy humanity. Whereas the protohuman mimetic conflict produced the language of humanity, the camp produced the Muselmann, that is, the silence of inhumanity. Auschwitz was a trip back in time, a regression to the origins of humanity, but featuring modern-day humans. Although conditions in the camp were akin to the brutish war of all against all, humans had in their biological makeup language, that is, ethics, as a possibility. This is why humans are so resilient to destruction, and also why destroying them was such an endless endeavor. As Maurice Blanchot wrote about Robert Antelme’s own account of the death camp, “Man is the indestructible, which means that he can be infinitely destroyed.”13 Hence, destroying humanity entailed more than killing men; it required destroying the very life of living men, transforming them into Muselmänner, into men between life and death, into men whose lives were so dim that they fell below animal life down to the level of vegetative life, where nothing mattered anymore except eating and surviving. This means that since the Nazis tried to destroy ethics in humanity, surviving was in itself an ethical act; saving oneself as a potentially ethical being was paramount to saving the possibility of ethics, paramount to saving humanity. This is why Levi’s witnessing is so important; this is why the words of the survivor need to fill the silences of the one who drowned; and this is why the anthropological value of If This is a Man does not lie only in its general statements, logical arguments, and philosophical distanciation. Here, we would like to revert to the openings remarks of Schwarz, Cheyette, Bauman, Sayre, and Vacca. The fragmentary aspect of Levi’s text, to which he refers as the “structural flaws” of his writing, may be the most telling anthropologically. Levi says that the book was born out of an absolute need for communicating his experience to his fellow human beings, an “urgency to tell” that did not allow for a neat organization. But these writing flaws might actually be the most precious features of his “anthropology,” for they reveal that survival of humanity is a communal rather than individual matter, an endeavor that favors communication over competition. The Saved saved themselves from death but did not save

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their humanity. Because the act of witnessing is itself anthropological through and through, Levi’s work might be the salvation not only of his humanity, but of all humanity. Saying what he feared in his nightmares would never be heard is the most desperate, the most human, the most anthropological act of a human being, one that makes us readers more human. Notes 1. “Potrà piuttosto fornire documenti per uno studio pacato di alcuni aspetti dell’animo umano.” Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 1989), 9. 2. Daniel R. Schwarz, “Painful Memories. The Agony of Primo Levi,” in Imagining the Holocaust (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 98. 3. Bryan Cheyette, “The Ethical Uncertainty of Primo Levi,” Modernity, Culture and the Jew, ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 268. 4. Patricia Sayre and Linnea Vacca, “On Language and Personhood: A Linguistic Odyssey,” in Memory and Mastery. Primo Levi as Writer and Witness, ed. Roberta S. Kremer (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 128. 5. “When the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion” (Quando il dogma inespresso diventa premessa maggiore di un sillogismo, allora, al termine de la catena, sta il Lager. Esso è il prodotto di una concezione del mondo portata alle sue conseguenze con rigorosa coerenza (9)). 6. Had Levi been imprisoned in a Gulag, he would have probably emphasized his rejection of the opposite conception just as strongly. 7. “Finchè la concezione sussiste, le conseguenze ci minacciano. La storia dei campi di distruzione dovrebbe venire intesa da tutti come un sinistro segnale di pericolo” (9). 8. Dalya M. Sachs,“The Language of Judgment: Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo,” MLN, 110, 4 (1995): 766–769. 9. Wolfgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 294. 10. Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz (Turin: Bollati Boringheri, 1998); trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Remnants of Auschwitz (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 11. Eric Gans, Originary Thinking. Elements of Generative Anthropology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993). 12. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1947), 82. 13. “L’homme est l’indestructible, et cela signifie qu’il n’y a pas de limite à la destruction de l’homme.” Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), 200.

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Philosophy After R. M. Rilke Lord, it’s time; the wine is already fermenting. The time has come to have a home, Or to remain for a long without one. The time has come not to be alone, Or else we will stay alone for a long time. We will consume the hours over books, Or in writing letters to distant places, Long letters from our solitude. And we will go back and forth through the streets, Restless, while the leaves fall. January 29, 1946

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Figure 12.1 Watercolor and ink on paper, 1971. “We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses . . . .”

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Primo Levi, Roberto Benigni, and the Politics of Holocaust Representation Marla Stone

rimo Levi is remembered as a memoirist, novelist, moral philosopher, and increasingly, as the Italian symbol of the Holocaust. When, in the 1990s, Italy witnessed its first major attempt to create a shared public Holocaust memory culture, Levi became Italy’s most well-known Holocaust survivor. The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in Levi’s work and life. Indeed, one need only to look at a wave of new editions of his work, two new biographies, documentaries, and Francesco Rosi’s film adaptation of La tregua to see the material fallout of this phenomenon. The renewed attention to Levi comes at a time when scholars and a larger Italian public debate in earnest Italian complicity in the deportation of Jews and antifascists from Italian soil. Italy is among the last of the European nations to develop a shared public memory culture around the Holocaust. The recent confrontation with a previously neglected part of the national past has led to a flurry of official commemoration, such as the giorno della memoria (Day of Memory) created in 1998 by parliamentary decree to establish January 27, the day of the liberation of Auschwitz, as national day of commemoration. In addition, many regions now have legislated school curricula on the Holocaust and the ruins of the Fossoli camp, abandoned since the 1950s, are now to be turned into a museum/ memorial.1 This belated “coming to terms with the past” has also led to the publication of a number of new books detailing the Fascist Racial Laws, Italian participation in the Holocaust, the Salò Republic’s participation in the Holocaust, the Italian sites of concentration and deportation, and the specific experiences of deported and murdered Italian Jews.2

P

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The debate has encouraged the Italian public to accept the Holocaust as a crime separate from Fascism and the war, which stands in contrast to the postwar tendency to subsume the murder of Italian Jews under the rubric of the antifascist struggle. Every memory culture has a character: the Italian one for most of the postwar period focused on Nazi barbarity and only partially confronted Fascist guilt. With this in mind, the contemporary Italian interest in memory remains ambivalent—caught up in an Italian self-definition as a nation of brava gente incapable of genocide and as the unlucky pawns of the Nazi occupation. The postwar compromise that allowed the Italian parliamentary system to function depended upon a less than full recognition of Italy’s role in the Holocaust. The Italian turn to memory in the 1990s has both dismantled the earlier paradigm and elided it: the politics of memory in Italy today is divided between a movement to accept responsibility, as evidenced by an attention to the nuances of Italy’s role in the Holocaust, and by a continued denial, best exemplified by an “Americanization of memory”—that is, the elevations of an apolitical, universalized, and deterritorialized depiction of the Holocaust. Two recent films embody the tensions in and conflicts over memory of the Holocaust in Italy: Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (1998) and Francesco Rosi’s film adaptation of La tregua (1997), released within a year of each other and contrasting in their notions of responsibility, history, and memory, demonstrate Italy’s continued divided relationship to the past. This essay investigates La tregua and La vita è bella as opposing approaches to representing the past and as representatives of contemporary Italy’s ambivalent relationship to Holocaust memory. Imbedded in the two solutions to the problem of historical memory are a series of dichotomies: simplicity versus complexity, resolution versus embracing the absence of it, and the search for a lesson versus a legacy of permanent disruption. Benigni’s parable, on the one hand, flattens the Holocaust and mobilizes it into a Hollywood, albeit Italianized, narrative, replete with a happy ending represented by the survival of the child; the film’s adoption of such a teleology implies a desire to assimilate the Holocaust into broader, more manageable narratives and to have audiences, after an initial disturbance, leave the theater reassured that the moral order remains intact. La vita è bella offers a banal “end of history” interpretation of the past—a past in which the trauma of the Holocaust is healed through paternal love. It also suggests a post-ideological and post-political view of the past—a past where the categories of Fascist and antifascist have been deflated and replaced by the sentimental categories of love and romance, as demonstrated by the protagonist, Guido, who is neither Fascist nor

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antifascist, but “post-fascist” or “afascist.” Moreover, the film’s protagonist responds to the aggression of Fascism and Nazism with flight and denial; as implied in the opening scene, the war and the Holocaust, according to La vita è bella, were caused by a downward spiral of events, not by specific political decisions. La tregua rejects the deracination and universality of La vita è bella and suggests, instead, the need to accept the irreconcilable nature of the crime and the challenge this presents for humanity. Levi and Rosi offer no redemption; the transgression against humanity committed by Nazism and Fascism cannot be erased nor hidden from. In La tregua, Levi makes the journey from death to life, but only by facing the lack of resolution. The crime has been committed and no amount of love, paternal or otherwise can change that reality. As seen in the journey across war-torn Eastern Europe, Levi demands a confrontation with the indeterminacy and the many layers of responsibility for the crime. No easy solution exists, declares Levi, only the persistent need to bear witness. Since the earliest attempts to come to terms with the Holocaust, scholars have debated the possibility and morality of representing Auschwitz. By the 1990s, the debate over representation of the Holocaust centered on two diverse and contrasting attempts to use film to convey the tragedy: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993). For those committed to the idea that the Holocaust and its dominant signifier, Auschwitz, is unrepresentable, Shoah remains the standard against which to measure respect for the dead, as Shoah’s documentary form scrupulously avoids reproducing or reconstructing the death camps.3 In opposition to the proscription against verisimilitude stands Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s mega-media event, instant classic, and Holocaust epic. Critics denounced it as unauthentic, manufactured, and emotionally manipulative.4 But, as Enzo Traverso writes and as La vita è bella demonstrates, today’s debate over Holocaust films have moved far beyond the prohibition over representation and into the question of how to represent the Holocaust without banality and trivialization.5 La vita è bella, a Holocaust fairy tale, reveals much about contemporary Italian and, in its widespread popularity, international reckonings with the Holocaust. La vita è bella, which Benigni wrote, directed, and starred in, presents the by now the well-known fable of the father who protects his son from the reality of Auschwitz by transforming extermination into a game. The reception of La vita è bella focused on the appropriateness of a fairy tale comedy set partly in Auschwitz and whether or not this implied trivialization or, even, Holocaust revisionism.6 As Millicent Marcus has argued, Holocaust “fundamentalists”—those for whom “the factual record stands as sacred textual source that gives the Holocaust the status of

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a religious absolute”—tended to reject the film as “heresy.”7 Other detractors, to quote a letter to the editor in The New York Times, are uncomfortable with the “desperate attempt to preserve childhood innocence despite Auschwitz; the urge to snatch redemption, morality, and victory from the crematoriums [sic].”8 In contrast, La vita è bella’s defenders find it a complex reconfiguration of notions of comedy and tragedy.9 For some of its fans, La vita è bella’s celebration of life and love and the triumph over evil was an attempt to return agency to the victims and a mode of challenging the legacy of Nazism. The “fable or not,” “comedy or not” discourse is less relevant than the film’s existence as a post-ideological and post-political presentation of Fascism and the Holocaust. I argue that its popular and critical triumph, everywhere, but especially in Italy, is due to its essential ahistorical and apolitical nature. In the make-believe world offered by Benigni, Fascism has no politics and the division between Fascist and non-Fascist is the divide between having a sense of humor and not having one. Guido, the naive, life-affirming protagonist, manages to miss the political realities of Fascism, treating them, instead, as a the object of parody. During the evolution of the film’s narrative from 1938 through 1944, Guido ignores anti-Semitism and Fascism, as if to say “bad things go away when we ignore them.” Guido responds to Fascism and Nazism with parody and buffoonery, in order to reveal the falseness and internal contradictions of the ideologies that are closing in on him. For example, in the scene, often cited as the core of the first part of the film, in which Guido offers his lesson in “racial science,” Benigni uses the regime’s theories against itself to show their meaninglessness. In the film’s fantasy world, any child can see the stupidity of racial categories. Guido demonstrates a childish (and clever) desire to repress the trauma and power of Fascism and to retreat into a private world of romance and love. As Pamela Kroll has argued, the film depends upon Guido’s childishness and his obstinate, desperate need to “disappear” from the political and social realities around him.10 Benigni argues for an individual, familial resistance to Fascism and genocide, implicitly rejecting the historical and collective Resistance. In Benigni’s “end of history” depiction, the categories of Fascist and anti-Fascist are devoid of relevance and meaning and only basic human, individual bonds and emotions create meaning. In interviews about the film, Benigni acknowledges his flight from politics: “My first thought was to make a beautiful movie,” said Benigni, “Not an ideology, not a history.”11 Benigni implies that devastation can be denied through a refusal to see it. He also desiccates the Holocaust of its historical specificity by filming a generic death camp peopled with generic Everymen. Benigni himself

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asserts that the Holocaust now belongs to everyone: “When I read about it, and discovered what happened, my life was different . . . So, I want to have the right to talk about the Holocaust because Holocaust belongs to me, too.”12 In Benigni’s imaginary, the universalized and generalized Holocaust represents ultimate evil and an opportunity “to say life is beautiful until the last step in my life. Even in the most horrible situation, like the extermination camp.”13 For Benigni, the Holocaust is a globalized commodity. Many reviewers accepted the premise of transcendence through denial and were drawn to the Benigni’s optimist message. La vita è bella “overcomes its challenge,” wrote Enzo Natta in Familigia Cristiana, “and it does this through its message of hope, its bursting vitality, and its faith in humanity, which saves itself by the grace of a laugh.”14 And, as a glowing review in the New York Daily News explained, “Guido saves the life of his child through the power of imagination.”15 Janet Maslin in The New York Times hailed the premise that “comedy is courage.”16 Jim Hoberman’s admonition that Schindler’s List was “the ultimate feel good movie about the ultimate feel bad experience” applies to La vita è bella. It carries a message similar to the American understanding of the Holocaust—that the Holocaust was the product of very bad people who killed other people just because they were different. The great American statement of this view, in addition to the film Schindler’s List, is the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The narrative of the museum proposes that it was an absence of tolerance, which caused the Holocaust and that, to quote Rodney King as presented in the museum “why can’t we all get along?” La vita è bella, like mainstream American representations of the Holocaust, asserts that if only people were nice to each other and loved each other, there would have been no Holocaust. The president of the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance called the film “a serious comedy that pays tribute to art as resistance and to the indomitable human spirit.”17 The museum, Schindler’s List, and La vita è bella are all driven by a teleology that depends on the “triumph of the human spirit.” And as in Schindler’s List, resistance in La vita è bella is individual and based on private attachments. Both films offer a redemptive narrative that implies the suffering of the victims led to a larger good. So, La vita è bella can be read as representative of one tendency in contemporary Italian reckonings with its wartime past. The film was produced at a time when the head of the ruling center–left coalition, Massimo D’Alema, called upon Italy to become a “normal” country. In part, he meant a country in which politics are less divisive, less ideological, and where public memory unites, rather than separates Italians. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of political polarities in Italy has

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brought to the fore such post-political renderings of the past. The stakes, once so deeply held, around the ideology of anti-Fascism are lowering as Italian identity becomes more European, more consumerist, and less political. Benigni’s celebration of love as resistance to Fascism could not have been made at any earlier moment when the divide between Fascist and anti-Fascist meant very determined things. The film is a deep statement about Italy’s own move away from politics as a dominant determinant of individual and national identity. Running counter to the evasion of responsibility and globalization of memory represented by La vita è bella is the renewed interest in Italy and abroad in Primo Levi.18 Levi remains a complex and challenging writer who offers no simple solutions, “no feel good” resolutions to the drama of the twentieth century. His work forces the reader to face moral ambiguity and “the gray zones” of the human experience and the “painful and uneasy stress between trauma and recovery.”19 In the most provocative and difficult aspect of his work, Levi questions “those who over the years have reduced the Holocaust to a manichean allegory which revolves around the already known division of good and evil.”20 In its place he offers the moral ambiguity of all those forced into the Nazi system, where “they crushed our souls, destroyed our compassion.”21 Francesco Rosi’s 1997 film of Levi’s ten-month odyssey across postliberation Europe, La tregua, was released just prior to La vita è bella.22 Based on Levi’s 1963 memoir of his slow return to consciousness and to home, the film depicts Levi’s internal and external voyage across the ruins of Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Austria, and Germany.23 The voyage consists of two parts: the first, from the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945 to the Allied victory in May, recounts Levi’s initial awareness of having survived and the immediate physical needs of healing. The second part, May 1945 to Levi’s arrival in Turin on October, is almost picaresque in its depiction of the next layer of need—for companionship, nature, music, and intimacy. Rosi struggled for ten years to film La tregua. Many potential backers rejected the project saying, “nothing happens in this novel.”24 To which Rosi responded, “Not true. Everything happens here: after the horror of the lager, Levi tells us of the return to life, of the desire to regain all that they had denied him up to that moment: the body, the desire to laugh, to love, even the desire to argue.”25 Intervention from Martin Scorcese eventually drew funding to the project—which, at a cost of thirteen million dollars represents an extraordinary budget for an Italian film.26 The themes of La tregua coincide with Rosi’s filmography, which, spanning more than five decades, has taken on many of the most complex elements of contemporary Italian life, from the mafia to political corruption. In contrast to Benigni, Rosi’s aesthetic and

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worldview are shaped by his belonging to the generation of anti-Fascism in politics and neorealism in film. Rosi’s commitment to the project was intensified by the fact that he had received Levi’s verbal support in a telephone conversation a month prior to the author’s death.27 In addition to directing the film, Rosi wrote the screenplay along with Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia. In an effort to mirror the polyglot cacophony of liberated Eastern Europe in the spring of 1945, Rosi chose an international cast, with John Turturro, an American, as Levi and Rade Serbedzija, a Serb, as Mordo Nahum. La tregua attempts to translate Levi’s poetics into film. For this, Rosi turned to a slow-paced structure driven by the protagonist’s emotive states and facial expressions. Rosi works to show the reemergence of human emotions and a will to live that had been destroyed in the camps. Rosi also used realist elements to convey Levi’s struggle against man and nature: he filmed in Ukraine and Poland and had a reconstruction of Auschwitz built at the base of the Carpathian mountains. Clear in his desire to stay close to the text and far from the banality that haunts many feature films about the Holocaust, Rosi said, “I wanted to film La tregua and not Se questo è un uomo because the umpteenth film on the lager did not interest me.”28 For Rosi, La tregua is a tale of “coming back not only to his friends, his country and his family, but also to life.”29 But, as Rosi labored to convey in the film, Levi’s message is profoundly hybrid, “between atrocity and hope, between death and the return to life,” and between the pain of memory and pleasure of freedom.30 Rosi was drawn to the challenge of depicting the slow, inconsistent process of posttraumatic reawakening. “What intrigued me the most,” said Rosi, “was to realize on film the thing that came so easily to Levi—that is, the reconquest of life and the return to hope through the natural, joyous, small and large everyday instances, which, in the end, work to affirm life over death.”31 While Rosi attempted fidelity to the novel, he also shaped the film according to his priorities and his life on the political left. His reverence for the book and his commitment to Levi’s injunction to bear witness make the film overly stiff and pious. Rosi added several scenes that betray the mood of the book. Most disturbing is the addition of an atonement scene: in the film’s penultimate chapter, the train taking Levi and other Italian survivors home stops in Munich. One of the German prisoners repairing the tracks sees Levi’s camp jacket with the yellow and red star and falls to his knees, with hand on heart. Rosi appropriated this act of atonement from German chancellor Willy Brandt’s kneeling before the Warsaw ghetto monument in 1970. No doubt, Rosi’s film fails to render the power and beauty of the Levi memoir. It replaces Levi’s sensitivity with sacredness and piety. Moreover,

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the film suffers from some of the traditional problems with converting literature into film, such as the dependence upon a traditional linear structure and a didacticism borne of an attachment to a by now iconic text. As needed by film, the multitudinous characters are reduced to a handful of composites. The film is truest to the text in its rendering of the chaos, complexity, and possibility of the moment between the Allied victory and the survivors’ arrival home. Critical responses to La tregua mixed reverence with disappointment over the film’s limitations, as in its transformation of Levi’s book into a solemn call to witness, its consolidation of Levi’s human panorama into a handful of stereotypical characters and its addition of didactic scenes. Despite an official celebration of Rosi’s effort—in 1997 he received the Davide di Donatello, Italy’s “Oscar,” for best film and best director—many reviewers noted a gap between the Levi book and the Rosi film. La Repubblica hailed the film as “emotional, powerful, epic,” but found the screenplay “not always up to speed.”32 Others, such as Film TV, felt that Rosi’s self-consciousness and hyper-vigilance desiccated La tregua to the point that “there is not a single instance of true poetry nor of true passion.”33 Roberto Escobar, in Sole 24 Ore, respected Rosi’s attempt to translate a classic, but declared the realization a failure: “Here is the style of La tregua: simplification, reduction and an rejection of nuance.”34 La tregua and La vita è bella each represent a journey and a mode of historical representation. Benigni journeys from naive detachment to denial to an apolitical martyrdom, as though to say “if we don’t acknowledge the evil of the Nazis, they do not exist.” Levi traveled from dehumanization to a glacial rehumanization, which implied that only through coming to terms with the evil committed by Nazism can the world repair. La tregua, which represents the Holocaust through its aftermath, its shadows and its remnants, avoids a direct confrontation with Auschwitz and, in so doing, allows the viewer to see its ravages in the few survivors. Rosi filmed the camp scenes in black and white and as flashes of memory. Each film mobilizes language as a response to genocide: Benigni uses a surfeit of comic language to dismay his enemies and to defy reality. In one of the film’s core scenes, Guido retranslates the German officer’s orders into a lighthearted riff on camp life. Here the cruelty of Auschwitz is literally overlaid by a more human translation, so that Giosuè the child can remain untouched by the horror. In La tregua, on the other hand, language has been stolen by the Nazis; words cannot convey the pain and John Turturro plays Levi nearly silently with only his piercing gaze to represent the catastrophe. When he does speak, it is with constraint and deliberation. He labors toward understatement, something rare in contemporary cinema. Rather than “laugh in the face of

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the unthinkable,”La tregua chooses silence.35 The film opens with the Soviet soldiers’ discovery of Auschwitz and remains silent for almost nine minutes. La tregua attempted a physical representation of Levi’s position “between catastrophe and communication.”36 At key moments in the narrative, Rosi employs a voice-over of Turturro quoting from Se questo è un uomo. Where La vita è bella depended upon moral absolutes, La tregua bravely labored to give dramatic form to Levi’s notion of “the gray zone.” Much of Levi’s philosophy depended upon his belief that the deepest evil of Nazism lay in its capacity to turn the victims against one another. Rosi films a scene set in the Soviet-run displaced persons camp in which Levi’s Venetian companion, Daniele, recognizes a Jewish girl who had collaborated with the SS and he wants to refuse her food. Levi/Turturro intervenes with the quotation from Se questo è un uomo, “Metterci l’uno contro l’altro dopo averci degradato peggio che un cane bastardo, questo fu il crimine più grande laggiu.” (The worst crime there was their setting us against each other after having degraded us worse than a damn dog.) There is another point of comparison that suggests the opposing relationship to history implied by the two films. For Benigni, searching for the symbol of ultimate evil, the film’s location in an extermination camp, to be read as Auschwitz (albeit a generic Auschwitz) was essential. In this fairy-tale Auschwitz, the liberators are American. The smiling, unsoiled-by-ideology soldier in the tank, who carries the surviving child into the postwar world, is an American. Benigni’s redemptive narrative required that the savior be an American, a figure without original sin able to be midwife to a new era. Benigni, in a search for popular acclaim, embraces the Cold War imperative to denigrate the contribution of the Red Army to the liberation of Europe and to judge the Soviet Union of 1945 by the knowledge of today. Francesco Rosi, tied to historical reality and to Levi’s own experience of liberation, makes the Red Army a character in the film, depicting its personnel with all the positive and negative characteristics found in Levi’s memoir. Levi and Rosi depict the Red Army as the liberators they were seen as then, not as we see them now. Many scenes open with Red Star emblazoned trains that seem to be driving the engine of history forward. One of the film’s most poignant scenes depicts a Red Army officer performing a dance to Fred Astaire’s “Cheek to Cheek” and the stirring of longing that this produced in the survivors/displaced persons attending the performance. Rosi includes Levi’s appreciation of the humanity of his liberators, using in a voice-over by Turturro his awe-filled quotation: “the good soldiers of the Red Army, gentle in peace, fierce in war, are going home.” A few critics in France accused Rosi of Stalinism for this—to which

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Rosi responded, “I was astonished, and I refute that idea completely . . . Was I supposed to ignore the truth that the Russians liberated many of the camps?”37 Certainly, Rosi’s fidelity to Levi’s appreciative depiction of the Red Army of 1945 can also be read, as has Millicent Marcus, as nostaglia for the heyday of the Italian left. This reading reinforces the divide between Rosi and Benigni as, in many ways, a generational/political split and seeing of the world through the Fascist experience. The two films diverge most antithetically in their conclusions: Benigni ends with victory, rebirth, and resolution. In the world of La vita è bella, the father’s sacrifice has repaired the damage. It is optimistic and uplifting, as are many of contemporary uses of the Holocaust. La tregua ends inconclusively at the beginning of the healing process, with Levi at his writing desk, his camp jacket beside him as a talisman. The audience does not know, and neither does Levi, what life means in the wake of Auschwitz. This final scene, with the traumatized Levi/Turturro at his desk and its aura of uncertainty, carries an implied subtext of Levi’s 1987 suicide—a powerful rejection of Benigni’s optimistic assertion. La vita è bella was a sensation, winning prizes from Italy to Cannes to Hollywood and became the highest grossing foreign film in American history. Francesco Rosi had trouble finding foreign distribution for La tregua. When asked about the two films, Rosi said, “They are two completely different films. The fundamental fact of Benigni’s film is that it is labeled a fable from the start, so that it depicts things which might belong to reality but which in fact belong to the world of the imagination . . . My film is about reality, with an actor of a different stamp playing a historical figure, acting within the limits of that reality.”38 The opposition of these two films should not be construed as that between “reality” and “fantasy,” but, rather, as suggesting some competing options for representing the Holocaust. La vita è bella wants to rescue the human spirit from the pain of Auschwitz, while Levi and the film based on his story accept the radical disruption created by the Holocaust and the anguished uncertainty that remains in its wake. La vita è bella shows us the Holocaust as a crime of universal suffering, as a generalized version of the Holocaust, deprived of its specificity and meant to represent evil in its most radical form. La tregua represents the imperatives of an older generation—Levi and Rosi’s generation for whom the Holocaust was produced by the painfully specific realities of Fascism and Nazism and, ultimately, defeated by war and anti-fascism. Schindler’s List revealed as much about contemporary America as it did about the Holocaust; so too do these two films tell us about Italy. Holocaust memory functions as a lightening rod for larger national issues and in these two films we find a conflicting desire to confront and avoid the national past.

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Notes 1. Giovanni Leoni (ed.), Trentacinque progetti per Fossoli (Venice: Electa, 1990). 2. See, e.g.: Il Museo monumento al deportato a Carpi, a cura di Roberta Gibertoni and Annalisa Melodi, (Venice: Electa, 1997); Un silenzio della storia: La liberazione dai campi e il ritorno dei deportati, a cura di Associazione Nazionale ex deportati—sezione di Roma and Biblioteca di storia moderna e contemporanea (Rome: Sabbadini Grafiche Sud, 1997); Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco: Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei (Turin: Silvio Zamorani, 1998); Francesco Maria Feltri, Per discutere di Auschwitz (Florence: Giuntina, 1998); Anna Rossi-Doria, Memoria e storia: il caso della deportazione (Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 1998); Michele Sarfatti (ed.), Il ritorno alla vita: vicende e diritti degli ebrei in Italia dopo la seconda guerra mondiale (Florence: Giuntina, 1998); Michele Sarfatti (ed.), La persecuzione degli ebrei durante il fascismo: Le leggi razziale del 1938 (Rome: Camera dei deputati, 1998); Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista: Vicende, identità, persecuzione (Turin: Einaudi, 2000). 3. On the debate over Holocaust representation, see Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 4. Yosefa Loshitsky (ed.), Spielberg’s Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 112–113. 5. Enzo Traverso, “La vita è bella? Roberto Benigni e Auschwitz,” Passato e presente, xvii, 48 (1999): 15. 6. See, e.g., Daniel Schrifin, “Whose Holocaust Is it?,” The Jewish Week, January 22, 1999. 7. Millicent Marcus, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 268. 8. “Holocaust Film Offends History”, Allan Nadler, Letter to the Editor, The New York Times, November 3, 1998. 9. Maurizio Viano, “Life is Beautiful: Reception, Allegory and Holocaust Laughter,” Jewish Social Studies, 5, 3 (1999): 47–66; Millicent Marcus, After Fellini 268–284. 10. Pamel Kroll, “Games of Disappearance and Return: War and the Child in Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 30, 1, (2002). 29–45. 11. Ron Givens, “ ‘Beautiful’ New Direction, Italian Comic-Film Maker Benigni Turns to Exploring ‘Life’ In A WWII Concentration Camp,” Daily News, October 22, 1998, 43. 12. Ron Givens, “Beautiful New Direction, Italian Comic-Film maker Benigni Turns to Exploring ‘Life’ in a WWII Concentration Camp,” Daily News, Ron Givens, October 22, 1998, 43. 13. Roberto Benigni as quoted in Ron Givens, “Beautiful New Direction, Italian Comic-Film maker Benigni Turns to Exploring ‘Life’ in a WWII Concentration Camp,” Daily News, October 22, 1998, 43. 14. Enzo Natta, “C’è posto per il sorriso nel lager di Benigni,” Famiglia Cristiana, 52 (1997): 131.

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15. Ron Givens “Beautiful New Direction, Italian Comic-Film maker Benigni Turns to Exploring ‘Life’ in a WWII Concentration Camp,” Daily News, October 22, 1998, 43. 16. Janet Maslin, “Giving a Human (and Humorous) Face to Rearing a Boy Under Fascism,” The New York Times, October 23, 1998. 17. Tom Tugend, “Jewish Community Generally Happy with ‘Life,’ ” Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1998. 18. For example, Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi: The Tragedy of an Optimist; Carole Angier, The Double Bond (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002); Ian Thomson, Primo Levi: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003). 19. Lawrence Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), xv. 20. Brian Cheyette, “The Ethical Uncertainty of Primo Levi,” Judaism, 48 (Winter 1999): 60. 21. See Primo Levi “The Gray Zone” in The Drowned and the Saved. 22. Directed by Francesco Rosi; written by Francesco Rosi and Tonino Guerra, based on the memoir by Primo Levi; starring John Turturro, Massimo Ghini, and Rade Serbezija. Miramax release. 23. Primo Levi, La tregua (Turin: Einaudi 1963). 24. Paola Jacobbi, “Ucraina 1997: ritorno dall’inferno,” Panorama, January 16, 1997, 108. 25. Ibid., 109. 26. Carlo Cimmino, Revision, http://www.revisioncinema.com. 27. Paolo Zefferi, “Il difficile ritorno da Auschwitz,” La Repubblica, April 16, 1997. 28. Paola Jacobbi, “Ucraina 1997: ritorno dall’inferno,” Panorama, January 16, 1997, 109. 29. Interview with Francesco Rosi, 17th Annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (1997), SFJFF website: http://www.sfjff.org. 30. Ibid. 31. “Intervista a Francesco Rosi,” Marco Spagnoli: http://www.tempimoderni.com/ 1997/inter97. 32. Paolo Zefferi, “Il difficile ritorno da Auschwitz,” La Repubblica, April 16, 1997. 33. Manuela Martini, Film TV, Film Chips, Le Critiche, http://www.iann.it/film/ F_C_Critiche. 34. Roberto Escobar, Il Sole 24 Ore, Film Chips, Le Critiche, http://www.iann.it/ film/F_C_Critiche. 35. Janet Maslin, “Giving a Human (and Humorous) Face to Rearing a Boy Under Fascism,” The New York Times, October 23, 1998. 36. Robert Gordon, “Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Responses to the Lager in Italy 1945–47,” Judaism, 48 (Winter 1999): 55. 37. Bob Flynn, “He’s Spent his life taking on corrupt cops and the Mafia. Now it’s Auschwitz; Veteran Italian director Francesco Rosi tells Bob Flynn why he decided to tackle Primo Levi’s The Truce,” The Guardian, May 7, 1999. 38. Ibid.

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Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and the New Ethics of Reading William McClellan

n one of his most recent books, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, the philosopher Giorgio Agamben comes to grips with a fundamental political and ethical problem laid bare in the Nazi death camps: the destructive effects of power on the human subject.1 Drawing heavily on Primo Levi’s testimony, especially Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved, Agamben argues that Auschwitz, which for him stands as a metonymy for the singular historical event variously named the Holocaust, Shoah, or the Extermination of the Jews, is the site where power absolutely degraded and destroyed human beings before exterminating them. Attentive to Levi’s focus on the issue of human dignity, or rather, loss of dignity, Agamben focuses much of his analysis on the figure of the Muselmann, who, Levi says, “touched bottom;” that is, lost conscious awareness of himself and his environment. The Muselmann is the figuration of a deracinated and disoriented subject who has lost awareness of himself as a thinking and sensate being. He fell below the bar of what we consider human, becoming an almost inert biomass. Further, Levi says the Muselmanner constituted the core of the inmates in the camp: “Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Muselmanner, the drowned, form the back bone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark already dead in them, already too empty to really suffer” (Survival, 90). The Muselmanner constituted “the anonymous mass” of the camp who suffered a total loss of human dignity. They were husks, emptied of those qualities of what we consider human, who hesitate between life and death. In fact, Levi says, even their death does not seem like death. Yet the Muselmann, who has lost his human dignity, his self-consciousness, and his ability to see and evaluate what is going on around him, Levi insists, is the “complete witness,” of Auschwitz.

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Agamben, in struggling to think through what he calls “Levi’s paradox” reaches a number of conclusions. The first is that the Muselmann is a limit figure that marks the threshold not only between life and death, but also between the human and nonhuman. As Agamben states: “The Muselmann is the non-human who obstinately appears as human; he is the human that cannot be told apart from the inhuman” (Remnants, 81, 82). It was sometimes difficult to distinguish between the Muselmann and the other inmates, who feared and hated him, if only because in the Muselmann they saw their own fates—it was a state they all feared they would fall into. Like the Muselmann all of the prisoners suffered a profound and catastrophic loss of human dignity, and this immediately upon entry into the camp. This conflation of human and nonhuman in the figure of the Muselmann has profound consequences for an ethics based on human dignity. Agamben argues that the Muselmann, the inhuman subject who was subjected to murderous violence challenges an ethics based on the principle of human dignity: “The Muselmann is a limit figure of a special kind, in which not only the categories such as dignity and respect but even the very idea of an ethical limit lose their meaning” (Remnants, 63). He rejects the conclusion of some, like Bruno Bettelheim, who argue that because the Muselmann falls beyond or below what is traditionally considered to be human—a subject who thinks, feels, and acts with relative autonomy— that the ethical standards we use to judge humans do not apply to him. Such a position, Agamben contends, which only regards the Muselmann as an object—a specimen of psychological or anthropological analysis—is unacceptable. He further argues that an ethics that automatically excludes a “part of humanity” disqualifies itself as a moral philosophy. To write off the Muselmann as beyond the pale, beyond the threshold of the human would be to accept the verdict of the SS. Agamben argues that because the extreme figure of the Muselmann ruins an ethics based on the principle of human dignity, it is necessary to develop a new ethics based on the knowledge the survivors brought back from the experience of Auschwitz. The knowledge they bring back is that there is still life in the most extreme degradation. He concludes that the human includes the inhuman; the nonhuman potential that is realized in the Muselmann is a human potentiality. Therefore the ontology of the Muselmann has to be incorporated into our idea of what it means to be human and consequently into our idea of an ethics. Finally Agamben argues that what the Muselmann gives witness to is the impossibility of seeing. The potential of the human that is realized in the Muselmann is this impossibility of seeing; that is, fundamentally the human contains the potential for not seeing and not knowing, a potential

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that was broached in Auschwitz in an unimaginable way. Analyzing Levi’s description of the Muselmann as he “who has seen the Gorgon” (Levi, Drowned, 84), Agamben concludes that seeing the Gorgon is a paraphrase for seeing the void, the abyss, the monstrous transforming power that renders the human into the nonhuman. The Gorgon, the Muselmann, and those who bear witness to the Muselmann are one gaze: an image of the impossibility of seeing. While this gaze represents the impossibility of seeing, and the conscious awareness we associate with seeing, it also urgently calls us to bear witness to the Muselmann, to bear witness to this impossibility of seeing. This gaze, then, is also an apostrophaic address that issues a call that we bear witness to the Muselmann and the inhuman power that transforms him from human to nonhuman. Agamben argues that we cannot avert our eyes from this gaze without forgoing ourselves as ethical beings (Remnants, 54). Levi’s insistence that the Muselmann is the complete witness then challenges our ideas both of what it is to be human and what constitutes an ethics. And the testimony he gives us of the camps demands an ethical response from us. There is an ethical imperative that we acknowledge what he gives witness to. The new ethical terrain that Levi’s testimony begins to define poses a challenge to us most immediately in reading his work.2 But Agamben insists that it places an injunction on us to use it “as a touchstone by which to measure all morality and dignity” (Remnants, 69). The question that arises is how can we use the knowledge that Levi and others have given us of the event called the Holocaust to read other extreme situations. I realize there is a paradox at work here. I agree with Levi and Agamben that the event named the Holocaust is a singularity and a unicum, so any comparisons, strictly speaking, are not possible. Yet as Agamben argues, as have others (like Yehuda Bauer for one) that the Holocaust should not remain a hermetically sealed event. Following Levi and Agamben I argue that we need to proceed with caution and respect in this task, but, as Agamben insists, we need to proceed. We need to risk undermining the status of singularity of the event. We need to use our knowledge of what happened there to help us understand what happens to the subject in other situations where political power threatens or succeeds in degrading the human subject. Here Agamben’s theory of political sovereignty is indispensable. He construes his analysis of the effects of power on the human subject in the Nazi death camps within the framework of a biopolitical theory of sovereignty. In another recent work, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,3 Agamben traces a genealogy from the ancient world and the Middle Ages through modernity and the Nazi camps in his analysis of the complex and ominous relation of sovereign power to the human subject.

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Agamben contends that the subject whom the sovereign takes under its power is subject to a series of exceptions. One of the most important of these is that when the sovereign constitutes the subject as a political subject he makes the subject potentially subject to a ban, an exclusion, and liable to be killed without penalty. Contrary to Hobbes who theorizes that the sovereign protects all against all, Agamben avers that the bare life captured by the sovereign is not protected but made liable to be killed under sovereign law. Agamben states that this ambiguous relation of sovereign and subject constitutes the originary domain of the political. This ambiguity never gets resolved and governs the relation of the subject to sovereign power even today, when the traditional sovereign has been translated into sovereign nation and sovereign power into state power. What makes possible the sovereign’s power over the subject is a complex series of exceptions regarding how sovereign power constitutes itself. Agamben argues that a fundamental exception in the constitution of sovereign power is that the sovereign is both inside and outside the law. The sovereign founds the juridical/political order of which it is a part through this sovereign exception. The sovereign maintains himself in relation to both constituting and constituted power, creating a zone of ambiguity or indistinction. One consequence of this ambiguity in regard to constituting and constituted power is that the distinction between law and violence becomes blurred. Hence the sovereign is also a zone of indistinction where violence and the law are conflated: “the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and the law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence” (Homo Sacer, 32). The sovereign enforces the law through its power, but the law is founded on its power, and there is no principle to distinguish law and power, violence and law. Agamben argues that this ancient paradigm of sovereignty guides every successive definition of it. Hence, potentially there is no limit to the sovereign’s power and his ability to exercise violence against those he subjects. This potential is broached in the state of exception when statutes protecting the “rights” of the subject are bracketed or suspended. Such a potentiality was exercised to its fullest and most murderous extent by the Nazis. Auschwitz is the place where the extreme situation and the normal situation perfectly coincide and in doing so clearly reveals what previously has been opaque; that is, the hidden and complicit relation between the normal situation and the state of exception. In Auschwitz what is fully revealed “from the inside,” and what is fully realized is the potential of sovereign power to degrade and destroy the human subject beyond all imagination. Agamben argues we must use this knowledge to examine other extreme situations today. I would extend his imperative and argue that it transforms our relation to the past as well, to all of writing and literature from our past.

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The historical reality of the Muselmann, a figure of the most extreme human degradation, throws new light on those imagined figurations of the human who in the past have been deformed by power and are, in some way, beyond the “normal.” In this sense, the Holocaust has changed the ethics of reading. The Holocaust creates an ethical demand that those real and imagined figures from our past who have been dehumanized by sovereign power be considered within the domain of the human and not be ignored, condemned out of hand, or dismissed as pathological or beyond the pale. We should use the knowledge that the survivors bring back from Auschwitz as a “touchstone by which to measure all morality and dignity” to read narratives from the past, especially those that deal with the issue of power and the human subject. We should read these texts with an eye to seeing how power limits and potentially degrades and deforms the subjects it creates. I want to suggest how the new ethics might be used as a touchstone for reading a medieval tale, Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale. The tale belongs to The Canterbury Tales, a work that originates and founds the English literary tradition. The tale was very popular in the late medieval and early modern period. It was originally written in Italian by Boccaccio and translated into Latin by Petrarch and, subsequently, into more than twenty European languages. The story is about a prince, Walter, who marries a peasant, Griselda, and has two children with her. At some point, he has a mysterious desire to test her and accordingly demands successively on two separate occasions the life of a child. Griselda accedes to his demands without complaint. After twelve years he reveals that he was just testing her and proceeds to reunite Griselda with her children. Readings of the tale have presented unresolved dilemmas. Some read it as a religious allegory of God’s relation to man, with Griselda a figure of spiritual constancy and patience. Others, including Chaucer’s fictional narrator, the Clerk, interpret it as a husband testing his wife; and in this reading, Griselda is the good wife. Even those who take account of the political dimension of the tale read Walter as a tyrant, an aberration of the just sovereign. However, reading Chaucer’s tale in light of the new ethics initiated by Levi and Agamben suggests that Walter’s demand for the life of Griselda’s children is the exception that proves the rule; that is, sovereign power always will demand the life that it is supposed to protect. As Chaucer says, it is a mysterious desire, born, I argue, from the need of the sovereign for reassurance of his subject’s loyalty. And as Agamben, following Foucault, argues, traditional sovereign power asserts its right and power ultimately in its capacity “to make die.” Traditional sovereign power, when it asserts its power can only demand the life of those it subjects. Following this logic, it becomes evident that sovereign power has no other way of knowing

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with any certainty the loyalty of its subjects, except to demand the ultimate test of life; that is, to make them die. The willingness to give one’s life is the paradoxical proof of submission to sovereign power. In Chaucer’s tale, there is a displacement of this demand onto the children of Griselda, the bare life she begets. The repetition of the demand by the sovereign Walter shows this exceptional demand for death is normative; it reveals that the demand of the sovereign “to make die” is a fundamental feature of the relation of sovereign to the human subject. I don’t think we are that surprised that the tale shows the willingness of the sovereign to exercise its power over the life of those it subjects. What is much more difficult for us to grasp is the secret relation of sovereign power and bare life revealed by Chaucer’s tale. The tale shows how completely sovereign power intervenes in the natural life it includes in its regime of power. Sovereign power is shown to thoroughly intrude into the “natural” and “sacred” relation of mother and child. The tale offers us a vision of the political subject actively willing to witness and accede to the death of its own bare life. What makes Griselda’s assent even more difficult for us to countenance is that Chaucer shows Griselda actively demonstrating her love for her children even as she gives them up. What Chaucer’s tale also reveals to us in the figure of Griselda is the subject witnessing its constitution and its own dissolution. The most secret relation of sovereign power and bare life that the tale reveals is that in creating the subject, inhuman sovereign power constitutes a political subject that contains an inhuman potential, which is nothing more than the potential of its own desubjectification it must suffer and endure. Griselda shows us this secret split of the subject oscillating between subjectification and desubjectification. It is this movement that constitutes the human subject who will consent to suffer and endure the most terrible things. Reading Chaucer’s tale with Levi and Agamben’s new ethics gives the tale a coherence and opens the text to a dimension of meaning previously hidden—the terrible effects sovereign power has on the human subjects it takes under its domination. Notes 1. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999). 2. I would like to thank my colleagues Elaine Kauvar and John Brenkman for their thoughtful reading and invaluable suggestions of an earlier draft of this essay. 3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. HellerRoazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

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The Question of Ethical Discourse: Emmanuel Levinas, Primo Levi, and Giorgio Agamben Dan Leshem

he chapter “Shame, or on the Subject” from Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, raises the question of how criticism can account for, address or face radical alterity. However, rather than addressing the alterity communicated through survivor testimony, Agamben guides his argument through a series of critical techniques aimed at limiting and categorizing the survivor’s narrative, thereby distancing himself and his discourse from the experience and retelling of horror that is constitutive of the survivors’ experience.1 The trajectory of his argument, as announced in the preface, involves a movement toward the retrospective site of testimony, and then back to the present in order to establish, “a human understanding of what happened there … its contemporary relevance” (11). This approach raises a couple of crucial questions: Why is understanding Agamben’s privileged method of approach to alterity?; and, Why does he direct the encounter to attend only to what happened in the past? I argue that the critical encounter for the “contemporary relevance” of Holocaust testimony happens in our present approach to the survivors and their testimony. Moreover, by displacing the ethical question onto the survivors’“inabilities,” Agamben perpetuates discourse that is unethical in Emmanuel Levinas’s terms, since it refuses to acknowledge the other’s subjectivity as a demand.2 With primary reference to Levinas’s Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, and with some reference to Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the differend, I will show that Agamben’s discourse, in the face of radical alterity, attends only to those assimilable elements that pose no threat to the investigating subject.3 Ultimately, I hope to offer a description of a discourse that could be ethical in Levinas’s terms.

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Agamben’s essay begins by addressing the problematic of the shame experienced by Holocaust survivors. Citing examples from Primo Levi, Bruno Bettelheim and Robert Antelme, and others, he argues that this shame cannot be as simple as Wiesel’s construction, “I live, therefore I am guilty,” nor Primo Levi’s statement “each one of us … has usurped his neighbor’s place and lived in his stead” (quoted in Agamben, 89, 91). For Agamben, both of these positions “claim to present the survivor’s shame as a tragic conflict,” in which, “what is tragic is … for an apparently innocent subject to assume unconditionally objective guilt,” which, Agamben argues, is no longer reasonable after Auschwitz (96). For Agamben, shame—of the type witnessed by Antelme on the death march from Auschwitz when an Italian student, called out of line to be shot, blushes— represents a “double movement, which is both subjectification and desubjectification” (106). Stripped of all identity and agency by the time of this event, the Italian student suddenly singled out by the SS is forced to acknowledge himself as both subject of and subject to a command. Thus, waking from a slumber of anonymity, he confronts his own radical abjection: He is simultaneously subject and object. Shame, Agamben argues, is the condition of a subject at the site of his own desubjectification: it is “nothing less than the fundamental sentiment of being a subject, in the two apparently opposed senses of this phrase: to be subjected and to be sovereign” (107). For Agamben, the “absolute concomitance” of “self-loss and self-possession” produces shame. Furthermore, the movement from language to discourse mimics the structure of shame—implying simultaneous subjectification and desubjectification—to the extent that “the psychosomatic individual must fully abolish himself and desubjectify himself as a real individual to become the subject of enunciation and to identify himself with the pure shifter ‘I’ … once the subject is in discourse, he can say nothing; he cannot speak” (116–117). Therefore, language acts partake of the structure of shame, in that every enunciation testifies to the break within the speaker into the speaking subject and the silenced subject. For Agamben, shame occurs in discourse, where the “psychosomatic individual,” must, in speaking and identifying himself with the deictic “I,” cease speaking on his own behalf.4 By implication, Agamben argues that in testimony the speaking subject experiences himself as a fraudulent screen blocking the addressee’s view of the real subject who remains mute and unrepresented. However, unlike the model of the individual, for whom the division into two distinct poles occurs internally, in testimony this division occurs, according to Agamben, between individuals. Agamben folds the terms subjectification and desubjectification, which signify the two poles of the individual in speech onto the terms human and inhuman, by which he identifies the two poles of testimony: the human subject who survives

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and speaks, who is opposed to the inhuman subject who gives up in the camp and dies Muselmann. Agamben’s argument folds the inner-subjective onto the inter-subjective as it is represented in testimony; for him, Primo Levi, through the act of testifying, becomes human, while simultaneously banishing the Muselmann, whom he himself calls the true witness, to silence and death. Following Agamben’s logic, Levi feels shame because, in testifying, he has entered into an economy with the nonsurvivor, the Muselmann, whom he metaphorically makes dead through speaking. By establishing a parallel argument, transposing the structural fracture of the subject in discourse onto the survivor in testimony, Agamben has taken literally Levi’s statement: the Muselmanner are the true witnesses. This identification allows Agamben to derive a general theory about testimony and survival: “ ‘human beings are human insofar as they are not human’ or, more precisely, ‘human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the inhuman” (121). Suffice it to say that, for Agamben, testimony narrates the becoming human of the survivor in the place of the Muselmanner. For Agamben, therefore, the “human” usurps the experience of the inhuman in order to speak, and through that usurpation silences the Muselmann. The identification of an inner-subjective structure with an inter-subjective one is only possible given Agamben’s perspective, which seeks to understand the past through its present value. The examination produces an optics that sees the survivor and the Muselmann as occurring in the same place, as two poles of one function, as dialectic. This structure cannot function effectively as either an ethics or as an interpretative approach to Holocaust testimony. After all Levi’s utterance, “we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses … [it is] the ‘Muslims,’ the submerged, the complete witnesses … whose deposition would have a general significance,”5 in its context does not seek solely to define the true hierarchical relationship between survivor and Muselmann. Rather, it indexes a certain concurrence between survival and shame that is complicated by the double valence of “survival”—surviving the other’s death and surviving one’s own death—and is present in many places in Levi’s work. Any reading of this trope would have to account for the responsibility and the accusation it contains. Levi begins The Reawakening by recounting the arrival of the first Russian soldiers that marks the preliminary liberation of Auschwitz. They arrive as Levi and another inmate bury a friend in a common grave. Levi describes their reaction as characterized by, “a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime.”6 The shame in this case belongs to the

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Russians; what binds victim and liberator is that each side feels shame and responsibility. This shame, Levi argues, is the human response to a catastrophe he or she is powerless to stop: the witness, in responsibility confronts the realization that his “will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defense.”7 After all, the Russian approach takes place across the dead body of Levi’s friend; those who remain feel responsible, while those who fled, the SS, will never know that shame. The notions of justice, responsibility, and judgment arise in Agamben’s text in a chapter titled, “The Witness.” There, Agamben identifies “the tacit confusion of ethical categories and juridical categories” as one of the “most common mistakes,” as law is directed toward establishing judgment as a substitute for both justice and truth. However, this distinction is not maintained, as he has extensive recourse to juridical argumentation in his chapter “Shame, or on the Subject” (18). In referring to “the survivor’s feeling of guilt,” he points out the excusability of that guilt, the “suspect” nature of survivor’s claim to guilt as a condition of survival, and the “accusation” contained in Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved. Furthermore, Agamben uses explicitly juridical terms in defining shame as “the living being’s incapacity truly to separate innocence and guilt.” His discourse, thereby, establishes the investigating critic as a judge—an objective interpreter of an acknowledged and established body of laws—who is able, without bias, to apply the law to a given set of circumstances within a network of reference to precedent. Therein, the judge thematizes the criminal and the crime as an anticipated deviation from societal norms, and through this judgment folds the exception back under the domination of the rule. These terms “thematization” and “judgment” will form the core of Levinas’s critique of the “habitual economy of being,” which struggles through those processes to constantly reassert its own priority in the face of alterity. Agamben’s recourse to juridical discourse and his application of subjective judgment to particular textual instances from within Holocaust testimonies, however, forces a reevaluation of the ethical claims of this work. Agamben assumes the role of judge, discriminating between true and false testimony, when he finds the chapter “Shame,” in Primo Levi’s book The Drowned and the Saved, “ultimately unsatisfying.” Levi, he complains, has submitted “himself to a test of conscience so puerile that it leaves the reader uneasy” (88, emphasis mine). Agamben’s critical overwriting of the survivor’s narrative becomes most troublesome when he discusses the tendency of many writers of testimony to assume a guilt “which inheres in the survivor’s condition as such and not in what he or she as an individual did or failed to do” (94).8 He rejects this explanation as being “suspect”;

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for Agamben, it “recalls the common tendency to assume a generic collective guilt whenever an ethical problem cannot be mastered” (94–95). He couples this explanation of “survivor guilt” with Hannah Arendt’s observations of the “surprising willingness of post-war Germans of all ages to assume collective guilt for Nazism [while displaying] an equally surprising ill will as to the assessment of individual responsibilities and the punishment of particular crimes” (95).9 Agamben’s movement goes from the survivors’ sense of their own guilt as not rooted in any act or omission, to the postwar German embrace of collective guilt and rejection of personal guilt. However, this gesture dislocates the survivor’s speech by eliminating its radical difference. While the average German was deprived of political agency and hence, his status as citizen, the Jewish victim was deprived of all agency and speech in a concentrationary universe designed to reduce him to utter abjection. Therefore, while the survivor’s text can be seen as an attempt to regain humanity through speech, the German utterance has an entirely different valence. This example argues forcefully for the need for a polyvalent and perhaps even fractured understanding of shame. However, Agamben takes the similarity between the aforementioned cases for granted, and he does not pause his discourse for explanation but proceeds to fold this forced comparison onto a further instance: that of the wartime histories of the German Protestant and Catholic Churches. Both of these institutions had very ambiguous policies toward Nazism but were willing to acknowledge only a general guilt after the war. Ultimately, each remained unwilling to cite particular instances in which they should have done something yet failed to act. Even if one can say the same thing about survivor’s guilt—that someone like Levi will “fail” to cite any particular instance in which he failed to act, the inclusion of which would help us to understand his shame—reading this as a “failure” turns the symptom into a judgment. Agamben’s seamless juxtaposition of victim, bystander, and questionable witness/participant—Jew, German, church—is an attempt to convince the reader of a similarity between these three situations, while ignoring their crucial differences. Of course, the total denial of agency and the dehumanization enacted by the Nazis on their Jewish victims is one to which the churches and average German were in no way subjected. At this essay’s crucial junctures, Agamben’s discourse denies difference to the survivor as subject, to testimony as text and here, to the Jew as victim. For what is indeed compelling about Wiesel’s formulation, “I live therefore I am guilty” is that the Jewish survivors had no opportunity for true action within the camps, yet they still cannot absolve themselves of their inability to intervene.10 Jean-François Lyotard argues in The Differend that a discursive strategy such as that Agamben employs is the ground of all

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injustice, making it impossible for the wronged party to articulate the wrong he has suffered. A differend occurs when the regulation of the conflict between two parties “is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the injustice suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.”11 In the case of the Holocaust, the critic who places himself in the position of judge usurps the alterity of the survivor’s experience and forces the survivor into a paradoxical assimilation; whereby, she can maintain her claim of alterity only by entering a discourse that, always already, forecloses the possibility of its articulation. In Holocaust testimony, the contemporary subject is confronted with a double threat: since the ordinary threat contained in every encounter is amplified by the radical otherness of the survivor whose experiences threaten to carry the subject too far away from itself. According to Emmanuel Levinas’s late ethical philosophy, presented in Otherwise than Being, ethical subjectivity recognizes the other as “the first one on the scene,” and, whose existence, therefore demands responsibility of an order that precedes any possible freedom.12 The subject’s very being is predicated on his responsibility to the other; his primary obligation is to alleviate the suffering of the other. By its nature, however, subjectivity does not tend toward the ethical, or alterity, but rather toward ensuring its own space of ability and action, its own place in the sun. The self denies alterity and works to synchronize all difference into a continuous narrative. Levinas’s critique extends to discourse itself and the violence inherent in every discussion that speaks about and not to the other. Therefore, one’s ethical obligation, in the face of the radical alterity encountered in testimony is first of all to address oneself to the demand posed by the other’s subjectivity. Testimony provides a metonymic site of encounter with alterity. The survivor fails to understand yet struggles to articulate an experience that is unthematizable within his own subjectivity; she puts into language an experience that, as it happened, exceeded language. Testimony, an exiled speech, is a paradox, since it answers an impossible demand to phrase that which speaking itself denies.13 The challenge to the critic in discussing the Holocaust is to identify and assert the ethical stakes in each situation— that is, to find the remnant of something other; since any language or narratival strategy the survivor may use to answer our demand will be truthful only to the extent that it is incomprehensible. The critic fails to address the alterity encountered in testimony to the precise extent that he seeks to understand it, to wrench from it something useful. Forcibly severing survivors from the very alterity of their speech, Agamben’s discursive strategies—and those of many other critics—approach the other from an angle, seeking to mine their experience. However, doing justice to the

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differend inherent in the text of testimony involves creating new idioms for hearing those texts as a demand. Levinas models such an ethical approach to alterity when he relates that his life and philosophy are “dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror”.14 This approach evacuates the space of action and ability, the here and the now, allowing it to be occupied by the other. In answering the demand addressed by the survivor, each of us is irreplaceable. One of the few ethical utterances, Levinas articulates, and indeed one of the few ethical acts, is the response of the prophets to God’s call: Hineni, here I am. Between presentiment and memory, in this temporal and spatial nonspace, the space of trauma and of testimony, we too speak from the site of a rupture. Notes 1. Giorgio Agamben, “Shame, or On the Subject,” in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 11. All further references to this work are noted in the text. 2. See, e.g., page 21, where Agamben states, “The unprecedented discovery made by Levi at Auschwitz concerns an area that is independent of every establishment of responsibility, an area in which Levi succeeded in isolating something like a new ethical element. Levi calls it the ‘gray zone’ … What is at issue here, therefore, is a zone of irresponsibility.” Hence, for Agamben, the ethical crisis happened there; while, we now approach the crisis after the fact as a third party. Thus, considering himself uninvolved and not implicated by the event he approaches, Agamben already distances himself from the possibility of an ethical relation. 3. This discourse concerns itself primarily with proving that the resources with which it approaches the survivor testimony are sufficient to account for the Holocaust, and it will therefore face any potential risk or threat arising from the site of testimony with perseverance and continuity. It is perhaps in this sense that one can understand Levinas’s claim that metaphysics, in this case criticism, is primarily an alibi, or a being elsewhere. Consider this in opposition to Levinas’s construction from Otherwise than Being (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988): “But in the responsibility for the Other, for another freedom . . . [it] commands me and ordains me to the other, to the first one on the scene and makes me approach him, makes me his neighbor . . . Despite-me, for-another, is signification par excellence. And it is the sense of the ‘oneself,’ that accusative that derives from no nominative; it is the very fact of finding oneself while losing oneself ” (11). Therefore, criticism begins with putting itself in question, and finds its only possible signification in spite of itself. Its signification arises from this movement away from its own being. 4. “Testimony,” Agamben states, “takes place in the non-place of articulation,” in the rupture between the speaking and the silenced poles (130). 5. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 83–84.

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6. Primo Levi The Reawakening (New York: Collier Books, 1993), 16. 7. Ibid., 16. 8. His proof text is Bettelheim’s essay “The Survivor,” Surviving and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1979). “Only the ability to feel guilty makes us human, particularly if, objectively seen, one is not guilty” (313). 9. No citation is given in the Agamben. 10. Cf. Reawakening, 16, where Levi identifies guilt as arising from a confrontation with the enormity of the Nazi crimes: “the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his own will for good should have proved too weak, or null, and should not have availed in defense.” 11. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988), 5. 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1988), 11. 13. According to Lyotard, the silence of the Holocaust survivor is conditioned by four negative phrases: “This case does not fall within your [the listener’s] competence, This case does not exist, It cannot be signified, It does not fall within my competence” (13). While any given silence does not indicate which negative phrase has usurped its utterance, any speech act is possible only after a refutation of all four of them. 14. Emmanuel Levinas, “Signature,” trans. Mary Ellen Petrisko, Research in Phenomenology 8, 1978, 175–189.

The Gray Zone Buna Torn feet and cursed earth, The long line in the gray morning. The Buna smokes from a thousand chimneys, A day like every other day awaits us. The whistles terrible at dawn: “You multitude with dead faces, On the monotonous horror of the mud Another day of suffering is born.” Tired companion, I see you in my heart. I read your eyes, sad friend. In your breast you carry cold, hunger, nothing. You have broken what’s left of the courage within you. Colorless one, you were a strong man, A woman walked at your side. Empty companion who no longer has a name, Forsaken man who can no longer weep, So poor you no longer grieve, So tired you no longer fear. Spent once-strong man. If we meet again Up there in the world, sweet beneath the sun, With what kind of face would we confront each other? December 28, 1945

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Figure 15.1 Watercolor and ink on paper, 1973. “Here there is no why.”

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he study of the Holocaust creates its own momentum; every question leads to tentative answers, and they, in turn, raise new dilemmas. For example: Was the Holocaust unique? An affirmative or a negative response raises serious moral, psychological, theological, and historical considerations that certainly could not be answered in this essay; and this issue, one might reasonably argue, is a relatively “easy” one. The spin-off effect generated from investigating nearly any Holocaust issue has been so rapid and wide-ranging that Holocaust publications—in print, electronic, and film forms—continue to proliferate at an exponential rate. It has become more difficult to absorb and manage all of the material now available. A recent annotated bibliography of the Holocaust, designed to serve as a general introduction for new readers as well as a guide for more specialized students in the field, totals over four hundred pages.1 This veritable explosion in new information has had the salutary effect of providing greater insight into the study of the Holocaust; but conversely, it has also undermined—or complicated—efforts to draw a workable balance between sufficient attention to detail and the formulation of some explanatory syntheses. Invariably, today’s better books on the Holocaust tend to be either multivolume issues or very lengthy one-volume tomes.2 One very useful monograph that does present a working, and workable, approach for understanding a large number of problems is Raul Hilberg’s 1992 book, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945.3 By providing a sociologically organized framework into which the various historical protagonists can be sorted, Hilberg has offered both a useful introduction for the general reader and, simultaneously, a new set of perspectives for the more serious student in the field. Certainly, the book has its limitations. It does not replace a straightforward chronological account, nor can it address analytically some important

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Holocaust issues; for example, the role of anti-Semitism in transforming ordinary people into the various subcategories of perpetrators. Further, one may legitimately suggest that Hilberg’s categorizations are too sharply drawn, that some of the protagonists may in fact be more accurately placed into another group; or that the distinctions between perpetrators and bystanders, between perpetrators and victims, or between victims and bystanders, are not always as clear as Hilberg has presented them. Still, regardless of where one may place certain historical figures, Hilberg’s method of organizing the material offers a workable paradigm. It also invites others to offer alternative models. Complicating matters even more is the fact that interpretations and perspectives offered on most Holocaust issues depend on the evidence used. There are, borrowing Hilberg’s useful construct, three broad approaches: the perspectives of the perpetrators, of the victims, and of the bystanders. Usually, the perspective of the perpetrators requires knowledge of, and familiarity with, the language and culture of the perpetrators; that is, primarily, but not exclusively, knowledge of German history and language. The perspectives of the victims and of the bystanders usually require mastery of different languages (e.g., Yiddish or Hebrew, Polish, or a Baltic language) and familiarity with histories other than those of Germany and Austria. So, the interpretations and the perspectives proposed are dependent on the evidence gathered and presented, and this is often based on the disciplinary background and strengths of the researcher. Raul Hilberg, certainly a preeminent authority on the Holocaust, usually approaches his topics from his Austrian background and his familiarity with the German archival documents. Yehuda Bauer, another notable authority, usually constructs his work with the material he has found primarily in the Yad Vashem archives in Israel. Their conclusions, such as on the level and quality of resistance of the Jews to the Nazi policies and actions, sometimes strongly diverge; and often their contrary views are based on one citing documents describing some of the perpetrators’ opinions while the other relies on views expressed by the affected victims. Clearly, there are still many gaps that need to be filled between these various approaches. An alternative framework for addressing Holocaust dilemmas, which attempts to close the gaps between methodological approaches, has already been initiated in Saul Friedländer’s 1997 book, Nazi Germany and the Jews.4 Yehuda Bauer describes Friedländer’s work as “the kind of history that needs to be written,”5 because it synthesizes the perpetrators’, victims’, and bystanders’ perspectives into one interconnected set of relationships. Bauer and, I suppose, many others are now eagerly awaiting Friedländer’s second volume—tentatively entitled The Years of

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Extermination—which will cover the period from 1939 to 1942,6 to see what new insights may be gained from this merger of history from “above” with the one from “below.”7 The Friedländer effort to close the gaps between categories of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders is valuable for our better understanding of the dilemmas previously raised in Holocaust studies. Understanding the dynamics of the interrelationships between the categories should yield more new answers, and thereby, I suspect, raise still more new dilemmas. However, there is still another consideration that needs to be addressed: not everyone fits neatly into one of the three classifications. It was indeed possible for an individual, or individuals, to fulfill more than one role— sometimes that of the perpetrator, at other times, that of the bystander or of the victim. Often individuals functioned in more than one category simultaneously. Primo Levi’s final book, The Drowned and the Saved,8 suggests precisely such a condition in the chapter entitled “The Gray Zone.” Levi described well this duality of roles within the Lager society in the section relating his introduction into the “new order,” an order reinforced by the inmates themselves. He wrote: “the first threats, the first insults, the first blows came not from the SS but from other prisoners, from ‘colleagues,’ from those mysterious personages who nevertheless wore the same striped tunic that they, the new arrivals, had just put on.”9 Yet, despite Levi’s observations of the existence of a Lager environment where the identities and roles of perpetrators and victims were not exclusively delineated, the current mainstream scholarship does indeed— consciously, or subconsciously—segment the two into distinct categories. Two recent treatments of perpetrators and victims, as part of broader works on the Holocaust and/or of life in the camps, help illuminate the limits of the current approaches. Inga Clendinnen’s Reading the Holocaust, published in 1999,10 and Tadeusz Debski’s A Battlefield of Ideas—Nazi Concentration Camps and Their Polish Prisoners, published in 2001,11 are representative of the existing methodological dichotomy: they cover much of the same ground, but from opposite starting points. The result is that each work provides interesting and valuable insights on either the roles of the perpetrators or of the victims, while concurrently obfuscating the diverse activities of the other group. Clendinnen presents herself as an outsider, that is, as a nonspecialist, in the study of the Holocaust. She nevertheless brings her training as a professional historian—who has obviously read the mainstream monographs—to formulate an approach for understanding many of the dilemmas raised by the Holocaust. The title of her well-received book, Reading the Holocaust, implicitly establishes that there is a proper, useful method for understanding the material.

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Her definition of perpetrators and victims is based on a clear and unassailable logic. The Nazis were the initiators, they had reorganized society on a new scale. Those who initiated and implemented the Nazi system were the perpetrators, the others were not. Both in the shtetl and in the camp environment, the perpetrator/victim distinction is based on one criterion: those outside versus those inside the barbed wire. Then, Clendinnen proceeds to segment the perpetrators into subcategories, while she persists—indeed insists—on conflating all victims into one group. Tadeusz Debski approaches similar issues from the perspective of a former camp inmate and Polish nationalist; that is, from nearly the bottom up. (I say “nearly” because Debski recognizes that the Jews were at the bottom of the Nazi social scale, i.e., they were at an even lower level than the Polish prisoners). In his analysis of the variety of the camps, Debski deliberately segregates them from the Holocaust. In his words: the camps and the Holocaust are two different subjects … the camps were an organizational tool intended to serve many purposes. Had Hitler realized some of his terrifying dreams and killed all Jews in Germany, and the conquered countries, the camps would not have disappeared. They would have continued to contain the enemies of the Nazis, function as a new kind of school to teach the populations of the conquered countries obedience, and house a great reservoir of slave-workers who could be used everywhere according to the needs of the state.12

In contrast to Clendinnen, Debski stresses the great diversity of the camps and of the victims. He identifies various “models” of interpretations of camp society; from Arendt to Bettelheim, to Des Pres, to Wiesel, to Améry, and finally, to his preferred “Polish Patriots” extension into a “Battlefield Model.” So, for example, the Des Pres thesis of excremental assault is seen by Debski as “a typical unwarranted generalization.”13 He continues: I have no doubt that given a choice the SS would always prefer cleanliness. They knew perfectly well that dirt breeds all kind of illnesses, some of them epidemic … But with the masses of new prisoners dragged into the camps from 1942 on, cleanliness was hard, or even impossible to maintain. That was the reason for the “excremental assault” described by Des Pres. The SS probably thought: one uses what one has at hand. If they cannot torment the prisoners using cleanliness as a tool, they can do it using dirt.14

Therefore, taking Debski’s analysis to its logical conclusion, if the camps’ conditions differed from each other and varied from one time to another,

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all descriptions are simultaneously true and false; and all conclusions are by definition correct or overgeneralizations. Further, Debski does not address Des Pres’ contention that excremental assault was a deliberate policy.15 We are reduced to studying each camp individually—as one might also have to do with the ghettos. Having differentiated the victims, and their treatment, Debski nevertheless provides a “typology” of prisoners, which could apply to all of the camps. He distinguishes prisoners by gender—arguing that their experiences were sufficiently different to require such differentiation—as well as into a large, almost amorphous, middle group of the “flotsam and jetsam”—borrowing the term from Primo Levi—and those at the bottom, the Muselmen. The Muselmen—called “goldstück” in Ravensbrück, and “gamel” in Majdaneck—are themselves further subdivided into groups of “active,” middle, and the ones who had given up types. The active were most likely to survive; the middle mostly kept quiet and endured in a protective shell that persisted even after liberation; and those who had given up just died.16 Beyond these categorizations, Debski also segments the prisoners into national, religious, and ideological groups. Each of these subgroups experienced and absorbed the camp conditions differently, and the chances of one’s individual survival was directly related to the degree of persistence of each to retain a strong connection with his/her (sub)group identity. Debski constantly reiterates that for the prisoners, life in the camps was “multi-faceted” and “ever-changing.”17 Yet, he would then proceed to describe a common set of experiences applicable to all within the enclosures (e.g., fear, hunger, abuse). Above all else, Debski stresses that existence in the camps was intense. And still, there was another vital factor operating within the camps: “the contemptuous attitude of the SS and of the prisoners-functionaries.”18 To survive such an intense assault required the prisoner to preserve his core, his inner self, his sense of inner dignity. It could also create a kind of dualism: “Today’s egoist could become tomorrow’s altruist and vice versa.”19 In his study of the camps—and of the “special case of the Poles”20 within the camps—Debski has the following to say about the SS: The SS were organizers, developers, overlords, and guardians of the concentration camp system. Some scholars, who wrote on the subject of the camps, are more interested in the SS than in the prisoners whom they see as an uninteresting, obedient mass of slaves. A sociologist says: “Yet it seems to me that in any political interaction between powerful and powerless, one learns more (or at least one learns differently) by studying the former. For it is not slaves but their masters who design and affect the policies of their

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captivity and death” [citing Gerard E. Markle, Meditation of a Holocaust Traveler, 1995]. So, they study those interesting masters of death.21

We could easily connect the above with Inga Clendinnen’s argument that the perpetrators defined the camps, and that the current imbalance in favor of coverage of the victims needs to be redressed in favor of more studies of the perpetrators; and implicit in that observation is Clendinnen’s tendency to find it necessary to segment the perpetrators into numerous categories while underplaying the diversity of the victims. Debski, as does Clendinnen, recognizes the existence of internal varieties amongst the “masters,” but he summarizes them in approximately five pages out of over two hundred; Clendinnen reverses the emphasis. The two books, put together, would give the effect of creating one whole; that is, of providing a perspective of the camps both from the top down and from the bottom up. Within Debski’s summary of the SS mindset is a recognition of multiple personalities, similar to the “doubling” effects Lifton described for the SS doctors.22 In Debski’s words: It should be added that a person has quite often not one but two or more sets of behavior. As Shakespeare said, everybody is an actor. The SS were playing one role in the camps, and another outside. That explains why an SS man could be very cruel to the prisoners and very caring about his family or his dog. After the war many SS men settled in Germany and other countries and generally behaved like exemplary citizens. They reverted to their pre-SS behavior.23

This paradox in the SS personality also applied to the prisoners’ behavior. Relying on Polish scholarship, less well known to the West, Debski cites one Cracow professor’s description of camp life as follows: Good and bad qualities of human nature which in normal life combine together, creating a complicated image of one’s character, expanded in the camp, taking on the dimension of heroism, saintliness, and martyrdom or monstrous brutality, egoism, cruelty and depraved cynicism.24

Therefore, both good and bad human qualities seem to have coexisted in the camps. To be sure, Debski’s agenda is to introduce to Western scholarship the less well-known Polish scholarship, and to explain the special solidarity that existed within the Polish prisoner population of the camps. Yet, in pressing his argument, he also touches upon the great diversity

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of inmates—in terms of their intellectual capacities and interests, as well as their differences in gender, nationality, class, and temperament— that existed in the camps. Thus, the survivors’ recollections—for example, their sense of guilt—or their post-camp resolutions to tell their stories also varied widely. In Debski’s case, after liberation, he made no personal oath to tell his story in order to remember the dead. According to him, he only made one personal oath: “never to eat rutabagas.”25 Clendinnen and Debski provide distinct approaches for interpreting— or “reading”—the Holocaust and the human behavior of those within and outside the camps. While Debski distinguishes between the Holocaust and the camps, Clendinnen focuses on the camps as part of the Holocaust. Where Debski writes from the inside out, or bottom up, Clendinnen writes from the outside in, or top down. Both books are well-organized, readable, instructive, useful and manageable monographs for a college-level audience. Clendinnen, although relying heavily on Levi’s testimony of the Gray Zone, nevertheless insists on retaining a sharp demarcation between perpetrators and victims. Those within the camps—and also within the ghettos—were victims; the perpetrators operated from outside in. As for those within who cooperated with the perpetrators, according to Clendinnen, they cannot be judged.26 Referring to the mass starvation in the ghettos, she concludes: “Under such chronically abnormal conditions the pressures on individuals were so urgent, so disparate and so irreconcilable as to vitiate the possibility of judgment.”27 This logic, Clendinnen feels, applies even more for withholding judgment of prisoner behavior in the camps. Thus, the issue of abuses perpetrated by some prisoners on others within the camps is closed to any further scrutiny. Yet, even if Clendinnen refuses to assess the behavior of the inmates, the fact remains that many former prisoners have indeed passed such judgments on their camp peers; perhaps most prominently Primo Levi, himself, in his chapter on the Gray Zone.28 Clendinnen, earlier in her book, relies on Levi’s testimony; she describes him as an extraordinary man, “not only as a fine writer, but as a fine historian.”29 Now, in her major chapter on the victims, partially entitled “Inside the Grey (sic) Zone,” she admits that “the usually compassionate Levi”30 did indeed pass judgment—a harsh judgment—on the inmate abusers. The prisoner-perpetrators, Clendinnen cites Levi, were “defective social beings who had betrayed the ‘natural solidarity’ they owed their comrades.”31 They were, Clendinnen further cites Levi, “monsters whose capacity for hatred, unfulfilled in the direction of the oppressors, will double back, beyond all reason, on the oppressed.”32

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Clendinnen, who had earlier in her book praised Levi as a good historian, now judges his opinions of human behavior in the Gray Zone as “facile psychologizing.”33 Further, in her words: My own view is that there is a great distance between those who do what they must to survive in an imposed situation, and those who design or participate in the imposition of that situation. It follows that prisoners or ghetto-dwellers forced to live within artificially demoralized worlds cannot be judged culpable for any action they took or failed to take to survive in that world, or to help those dear to them to survive, even if by doing so they jeopardized or directly damaged others—although I will of course celebrate those individuals like Levi who steadfastly refused to be corrupted. The moral responsibility for the evil done in the camps and ghettos, including the evil done by inmates, lies squarely with those Germans, whether dedicated to Nazi ideals or to their own advancement, who filled, sealed, and starved the ghettos, and who organized and directed the camps.34

So, the division between the perpetrators on the outside and the victims on the inside is sharply drawn; and, according to Clendinnen, apparently no fault may be found with those on the inside regardless of any individual circumstances. Yet, a sense of what was acceptable or unacceptable behavior did in fact exist amongst the inmates; the numerous survivors’ reminiscences make it clear that there existed a prisoners’ language composed of a new vocabulary, which distinguished between, for example, “stealing” and “organizing” items essential for survival.35 That is, the victims who were together in the same enclosures knew the difference between each other; and enforced an internal code of behavior. It seems that the separation between perpetrators and victims was not so sharply etched by the inmates as Clendinnen now presents it. Curiously, while conflating the inmates into one broad category of victims, Clendinnen recognizes an extended set of shadings amongst the perpetrators; not all guards exhibited the same behavior, some even acted “with reasonable decency and humanity.”36 That is, she sees and recognizes distinctions between perpetrators, yet rejects equivalent shadings amongst subcategories of prisoners; not even between the general camp inmate population and the members of the Sonderkommandos (SKs), particularly the SKs of Auschwitz. By making a case for the Sonderkommandos, Clendinnen deliberately selects the most extreme and most controversial case of possible complicity with the death camp system in order to reinforce her argument that all inmates, even those in the SKs, were victims. In Treblinka, she cites the observations of a former SK member, Richard Glazar, that the SKs in the

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camp were “a kind of natural elite” who wore the best clothing— “fashionable young men from the realm of death and decay.”37 Yet, their appearance, she explains, was in fact a strategy for survival; the more one looked like the SS, the more human one appeared, and the more difficult it would be for the SS to execute them.38 So, after several pages of description of the plight of the SKs and of the symbiotic relationships that developed between these special prisoners and their guards, Clendinnen concludes that the physical proximity between perpetrators and victims explains that apparent blurring of roles. The joint venture of killing and disposing of the bodies produced, as she points out, “two sets of parasites”39 coexisting; elsewhere, she admits that, in her words: “the reduction of the artificial distancing maintained in the larger camp clearly had some effect.”40 But, Clendinnen asks later on, were these men “morally defective”? She responds, “My own inclination is to admire their toughness of spirit.” They were adaptable, which she sees as a “human virtue, requiring its own brand of courage.” Besides, she points out, the SK members were not in a position to act otherwise, as the setting was, again in her words, “studiously disposed to deny the autonomy, indeed the moral existence” of these prisoners.41 Several problems arise from the Clendinnen presentation—a presentation well written but not really unique in the Holocaust literature; but the fundamental problem originates with the selection of her point of departure and of the subsequent direction this approach then requires her to take. Clendinnen starts with an inquiry into whether or not the SKs were perpetrators/oppressors. She then concludes with the obvious, that the SKs were not the architects of the death camp system and therefore cannot be criticized for trying to survive. Besides, Clendinnen’s approach implies, who are we who have not experienced the conditions of the camps to pass any judgment on those who did? Whatever credibility this line of argument may have is undermined by the fact that there were indeed inmates—Primo Levi being an obvious example—who did pass judgments, and those opinions cannot simply be ignored. The entire treatment of this issue could easily be reversed. Instead of asking whether the SKs were perpetrators, one might instead ask to what extent were they victims? After all, other inmates did not give the SK members a blanket absolution, and surely these victims would have known—and been predisposed to support—the arguments of extenuating circumstances. The view from the bottom up differentiates the victims and is less forgiving of prisoner collaborative actions than when the same issues are approached from the top down. To suppose that the SKs were not perpetrators—particularly in contrast to the role of the guards—does not respond to the accusations

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made by many victim survivors who, from their perspective, did see many of them as a category of accomplices. Besides, the entire Clendinnen approach juxtaposes the SS and the other guards (e.g., the Ukranians) with what she seems to assume to be the prisoner group closest to the description of possible complicitors, that is, the SKs. Yet, one could argue that the SKs were not part of the internal camp hierarchy in the first place. The SK members had been removed from the general camp system, remained segregated from the other inmates, and had therefore been placed into yet another subenclosure of their own. Their actions must then be viewed by themselves, apart from the general inmate environment; with their own dynamics and separate internal hierarchies; with, call it if you wish, a separated Gray Zone of their own. The Clendinnen selection of the SK members for special attention, and her subsequent—almost predictable—conclusion that they clearly not be viewed as victims, again reinforces her preference to conflate the victim categories even when testimony exists from other victims that insists on differentiations. Such an approach uses the SK as the extreme case of possible collaboration; yet the role of the Kapos—who often acted with a brutal gusto—as the internal enforcers of prisoner discipline and routines becomes obfuscated. Within the prisoner hierarchy, the activities of the various ranks of prisoner functionaries who implemented the daily camp routines needs to be recognized as an example of behavioral dualism; and the raising of the special, isolated case of the Sonderkommandos blurs rather than sharpens the focus of the Gray Zone. The paradigm of behavioral dualism—of inmates who exhibited the paradoxical behavior of abusers and victims, and of those outside the enclosures who could also exhibit the sharply contradictory behavior of overt brutality and apparent kindnes—allows us to clarify the Gray Zone to include the perspectives from the bottom up and the top down; it creates a broader and truer representation of human behavior in extremis. The model of dualism in this case—and, I suspect, also in other cases not under discussion here—becomes useful in expanding the variations of human behavior for those clearly not on either extreme; that is, distinct from those obviously recognized as oppressors or victims. Those in between the clearly recognized opposite poles of behavior occupy the Gray Zone, which now needs to be examined through a sharper prism to allow for further clarification of shadings. Somewhere in those subcategories is one group that exhibits dual characteristics almost simultaneously. The broad distinctions between perpetrators and victims are obvious and easily recognized. They are also only of limited instructive value. We need to recognize that neither the perpetrator nor victim group was a solid monolithic entity. Within each—regardless of whether they were inside or

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outside the enclosure—there were shadings of behavior. Varieties existed within each, and the connection from one form of behavior to the other was more fluid than presented by Clendinnen, for the top down approach, and by Debski, representing the view from the bottom up. The more intense conditions became—the more immediate the need to act became—the less room existed for alternative maneuverings for either the oppressor or the victim. Some oppressors, while actively engaged in committing their crimes, slid into—or perceived themselves as experiencing—some kind of victimization, (e.g., being required to follow orders they found unpleasant, or of perceiving themselves as victims of unfortunate circumstances that removed the possibility of all other choices). From the perspective of the prisoners, some of them slid into the behavior patterns of abusers, in some cases sinking to the level of committing crimes usually ascribed to perpetrators (e.g., the Kapo who would commit murder). The result is a mixture of behaviors in the middle area—Primo Levi’s Gray Zone. Thus, not all guards were uniformly brutal, nor were all members of the SKs doing their work purely because they were under orders, nor were all prisoners/functionnaires uniformly in one or the other behavioral pattern. A duality of behavior seemed to have operated on both sides of the barbed wire. The implications of this duality are broad and far-reaching. They allow us to refocus on—and rethink—issues such as: the puzzling question of postwar testimony from accused and condemned perpetrators who presented themselves as victims (e.g., the testimonies of Stangl and Höss);42 the equally puzzling phenomenon of inmates who felt guilty for having survived;43 The issue of whether survivors’ (or perpetrators’) accounts are more or less valid with the passage of time; that is, that testimony given in the early aftermath of the events is more or less trustworthy than that given one or more decades later;44 The possibility—if not the likelihood— that the dynamics operating in the Gray Zone were not limited to the Lager. The Lager was a maximally controlled social environment, and the Gray Zone dualities may only have been most pronounced there. Similar examples may be found in the ghettos where individuals also operated simultaneously on dual levels (e.g., the Jewish leadership, or the Jewish policemen); where individuals saw themselves and were being perceived both as victims and perpetrators (or, at least, as collaborators).45 The possibility that Nazis controlled European society at large, although not under the same extreme levels of control as in the Lager, also exhibited these dualities of perception and behavior. This Gray Zone duality approach may provide fresh perspectives on the conflicting postwar assessments of the roles of ordinary people as either followers of orders from above or as initiators of radical solutions from the bottom. After the

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war, many abusers presented themselves as victims. Even the defendants at Nuremberg—or Eichmann in Jerusalem—would exhibit such dualities.46 There may have been many more people who exhibited such perception and behavioral symptoms than just those in the Lager. The demarcation between subcategories of perpetrators and victims was fluid, constantly changing in response to real or imagined pressures. Robert Jay Lifton, in 1986, described the Nazi doctors who were engaged in the killing processes as examples of the psychological phenomenon of “doubling.”47 At the same time, in his final published work, Primo Levi described the Lager as an environment in which the victims turned on each other and imposed an internal hierarchy.48 Even earlier, in his first published work, Levi had already succinctly described his introduction to Lager life, as follows: “I already know that it is the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged; the social order of the camp is based on this human law.”49 So, it was an environment where the inmates exhibited the contradictory dual characteristics of abusers and victims. If we expand Levi’s Gray Zone from the bottom up, and simultaneously extend Lifton’s thesis of “doubling” from the top down, and apply them beyond the confines of the Lager, we may begin to address many of the dilemmas that have still remained unresolved in the study of the Holocaust. We may also begin to satisfy other corollary needs, such as that of managing better the teaching of the Holocaust; that of providing some new insights into the behavior of individuals whose roles could place them into multiple, but seemingly contradictory categories; and that of extrapolating from the Holocaust a better understanding of human behavior under varying degrees of extraordinary stress. Notes 1. Donald Niewyk and Francis Nicosia, The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000). 2. Some of the standard texts would be: Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York: Franklin Watts, 1982). Lucy Davidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1975). Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1987). Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3 vols. (New York: Holmes and Meyer, 1985). Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 3. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 1992). 4. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).

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5. Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 118. 6. Ibid., 114. 7. Ibid., 117. 8. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage International, 1989). 9. Ibid., p. 20. 10. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 11. Tadeusz Debski, A Battlefield of Ideas: Nazi Concentration Camps and Their Polish Prisoners (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). 12. Debski, Battlefield of Ideas, 11–12. 13. Ibid., 71. 14. Ibid., 71. 15. Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 59. 16. Debski, Battlefield of Ideas, 88–97. 17. Ibid., 123. 18. Ibid., 126. 19. Ibid., 162. 20. Ibid., 195. 21. Ibid., 184. 22. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 418–429. 23. Debski, Battlefield of Ideas, 189. 24. Ibid., 225. 25. Ibid., 257. 26. Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, 63–64. 27. Ibid., 64. 28. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, chapter 2, 36–69. Also, nearly every victims’ recollections recount examples of fellow prisoners’ abuses. A good bibliographic summary of the victims’ publications—in the camps and in other conditions of oppression and deprivation—can be found in Niewyk and Nicosia, Columbia Guide, 319–322, and passim. 29. Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, 48. 30. Ibid., 67. 31. Ibid., 65. 32. Ibid., 65. 33. Ibid., 65. 34. Ibid., 65. 35. Cf. Abraham J. Edelheit and Hershel Edelheit, History of the Holocaust: A Handbook and Dictionary (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), particularly part 2, entitled, “Dictionary of Holocaust Terms.” Also, Debski, Battlefield of Ideas, in the section entitled, “Camp Language,” 263–265. 36. Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust, 66.

176 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

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Ibid., 75. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 78. Cf. Gita Sereny, Into that Darkness, An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), passim; Rudolf Höss, Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1992), passim. Cf. e.g., Olga Lengyel, Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz (Chicago: ZiffDavis, 1947), 1, which opens with a “mea culpa”; Also, see Anton Gill, The Journey Back From Hell, Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors: An Oral History (New York: Avon Books, 1988), 15, 92, passim. Cf. Gill, Oral History, passim; also, Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Cf. Isaaiah Trunk, Judenrat: The Jewish Councils in Eastern Europe Under Nazi Occupation (New York: Macmillan, 1972); Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, eds., The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniankow, Prelude to Doom (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999); Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Lódz Ghetto, 1941–1944 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Also, see Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve, A Memoir of Auschwitz (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), especially 119–128, dealing with the seemingly contradictory role of Chaim Rumkowski in the Lódz ghetto. For a lengthy treatment of the process of social acceptance and eventual widespread support of Nazi racial policy see Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State, Germany 1933–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); also, see Robert Gellatelly, Backing Hitler, Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); also, an exceptionally good selection of excerpts from major works dealing with the issue of “Bystander Reactions” throughout organized Europe is contained in Donald L. Niewyk, ed., The Holocaust: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2003); see as well Eichmann recounting that “my superiors held the knife to my throat,” and “there was nothing I could do,” in reference to the sending of an Evangelical clergyman into “protective custody” for aiding and “interceding with the authorities in favor of Jews” in Jochen von Lang with Claus Sibyll, Eichmann Interrogated: Transcripts from the Archives of the Israeli Police (New York: Da Capo Press, 1999), 107. As for the role of ordinary people as executioners, see Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, with a new Afterword (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998) and Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). Cf. note #22, in this chapter. Cf. note #8, in this chapter. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, the Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Collier Books, 1984), 44.

16

A Typology of Gray Flowers: Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl on Auschwitz Timothy E. Pytell wo of the most widely read testimonies on surviving Auschwitz are Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. But when read together we get two very different renditions of the experience. Levi’s meditation is at once profoundly moving and disturbing. His description of the dehumanizing horror of the camp moves us, but also forces us to confront the disturbing insight that language fails to fully convey the experience. In addition, for Levi the categories that are easily placed in opposition in everyday life; good/evil; moral/immoral; innocent victim/guilty perpetrator, and so forth were eroded in the inverted world of Auschwitz. Levi sustained and developed his analysis of the moral ambiguity of Auschwitz in his final work The Drowned and the Saved, especially with his reflection on the “Gray Zone.” Frankl’s version offers a striking contrast to Levi’s. For Frankl the reality of Auschwitz required no radical revision of moral categories. In the words of the renowned Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, Frankl rendered “hunger, humiliation, fear and deep anger at injustice . . . tolerable by closely guarded images of beloved persons, by religion, by a grim sense of humor, and even by glimpses of the healing beauties of nature.” Allport was also moved by Frankl’s ability to make “larger sense out of his apparently senseless suffering” by facing “fully the ubiquity of suffering and the forces of evil,” and thus deriving “a surprisingly hopeful view of man’s capacity to transcend his predicament and discover an adequate guiding truth.”1 Unlike Allport, the highly regarded specialist on Holocaust testimonies Lawrence Langer was extremely critical of Frankl. Langer criticized Man’s Search for not realizing that Auschwitz represented a rupture in the values of Western civilization. According to Langer, Frankl relied on Spinoza,

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Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and the like in order “to transform his ordeal in Auschwitz into a renewed encounter with the literary and philosophical giants” and thus preserved “the intellectual and spiritual traditions they championed, and his own legacy as an heir to their minds.”2 Langer also claimed that Frankl’s testimony “avoids the difficulty of altering the reader’s consciousness so that it can contend with the moral uncertainties of the Holocaust.”3 It is easy to comprehend the mass appeal of Frankl’s version of survival but given what we know about the horrific reality of Auschwitz, the optimism is perplexing. Perhaps the best explanation for the contrast between Levi and Frankl’s rendition is found in an examination of their character, life, and camp experience. For his part, Levi was a shy assimilated Italian Jew born on July 31, 1919 in Turin. His father Cesare was an engineer, and before the First World War he worked for the Ganz company in Budapest, Hungary. After the war broke out Cesare was sent home to Italy but remained a representative for Ganz until his death in 1942. In terms of politics, Cesare was apparently hostile to the Fascist regime, but he did begrudgingly join the party in the early 1930s. For Levi, Fascism was simply something he had grown up. In his teens though, he became disgusted with the regime and when he entered the university in 1937 he decided to study chemistry. He described his choice of chemistry as “a haven of reason against the madness of fascism.”4 While at the university Levi took up mountain climbing as a hobby, and he later described how he learned the virtues of resistance, endurance, and sustenance in the mountains, without which he claimed “no doubt I would have not survived.”5 Levi apparently never seriously considered emigration, even after the anti-Jewish legislation in September 1938. After receiving his doctorate in July 1941, and despite the anti-Jewish laws, Levi managed to find employment in a nickel mine about thirty kilometers from Turin in Bolangero. At the mine in his spare time he began writing his first short stories. When the mine failed to produce he took a job in June 1942 with the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Wander in Milan. In Milan, Levi had a circle of friends and after the Nazi occupation in September 1943, they decided to flee to the mountains in Piedmont and joined the partisans. But on December 13, 1943 Levi and two of his friends were captured by soldiers of the Fascist Republic, and were interrogated and imprisoned for a month before being transferred to the internment camp Fossoli di Carpi on January 20, 1944. Although they were told by their captors that they would not fall into the hands of the Nazis the 7,000 Jewish prisoners at Fossoli di Carpi were nevertheless transferred to Nazi concentration camps. On February 22, 1944 Levi was deported, arriving in Auschwitz four days later. In the face of

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this Nazi persecution Levi claimed he felt for the first time a Jewish identity. As he said “I lived through the surprise and the pride of an identity.”6 Of the 660 men, women, and children transported with Levi, 95 men and 29 women survived the first selection. Levi was number 174517 and was interned in Auschwitz Monowitz, which was one of the larger of the forty satellite camps of Auschwitz. Monowitz had around three thousand inmates and provided workers for the I.G. Farben dye trust. When Levi arrived in Auschwitz the horrific conditions of the camp were improving slightly and his testimony opens with the ironic claim that it was “his good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944.”7 Levi was referring to the fact that due to labor shortages the food ration was a bit higher and life expectancy went up from three or four months to six and a half months. Further, at Monowitz conditions were better than at Auschwitz I (Buna) because there were showers, a medical department, and no gas chambers or torture rooms on the premises. In Monowitz, Levi worked in an excavation commando as a laborer. In the spring, after severely injuring his foot he spent twenty days in the Ka-be/infirmary recovering. In June, Levi had his first great stroke of luck when he met Lorenzo Perrone, an Italian mason. Lorenzo was a civilian who had worked for an Italian firm in France; when the war broke out the Germans moved the firm to the outskirts of Auschwitz. Lorenzo took a liking to his fellow countryman and provided him with an extra ration of food, some mail, and a sense of humanity, all of which were key to keeping him alive. Myriam Anissimov sums up Levis first five months in Monowitz in these terms: Thanks to Lorenzo, who continued to deliver the daily bowl of soup, his condition was not desperate. He had not yet caught any illness, and the combination of his small size, natural thinness, and habitual frugality continued to give him a nutritional advantage. His mind stayed sharp. He observed his surroundings and companions, and his exceptional memory enabled him to preserve names and faces.8

The work and deprivation of summer and early fall clearly took a toll on Levi; nevertheless in the autumn of 1944 he managed to survive selection for the gas chambers. Then as winter set in Levi had his second great fortune, he was chosen for the chemical commando’s laboratory after passing an exam. Without this indoor work and the subsequent protection it gave from the elements, along with the possibility to “organize” material goods Levi would not have survived the winter. Again Anissimov sums up his situation: “At the end of the Monowitz year, Primo Levi’s condition had stabilized since his earlier decline. He was working as a specialist, in buildings protected from the cold. There were no beatings in the laboratory, the work

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was not tiring, and the daily calorie supplement afforded him a margin of safety.”9 Still, such protections did not prevent Levi from coming down with scarlet fever, and on January 11, 1945, he entered the infectious diseases ward of the infirmary. On January 17 the Germans evacuated the camp as the Russians approached, and Levi, along with a number of sick prisoners were left behind. Thus began the Robin Crusoeesque “The Last Ten Days,” that Levi movingly described in his testimony. With the arrival of the Russians on the 27th Levi’s fever overran him and he spent most of February in bed. After an adventurous and somewhat treacherous detour through Central Europe he managed to get back to Turin on October 19, 1945. Viktor Frankl was born in Vienna in 1905 and was therefore fifteen years older than Levi. Frankl’s father worked in the state ministry for youth welfare and unlike Levi’s father was a practicing orthodox Jew until the material deprivation of the First World War forced him to abandon the practice. In contrast to the shy Levi, Frankl was somewhat precocious and at the end of high school he started an epistolary exchange with Sigmund Freud. Freud even published one of these letters as a short article by Frankl in 1924. Frankl then joined Alfred Adler’s circle in 1924, and in the same year he began his medical studies. He also became involved in youth counseling, and for a short time he was president of the Social Democratic student movement in Austria. With the breakup of Adler’s circle in 1927, which seems to have been essentially political, Frankl aligned himself with two older, more conservative departing members—Rudolf Allers and Oswald Schwarz. It seems that after his youthful socialist commitment, Frankl had become more conservative and eventually joined the Fatherland Front—the Austrian form of fascism—in February 1934.10 After receiving his medical degree in 1930, Frankl began practicing as a doctor. From 1933 until 1937 he worked in the female suicide ward at the state hospital Am Steinhof. In 1936 and 1937 he participated as a commentator in four seminars conducted by the Austrian branch of the Göring Institute. Founded by Matthias Heinrich Göring, the cousin of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, the institute tried “to assemble in the spirit of the National Socialist German government” physicians who would “consider the whole personality of the patient” and “not ignore the person’s soul; above all, those who [were] willing to acquire and practice a psychotherapeutic medicine in the spirit of a National Socialist worldview.”11 Frankl also wrote an article for the Göring Institute’s Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie, entitled “Zur geistigen Problematik der Psychotherapie” (On the Mental/Spiritual Problem in Psychotherapy) in 1937. It presented a vision of logotherapy that had crystallized during Frankl’s youth counseling. On a theoretical level Frankl attempted to

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construct a new vision of psychology—“height psychology”—which consisted of directing the patient to finding the unique meaning of their lives by imbuing them with a sense of responsibility. Frankl believed this new form of therapy could surpass that of both Freud and Adler and thus represent the genesis of the so-called “third school of Viennese psychotherapy.” Elsewhere I have argued that Frankl’s article in 1937 is a “tactical accommodation” of the Nazi psychotherapy movement because his focus on worldviews, responsibility, and finding a mission in life offered a solution to those therapists who were uncomfortable with the Göring Institute’s attempted imposition of Nazi ideology into the therapeutic situation.12 After the Anschluss in 1938, Frankl was denied affiliation with the Göring Institute and was also unable to practice as a doctor. Eventually he took a job as “Judischer Fachbehandler” (Jewish specialist) at the Rothschild Hospital, which at the time also functioned as the communal center for Jews. But in 1939 the hospital was taken over by the Nazi authorities. The hospital was one of the few places Jews could work, and Frankl became director of the neurological department. Frankl applied for, and eventually received, a visa to the United States in November 1941, but apparently to take care of his parents, he let his request lapse. As director of the neurological department, Frankl had the opportunity to conduct experimental brain surgeries on suicidal patients. Frankl was rather reticent over the years about these experiments. He didn’t mention the research in his original 1973 autobiographical statement.13 He did describe the experiments in a private interview in 1981 with the Canadian filmmaker Tom Corrigan, but he claimed the information “might be of interest—but it could not be of use.”14 The first public description came in 1995, two years before his death. Most of what we know about the research is derived from this statement and a short article published in 1942.15 In the statement Frankl heroically claimed that although he had no training in neurosurgery, and “Professor Schönbauer did not even allow me to look on when he performed brain surgery” he was nevertheless “able to conduct the surgery.” Frankl also admitted that the “Primary surgeon Reich had refused to undertake the surgeries.”16 It is not clear why Reich refused, but likely he thought the surgeries a bad idea. Still, in these circumstances Frankl read about the relatively novel brain surgery techniques and decided to attempt them. It seems that when patients, in order to avoid deportation to concentration camps, had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and were subsequently given up for dead by other doctors, Frankl felt “justified in trying something.” First, “some injections intravenously . . . and if this didn’t work I gave them injections into the brain . . . into the Cisterna Magna. And if

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that did not work I made a trepanation, opened the skull . . . inserted drugs into the ventricle and made a drainage so the drug went into the Aquaeductus Sylvii . . . People whose breathing had stopped suddenly started breathing again.” But he “could only keep them alive for twentyfour hours, no longer.”17 Frankl’s drugs of choice were the amphetamines Pervitin and Tetrophan. These experiments were ethically questionable and bordered on collaboration with the Nazis. That is, Frankl’s research was supported by the Nazis and his actions stood outside a vision of Jewish communal solidarity. Despite the support the Nazi’s gave his research, Frankl, his wife Tilly, and his parents (Elsa and Gabriel) were all deported to the “model ghetto” of Theresienstadt on September 25, 1942. At Theresienstadt privileged Jews were expecting to live in comparative comfort, but the reality of Theresienstadt was a living hell. The conditions—overcrowding, malnutrition, and starvation—were more akin to a concentration camp. Frankl’s father, like many elder residents, starved to death. In the end, Thersienstadt served as a cover-up for the Holocaust. At Thersienstadt Frankl wrote monthly reports for the so-called Public Health department, and it is clear he was involved with the mental hospital. Apparently he was providing psychotherapy and at the urging of another doctor in the camp, Karl Fleischman, Frankl set up a “Stosstruppe” (shock troop) in order to help prisoners adapt to the new conditions. After his two-year internment in Theresienstadt, Frankl’s life took a dramatic turn for the worse. To ease overpopulation in Thersienstadt, the Nazis initiated numerous transports to Auschwitz, and the deportations peaked in the fall of 1944. Frankl and his wife were transferred to Auschwitz on October 19, 1944. His mother followed four days later. In a 1991 interview with the American minister Robert Schuller, Frankl confessed: “I was in Auschwitz only three or four days. . . . I was sent to a barracks and we were all transported to a camp in Bavaria.”18 Frankl’s short time in Auschwitz is documented by the prisoner log from the subcamp of Dachau, Kaufering III, which listed Frankl’s arrival on October 25, 1944, six days after his deportation from Theresienstadt. Therefore it seems he was in Auschwitz for three days and two nights. Still Frankl wasn’t very forthcoming because in Was nicht in meinen Buechern steht, he made it seem like he was transported quickly from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, rather than after two years, when he described how “nine months later [after their marriage] we arrived in Theresienstadt. Tilly was given a two-year exemption from deportation because her work in the munitions factory was important for the war effort. But I was summoned to be transported to the east, to Auschwitz.”19

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At Kaufering III Frankl was put to work digging ditches. In his words: I was Number 119104, and most of the time I was digging and laying tracks for railway lines. At one time, my job was to dig a tunnel, without help, for a water main under a road. This feat did not go unrewarded; just before Christmas 1944, I was presented with a gift of so-called “premium coupons.”20

Frankl also volunteered for duty as a doctor in a typhus ward: On my fourth day in the sick quarters I had just been detailed to the night shift when the chief doctor rushed in and asked me to volunteer for medical duties in another camp containing typhus patients. Against the urgent advice of my friends (and despite the fact that almost none of my colleagues offered their services) I decided to volunteer. I knew that in a working party I would die in a short time. But if I had to die there might at least be some sense in my death. I thought that it would doubtless be more to the purpose to try and help my comrades as a doctor than to vegetate or finally lose my life as the unproductive laborer that I was then.21

Thus we get a sense of the desperate reality Frankl experienced in the winter of 1944–1945. He also depicted how “in the winter and spring of 1945 there was an outbreak of typhus which infected nearly all the prisoners.”22 Türkheim was the camp Frankl volunteered for because the prisoner logs from Kaufering III have number 119104 arriving there on March 8, 1945. Therefore Frankl was in the work camp Kaufering III just short of five months (October 25 to March 8). Upon his deportation to Türkheim, Frankl likely felt very lucky because he would not have survived much longer under the conditions at Kaufering III. At Türkheim Frankl eventually became senior block warden and was responsible for fifty typhus patients. Frankl was liberated on April 27, 1945. Therefore Frankl endured about six months (October 19, 1944, to April 27, 1945) of concentration camp experience. Before turning to the issue of the radical differences between Levi’s and Frankl’s versions of survival, a couple of similarities in their biographies stand out. First, both Levi and Frankl were slight in stature, which seems to have enabled them to endure physical deprivation slightly better. Also, both were assimilated, educated doctors and subsequently had skills that helped their prospects of survival. Their scientific education also allowed them to objectify their experiences. Therefore they could distance themselves from the absurdity and chaos of the moment and analyze their situations. Interestingly, like Levi, Frankl was an avid mountain climber and also attributed his ability to survive to experiences related to climbing. Frankl spoke German and

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Levi managed to quickly learn enough to survive. Finally, both were incredibly lucky. But the differences between them are glaring. For one, before internment Levi joined the resistance while Frankl engaged in a number of ambiguous activities that bordered on collaboration. The most striking difference is Frankl’s limited experience in Auschwitz. Frankl’s testimony Man’s Search for Meaning leaves the impression he spent a great deal of time in Auschwitz. For example, Jean Améry, Auschwitz survivor and author of At the Mind’s Limits erroneously claimed Frankl “was for years a ditchdigger in Auschwitz-Monowitz.”23 For sure, any reader of Man’s Search is shocked to discover that Frankl spent only a few days in Auschwitz. In the book, Frankl made no reference to his two-year internment in Theresienstadt. Instead, his testimony begins with his arrival in Auschwitz and movingly describes the details of his experiences there at great length. He begins with “the circumstances of [his] admission” and described how a “cry broke from the ranks of anxious passengers . . . Auschwitz!”24 He then related the initial selections, shaving, numbering, delousing, and showers that occurred upon admission to Auschwitz. But the reader is led to believe that Frankl spent a great deal of time in Auschwitz by his descriptions of enduring sleep deprivation; the inability of prisoners to clean their teeth, yet they “had healthier gums than ever before”; and the wearing of “the same shirts for half a year,” and so forth.25 Therefore, he leaves the impression that he experienced the reality of Auschwitz, but the truth is he escaped and subsequently denied the real horror. For example, he claimed “the prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days.”26 Since Frankl was in Kaufering III, after the first few days the horror of the gas chamber certainly disappeared for him. Still, on the opening page of Man’s Search he honestly asserted, “most of the events described here did not take place in the large and famous camps, but in the small ones where most of the real extermination took place.” Nevertheless, he spent the first third of the book describing his experiences in Auschwitz. But he also overlooks the fact that the death camps were where “the real extermination took place” and not in the work camps and ghettos. Although Frankl’s experience was no doubt atrocious, his version of heroically surviving Auschwitz was certainly mendacious. Since Levi spent twice the time in Auschwitz Monowitz that Frankl spent in two subcamps of Dachau perhaps we should not be surprised by the radical differences in the tenor of their testimonies. Nevertheless Frankl’s limited experience must be qualified with his two-year internment in Thersienstadt. Although conditions in Thersienstadt were somewhat manageable they were trying. Frankl describes how he was beaten once,

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and although he could visit with his wife and parents they had separate accommodations. Still it was a ghetto and not a concentration camp. In addition, Frankl had a position as a doctor, but surviving two years under such circumstances was no doubt full of physical, mental, and emotional stress and anxiety. Finally, unlike Levi, we should keep in mind that Frankl lost his entire family: his mother, father, brother, and wife; only his sister survived by emigrating to Australia. Suffering is very difficult, perhaps impossible to quantify. But in attempting to do so we might ask one question: is there a difference between surviving Auschwitz and Dachau? Jean Améry, who spent a year in Auschwitz made just such a distinction when he claimed that as one of the earliest Nazi concentration camps Dachau had “a tradition,” while Auschwitz, created in 1940 “was subject to improvisations from day to day.” Améry then concluded: “Indeed, it is not simple to find a common denominator for these two camps.”27 Could this be one element in the explanation of why the role, impact, and description of suffering differs so greatly in Frankl and Levi’s testimonies? For example, Frankl claimed that in the camps “suffering had become a task on which we did not want to turn out backs. We had to realize its hidden opportunities for achievement.”28 He also argued that the attitude he promoted amongst other prisoners in the camps was one of “suffering proudly—not miserably—knowing how to die.”29 In contrast to Frankl, Levi stated that the image of those suffering and uniting together is only possible “when oppression does not pass a certain limit, or perhaps when the oppressor, through inexperience or magnanimity, tolerates or favors it. But we state that in our days . . . an analogous position of rivalry and hatred among the subjected has been brought about . . . in the Lager.”30 The key point is Levi’s distinction of what happens when oppression passes a certain limit. Essentially this is the line of divide between Frankl and Levi. Frankl was in two subcamps of Dachau and not Auschwitz; in Auschwitz even when conditions had improved the situation was too severe to depict suffering as heroic. In short, Frankl was never injured; although deprived he apparently was never starving, and at key moments—like quickly escaping Auschwitz—he found reprieve. These factors led to Frankl’s heroic version of survival. No doubt there may be a element of truth to the claim that suffering generates insights into truth and thus stature for the survivor of trauma—but the lesson Levi imparts is that this is true only if suffering doesn’t surpass a certain point. We might imagine that Levi’s response to Frankl’s quoting Nietzsche’s dictum that “whatever does not kill you makes you stronger”31 would be, just because you survive—and we should recall the vast majority didn’t— doesn’t mean you are alive.

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In his critique of Frankl’s testimony, Langer pointed out a contradiction between Frankl’s myth of heroic survival and his descriptions of atrocity. According to Langer, it is “as if Frankl himself were unconsciously committed to a dual vision, torn between how it really was and how, retrospectively, he would like to believe it had been.”32 This contradiction in Frankl’s testimony stems from his limited experience that led him to present atrocity as a backdrop to his heroism. But Frankl’s platitudes that “one could make a victory of those experiences, turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did a majority of the prisoners”33 (which suggests he had) sound hollow when confronted with the reality Levi depicted. The deprivation of Auschwitz quickly eroded one’s spiritual reserves and reduced people to beasts. According to Levi all prisoners became debased by the conditions of the camp. Morality and humanity were luxuries of normality that couldn’t be afforded. Clearly Frankl was able to resort to such platitudes because he was lucky enough to have escaped Auschwitz and such depths of suffering. Nevertheless, as Langer recognized, the atrocity is in his testimony, which only serves as a backdrop to Frankl’s spiritual heroics. In addition to actual camp experience we can also explain these radically different versions of survival by comparing how Levi and Frankl thought people would respond to their testimonies, and by analyzing the connected issue of what were their motivations to write. In the camps Frankl had a daydream about how his experience would be received, while Levi had a recurring nightmare. Frankl maintained that one element in survival was sustaining a vision of the future. One way he did this was to imagine himself lecturing about his camp experiences. Thus, when Frankl found himself reflecting upon “the trivial things” of daily survival he described how: I forced my thoughts to turn to another subject. Suddenly I saw myself standing on the platform of a well-lit, warm and pleasant lecture room. In front of me sat an attentive audience on comfortable upholstered seats. I was giving a lecture on the psychology of the concentration camp! All that oppressed me at that moment became objective, seen and described from the remote viewpoint of science. By this method I succeeded somehow in rising above the situation, above the sufferings of the moment, and I observed them as if they were already of the past. Both I and my troubles became the object of an interesting psychoscientific study undertaken by myself.34

For his part Levi had a very different conception of how his experiences would be received. In recounting a recurring dream to his friend Alberto

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in Auschwitz, Levi describes how when he wants to tell of his experiences his audience is “completely indifferent: they speak confusedly of other things among themselves, as if I was not there. My sister looks at me, gets up goes away without a word.”35 (We should note that when Levi returned he actually found a receptive audience, which gave him the confidence to write). Although Frankl is daydreaming and Levi literally dreaming, the contrast between the dreams/expectations reflects a number of issues. First, since he already had achieved limited professional success Frankl was likely confident he could expect an audience. But unlike Levi he has no concern that people would not understand him. Arguably, Levi’s experience is of such horrifying intensity that he recognizes no one will be able to fully understand him. Frankl is not beset with such a concern and his daydream is grandiose; his experiences are fodder for his professional development and self-congratulatory. Although the motivation for the daydream is to escape the trying circumstances, one would be hardpressed to claim that Frankl’s anguish is comparable to the fever pitch of Levi’s. Frankl’s level of suffering is such that he has no worries that he would be understood or even listened too. Levi, on the other hand is beset with fear that no one will be able to, much less want to, understand. This contrast also reflects their distinctive characters. Levi was shy and prone to introspection, while Frankl was self-promoting and an extrovert. These embers of the unconscious also lead us a step closer to understanding what each thinker was trying to convey when he sat down to write his testimony. Frankl decided to write his testimony as a psychological description of the concentration camps and he originally titled it Ein Psychlog erlebt das Konzentrationslager (A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp). In doing so he was clearly trying to makes sense of and objectify his experience. In short he wanted to execute the scientific study he had dreamed of. In contrast Levi felt an obligation as a survivor to bear witness; in his words he was motivated by “the need to tell our story to ‘the rest,’ to make ‘the rest’ participate in it.”36 In a way then Frankl was trying to distance and objectify his experience as a way to gain psychological insight. This leads to a testimony somewhat detached from actual experience, and as we have argued, from the subsequent impression he was in Auschwitz. But also as a survivor and psychologist he leaves the impression he had the makeup to survive. As Langer remarked, “the real hero of Man’s Search for Meaning is not man, but Viktor Frankl.”37 No doubt, the success of logotherapy as a psychological school has depended on the lionized image of Frankl the Auschwitz survivor. Levi, like Frankl, depicts his experience with the objectivity of a scientist, but Levi’s work is absent of spiritual heroics; there are embers of humanity, but no celebration of survival. In

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contrast to Frankl, Levi narrates succinctly his experience and his memory for details is astounding. Also, unlike Frankl, who dictated his testimony in nine days shortly after his return, Levi recounted his experience a multitude of times verbally before spending a year writing his testimony. Levi’s original title was Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man). If Frankl’s question is a psychological investigation of the impact of concentration camps, Levi is describing what happens to humanity in the face of such oppression. More specifically, Levi is trying to make the reader confront extreme experience that nevertheless remains beyond full depiction or portrayal. Therefore, their different agendas lead Frankl to a heroic realm of spiritual freedom while Levi depicts a desperate effort to survive and maintain traces of humanity. Another element in a plausible explanation for these contrasting versions of spiritual heroism versus maintenance of humanity turns on the issue of belief in God. Langer remarked that the pervasive Christian vocabulary in Frankl’s testimony makes it seem as if “Frankl secretly yearned for a transfiguration of Auschwitz into nothing more than a test of the religious sensibility.”38 It is likely that Frankl was a believer before his concentration camp experience, but afterwards he certainly was and he even went so far as to use his survival to justify his religious commitment. For example, he argued “my personal experiences offer evidence—religion did not die even in Auschwitz, nor ‘after Auschwitz,’ to allude to the title of a book that was authored by a rabbi (who incidentally had not been there).”39 Frankl’s disparaging remark was directed at Richard L. Rubenstein’s controversial After Auschwitz that rejected “the traditional biblical theology of covenant and election” in the name of a “death-of-God theology.”40 But, for Frankl, working through the reality of Auschwitz did not require a profound reevaluation of theological propositions. Levi, on the other hand, had the opposite response. He entered Auschwitz a secular humanist and had no religious revelation in the camps. Actually, the religious lesson that Levi derived from the camps was that there was no benevolent God capable of intervening in history, and the “frightful iniquity” of the camps confirmed his nonbelief.41 But Levi also concurred with Améry that in the camps “the believers lived better.”42 The issue of belief surely sheds light on why Frankl—with his limited experience—was able to give an uplifting spiritual account of survival and why Levi’s account is so sobering and deeply humanistic. A related issue that reflects the metaphysical difference between Levi and Frankl and their different extremes of experience is reflected by the disparity between Levi’s haunting statement that in Auschwitz—“Here there is no why,”43 and Frankl’s claim that the camps reaffirmed Nietzsche’s statement that “if one has a why they can endure almost any

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how.”44 One is tempted to attribute this difference to their contrasting religious attitudes. But it was an SS guard who taught Levi that in Auschwitz there is no why. That was the first rule of the camp. Frankl had a similar experience upon his admission to Auschwitz when he tells an old prisoner he wants to save his book manuscript—“his life’s work.” In response the prisoner just grinned and said “shit.” For Frankl this was the first phase “of psychological reaction: I struck out my whole former life.”45 Nevertheless, Frankl’s response to this debasement is “a man can get used to anything, but do not ask us how.”46 But the truth is that Frankl never had to get used to the extreme reality of Auschwitz. He therefore was able to sustain a why. Also, the ability to maintain a why is likely what Améry meant when he stated Dachau had a tradition while Auschwitz was a day-to-day improvisation. The absence of a why in Levi’s testimony brings us a step closer to his goal of making us experience the nonsensical realm of Auschwitz. In contrast, Frankl’s impression that he survived Auschwitz by maintaining a why transfigures Auschwitz into a type of spiritual test that he was capable of passing. It was exactly this world of extreme experience beyond the why that Levi feared he would be unable to convey and yet struggled to intensely. Since Frankl had such limited experience he could turn a blind eye to this realm, and reassert normal moral categories and modes of explanation to convey his experiences. The final contrast between Levi and Frankl is reflected in their different conception of what it meant to survive and how they felt about the public recognition that came with survivorship. As we have seen, Frankl certainly made use of his survival of Auschwitz. He also used his survival to promote his brand of psychotherapy by claiming “the main tenets of logotherapy were justified by the acid test of the concentration camp.”47 He was extremely proud of the popularity of Man’s Search for Meaning and the impact the book had on readers. He described how he received an “average of twenty-three letters a day” mostly from Americans who mainly write “to say, ‘Thank You, Dr. Frankl, for changing my life.’ ”48 In sum, Frankl clearly enjoyed his fame as an Auschwitz survivor, and the legitimacy it brought to his psychological theory. Once again Levi was strikingly different on these issues. After retiring as a chemist, he turned his energy to writing and eventually achieved success, especially with the publication of The Periodic Table in 1975 (1984 in America). But Levi was ambivalent about success at best; in the words of Levi biographer Carole Angier he was a “man who needed recognition, and one who could not endure it.”49 Also like Frankl, Levi received “fan mail” of at least two or three letters a day. For Levi though, every morning when the post arrived became a moment of dread for him.

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He was clearly uneasy with the fame of survival and his newly emergent celebrity status. Thus near the end of his life in an interview he attempted to clarify who he really was. “He was not a prophet, and he was not strong. His readers thought he was, because he had survived the Lager.”50 The need to dispel the fame of survival—which was a key component of the depression he was suffering near the end of his life—offers striking contrast to Frankl who never even set the record straight about his limited experience in Auschwitz. Levi’s attempt to honestly portray the reality of Auschwitz and to stay true to the historical significance of Auschwitz foreclosed any possibility that his survival was heroic. Millions died and he recognized his survival was sheer chance. Any attempt to sanctify his survival by deriving fame from it or finding redemption in the Holocaust was dishonest and an insult to the millions who died. Levi said this best when near the end of his life he wrote “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself, and this all the more when they are available, blank, and lacking a political or moral armature.”51 This is the terrible truth about Holocaust survivors. I have designated them “gray flowers”; figures that managed to bloom even after the inferno of the Holocaust. I picture an unending field burnt black with a few gray flowers—these are unsettling tragic tales such as Frankl and Levi lived and described. Notes 1. Gordon Allport, preface to Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) by Viktor Frankl, 7–10. 2. Lawrence Langer, “The Literature of Auschwitz,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, eds. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 604. 3. Lawrence Langer, Versions of Survival (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 24. 4. Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi: The Tragedy of an Optimist, trans. Steve Cox (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1999) 38. 5. Ibid., 56. 6. Ibid., 95. 7. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 9. 8. Anissimov, The Tragedy of an Optimist, 177. 9. Ibid., 190. 10. See Frankl’s Gauachten in the Staatsarchiv Vienna, document PB 7223.

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11. Matthias Göring, Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie (1933), quoted in Geoffrey Cocks, Psychotherapy in the Third Reich (Oxford University Press, 1985) 117. 12. See Timothy E. Pytell “Viktor Frankl and the Genesis of the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy,” Psychoanalytic Review, 88, 2 (April 2001): 311–334. 13. Viktor Frankl, “Viktor Frankl,” in Psychotherapie in Selbstdarstellung, ed. Ludwig J. Pongratz (Vienna: Verlag Hans Huber, 1973). 14. Viktor Frankl interviewed by Tom Corrigan 1981 (audio tape), Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California. 15. See Viktor Frankl, Was nicht in meinen Buechern steht (Muenchen: Quintessenz 1995). Frankl’s written documentation is Frankl, “Pervitin Intrazisternal,” Ars Medici no.1 (1942): 58–60. 16. Frankl, Was nicht in meinen Buechern steht, 57. 17. Corrigan Interview, GTU. 18. Frankl, “Dr. Robert Schuller Interviews Viktor Frankl: How to Find Meaning in Life,” Possibilities: The Magazine of Hope (March/April 1991): 10. 19. Frankl, Was nicht in meinen, 68. 20. Frankl, Man’s Search, 21. 21. Ibid., 59–60. 22. Ibid., 46. 23. Jean Améry, At the Mind’s Limits (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 3. 24. Frankl, Man’s Search, 22. 25. Ibid., 30–32. 26. Ibid., 36. 27. Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 6. 28. Frankl, Man’s Search, 86. 29. Ibid., 91. 30. Levi, Survival, 91. 31. Frankl, Man’s Search, 89. 32. Langer, Versions of Survival, 19. 33. Frankl, Man’s Search, 81. 34. Ibid., 82. 35. Levi, Survival, 60. 36. Ibid., 9. 37. Langer, Versions of Survival, 24. 38. Ibid., 22–23. 39. Frankl, Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning (New York: Insight, 1997), 152. 40. See Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), especially Part III: Theology and Contemporary Judaism, 157–293. 41. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 145. 42. Ibid., 146. 43. Levi, Survival, 29. 44. Frankl, Man’s Search, 88. 45. Ibid., 27.

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46. Ibid., 30. 47. Frankl, quoted in Hall, “Conversation with V. E. Frankl,” 58. 48. Frankl Interview with Matthew Scully “First Things” (http://www.firstthings. com/ftissues/ft9504/articles/scully.html). 49. Carole Angier, The Double Bond (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 592. 50. Ibid., 688. 51. Levi, The Drowned, 40.

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“The Gray Zone” as a Complex of Tensions: Primo Levi on Holocaust Survival Marie L. Baird Introduction An article entitled “A Holocaust Horror Story Without a Schindler”1 appeared in The New York Times of Sunday, January 7, 2001. Although clearly meant as a review of director Tim Blake Nelson’s film “The Grey Zone,” I was drawn to the article by the film title’s unambiguous reference to Primo Levi’s work. Levi had devoted a chapter to a detailed analysis of what he called “the gray zone” in his final book, The Drowned and The Saved;2 an analysis that had been extensively commented upon by Tzvetan Todorov and Giorgio Agamben in separate works.3 Indeed, Levi’s notion of a “gray zone” of extreme moral ambiguity in the concentration and extermination camps has become an anchoring point for much commentary on Holocaust survival. Very provisionally, we might regard the notion of “the gray zone” as Levi’s symbolization of the moral compromise that many desperate prisoners were forced to make in order to buy themselves more time. The price exacted was collaboration with the SS, up to and including the murder of their fellow prisoners. Because the notion of “the gray zone” functions in Holocaust research as a symbol of a perhaps unprecedented degree of moral ambiguity that renders a facile ethical judgment impossible, and because, as symbol, it also designates the concrete effluvium of that ideologically poisoned “second reality”4 known as National Socialism, it deserves analysis in terms of the “consciousness-reality-language complex” that Eric Voegelin delineates in the fifth volume of Order and History.5 My essay discusses “the gray zone” as a differentiated index of existential truth, the outcome of Levi’s experience of incarceration in Auschwitz and his symbolization of such experience—both of which are held in “the procedural tension

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between experience and symbolization” that allows the “truth of consciousness” to emerge in its limpidness.6 As will become apparent, “the gray zone,” as symbol, ironically clarifies the fact of an extreme moral ambiguity that all but precludes ethical judgment.

“The Gray Zone” as a Complex of Tensions James Rhodes writes that “the only events that even counted as ‘history’ for [Voegelin] were those ‘experiences in which man gains the understanding of his humanity and together with it the understanding of its limits.’ ”7 For Voegelin, a history that limns the truth about the human condition emerges as men and women participate in what he calls “It-reality,”8 a reality that is apprehended as infinitely transcending humankind’s attempts to grasp it but that nevertheless shows itself, however fleetingly, as moments of insight into existence. Such insight then issues forth in symbols that function as clarifying linguistic indices of an ever more differentiated and hence nuanced “picture” of reality. In particular, the truth of human existence is illuminated as the tension between matter and spirit or, as Levi characterizes the human condition, “man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.”9 Hypostatization of any of these symbols destroys the tension between the experience and its symbolization, reifying the always evanescent and conceptually indeterminate symbol into conceptual rigidity. In such manner are “second realities” such as National Socialism born, as the participation in It-reality that gives rise to fragile and polyvalent symbols of existential truth is eschewed in favor of participation in the ideological System that generates its own conceptually rigidified “truths.”10 Primo Levi was one of millions of victims of such an ideologically fueled derailment. His incarceration in Auschwitz tested his own understanding of humanity and its limits so severely, though perhaps not in the manner that Voegelin had in mind, that the Italian title of his first book translates into If This is a Man.11 The remainder of his life was devoted to the interrogation of what Agamben calls “[t]he aporia of Auschwitz … a non-coincidence between facts and truth, between verification and comprehension.”12 In terms provided by Voegelin’s theory of consciousness, the aporia of Auschwitz that exercised Levi’s soul and mind was the utter discrepancy between the facts of his experience as stated empirically and the reality of that experience as articulated truthfully by symbols such as “the gray zone.” The empirical facts of Levi’s incarceration are well known. He spent roughly eleven months in Auschwitz and was able to survive by the combination of luck, intelligence, and a selflessly generous rescuer, Lorenzo

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Perrone. He was freed when the Russian Army liberated the camp in January 1945, and was eventually repatriated after a sojourn in Russia. His experience of the camp—and here we pass over immediately into its symbolization, holding the two in tension—enabled him to differentiate a symbol that he introduces thus: Let us confine ourselves to the Lager, which (even in its Soviet version) can be considered an excellent “laboratory”: the hybrid class of the prisonerfunctionary constitutes its armature and at the same time its most disquieting feature. It is a gray zone, poorly defined, where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge. This gray zone possesses an incredibly complicated internal structure and contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge.13

As symbol, “the gray zone” is clearly part of a narrative and Voegelin’s work reminds us that narrativity is a product of conceptual reification.14 Yet as symbol “the gray zone” is also the polyvalent result of Levi’s moment of “insight into a fundamental truth about existence.”15 This is but the first of the many tensions with which this symbol confronts us. “The gray zone” as taken up in the tension between Levi’s experience and its symbolization also confronts us with a number of concurrent tensions: its status as the experienced consequence of the “second reality” of National Socialism held in relation to participation in It-reality; the “immanence” of the symbolized experience of “the gray zone” held in relation to the self-transcendence of Levi’s symbolizing consciousness; the extreme moral ambiguity of the “zone” itself held in relation to the status, strictly speaking, of its occupants as “perpetrators” against “victims”; and the extension of its symbolizing capacity beyond camp walls as it confronts a much larger population, which ultimately for Levi includes us all. I examine each of these tensions in turn. “The Gray Zone” and the Tension Between Thing-Reality and It-Reality We begin by taking up Levi’s own status as narrator of the story that exists in the tension between conceptual narration and existential participation, between what Voegelin calls Thing-Reality and It-Reality. Agamben asserts, plausibly I believe, that Levi’s testimony, as bearing witness through his writings, “has nothing to do with the acquisition of facts for a trial (he is not neutral enough for this, he is not a testis).”16 The Drowned and The Saved opens with the following few lines from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: “Since then, at an uncertain

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hour, / That agony returns, / And till my ghastly tale is told / This heart within me burns.”17 In an interview published in English only in 1997, Levi referred to himself as being “reduced to the state of the Ancient Mariner.”18 He ceaselessly interrogated his own experience of Auschwitz; it would not let him alone. In a conversation with Ferdinando Camon, Levi stated unequivocally, “If there is an Auschwitz, then there cannot be a God” yet wrote on the manuscript of his interview with Camon: “I find no solution to the riddle, I seek, but I do not find it.”19 While it is crucially important to acknowledge fully Levi’s atheistic convictions, I am unable to dismiss him as being therefore exempt from an insightful participation in It-reality that differentiates itself truthfully in symbols such as “the gray zone.” Voegelin notes: The immediate presence [of It-reality] in the movements of the soul requires the revelatory language of consciousness. This is the language of seeking, searching, and questioning, of ignorance and knowledge concerning the divine ground, of futility, absurdity, anxiety, and alienation of existence, of being moved to seek and question, of being drawn toward the ground, of turning around, of return, illumination, and rebirth.20

That Levi’s testimony stressed and restressed the anguish of the search, particularly in light of his experience of incarceration, does not negate the fact of his search as such. That Levi refused to assent to belief in the God proclaimed by his religious tradition does not condemn him to a hypostatized position of relinquishing the need to search. In that sense, we might speculate that Levi’s atheism actually nourished what could perhaps be more accurately described as a participation in It-reality whose tragic terminus stems from an apparent renunciation21 of the “undying struggle in which man is fated to participate by his existence.”22 From the perspective Levi’s unfulfilled searching offers us in its interrogating differentiation of symbols such as “the gray zone,” I venture to assert that his story—and its symbols—articulate the event of his conscious participation as a “questioner”23 in an It-reality differentiating itself truthfully. “The gray zone” is not merely a concept referring to the empirical facts of a once lived reality, a fossilized remainder of an experience now past; it is rather a linguistic index of an existentially nuanced differentiation of reality, a profound moment of truth. But—in dialogue with Voegelin—what truth? Agamben restates “the aporia of Auschwitz” mentioned earlier: On the one hand, what happened in the camps appears to the survivors as the only true thing and, as such, absolutely unforgettable; on the other hand,

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this truth is to the same degree unimaginable, that is, irreducible to the real elements that constitute it. Facts so real that, by comparison, nothing is truer; a reality that necessarily exceeds its factual elements—such is the aporia of Auschwitz [emphasis added].24

“The gray zone” is the noetic differentiation that symbolizes the experienced outcome of order perverted into extremity, what I earlier called “the concrete effluvium of that ‘second reality’ known as National Socialism.” The dire moral ambiguity “the gray zone” symbolizes can only be articulated from the insightfulness of a consciousness that is able to recognize it as such. To gain a better understanding of its “truth” requires us first to examine more closely the second reality that gave rise to it. From there, we can then proceed to a discussion of the experienced “immanence” “the gray zone” symbolizes, as recognized by the self-transcending impetus of Levi’s relentless questioning. “The Gray Zone” and the Tension Between Second Reality and It-Reality The “truth” Levi’s symbol articulates is paradoxically founded on the harrowing experience of the consequence of “the lie,”25 taken to its dehumanizing extreme. Voegelin analyzes the various “descents” from It-reality into second reality throughout Hitler and the Germans, but nowhere more helpfully to the present purposes than in the second chapter of that book, devoted to the “development of diagnostic tools.”26 There, he limns the “descent” from It-reality into second reality as occurring through a number of stages. Briefly, the possibility of an open, ideologically unsullied participation in It-reality is denied along with humankind’s “theomorphic”27 nature; the result is the concomitant “dedivinization” of humans that proceeds in tandem with their “dehumanization.” Such denial renders the It-reality unavailable to human consciousness. Loss of It-reality then permits the substitution of a second reality, understood as the reality conceptualized by an increasingly dedivinized, dehumanized consciousness that becomes quite incapable of insightful participation in It-reality. Voegelin wonderfully quotes Novalis’s “The world shall be as I wish it!” which he so rightly identifies as “in a nutshell the whole problem of Hitler.”28 Interestingly for our discussion, the “dedivinization” and “dehumanization” that accompany the loss of insightful participation in It-reality become literalized as the second reality of National Socialism fashions the topos of a putative “Judenfrage” into the brick and mortar of the crematoria. Dedivinization and dehumanization are concretized into the

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specters of the Sonderkommando, or “crematorium ravens” as Levi calls them,29 the basely murderous Kapos, the Muselmanner, and all the other denizens and their victims who inhabit “the gray zone.” Loss of reality transmogrifies into life—and death—in extremity. I am convinced that Levi was absolutely aware of this “descent” into second reality and provides ample evidence of his awareness. The Drowned and the Saved alone contains discussions of the deformed language of the Third Reich taken, interestingly, from the work of Victor Klemperer,30 though it could have been taken just as easily from Hitler and the Germans. In seeking to describe the useless and excessively violent practices of the Nazis he twice complains of having “to reason with a logic that isn’t mine.”31 He portrays escape from the camp as “[i]n Nazi logic, an intolerable event” because it constitutes nothing less than “a shattering of the myth” of the Jewish people who are supposed to be “defeated by definition.”32 Indeed, “the entire history of the brief ‘millennial Reich’ can be reread as a war against memory, an Orwellian falsification of memory, falsification of reality, negation of reality.”33 As Voegelin never tires of reminding his readers, when second reality triumphs over first reality the self-transcendence of an open, insightful participation in It-reality gives way to the immanence of rigid enclosure in the ideological System; murder lies just around the corner.

“The Gray Zone” and the Tension of Experienced Immanence as Limpidly Symbolized Agamben observes that in Auschwitz, “[t]he bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent.”34 Auschwitz is indeed the extreme example of a world devoid of transcendence. The immanence of the Nazi “worldview” in which reality is created in the image of Adolf Hitler plays itself out in the absolute immanence of the extermination camp. The symbol “the gray zone” is born in the tension between the experience and symbolization of a universe in which life is reduced to its lowest common denominator—the struggle to survive. Even though “the gray zone” is a polyvalent symbol with many shadings and gradations, as Levi himself attests, its ultimate anchoring point remains the experienced immanence of a human body that feels itself to be in an irreversible process of decline due to extreme privation. Given the inevitability of such decline in the face of the conditions prisoners were forced to endure, the fight for survival required them to “retreat to individual interests”35 in order to maximize their own

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potentialities. The neighbor be damned—quite literally—an assertion not yet capable, however, of ethical judgment. The various denizens of the camps attain visibility by the degree of their luck and determination to survive, or precisely the lack thereof. (The specter of the Muselmann, e.g., bears the mark of the greatest degree of abandonment possible in the greatest hour of need.) But even if luck allowed the prisoner to exercise his or her determination to endure, it was very difficult to escape the almost inevitable taint of moral ambiguity for the simple fact that his or her survival was often predicated on harm to (or worse, the death of) another. As if that weren’t enough, his or her chances of survival improved the more he or she collaborated with the oppressor—or such, at least, was a commonly held perception.36 “The gray zone” arises at the first hint of moral ambiguity. Perhaps the essence of “the gray zone,” as Levi describes it, is his assertion that “[i]t is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself … .”37 This point is key to an understanding of “the gray zone” as the symbol of an immanence devoid of transcendence. In Voegelinian terms, either the “retreat to individual interests” mentioned above or outright collusion with the oppressor introduces the prisoner to the National Socialist second reality in which another insightfully differentiated symbol, that of “universal humanity,” has been utterly abandoned. The intense moral ambiguity of the prisoner’s situation, for Levi, arises when he or she steals, lies, or colludes—taking up the power offered and exercising it in ways that harm others. Although the motivations for doing so are varied and complex,38 acting on them serves to taint the survivor’s life with the unforgettable memories of having participated in sometimes unspeakable acts that degraded and killed others. “The gray zone” symbolizes the lived consequences of that second reality where theft, degradation, and murder become routine and where prisoners are dragged down morally into complicity. It exudes immanence: that of the human person whose open participation in It-reality is stripped of its quest for existential truth given the overriding concern with bodily needs, and that of the concentrational milieu that mirrors the second reality that created it. Clearly, it is a zone that Levi knew from the “inside,” so to speak. Equally clearly judging from Levi’s writings, it is a zone that can also, perhaps paradoxically, allow for existential truth to emerge in the tension between experience and symbolization. It is extremely important to be precise in my claims at this point. I offer here no “redemptive” interpretation of the prisoner’s ordeal. It remains an absolute affront to humanity that no amount of theologizing can—or ought to try to—reclaim. In this

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regard, Levi invokes Alessandro Manzoni’s remark that “[p]rovocateurs, oppressors, all those who in some way injure others, are guilty, not only of the evil they commit, but also of the perversion into which they lead the spirit of the offended,”39 a sentiment that I am confident Voegelin would have agreed with as long as it is not used in an attempt to collectively exonerate the German people. I also do not claim that Levi took up a privileged position of detachment from the other prisoners as the chronicler of their experiences, in the sense of being granted some kind of immunity from their suffering. I do claim that he felt compelled, after the fact, to interrogate his experience in a quest to “understand” it, as he wrote to his German translator.40 And herein lies his anguished searching for the truth of existence, in my estimation, given voice by an insightful awareness that symbolizes the abomination of an experienced immanence devoid of transcendence. Although he does not recognize his experience of It-reality in any manner that can be termed theistic and is therefore unwilling to symbolize it as such, I believe the case can nevertheless be made that he engaged the “undying struggle in which man is fated to participate by his existence” by the very fact of his quest as a writer.

“The Gray Zone” and the Tension Between Complicity and Victimhood: A Caveat One of the difficulties of writing about “the gray zone,” particularly as an outsider, is the fear of describing its extreme moral ambiguity in a way that blurs the majority of prisoners’ status as victims who are in no way to be blamed. Surely, there were prisoners who collaborated in ways for which they could be held criminally culpable, from the prisoner-informant to the Kapo who routinely murdered. The viciousness of “the gray zone” results, in part, from the oppressor’s creation of conditions that forced the heretofore innocent but desperate prisoner into performing morally reprehensible acts,41 as Levi’s quotation of Manzoni suggests. Survivors’ testimonies are replete with accounts of “organizing” food, clothing, and other valuable articles. Theft from other prisoners was rampant. As a symbol, therefore, “the gray zone” bears within it the tension between an environment that forced otherwise innocent prisoners to take advantage of others in order to enhance their own chances of survival and the ongoing fact of their victimhood as such. “The gray zone” also bears the added tension between those driven by desperation to “organize” at the expense of their neighbors and criminally culpable prisoners who collaborated for reasons beyond a care for personal survival. For the first group, the environment that induced them to engage in morally questionable acts

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ironically guarantees their victimhood because such acts are such an extreme example of it.42 Here, we see once again the consequences of a second reality that has become concretized: erstwhile victims are deprived even of the transparency of their innocence. For the second, the degree of their victimization has to be offset by the motivations informing their collusion. On this point Levi is clear: I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer. I know that the murderers existed, not only in Germany, and still exist, retired or on active duty, and that to confuse them with their victims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign of complicity; above all, it is precious service rendered (intentionally or not) to the negators of truth.43

The extreme moral ambiguity of “the gray zone” is evident in my own discussion of it. At any rate, one can only imagine the anguish inscribed in the experience out of which Levi’s insightful awareness was able to wrest “the gray zone” as that symbol of an immanent universe that seeks to torment its “guiltless victims” by denying them “even the solace of innocence.”44 In light of the foregoing discussion, Levi’s insistence upon the suspension of ethical judgment in relation to the noncriminally motivated prisoner becomes clear. Both Agamben and Todorov agree that Levi’s interrogation of “the gray zone” implies the refusal of the very possibility of judgment.45 As well as symbolizing an immanent universe devoid of transcendence, it also symbolizes the impossibility of judging those its minions forced into performing morally questionable acts.46 It therefore makes a direct appeal to us, questioning our right to judge and thereby perhaps drawing us into a different kind of interrogation that echoes Levi’s own—the questioning of our own experience that would make such a judgment difficult, if not impossible. The Extension of “The Gray Zone” Beyond Camp Walls Voegelin’s analysis of the German bystander’s position, ironically named the “Buttermelcher Syndrome”47 after the street address of an erstwhile bystander offended by Voegelin’s work, offers a general extension of “the gray zone” beyond the walls of Auschwitz. The Syndrome’s focus is somewhat different however, as it is concentrated on ordinarily decent citizens who have either lost or relinquished that degree of insightful consciousness that would enable them to recognize their support of National Socialism as a crucial personal failure. In short, the spoudaios (serious, educated) has ceded the field to the amathes (ignorant, “untaught”).48

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The Syndrome takes on many forms, all of which are characterized as “descents” entailing a corresponding loss of insight, which is inevitably accompanied by the loss of “primary virtue.”49 All of this occurs while maintaining the appearance of civilized decency. The fact that Voegelin’s analysis of the “Buttermelcher Syndrome” helps to explain why the otherwise decent citizen consents to the domination of a second reality does not yet touch upon the extreme moral ambiguity of “the gray zone,” however. Or does it? Todorov suggests a strong connection between the two when he asserts, on the basis of personal experience, that “the gray zone” is “a zone that in totalitarian states includes the entire population to one degree or another.”50 He thereby widens the focus to “Buttermelcher Syndrome” proportions, if those proportions include the erstwhile inhabitants of the Third Reich who supported the regime as well as their spiritually perverted heirs who Voegelin was analyzing in 1964. And interestingly, Levi implicitly concurs by widening the focus even further—by posing an essentially Voegelinian question that we must now examine. Levi’s analysis of Chaim Rumkowski, the Elder of the Lodz ghetto, is his second invocation of “the gray zone” in The Drowned and the Saved, one situated, strictly speaking, outside the camp. The conditions of the ghetto make that distinction of little importance to Levi or to us. Rumkowski exhibits a degree of moral ambiguity that enables Levi to consign him to the same category as “the Kapos and Lager functionaries, the small hierarchs who serve a regime to whose misdeeds they are willingly blind, the subordinates who sign everything because a signature costs little, those who shake their heads but acquiesce, those who say, ‘If I did not do it, someone else worse than I would.’ ”51 It is important to note that from the perspective of my earlier discussion of complicity and victimhood, Rumkowski—or at least Levi’s portrayal of him—may be considered to exhibit a particularly high degree of ambiguity in this regard. Levi articulates this ambiguity in a passage that is important enough to cite in its entirety: Had [Rumkowski] survived his own tragedy, and the tragedy of the ghetto he contaminated, superimposing on it his histrionic image, no tribunal would have absolved him, nor, certainly, can we absolve him on the moral plane. But there are extenuating circumstances: an infernal order such as National Socialism exercises a frightful power of corruption, against which it is difficult to guard oneself. It degrades its victims and makes them similar to itself, because it needs both great and small complicities. To resist it requires a truly solid moral armature, and the one available to Chaim Rumkowski, the Lodz merchant, together with his entire generation, was fragile. But how strong is ours, the Europeans of today? How would each of us behave if driven by necessity and at the same time lured by seduction? [Emphasis added]52

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Levi’s question resonates with Voegelinian overtones, widening the focus beyond Todorov’s observation and extending it to the human order as such: “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit.”53 The fragility of our participation in It-reality is never more evident than when we are seduced by a second reality promising something other than the fragile, yet true, reality of the tension governing our “hybrid” existence. However, and this is a crucially important point both in Hitler and the Germans and in Levi’s work, each individual is called upon to bear personal responsibility for his or her seduction, rather than to lay the blame on the siren-like qualities of the seducer.54 Refusal to do so prepares the way for the “descents” into the various “abysses” that Voegelin analyzes so ably, as well as for the “Buttermelcher Syndrome” that lingers for years, decades, or even centuries after the fact. To comment further upon this refusal would be to simply repeat the arguments of Hitler and the Germans. Perhaps Levi entertained his own form of refusal, although I hesitate to call it that. It does seem that he ultimately renounced “the struggle” that characterizes the human experience as one of insightful—if for him anguished—participation in It-reality. Todorov comments, “Everything would be clear and simple had Levi not taken his life in 1987.”55 Despite the fact that Levi left no note, I am inclined to believe that his death was an act of suicide, evoking, of course, the need to try to understand and explain it. Todorov speculates, with the aid of psychoanalysis, that Levi killed himself because of his realization that “ordinary people” like himself are capable of inhabiting “the gray zone” understood in its widest possible sense. This realization, according to Todorov, imposed an extra layer of guilt on the survivor guilt that Levi was already struggling with, sending him over the brink. It was also “[a]n absurd conclusion, of course, an erroneous deduction, but our unconscious minds favor that kind of mistake.”56 And later, “In his effort to understand, Levi may well have internalized the desire of others to destroy him.”57 It is perhaps best to leave speculation about the facts and motivations surrounding Levi’s death to his biographers. From a Voegelinian perspective, we might only suggest that Levi perhaps renounced his own participation in It-reality. This outcome in no way calls into question the integrity of his search for existential truth, however. Todorov writes that “[o]ne almost regrets Levi’s commitment to his project of understanding the enemy (for his sake, not for ours: as readers we are only enriched by his accomplishment).”58 I am not so sure of this if our “enrichment” were to come at the price of a death that was conclusively proven to be suicide. Truth should not have to be purchased at so high a price.

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Notes 1. Kristin Hohenadel, “A Holocaust Horror Story Without a Schindler,” The New York Times, January 7, 2001, Section 2, 13, 22. 2. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Random House, 1988), 36–69. 3. Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps, trans. Arthur Denner and Abigail Pollak (New York: Henry Holt, 1996); Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999). 4. Cf. Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, trans. and ed. Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 108–109. I argue later that “the gray zone” is a symbol whose polyvalence ultimately exceeds this study’s capacity to do it full justice. 5. Cf. Eric Voegelin, Order and History Volume Five: In Search of Order, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 31–33. 6. Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis, trans. and ed. Gerhart Niemeyer (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1978), 12. 7. James M. Rhodes, “On Voegelin: His Collected Works and His Significance,” in The Review of Politics, 54, 4 (1992): 634. Rhodes cites Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952), 78. 8. Cf. Voegelin, In Search of Order, 30, to be contrasted later with his notion of “Thing-Reality.” 9. Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Knopf, 1984), 11. 10. Cf. Voegelin, In Search of Order, 28–30, 54–56. In 34–35 he reminds us that “the tension itself is the structure to be explored; it must not be fragmentized for the purpose of using one of the poles as the basis for clever psychologizing.” The present study seeks to avoid this temptation, one to which Todorov succumbs, to be discussed later. 11. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 1958), translated into English as Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Macmillan, 1960). 12. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 12. 13. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 42. 14. Cf. Voegelin, In Search of Order, 40. 15 Ibid., 41. 16. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 17. 17. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, vii. 18. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 16. 19. Cf. Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist, trans. Steve Cox (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1998), 390. The conversation with Camon has been translated as part of Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi, trans. John Shepley (Marlbaro, VT: Marlbaro Press, 1989).

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20. Eric Voegelin, Order and History Volume Four: The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 17–18. 21. Although I am inclined to accept the pronouncement of suicide, this study must leave the status of Levi’s death outside consideration. 22. Voegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” 365. I develop this discussion more fully later. 23. Voegelin, In Search of Order, 41. 24. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 12. 25. Cf. Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, 109, where he writes: “In practice, the consequence of the conflict between the second and first [or It-] reality is, not the intellectual swindle, but the lie.” 26. Cf. Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, 70–109. 27. Hitler and the Germans, 87. This entire discussion rests in 87–88. 28. Ibid., 88. 29. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 60. Tim Blake Nelson’s film “The Grey Zone” focuses on this most unfortunate of groups, the “conceiving and organizing” of which Levi characterizes as “National Socialism’s most demonic crime.” Cf. The Drowned and the Saved, 53. 30. Cf. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 97 ff. Victor Klemperer’s journals have appeared in English translation as I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: Random House, 1998, 1999). 31. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 115. Cf. also 120. 32. Ibid., 154–155. 33. Ibid., 31. 34. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 69. 35. Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, 153. Although Voegelin writes here in relation to the German social order, the same holds—ferociously—in the camps. 36. As might be expected, the “reality” was a good deal more complex. Lawrence Langer’s notion of “choiceless choice” also symbolizes this extreme degree of moral ambiguity. Cf. Versions of Survival: The Holocaust and the Human Spirit (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982), 72. 37. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40. 38. Levi mentions “terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever … cowardice, and, finally, lucid calculation aimed at eluding the imposed orders and order.” Cf. The Drowned and the Saved, 43. 39. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 44. 40. Cf. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 174. 41. Such acts are, of course, morally reprehensible from the perspective of those who have never known such desperate conditions—this fact is part of Levi’s point in choosing to suspend ethical judgment, to be discussed later. 42. This assertion is by no means intended to exonerate criminally culpable prisoner collaborators, who did indeed exist. 43. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 48–49. Voegelin makes a similar point on p. 64 of Hitler and the Germans.

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44. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 53. 45. Cf. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 17; Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 262. 46. Certainly, judgment is warranted against those prisoner collaborators whose criminal culpability required them to be brought to justice. 47. Cf. Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, 58, 81. Cf. also Brendan Purcell’s very helpful commentary in his “Editor’s Introduction,” 26. 48. Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, 89, 96. 49. Purcell, “Editor’s Introduction” to Hitler and the Germans, 26. 50. Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 182. 51. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 68. 52. Ibid., 68. Levi’s question need not be confined to any particular nationality, race, or ethnicity. 53. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 69. 54. Cf. Detlev Clemens “Editor’s Introduction” in Hitler and the Germans, 6–7. Cf. also Hitler and the Germans, 76 ff. 55. Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 262. 56. Ibid., 268. 57. Ibid., 268. Cf. 262–271 for Todorov’s complete discussion of Levi’s death. 58. Ibid., 269.

After Auschwitz Unfinished Business ... Above all, dear sir, I had in mind A marvelous book that would have Revealed innumerable secrets, Alleviated pain and fear, Dissolved doubts, given to many people The boon of tears and laughter. You’ll find the outline in my drawer, In back, with the unfinished business. I haven’t had time to see it through. Too bad. It would have been a fundamental work. April 19, 1981

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Figure 18.1 Watercolor and ink on paper, 1973. “Nobody has yet been able to penetrate the reason and the roots of his suicide.”

18

The Biographical Fallacy Alexander Stille

he relation between an artist’s work and biography is always complex and becomes especially so when the artist dies under extraordinary circumstances: murder, suicide, or unaccounted disappearance. People tend to take a teleological approach to his work, reading it backward from the death to the beginning, and everything now seems to point inevitably toward the terrible end. This has been unusually true in the case of Primo Levi after he fell to his death, an apparent suicide, in 1987. People immediately spoke about Auschwitz claiming its last victim. The Italian writer Ferdinand Camon said, “This suicide must be backdated to 1945. It did not happen then because Primo wanted (and had to) write. Now, having completed his work (The Drowned and the Saved was the end of the cycle) he could kill himself. And he did.”1 Even Levi’s son, Renzo was quoted as saying. “Read the conclusion of The Truce and you will understand.” Many began reading Levi’s final book, The Drowned and the Saved, as a kind of suicide note and looked for further clues in earlier books that foreshadowed his death. Others went further, reinterpreting earlier works and assessing their strengths and weakness in relation to his death. Elizabeth Macklin in the New Yorker wondered if the “efficacy of all his words had somehow been canceled by his death—that his hope, or faith, was no longer usable by the rest of us.”2 There were those who insisted that Levi’s message as a writer—itself a dubious concept in my opinion—an optimist’s faith in the powers of reason and humanity and his apparent achievement of serene equanimity in the face of his Auschwitz experience—was thrown into question by his violent death. Many focused on his exchange of views with Jean Améry about “trading blows.” Améry had insisted on the importance of fighting back in Auschwitz; of “trading blows” with the world. Levi had written about the impossibility of taking on the entire world. Aside from the fact that fighting was alien to Levi’s

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personality, his own attempt at retaliation in Auschwitz had nearly gotten him killed at the hands of the preternaturally strong dwarf whom he calls Elias in Se questo è un uomo. This refusal to fight back—which was seen as a central characteristic of Levi’s work—was seen as a kind of fatal flaw that led straight to Levi’s death. Leon Wieseltier, in The New Republic, wrote: “He spoke for the bet that there is no blow from which the soul may not recover. When he smashed his body, he smashed his bet.”3 The novelist Cynthia Ozick essentially read Levi’s suicide as the result of pent-up rage that had been masked by his excessively well-mannered early work, which was allowed to come to the surface only too late in The Drowned and the Saved, when, she wrote, Levi gave up being the “well-mannered cicerone of hell, mortal horror in a decorous voice” and allowed himself to lash out at his Nazi oppressors in “a book of blows returned by a pen of fire.”4 At the same time, there was an opposite—but I would argue fundamentally parallel—development: the effort to deny the possibility of Levi’s suicide. Although apparently opposite—one insisting on the centrality of suicide to an understanding of Levi’s work, the other insisting that not only was suicide not central but that it had not happened at all—I think these two schools of thought are operating on the same fundamental premise: namely that Levi’s death is itself a kind of commentary on his work. For the suicide deniers, a final gesture of despair would represent such a fundamental contradiction with the fundamental hopefulness and reasonableness of the great bulk of Levi’s work. This is essentially what both Ozick and Wieseltier are also saying: that Levi’s death exposed the fundamental inadequacy of Levi’s earlier “hopeful” work—the Levi of Se questo è un uomo and La tregua. The deniers, of course, moved from this premise to an opposite determination: precisely because suicide undermined the idea of a hopeful Levi, ipso facto, it could not be suicide. They grasped spontaneous comments of friends and acquaintances of Levi who responded that this was not the Primo Levi they had known. “Until the day of his death I was convinced he was the most serene person in the world,” the philosopher Norberto Bobbio said. The writer Ferdinando Camon went further, saying that if it was indeed a suicide, “Then, he was pretending” in his books, his interviews, and his personal encounters, in which he maintains such a calm, controlled demeanor. From this many developed the idea that because the value of Levi’s work was fundamentally incompatible with suicide it should be made to go away. The Nobel Prize–winning chemist, argued that Levi, as a chemist, would never have committed suicide by jumping to his death when he could have much more easily prepared a chemical dose. Others pointed

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out that Levi would never have been so inconsiderate as to commit suicide in such a violent and messy way, or that he could not have committed suicide because he did not leave a note. This shows a complete lack of understanding of the nature of suicide: suicide is a violent act and while women tend to favor nonviolent ends such as taking pills, men tend to choose violent means of taking their lives such as shooting themselves or jumping off buildings. Camon noted that he had received a hopeful and upbeat letter from Levi that he must have written only a short time before his death. Surely this was incompatible with suicide? Of course, Mario Rigoni Stern, in this same period, received a letter in which Levi said that he “lost the will to live.” Suicide is a tormented decision against which the person generally fights mightily, so that someone who is contemplating suicide should do his best to maintain a brave appearance, appear hopeful, and speak of future plans and, at other moments, exhibit signs of despair and hopelessness is hardly contradictory or surprising. The suicide deniers came up with rather farfetched scenarios in which Levi, after having received the mail from his concierge, would have walked across the landing outside his apartment, been taken by a sudden attack of dizziness and somehow fallen over the railing of the landing to his death—an extremely improbable sequence of events if one has been to Levi’s apartment and seen the physical layout. The suicide denial school reflects, I think, a deeply held, if unconscious, reflection of the religious belief in the fundamental impiety and shamefulness of suicide. In fact, the rabbi of Turin’s community had to declare the cause of Levi’s death uncertain—despite a coroner’s report of suicide—in order to justify his proper burial in the city’s Jewish cemetery. This sense of shame—even in secular readers who somehow feel that suicide is a kind of admission of defeat that undermines his entire work— is, I think, completely wrong. Both schools of thought—one that reads Levi’s work as a kind of “bitter suicide note” or that sees suicide as impossible because it is a deep contradiction of his work—show a very narrow view of artistic creation, of life and of death. That the human personality is not a simple monolith, that it is multiple and complex, and that the relationship between life and work, between artist and his creation does not submit to a simple algebraic equation: x ⫹ y ⫽ z. Two recent biographies of Levi, one by the Englishman Ian Thomson the other by the American writer Carole Angier, have entered the fray and may throw some light on these issues.5 Both, after having spent ten years on their books, have concluded unequivocally that Levi committed suicide. It is also worth noting that no one who really knew Levi well—his wife, children, sister, and his circle of

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closest friends—ever doubted it. Unlike his many readers and people with whom Levi had a more superficial acquaintance, they knew that Levi suffered a life-long battle with depression. “Primo was out of his mind with misery, no amount of love from other people could have saved him,” said Luciana Nissim, who was deported to Auschwitz with Levi and one of his closest friends. Less than a week before he died, Levi’s wife was so concerned about her husband that she called Bianca Guidetti Serra, one of Levi’s oldest childhood friends, to see if she could coax him to leave the house. Levi talked about his depression and when she asked him whether it might be related to his camp experiences, he replied, “No, I survived, I was able to tell my story.” The biographers revealed that Levi’s first battle with depression actually preceded the Second World War and Auschwitz and that it was an intermittently serious fact in his adult life since the 1960s. The depressions were serious enough, in fact, that Levi, despite his stoic reticence, felt obliged to seek psychiatric help and go on antidepressant drugs. Moreover, they discovered that there were at least two suicides in Levi’s family. Levi’s grandfather, in particular, jumped to his death in a manner much like Levi. This history is far from irrelevant. Research into suicide indicates that an extremely high percent of patients suffering from serious depression—a full fifteen percent—actually take their lives. This percentage is fifteen to twenty times the suicide rate of the general population. Suicide is also more likely among those who have been “treated for a medical or psychiatric condition”; “the typical suicide completers [as opposed to suicide attempters] are older men,” and they do it “sometimes seemingly out of the blue.” Finally, “like depression, suicide is familial, with relatives of suicides having roughly ten times higher risk of suicide than that of the general population.”6 Ian Thomson, for example, gained access to Levi’s twenty years of correspondence with a close female friend, Hety Schmitt-Maas, to whom he confided regularly about both his bouts of depression and his family problems. Already in the 1960s, Levi wrote to Schmitt-Maas: We are not masters of our mood, of our reactions, of our very personality: a slight disturbance in one’s hormonic [sic] balance, and you are turned into somebody else; and you are liable to revert to this obnoxious state again and again, and each time you will stubbornly be persuaded that this is your real and final condition, that you will have no future . . . that there is [nothing to do] but sit and weep.7

Only a few days later, when the depression had begun to lift, Levi wrote: “Almost all I have told you seems to me extremely silly; not false, mind you, just silly and foolish.”

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This is typical of depression. It comes on inexplicably, and when it holds the sufferer in its grip, makes life seem absolutely hopeless and unendurable, and then passes, often equally unaccountably, bringing a radical change of mood that makes the previous state seem as incomprehensible as it had seemed overwhelming just days before. Both Thomson and Angier (but especially Angier) go to great lengths to show that Auschwitz was not the source of Levi’s depression. Levi himself seems to have concluded the same thing, in his various private reflections on depression. In 1968, in writing to Schmitt-Maas, he speculated about the possible roots of his depression. “Auschwitz, perhaps? No, I do not think so, the camp belongs to a far too-remote past, and moreover it has been exorcized by my books.”8 Angier, who theorizes that Levi’s principal psychological problem was a kind of deep sexual inhibition, argues that contrary to what many might think, Levi’s time at Auschwitz was, on a psychological level, a liberating and strengthening experience. Leaving aside the rest of Angier’s theories for the moment, I think there is a certain merit to this view. The period of the war and his imprisonment at Auschwitz appears to have helped Levi throw off some of his adolescent fears and inhibitions. (It is worth noting that Levi entitled his Auschwitz memoir, Se questo è un uomo, If This is a Man, rather than the anodyne title of the American edition, Survival in Auschwitz.) Precisely because the Nazi system set out to annihilate its victims, reducing them to beasts as they also destroyed them physically, Levi’s survival was an assertion of his own humanity as well as a mere perpetuation of his life. One of the things that Levi (like others) found most shocking on his arrival at the camp was the almost total lack of solidarity he experienced from his fellow inmates. The desperate struggle for survival generally brought out the worst in people and newcomers were regarded with derision, contempt, or even hostility as a strain on the inmates’ precarious equilibrium. The demonic brilliance of the camp system was in getting the inmates themselves to rule over each other, creating a brutal pecking order that pitted one against the other. “The worst survived,” Levi wrote. But for many, including Levi, refusing to become an animal was crucial to their survival. Levi managed to survive without stealing other prisoners’ food. Sharing—when he could—extra rations he had gotten his hands on, Levi discovered a toughness and resourcefulness in himself that surprised himself and others. He stole anything he could get his hands on (but not from other prisoners) and invented a thousand stratagems and tricks to avoid backbreaking labor but retained a fundamental decency. Human warmth and contact, exchanging stories of home or a verse of Dante during a rare moment of respite, were as important as a crust of bread.

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That Levi was proud of himself for having survived and for how he survived is evident from a letter that he wrote after being liberated but before returning (which Thomson quotes): Maybe I’ll come home shoeless, but in compensation for my ragged state I’ve learned German and a bit of Russian and Polish. I also know how to get out of many situations without losing my nerve, and how to withstand moral and physical suffering . . . I know how to make a cauliflower or turnip soup, cook potatoes in a hundred ways . . . And I’ve been through an incredible variety of careers: assistant bricklayer, navy sweep, porter, grave-digger, interpreter, cyclist, tailor, thief, nurse, fence, stone-breaker. I’ve even been a chemist.9

In 1986, the daughter of a friend asked him to tell her something he had “never told anyone else.” She was looking for a scoop. Levi replied that before Auschwitz, he had been “a timid, neurotic person.” Afterwards, this was gone . . . Why? he says, “I don’t know.” Before the war, Levi had never been able to summon the courage to go dancing with his friends in order meet girls; after the war, he did. A young woman, Lucia Morpurgo, offered to teach Levi to dance and he eventually married her. Angier develops a whole theory of Levi’s life, death, and work based on the notion that extreme sexual repression was “the key to everything.” Indeed, Angier offers a psychosexual interpretation of Levi’s life, which she says is “a key to everything, his life, his writing and his death.”10 The key, in Angier’s view, is profound sexual fear, the result of Levi’s suffocatingly close relationship with his mother, which he duplicated in adulthood through an equally suffocating marriage. The origins of Levi’s troubles, according to Angier, lie in his own parents’ unhappy, loveless marriage. Levi’s father sought love outside of the marriage and evidently had a mistress for many years—something that both biographers agree on. Levi’s mother compensated for this loss by tying her only son closely to her and he was taught to reject his father’s selfish sensualism and dedicate himself exclusively to his mother’s wellbeing. While Levi’s father represented an example of shameful sexual license, his mother offered love of a particularly arid and unphysical kind. Levi once told an interviewer that he could not recall his mother giving him “a single kiss or caress.” Unfortunately, Levi reproduced—in his own adult life—many of the unhappy aspects of his childhood. For starters, Levi brought Lucia to live with his own family, putting his wife under the dominating wing of his mother. While this may have been dictated by necessity in the first hard

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years of Italy’s postwar recovery, this tense, complex ménage a trois continued up until the moment of Levi’s death. Moreover, Levi appears to have chosen as a wife someone who, like his mother, was highly devoted but also jealous and controlling. Levi’s wife did not get along well with Levi’s childhood friends, in particular his female friends. She rarely accompanied him when he went to their homes and they, in turn, were rarely invited to his. According to Angier, he asked his female friends not to call him at home. As Levi wrote to his German confidante about his wife: “She becomes nervous and diffident in front of intellectuals, particularly if female: she generally judges them braggarts, hypocrites, selfish people; most typically, she interferes in my speaking with them, breaks up the conversations with aberrant, wild opinions (of which she is herself obviously ashamed), and contradicts me stubbornly in a sort of naïve sabotage.”11 Very revealingly, in a poem ostensibly to celebrate his wife’s sixtieth birthday, Levi wrote lines that speak volumes about the extent of his domestic misery: Have patience, my weary lady, Patience with worldly things, With your journey’s companions, myself included . . . Have patience, my impatient lady, So ground down, mortified, flayed, You who flay yourself a little every day So that the naked flesh hurts still more . . .12

Yet, despite a very difficult domestic situation, Levi managed reasonably well for about thirty years by living a double or triple life. Until the late 1970s, he continued running a paint factory and, in his spare time, he somehow found the space to write. Indeed, three of his four most important books, Se questo è un uomo (1947), La tregua (1963; translated in the United States as The Reawakening), and The Periodic Table (1975) were all written while he was working fulltime, albeit with gaps of several years between them. Levi retired in 1977 in order to dedicate himself to writing fulltime and the complex balancing act between the different parts of his life grew increasingly difficult to maintain as his mother aged and grew increasingly ill. Toward the end, she suffered from a paralytic stroke and became entirely bedridden. Levi’s wife, Lucia, was, at the same time, consumed with caring for her own blind and infirm ninety-year-old mother. Levi felt bound to do the same for his own. Thus, at the time at which Levi achieved his greatest professional success and was in demand around the world, he was increasingly trapped inside his own home. The house became a joyless prison of filial and marital duty from which the various activities

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and pleasures that made up Levi’s life—travel, friendship, mountain climbing, writing, and love—were systematically excluded. As Thomson reports, Levi told a German publisher (while turning down another invitation to travel abroad) that his mother would bang on the wall of his study with her cane to get his attention making it impossible for him to write. Levi was, in effect, in an impossible double-bind of having to act purely for himself and betray his mother or sacrifice himself at the altar of filial piety. When a colleague at Levi’s Turin publishing house, Einaudi, seeing how seriously depressed Levi had become, suggested that he place his mother in a home for the elderly Levi was scandalized at the suggestion, indicating that the move would kill her. Seeing how serious Levi’s depression had become, the woman replied, “It’s either you or her.”13 In a cry for help, Levi wrote to an English cardiologist he knew, Dr. David Mendel, describing his symptoms: I’ve fallen into a pretty serious state of depression; I’ve lost all interest in writing, as well as reading. I’m extremely dispirited and don’t want to see anybody . . . For months I’ve been on Parmodalin, but without visible results. My fear is that this will never end. Everything I do, even if it is banal, costs me strength, including, for example writing this letter. I feel I need help, but I just don’t know what sort. I know that this phase will pass, just as the others have done, but I’m aware of this only at the rational level; my overriding impression is that it will last for ever and that I will never find an exit out . . . In my waking hours I’m in a permanent state of unhappiness and anxiety. I seek refuge in sleep, even during the afternoon, with a couple of glasses of wine; otherwise the stress diminishes only in the evening, with the prospect of taking myself to bed.14

As those closest to him knew, Levi had passed through several major depressions in which he had been tormented by thoughts of suicide, but, fortunately, they had passed, sometimes with the help of antidepressant drugs. This last depression was deeper and darker. In July, six months before his death, his mother had suffered a paralytic stroke, which left her helpless but very much alive. Indeed, she would hang on until the age of ninety-six, outliving her son by four years. His mother-in-law was ninetyfive and completely blind, also requiring around-the-clock care. When he was in an especially deep depression, he became convinced that he was losing his memory and suddenly lost his ability to speak foreign languages—almost certainly a direct cause of the depression itself. In this condition, he was unable to write and was convinced that his future was an empty void. Levi himself was sick and had a prostate operation that required follow-up surgery. The prostate problem interfered with his

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depression medication, leaving him especially vulnerable at his moment of greatest need. But even this seems too pat. Unquestionably, Levi’s inability to separate himself from his mother intensified when his mother became entirely dependant on him. And yet, if Angier’s own account about Levi’s infidelities is any indication, he appears to have overcome his sexual inhibitions and inner torment in the later years of his life when his depression became more acute. The fact that he suffered from depression frequently, that it ran in the family suggests that it does not lend itself to a simple explanation. Thomson quotes Angelo Pezzana, a Turin bookseller who knew Levi: “Primo did not kill himself because of his mother or Auschwitz: it was something deep inside him.” As Thomson writes: In 1967 Levi had written of the Piedmontese poet Cesare Pavese: ‘Nobody has yet been able to penetrate the reason and the roots of his suicide.’ And the same must be said of Levi. His suicide was provoked by his clinical depression, which was compounded by a complex web of factors. His mother’s illness, the prostate operations, historical revisionism, fears of mental incompetence; all these are provocations. But, however accommodating it is to see the concentration camp or domestic smothering as the explanation, no one will turn the lock. The real causes for suicide always remain fugitive, because the suffering of those who kill themselves is private and inaccessible. As Antonio Paccagnella, a carpenter who was rescued from Auschwitz with Levi, told me in 1989: “Nessuno ha la verità in tasca,” “nobody has the truth in their pocket.”15

But the question remains: what does this portrait of private struggle and torment tell us about the Primo Levi who really matters, Primo Levi the writer? The character that emerges from these biographies is a much less interesting figure than the Primo Levi who wrote Se questo è un uomo, The Truce, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and the Saved. We learn much that Primo Levi chose not to tell us, that he had a complicated childhood, a messy family life, and a series of private neuroses and troubles that clouded periods of his life. In this, he was not that different from many others. Where he differed was in writing several of the most enduring books of the last half century. That he wrote The Drowned and the Saved— perhaps the most profound meditation on the meaning of the Holocaust—while struggling with bouts of depressions and coping with his mother’s illness is interesting but doesn’t really tell us that much. It only makes its composition seem more miraculous. Even though he was in the grip of volatile and violent emotions, in his work Levi achieved an incredible equilibrium, a subtle sense of emotional and verbal nuance that allowed deep and cutting analysis at perfect moral and literary pitch.

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Thomson makes no real effort to tie the biography to an analysis of Levi’s work. Angier does, at least, make an attempt. She argues that Levi’s need to keep his emotions in check within his family helps to account for the extraordinary emotional control of his work. This is an interesting argument but is not sufficient to explain the beauty and intelligence of Levi’s work. In the end, the difficulty of putting together Levi the man with Levi the writer leads Angier to fall back on the word “genius” to describe Levi the writer. Of course, this is a problem that haunts the field of artistic biography in general. But it is especially acute in the case of Levi who hardly wrote about his own private or inner life. For writers like D. H. Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, or even Franz Kafka, who either wrote about personal experience or drew heavily on it to create their work, biographies can genuinely help illuminate their work. But with Levi, whose best work deals very much with external life, the same does not apply. Despite Angier’s claims, Levi made the right artistic choice in deciding not to write about his private life and in focusing on the world around him. “I was conscious of living the fundamental experience of my life,” he wrote about his time at Auschwitz, where his vocation as a writer crystallized. [T]he idea of having to survive in order to tell what I had seen obsessed me night and day. I never stopped recording the world and the people around me . . . I had an intense wish to understand, I was constantly pervaded by curiosity . . . the curiosity of the naturalist who finds himself transplanted into an environment that is monstrous but new, monstrously new.16

Joan Acocella, the last of the suicide-deniers, having read only Angier’s book, which lacks the extremely revealing confidential letters to Hety Schmitt-Maas, writes that there is no evidence that Levi was seriously depressed let alone that he committed suicide. She writes that she doubts the suicide thesis for the simple reason that the Levi she has come to know in his work is a happy person, that someone who supposedly suffered as much as Angier claims he did could not have written such a joyful work as La tregua.17 This seems to me to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of artistic creation as well as its relation to life. Acocella is right: there is a joyful vitality in Levi’s work, even in the darker works like If This is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved. Levi’s epigram at the beginning of The Periodic Table reads thus: “troubles past are good to tell”; this simple phrase, I think, encapsulates a deep paradox at the heart of Holocaust literature, that, despite the subject matter, we actually take pleasure from reading about tragedy. Many readers of my first book Benevolence and Betrayal have said to me, “I really enjoyed your

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book,” and then correct themselves and say, “I guess I should not use the word ‘enjoy.’ ” On the contrary, narrative works, even dealing with tragic subjects, are written to be enjoyed. The critics who want to reduce Levi’s work to a single message—a hopeless, dark indictment of Nazism—are missing something important that escapes single explanation. Roland Barthes picked up on this in his book, Le Plaisir du texte, the pleasure of the text, that there is an element of deep, if you want, erotic pleasure in the act of reading and of writing. And thus Acocella is not wrong when she writes that the author of If This is a Man, The Truce, The Periodic Table, and The Drowned and Saved was a happy man. But what is wrong is the one-to-one identification with an artist’s work and his life. A person can be happy in the parallel universal of artistic creation and depressed outside it. A person can be strong in one part of his life—as Levi was at Auschwitz, in his work, with his friends—and weak and frightened in his relationship to his mother. Levi himself understood this: “In my work, I have portrayed myself variously as courageous, cowardly, prophetic or naïve, but always, I believe, well-balanced. However, I’m not well-balanced at all. I go through long periods of imbalance.”18 And thus, to conclude, let us approach Levi’s work and life with greater humility. It is natural that we should be curious about the life of a writer whom we admire, but let’s not presume to have found the key to everything. As Levi’s close friend Bianca Guidetti Serra has said: “Primo was a man like any other one; we should not judge his writing by whatever means he chose to die.”19 Notes 1. Ferdinando Camon, Panorama, April 26, 1987. 2. Elizabeth Macklin, “Notes and Comment,” in the New Yorker, May 11, 1987. In a personal correspondence, Macklin made it clear that this phrase was often misunderstood at the time of publication. In fact, she said, the piece had continued: “Later, though, when we went and looked, we found that among his words he had left a precise vocabulary—a gift, possibly inadvertent—for the strangely familial pain his death had caused.” (Editor’s note.) 3. Leon Wieseltier, quoted in Diego Gambetta, “Primo Levi’s Last Moments,” Boston Review (Summer 1999), available online at www.bostonreview.net/ BR24.3/gambetta.html.. 4. Cynthia Ozick, review of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved in The New Republic, March 21, 1988; reprinted in Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1991), 34–38. 5. Ian Thomson, Primo Levi (London: Hutchinson, 2002; New York: Metropolitan, 2003); Carole Angier, The Double Bond: A Biography of Primo Levi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).

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6. David B. Cohen, Out of the Blue: Depression and Human Nature (New York: Norton, 1995), 115, 122–123, 131; quoted in Gambetta, “Primo Levi’s Last Moments.” 7. Thomson, Primo Levi, 332. 8. Ibid., 329. 9. Ibid., 201. 10. Angier, The Double Bond, xix. 11. Thomson, Primo Levi, 315. 12. Quoted in Thomson, Primo Levi, 389. 13. Thomson, Primo Levi, 483. 14. Ibid., 489. 15. Ibid., 505. 16. Angier, The Double Bond, 301. 17. Joan Acocella, review of Angier’s book in The New Yorker, June 17/24, 2002. 18. Thomson, Primo Levi, 538. 19. Ibid., 516.

19

On the Dangers of Reading Suicide into the Works of Primo Levi Jonathan Druker hen, on April 11, 1987, Primo Levi died an untimely death, an apparent suicide, his readers around the world were deeply shocked because among Holocaust survivor-writers Levi was considered one of the most hopeful and even-tempered. In order to shed light on the unfamiliar hell of the Nazi concentration camps, he utilized his professional background in chemistry and brought to bear a detached, scientific precision. His memoir of ten months in a death camp, Survival in Auschwitz, records the tragedies that occurred there without introducing the self-pity or rage that would be completely justified by the circumstances. As a narrator, his emotions are purposefully subordinated to the task of credibly witnessing a series of unimaginable events. Levi and the other men who lived and died with him in the camp were robbed of every human dignity, and his unflinching memoir documents all of this very thoroughly; but it also records bright moments of human solidarity in a world so harsh that generosity toward a fellow inmate could be very costly, even fatal. Overall, Levi’s books are marked by a profound sense of obligation to the victims and also to future generations who run the risk of repeating the errors of the past. He considered the Holocaust to be a fundamental event replete with urgent moral and historical lessons that fill his thoughtful pages. Given his reputation as a witness to the depth of human resilience, Levi’s apparent suicide has puzzled a great many people and even left them feeling betrayed. He appeared to have a mission, after all, a consequential reason for living and writing: to offer his readers a lucid, constructive response to the Holocaust. When a writer terminates his own life, it is not only prudent but also necessary that we engage in a reassessment of his literary production that takes into account the irrevocable silence he has willed. In Levi’s case, the

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stakes are especially high because the very core of his life and art were shaped much less by personal circumstances than by massive historical forces, by events that still affect all of us. Levi seemed to speak not only for himself, but also for a whole generation who lived through unprecedented times. “He left us,” Lawrence L. Langer wrote, “with the lingering question of whether the death he eluded at Auschwitz did not finally defeat him.”1 It is high time, therefore, that we consider in a serious fashion what consequences, if any, Levi’s alleged suicide has for the interpretation of his texts. A number of Levi’s readers have speculated about what caused the state of depression that he was known to have experienced immediately before his death. Had the pain of surviving such horrors finally overwhelmed him? Had he despaired that his warnings about the possibility of other, future “Holocausts” would ever be heard by the world? Had he been so profoundly depressed by the minimal successes of pseudo-historians who denied that the Holocaust had even occurred?2 These are important questions for the Levi biographers but what scholars of Holocaust literature really need to know, and still remains to be discussed, is whether Levi’s alleged suicide affects the reader’s stance vis-à-vis the texts.3 The issue was touched upon provocatively in Woody Allen’s 1989 film, Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which a philosophy professor and Holocaust survivor, referred to by film reviewers as “the Primo Levi character,” delivers a courageous message of dignity and hope in the face of a world both cruel and senseless. Then, tragically and inexplicably, he takes his own life, leaving his admirers bereft and baffled. Regardless of the film’s overall merits, the story it tells poses some relevant questions for the thoughtful viewer. If the fictional professor’s message of moral courage could not sustain him, can it sustain the other characters in the film that revered him? In other words, was the self-destructive act of the man only and not of his ideas? In a broad sense, the film even invites us to inquire into the theoretical relationship between author and text, life and art. When we engage similar questions about the connection between Levi’s work and his death, the debate coalesces around three distinct and irreconcilable positions. One stance is that Levi’s suicide is a desperate admission of failure: nothing less, in other words, than a negative self-critique of his Holocaust writing and a bitter condemnation of the notion supported by his books that words might help repair the fabric of human life so violently rent at Auschwitz. From this point of view, the validity of the writer’s constructive response to the Holocaust, indeed the very efficacy of his words, must be called into question by their failure to sustain Levi himself. Another critical stance seeks to revise an overly simple label—“lifeaffirming”—that has stuck to Levi’s books for quite some time. Indeed, the

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phrase fails to do justice to the complexity of his testimony. From this point of view, it is not that suicide changes the meaning of Levi’s words as much as it undermines the dominance of wishful misreadings that stem from our desire to see the world healed and made whole again. In rereading his texts carefully, we now find the long-ignored expressions of anger and pessimism consistent with suicidal behavior. Under such a revision it follows that Levi’s suicide is, sadly, a highly appropriate response to the Holocaust, as it was for other distinguished survivor-writers like Paul Celan and Jean Améry. More banal, but ultimately no less compelling than the two positions just outlined, is the argument that Levi’s suicide does not fundamentally change our reading of his texts because, as is so often the case, the relationship between the writer’s public self and his private act is simply unclear and destined to remain so. This stance, which might at first seem an exercise in denial or evasion, is strengthened by the curious fact that Levi, who condemned obscure writing and ambiguous messages, left no note explaining his desperate act. In addition, there are plausible theories which suggest that the writer’s death was accidental, contrary to the report submitted by authorities in Turin.4 I am a partisan of this last position: to me, the irresolvable doubts about Levi’s death make it prudent and even necessary that we reject any and all attempts to fix a definite meaning to such ambiguous circumstances that, after so many years, are unlikely to become clearer. Moreover, we should reject blunt stereotypes about Holocaust victims, and their proclivities for suicide, and instead engage with Levi’s books, which are his most important legacy. I hope to persuade my readers of the merits of this argument while demonstrating the problems that arise from the pervasive tendency to read suicide into Levi’s works. *** It is difficult to respond specifically to the notion that Levi’s suicide is an admission of failure on the writer’s part because, as yet, no one has offered a rigorously argued defense of this stance. Instead, there have been a few scattered remarks in support of the idea, which only raise more questions than they answer. For example, Leon Wieseltier wrote that Levi “spoke for the bet that there is no blow from which the soul may not recover. When he smashed his body, he smashed his bet.”5 Yet, a close look at Levi’s texts reveals no such simple, redemptive formulation that his suicide would now disprove. From his first book on, Levi states emphatically that Auschwitz poisoned the world, that it was “an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again.”6 Gian Paolo Biasin

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suggested that Levi’s death resulted from his loss of faith in the capacity of literature to express the depths of atrocity.7 Yet Levi never demanded so much from the written word, or so much from his own writing. Of the dehumanization at Auschwitz, he observed, “our language lacks the words to express this offence, the demolition of a man.”8 An unsigned piece in The New Yorker suggested, “the efficacy of all [Levi’s] words had somehow been cancelled by his death.”9 Cancelled? Perhaps this would be true if Levi had argued that Holocaust survival is an uncomplicated affair leaving no scars. In fact, he devoted many pages to the phenomenon of survival guilt or, as he calls it, vergogna.10 He admits to feeling guilty for having assimilated the principle rule of the death camp: “you take care of yourself first of all.”11 Moreover, his investigation of the Holocaust goes far beyond the psychological implications of survival. For example, how might Levi’s possible suicide render inefficacious his subtle analysis of the character and values of men like Rudolf Höss, a commandant of Auschwitz, who carried out the work of genocide?12 My point is simply that Levi’s books speak to a great deal more than just his individual fate; their success cannot be measured in a narrowly biographical context. More numerous are the commentators who consider suicide an expected and appropriate act for Levi and other Holocaust survivors even though in-depth research suggests there is no higher incidence of suicide for survivors than for the general population.13 Noted Holocaust scholar James Young groups Levi with other survivor-writers, including Paul Celan and Jean Améry, who committed suicide, without feeling a need to point out that each had different experiences of the Holocaust. For Celan, Améry, and Levi, “enunciating their pain seems not to have kept them from despair . . . but may have only deepened it.”14 For this position to be defensible one must explain why Levi’s texts are not, in reality, so very different from those of Celan and Améry, two authors with whom he engaged but also from whom he took great pains to distance himself. In fact, Levi argued purposefully that his literary style and personality had nothing in common with them. He often expressed his preference for lucid writing intent on communication, asserting that Paul Celan’s Holocaust poetry, though “tragic and noble” amounted to “an animal whine” that shed little light on the Holocaust. (“Deathfugue” is an important exception for Levi because it is accessible enough to rise above the merely personal.15) In Levi’s view, Celan’s inability or unwillingness to communicate, to turn outward, presaged an early exit from life. [His] destiny makes one think about the obscurity of [his] poetry as a pre-suicide, a not-wanting-to-be, a flight from the world, of which the intentional death was the crown . . . This darkness grows from page to page

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until the last inarticulate babble consternates like the rattle of a dying man, and that is just what it is.16

Indeed, Levi’s very rational and clear Holocaust writing, leaving aside the poetry that he never intended for wide dissemination, could not be more different from Celan’s emotionally dark, hermetic texts. If style indicates psychological state, it would be difficult to suggest that both men’s works reveal the same suicidal nature. On the other hand, it might be prudent for us to reject Levi’s argument because its questionable assumptions are the same misguided ones now used to reread Levi’s entire opus. Levi assumes that Celan’s life is an extension of his texts, that his suicide is not only presaged by what and how he wrote, but that it also acts to complete his literary production, that his willed silence is his final text, the destination or telos, to which his texts lead. Taken to its extremity, such a teleological reading suggests that had Celan died in an accident rather than by his own hand, we would not understand his poems as well as we do; indeed, we would have missed the point. Seizing on suicide as the common thread that ties Levi to Jean Améry is no more fruitful than the attempt to equate Levi with Celan. Harold Kaplan dedicates his book Conscience and Memory to Levi and Améry, but he makes virtually no distinction between what the two writers experienced in Auschwitz and what their agendas were after the fact, nor does he address Levi’s critique of Améry except to see it as, perhaps, a “bad omen for his own future suicide.”17 Did Primo Levi and Jean Améry, the most articulate and compelling of survivors, pronounce final judgment in their own suicides? The Holocaust was a mass drama of testing the will to live. Every memory of the Holocaust begins to strive for replacing what was lost and destroyed. Or to put it another way, we think of the Holocaust in order to deny murder and suicide a complete victory.18 I am sympathetic to Kaplan’s tendency to focus on what the Holocaust and our imperfect understanding of it can affirm, on what can be learned from it. He reveres and seems to have learned from Levi, yet implies that Levi has failed to understand something fundamental: “If the Holocaust teaches many things, one of its lessons is against suicide. So one would have wished to say to those men of martyred consciousness, to Jean Améry and Primo Levi.”19 But do these two witnesses have the same “martyred consciousness”? In The Drowned and the Saved Levi said that he admired Améry but could not share his colleague’s bitter and ultimately self-destructive appraisal of humanity after the Holocaust. In order to maintain a sense of dignity, both in the camp and forever afterward, Améry felt it necessary to

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live by the creed of “trading the blow,” of returning abuse in kind, even when it meant suffering brutal retaliation. “I admire it,” Levi writes, but I must point out that this choice, protracted throughout his postAuschwitz existence, led him to positions of such severity and intransigence as to make him incapable of finding joy in life, indeed of living. Those who “trade blows” with the entire world achieve dignity but pay a very high price for it because they are sure to be defeated.20

After Levi’s strong articulation of the difference between Améry’s attitude and his own, I think he would have been surprised that he and Améry are so often linked and are seen as two victims of Auschwitz who, by virtue of their apparent suicides, are thought to have come to the same angry or self-destructive conclusions about the legacy of the Holocaust. Yet, this distorted view has gained a following. In her essay “Primo Levi’s Suicide Note,” novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick writes forcefully in support of the idea that Levi’s books reveal more anger and frustration than has been previously noted. In particular, she argues that his final book of essays, The Drowned and the Saved, marks a profound change in tone, the sober calm of his earlier books giving way to a long-suppressed eruption of self-destructive rage.21 To begin her essay, Ozick observes that Levi has an exaggerated reputation for being “free of rage, resentment, [and] violent feeling.”22 I applaud her for taking to task Levi’s American publishers for the shallow, deceptive words that graced the dust jacket of The Drowned and the Saved, describing the book as “a testament to the indomitability of the human spirit and humanity’s capacity to defeat death through meaningful work, morality and art.” These tired clichés are used to market Holocaust literature by making it seem easier to read than it truly is, and they do not begin to describe the depth and scope of Levi’s book. But Ozick goes on to suggest than any positive response to the Holocaust’s legacy is essentially dishonest, even if balanced by a sober acknowledgment of the injuries that will never heal. “It strikes me as impossible,” she admits, “to speak of redemption and Auschwitz in the same breath.” While admiring Levi’s work, calling him “a writer of high distinction,” she is clearly troubled by the “glow of good feeling . . . that generally attaches to Levi’s name.”23 For her, his voice is too detached and too peaceful, to capture anything close to the essence of the death camps. She writes: Of the scribes of the Holocaust, Levi appears to be the one who troubles the least, least wounds, least implicates, the reader. A scientific or objective attitude will inform, certainly, but declines any show of agitation. What we

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have had from Levi, accordingly, is the portrait of a psychological oxymoron: the well-mannered cicerone of hell, mortal horror in a decorous voice.24

Ozick has a valid point: detachment may be a way for both the writer and the reader to avoid the worst and most significant aspects of the Holocaust. Yet, it seems to me that Levi’s dispassionate voice does not make his version of Auschwitz more palatable; on the contrary, with its precision and restraint, it states the facts of atrocity so persuasively that even the most skeptical reader fails to escape them. That point aside, we should note that Ozick considers Levi’s psychological state contradictory and, ultimately, untenable: victims, she believes, cannot honestly carry on “decorous” discussions about the Holocaust, nor, apparently, can they find any joy in living. She is not surprised when The Drowned and the Saved reveals, at least to her, a very different and more truthful tone. Choosing a locution that equates Levi with Améry, she asserts that the book “is the record of a man returning blows with all the might of human fury, in full knowledge that the pen is mightier than the fist.” The convulsions of rage have altered the nature of the prose, and—if we can judge by Levi’s suicide—the man as well. Almost no one, interestingly, has been disposed to say that Levi’s final testimony is saturated in deadly anger—as if it would be too cruel to tear from him the veil of the spirit pure.25 While it is true that The Drowned and the Saved resounds with more righteous indignation than Levi’s earlier books, which are not in fact completely devoid of ire, to claim that this final volume “is saturated in deadly anger” strikes me as wholly inaccurate. Contrary to what Ozick would have us believe, the few passages cited as examples of this anger do not incontestably voice “all the might of human fury.” If anything, these sentences remind us that the real power of Levi’s prose resides, as it did in his earlier books, in its capacity to describe unimaginable crimes both clearly and credibly. Levi succeeds in arousing our anger because we trust his narration implicitly; he knows that he would be much less effective if his own anger got in the way. Ozick stresses the difference between The Drowned and the Saved and the predecessor volumes; but, I submit, there is more continuity than difference in Levi’s writings. The final book’s title is identical to a chapter title from Survival in Auschwitz, written forty years earlier. That chapter offers a preliminary investigation of what proves to be the central concern of The Drowned and the Saved: a careful weighing of the choices, moral and immoral, made by the perpetrators of the Holocaust, by the apathetic bystanders, and by the death camp inmates themselves in their effort to survive.

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Perhaps the most disturbing part of Ozick’s argument is her assertion that Levi’s “deadly anger” is a better, more appropriate response to the Holocaust than was achieved in his earlier books, whose restraint, she tells us, “was undertaken out of a consistent adherence . . . possibly to a selfdeception: a picture of how a civilized man ought to conduct himself when he is documenting savagery.” How Levi became undeceived Ozick does not explain, but she assures us that The Drowned and the Saved constitutes a rejection of his earlier work, indeed, of his self-conception as a Holocaust writer. “What we know now . . . is that at bottom Levi could not believe in himself as a vessel of clear water standing serenely apart. It was not detachment. It was dormancy,” she says in reference to the “deadly anger.”26 Yet, to see Levi’s last book as a repudiation of his other works seems an extreme and groundless position given the continuities I have documented. Ozick’s interpretation ostensibly rises from Levi’s texts, but there are indications that she could not have arrived at her suspect conclusions, or even initiated her investigation, without starting from the notion that the writer’s suicidal nature must be revealed in his words. Seeing Levi’s last book as an angry prelude to suicide, itself the ultimate admission of defeat, legitimizes Ozick’s overarching view of the Holocaust, “that no promise, no use, no restitution . . . can come out of the suffering and destruction of one-third of the Jewish people.”27 I respect and to some degree sympathize with this view, but it seems that Ozick is imposing the idea on Levi. By describing The Drowned and the Saved as “the bitterest of suicide notes,” at the conclusion of her essay, Ozick reduces Levi’s least personal effort, a book of wide moral and historical scope, to a self-indulgent wail of despair. Ozick’s is a teleological interpretation: she attempts to focus the meaning of Levi’s literary production through the lens of his final, desperate act, as if suicide marks the culmination of a career, as if it serves as a master text that unlocks the meaning of all the others. But there is more than enough doubt about how and why Levi’s life ended to suggest the inadvisability of basing a literary interpretation on the ambiguity of suicide. With reference to Améry, Levi commented that his suicide, “like other suicides admits a cloud of explanations”:28 it seems no less true in Levi’s own case. Even if we can be certain that Levi took his own life, how can we know the reasons for his act of desperation? How can we know whether the scars of the Holocaust were a major or minor factor in his decision? Suicide, after all, is a sadly common occurrence among all sorts of people, not just Holocaust survivors. Yet, it may be less burdensome for us to believe that Levi was overwhelmed by the horror and incomprehensibility of the death camps because his defeat in some way absolves us of our responsibility to fully absorb and understand the crimes described in his books.

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Since the question of whether Levi’s death resulted from premeditated suicide remains in dispute, the reinterpretations offered by Ozick, Kaplan, and the others, rest on a precarious foundation. More importantly, reading suicide into Levi’s texts with undue insistence tends to reduce their possible range of meanings. It seems to me that the autobiographical origin of Levi’s work is much less significant to us than his texts’ wide applicability to issues of morality and justice in the post-Holocaust age. Perhaps, Levi’s writing did not save him from despair; this should not be taken to mean that writing about the Holocaust is a failed proposition. On the contrary, Levi’s humane voice of reason offers his readers the rare insight necessary for future salvations. If we wish to learn about the Holocaust, we ought to focus on how Levi lived rather than how he died, on what he wrote, rather than speculate on the hypothetical contents of the suicide note he did not write. Levi’s old and dear friend Rita Levi-Montalcini, a Nobel laureate in medicine, believed that Levi’s death was unintentional. Sadly, she felt, as I do, that many people take from Levi’s alleged suicide a horrendous message that destroys the courageous message that he sent to all of us right up to his last book, The Drowned and the Saved. The last day, the last minute cannot contradict an entire life. It is repugnant that a suicide can be considered normal or obligatory. It is accepted as such by everyone out of mental laziness, but not by me.29

Indeed, we should not read Primo Levi’s works as the prelude to suicide. We should not succumb to that mental laziness or rely on easy stereotypes of the Holocaust survivor to convince ourselves that a suicide is logical and appropriate when a whole life and a multitude of words in black and white shout their denial. Notes 1. “Legacy in Gray,” in Memory and Mastery: Primo Levi as Writer and Witness, ed. Roberta S. Kremer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 215. 2. See, e.g., William Styron, “Why Primo Levi Need Not Have Died,” New York Times, December 19, 1988, A17. Giulio Einaudi, “Primo Levi e la casa editrice Einaudi,” in Primo Levi as Witness: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at Princeton University, ed. Pietro Frassica (Fiesole: Casalini, 1990), 41–42. Alexander Stille, “Primo Levi: Reconciling the Man and the Writer,” The New York Times Book Review, July 6, 1987, 5. 3. Three biographies discuss in detail Levi’s depression and the circumstances of his death: Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist (New York: Overlook, 1999); Carole Angier, The Double Bond, Primo Levi: A Biography

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002); and Ian Thomson, Primo Levi (New York: Random House, 2002). Here are two arguments for accidental death: (1) Rita Levi-Montalcini suggests that, if disposed toward suicide, Levi would have chosen a different method. “Primo di tutto sappiamo che Primo Levi era assolutamente contrario al suicidio. E poi con la sua enorme cultura, in chimica particolarmente, sarebbe stato tanto facile uccidersi in un altro modo. Mai e poi mai in un modo così poco sicuro, gettandosi in un piccolo varco tra scala e ascensore, col rischio di rimanere paralizzato” (“Non si é suicidato,” Panorama, May 3, 1987, 62); (2) A British physician argues that Levi’s death was accidental. “Dr. David Mendel, a retired cardiologist from Kent, England, who met with Levi and corresponded with him regularly, said it is far more likely that Levi fell over the banister accidentally after a bad reaction to anti-depressant medication” (“Book Notes,” New York Times, December 11, 1991, 22). Other crucial medical information is given in the same article. Finally, a detailed essay by Diego Gambetta (“Primo Levi’s Last Moments,” Boston Review (Summer 1999): 25–29, presents good evidence both for and against suicide and also asserts that we will probably never know with certainty. The New Republic March 21, 1988, cited in Gambetta, “Prime Levi’s Last Moments,” 26. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 130. Kremer (ed.), Memory and Mastery 13. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 24. Cited in Anthony Rudolf, At an Uncertain Hour: Primo Levi’s War against Oblivion (London: Menard Press, 1990), 38. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit Books, 1988), 70–87. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 79. Ibid., 23–35. See Hass’s study, cited in Gambetta, “Prime Levi’s Last Moments,” 29. James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 127. Primo Levi, La ricerca delle radici (Turin: Einaudi, 1981), 211. Primo Levi, Other People’s Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit, 1989), 173. Harold Kaplan, Conscience and Memory: Meditations in a Museum of the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 140. Kaplan, Conscience and Memory, xii. Ibid., 43. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 136. Cynthia Ozick, Metaphor and Memory (New York: Random House, 1991), 34–48. Ibid., 36.

READING SUICIDE INTO THE WORKS OF PRIMO LEVI

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

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Ibid., 45, 35, 40. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 47. Berel Lang, Writing and the Holocaust (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988), 279. Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 136 “Non si é suicidato,” Panorama, May 3, 1987, 63. My translation from the Italian: “un messaggio orrendo, che distrugge il messaggio di coraggio che ha mandato a tutti noi anche nell’ultimo I sommersi e i salvati . . . Non si può contraddire tutta una vita l’ultimo giorno, l’ultimo minuto. È ripugnante che un suicidio . . . possa essere ritenuto normale, dovuto. E come tale accettato da tutti per pigrizia mentale. Ma non da me.”

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A Bibliography of English and Italian Scholarly Writings on Primo Levi, 1985–2002 James Tasato Mellone

Bibliographic Review The past decade has seen a tremendous growth in Levi studies as scholars in Italy and throughout the English-speaking world have embraced the universal aspects of his work. Bibliographic research on Levi scholarship, however, is still in its infancy. Previous efforts have varied in quality and reliability, and have usually been selective in nature. This bibliography is a preliminary effort to collate the full body of scholarly work done on Primo Levi, in English and Italian, since just prior to his death in 1987. One of the earliest monographic works to deal with Levi’s life and work was Fiora Vincenti’s Invito alla lettura di Primo Levi (1973). It contains a short “Nota Bibliografica” (171–173) that lists the early reviews of Levi’s books that appeared in Italian newspapers and weeklies from 1947 through July 1971. Giovanni Tesio repeated much of the same list at the end of his critical portrait of Levi in 1979 (675–676). This was followed in 1981 with Giuseppe Grassano’s monographic critical study, Primo Levi, which contains a more extensive list of Italian reviews, through 1980, in his “Nota Bibliografica” (132–143). In addition, Grassano provides a list of Levi’s journalistic writings from 1947 through March 1981, as well as the most important interviews with Levi from 1963 through March 1980. He also notes the small handful of scholarly criticism that had appeared up until that time, namely two studies by Tesio (1977, 1979) and those by Pietro Frassica (1974) and Mirna Risk (1979). Grassano’s excellent work was followed by Vania De Luca’s sound “Bibliografia critica su Primo Levi,” which appears in her Tra Giobbe e i buchi neri (101–104; 1991). It adds a few reviews from 1963 to 1980 missing from Grassano’s list, and then provides a supplementary list of reviews and short critiques from 1981 through early 1991.

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Beginning in the early 1990s numerous conferences devoted to Levi began to occur in Italy. At this time articles in scholarly journals also began to appear with regular frequency. This occurred not only in Italy but also in Anglo-America where most of Levi’s work had by then been translated into English. His growing reputation in the English-speaking world was soon reflected in Cathe Giffuni’s compilation, “An English Bibliography of the Writings of Primo Levi” (1993). It lists the various editions of Levi’s books translated into English, including short essays of his that were published in English-language periodicals. It also includes reviews of Levi’s books from popular English periodicals, published through 1990. Although the reviews are organized under the title of the Levi book that they critique, they are listed in chronological not alphabetical order, which makes browsing by author difficult. With her “Nota Bibliografica” (1995) Vania De Luca followed her previous effort with a valuable bibliographic critique of the more important Levi interviews, as well as some of the major critical essays and articles on his work up to that time. It also includes a long list of the obituaries and notices that appeared in Italy upon Levi’s death in 1987. One of the more recent bibliographies to appear, and one of the few extensive ones in English, is that by Kremer (2001). It provides a sizeable list of Levi’s works in English, and a compilation of the representative scholarship. It is in alphabetical order by author, which makes for easy browsing. However, many citations are incomplete, lacking volume, issue, or page numbers. Others are incorrect as to names, titles, or dates. The parameters of the bibliography are also not given, so there is scholarly work mixed in with book reviews and shorter pieces from popular periodicals, published in numerous languages, over an indeterminant period of time. A more reliable, yet selective, bibliography (59–62) follows Giuseppina Santagostino’s summary critique of a decade of scholarship (1987–1997) on Levi (2001). The present bibliography has taken freely from the work of those discussed above and from the scholarly writings that appear below. Due to the frequency with which citations in these works have been inaccurate or incomplete, every effort has been made to present correct and full citations, with the exception of newspaper articles. To do so, almost all of the material has been consulted directly. The bulk of the bibliography is composed of scholarly writings that have appeared about Levi: books, essays in books or proceedings, and articles from scholarly journals. The frequent republication of Italian articles or essays in more than one journal or in more than one edited book has made the task of compilation an exacting one, and has contributed to the bibliography’s length.

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In general, the bibliography does not include book reviews, nor does it include brief critiques or short essays that have appeared in newspapers or in weekly magazines. It does include book reviews from scholarly journals that are comparative in nature, or that deal with numerous works of Levi, or the corpus of his work in general. Edited collections of essays or proceedings have been indexed as fully as possible. Therefore, some citations are included for articles in French, and for brief critiques or short essays in English and Italian, which would not otherwise have been included. Due to space considerations, no attempt has been made here to cover the growing and valuable body of French scholarship on Levi. Notes within citations that are placed in brackets [ ] are derived from, or copied verbatim, from the original publication being cited. The compiler’s notes are set off by cursive brackets { }, usually at the end of citations. They help to explain a citation more fully, frequently when the subject matter is not apparent from the title of the material. The compiler will publish a more extensive and fully annotated bibliography on Primo Levi in the near future. The Works of Primo Levi {In chronological order: the Italian original is first, followed by the English translation.} Levi, Primo. Se questo è un uomo. Turin: De Silva, 1947. Se questo è un uomo. Rev. ed. Turin: Einaudi, 1958. If This is a Man. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Orion, 1959. Survival in Auschwitz. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Macmillan, 1961. Survival in Auschwitz. Trans. Stuart Woolf. With Afterword, “Primo Levi and Philip Roth: A Conversation.” New York: Macmillan, 1993. ———. La tregua. Turin: Einaudi, 1963. The Truce: A Survivor’s Journey Home from Auschwitz. Trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Bodley Head, 1965. The Reawakening: A Liberated Prisoner’s Long March Home through East Europe. Trans. Stuart Woolf. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1965. The Reawakening. Trans. Stuart Woolf. With Afterword, “The Author’s Answers to his Readers’ Questions,” Trans. Ruth Feldman. New York: Macmillan, 1987. ———. [Malabaila, Damiano. pseud.] *Storie naturali. Turin: Einaudi, 1966. ———. *Vizio di forma. Turin: Einaudi, 1971. *Both are contained in The Sixth Day and other Tales. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Summit Books, 1990. ———. L’osteria di Brema. Milan: Scheiwiller, 1975. ———. Il sistema periodico. Turin: Einaudi, 1975. 1994 ed., con Appendice, “Intervista di Philip Roth a Primo Levi.”

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The Periodic Table. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Schocken Books, 1984. ———. La chiave a stella. Turin: Einaudi, 1978. The Monkey’s Wrench. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Summit Books, 1986. The Wrench. Trans. William Weaver. London: Joseph, 1987. ———. Lilít e altri racconti. Turin: Einaudi, 1981. Moments of Reprieve. Trans. Ruth Feldman. New York: Summit Books, 1986. ———. La ricerca delle radici: antologia personale. Turin: Einaudi, 1981. La ricerca delle radici: antologia personale. Ed. Marco Belpoliti. Intro. Italo Calvino. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. The Search for Roots. Trans. Peter Forbes. London: Allen Lane, 2001. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002. ———. Se non ora, quando? Turin: Einaudi, 1982. If Not Now, When? Trans. William Weaver. Intro. Irving Howe. New York: Summit Books, 1985. ———. Ad ora incerta. Milan: Garzanti, 1984. 2nd ed., 1998. Collected Poems. Trans. Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann. London: Faber & Faber, 1988. ———. Dialogo. Ed. Tullio Regge. Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Dialogo. Ed. Tullio Regge. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Conversations. Ed. Tullio Regge. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. London: I.B. Tauris, 1989. ———. L’altrui mestiere. Turin: Einaudi, 1985. L’altrui mestiere. Ed. Ernesto Ferrero. Intro. Italo Calvino. Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Other People’s Trades. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Summit Books, 1989. ———. I sommersi e i salvati. Turin: Einaudi, 1986. The Drowned and the Saved. Trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Summit Books, 1988. ———. Autoritratto di Primo Levi. Padua: Edizioni Nord-Est, Distribuzione Garzanti, 1987. Conversazione con Primo Levi. Ed. Ferdinando Camon. Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Conversations with Primo Levi. Ed. Ferdinando Camon. Trans. John Shepley. Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1989. ———. Opere. 3 vols. Turin: Einaudi, 1987–1990. Vol. I. Se questo è un uomo, La tregua, Il sistema periodico, I sommersi e i salvati. Intro. Cesare Cases. Vol. II. Romanzi e poesie. Intro. Cesare Segre. Vol. III. Racconti e saggi. Intro. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo. ———. Echi di una voce perduta: incontre, interviste e conversazioni con Primo Levi. Ed. Gabriella Poli and Giorgio Calcagno. Milan: Mursia, 1992. ———. I racconti. [Storie naturali. Vizio di forma. Lilít.] Intro. Ernesto Ferrero. Turin: Einaudi, 1996.

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———. Conversazione e interviste: 1963–1987. Ed. Marco Belpoliti. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987. Ed. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon. Trans. Robert Gordon. New York: New Press, 2001. ———. Il fabbricante di specchi: racconti e saggi. 3rd rev. ed. Pref. Lorenzo Mondo. Turin: La Stampa, 1997. ———. Opere. 2 vols. Ed. Marco Belpoliti. Intro. Daniele del Giudice. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Vol. I. Se questo è un uomo, La tregua, Storie naturali, Vizio di forma, Il sistema periodico, La chiave a stella, Pagine sparse 1946–1980. Vol. II. Lilít e altri racconti, Se non ora, quando?, Ad ora incerta, Altre poesie, L’altrui mestiere, Racconti e saggi, I sommersi e i salvati, Pagine sparse 1981–1987, La ricerca delle radici. ———. L’ultimo Natale di guerra. Ed. Marco Belpoliti. Turin: Einaudi, 2000. ———. L’asimmetria e la vita: articoli e saggi, 1955–1987. Ed. Marco Belpoliti. Turin: Einaudi, 2002.

Biographical and Critical Studies on Primo Levi and His Work Essays in Reference Books Beer, Marina. “Primo Levi: il termitaio di Se questo è un uomo.” In Storia generale della letteratura italiana, Vol. XI: Le forme del realismo, ed. Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedullà, 608–615. Milan: Federico Motta, 1999. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. “Levi, Primo.” In Dictionary of Italian Literature, revised and expanded edition, ed. Peter Bondanella and Julia Conaway Bondanella, 321–324. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Berger, Alan L. “Levi, Primo (1919–1987).” In Encyclopedia of Holocaust Literature, ed. David Patterson, Alan L. Berger, and Sarita Cargas, 107–112. Westport, CT: Oryx Press, 2002. Brandalise, Adone. “Primo Levi.” In Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, 2nd ed., ed. Vittore Branca, Vol. 2, 609–610. Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1986. Foa, Simona. “Levi, Primo (Torino 1919–ivi 1987).” In Dizionario della letteratura italiana del Novecento, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa, 301. Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Klein, Ilona. “Primo Levi.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 177: Italian Novelists Since World War II, 1945–1965, ed. Augustus Pallotta, 162–170. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1997. Massi, Donatella. “Levi, Primo.” In Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana del Novecento, ed. Enrico Ghidetti and Giorgio Luti, 431–433. Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997. Pampaloni, Geno. “Primo Levi”; and Piero Cudini, “[Schedario dei poeti e dei prosatori:] Levi, Primo.” In Storia della letteratura italiana, Vol. 9: Il Novecento [t.2], new expanded and updated edition, ed. Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, 574–578, 947–948. Milan: Garzanti, 1987.

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Pulce, Graziella. “Primo Levi (Torino, 1919–1987);” and Piero Cudini, “[Schedario dei poeti e dei prosatori:] Levi, Primo (Torino 1919–1987).” In Storia della letteratura italiana, Vol. 9: Il Novecento [t.4], Scenari di fine secolo 2, ed. Nino Borsellino and Lucio Felici, 449–453, 984. Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Sodi, Risa. “Primo Levi.” In Jewish Profiles: Great Jewish Personalities and Institutions of the Twentieth Century, ed. Murray Polner, 168–180. Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1991.

Books Angier, Carole. Double Bond: Primo Levi, A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. Anissimov, Myriam. Primo Levi, ou, la tragédie d’un optimiste: biographie. Paris: Lattè, 1996. Primo Levi: The Tragedy of an Optimist. Trans. Steve Cox. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1997. Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. Trans. Steve Cox. London: Aurum, 1998. Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. Trans. Steve Cox. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1999. Primo Levi, o la tragedia di un ottimista. Trans. Andrea Giardina and Andrea Zucchetti. Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 2001. Banner, Gillian. Holocaust Literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman, and the Memory of the Offence. Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000. Bárberi Squarotti, Giorgio and Carlo Ossola, eds. Letteratura e industria: atti del XV Congresso A.I.S.S.L.I., Torino, 15–19 maggio 1994. Associazione internazionale per gli studi di lingua e letteratura italiana. 2 vols. Florence: L.S. Olschki, 1997. {See citations in the journals section for: D’Angelo, Dovara, Santagostino.} Belpoliti, Marco. Primo Levi. Serie: Biblioteca degli Scrittori. Milan: Mondadori, 1998. {Contains a short biographical essay, a reader’s guide to Levi’s works, and a selective bibliographic essay.} ———. ed. Primo Levi. [Serie: Riga; 13.] Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1997. {See citations in the journals section for: Affinati, Amsallem (2), Bartezzaghi, Belpoliti, Bertone, Biasin, Bidussa, Calvino (2), Calvo Montoro, Cataluccio, Cavaglion, d’Eramo, Delmay, Fonzi, Fortini, Giglioli, Ginzburg, Gordon, Gozzi, Grazioli, Lollini, Magris, Mengaldo, Mila, Nezri, Pauletto, Porro, Raboni, Raffaeli, Rigoni Stern, Rosato, Rudolf, Scarlini, Scarpa, Sebregondi, Sessi, Starnone, Steiner, Strati, Valabrega (2).} Bianchini, Edoardo. Invito alla lettura di Primo Levi. Milan: Mursia, 2000. Bianucci, Piero. L’uovo del futuro: cronache di scoperte prevedibili nel terzo millenio e un inedito di Primo Levi. Milan: Simonelli, 1996. Brambilla, Rosa and Giuseppe Cacciatore, eds. Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo. Atti del seminario di studio, 20–23 novembre 1994, Biblioteca della Pro Civitate Christiana, Assisi. Assisi: Cittadella, 1995. {See citations in the journals section for: Bolzoni, Calcagno, Castelli, Cristini, Farinelli, Fiore, Lanza, Levi Coen, Mancini, Martellini, Poli, Tesio, Tuscano.}

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Borri, Giancarlo. Le divine impurità: Primo Levi tra scienza e letteratura. Rimini: Luisè, 1992. Carlà, Marisa and Luca De Angelis, ed. L’ebraismo nella letteratura italiana del Novecento. Palermo: Palumbo, 1995. {See citations in the journal section for: Amsallem, Cavaglion, Valabrega.} Cases, Cesare. Patrie lettere. Turin: Einaudi, 1987. {See citations in the journal section for Cases: “Difesa di un cretino,” “Levi racconta l’assurdo,” “Levi ripensa all’assurdo.”} Caspar, Marie-Hélène, ed. Primo Levi. Atti di un convegno, 12 dicembre 1992. Nanterre: Universite Paris X—Nanterre, 1993. {Also published as a special issue of Narrativa 3 (janvier 1993); see Caspar in the journals section.} Cavaglion, Alberto. Primo Levi e “Se questo è un uomo.” Turin: Loescher, 1993. ———, ed. Primo Levi, il presente del passato: giornate internazionali di studio. Atti di un convegno tenuto a Torino, marzo 28–29, 1988, Consiglio regionale del Piemonte-ANED (Associazione nazionale ex deportati politici nei campi nazisti). Milan: Franco Angeli, 1991. {See citations in the journals section for: Beccaria, Bobbio, Bonino, Bravo and Jalla, Bruck, Cavaglion, Cereja, Collotti, Fortini, Giuntella, Goldstein, Langbein, Meghnagi, Minoia, Mondo, Quazza, Pierantoni, Regge, Revelli, Samuel, Ce. Segre, Stille, Vasari, S. J. Woolf.} ———, ed. Primo Levi per l’ANED, l’ANED per Primo Levi. Consiglio regionale del Piemonte; ANED (Associazione nazionale ex deportati politici nei campi nazisti); Centro studi Amici del triangolo rosso. Milan: F. Angeli, 1997. Cicioni, Mira. Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge. Washington, DC: Berg, 1995. Cinanni, Maria Teresa. Testimoni di voci sommerse: l’esperienza del nazismo in alcuni scrittori ebrei europei, Joseph Roth, Primo Levi, Jean Améry, Miklós Radnóti. Cosenza: Periferia, 1997. De Luca, Vania. Tra Giobbe e i buchi neri: le radici ebraiche dell’opera di Primo Levi. Naples: Istituto Geografico Editoriale Italiano, 1991. Dedola, Rossana. La musica dell’ uomo solo: saggi su Luigi Pirandello, Primo Levi, Leonard Sciascia, e Giovanni Orelli. Florence: Polistampa, 2000. Dini, Massimo and Stefano Jesurum. Primo Levi: le opere e i giorni. Milan: Rizzoli, 1992. Ferrero, Ernesto, ed. Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. {See citations in the journals section for: Bobbio, Cases, Cavaglion, Einaudi, Ferrero, Fortini, Grassano, Levi Della Torre, Magris, Meghnagi, Mengaldo, Mila, Ozick, Sanvitale, Ce. Segre, Tesio, Valabrega.} Folena, Gianfranco, ed. Tre narratori: Calvino, Primo Levi, Parise. Padua: Liviana, 1989. {See citations in the journals section for: Cases, Mengaldo.} Frassica, Pietro, ed. Primo Levi as Witness: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at Princeton University, April 30 to May 2, 1989. Fiesole: Casalini, 1990. {See citations in the journals section for: Biasin, Cases, Einaudi, Ferrucci, Fontanella, Lagorio, Rosenthal, Ce. Segre, Stille, Tesio.} Gordon, Robert S. C. Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Grassano, Giuseppe. Primo Levi. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1981.

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Hatley, James. Suffering Witness: The Quandary of Responsibility After the Irreparable. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. {Analyzes the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas, Tadeusz Borowski, and Levi.} Homer, Frederic D. Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Ioli, Giovanna, ed. Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione. Atti del convegno internazionale, San Salvatore Monferrato, 26–27–28 settembre 1991. San Salvatore Monferrato: Edizioni della Biennale Piemonte e letteratura, 1995. {See citations in the journals section for: Bàrberi Squarotti, Beccaria, Beccaria Rolfi, Bertone, Bonino, Borri, Bravo, Cavaglion, De Luca (2), Frassica, Gioanola, Grassano, Greppi, Guglielminetti, Marabini, Millu, Mondo, Prosperi, Santagostino, Segre Amar, Tesio, Vasari, Verdenelli.} Kelly, Judith. Primo Levi: Recording and Reconstruction in the Testimonial Literature. Burlington, VT: Troubador, 2000. Kremer, Roberta S., ed. Memory and Mastery: Primo Levi as Writer and Witness. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. {See citations in the journals section for: Biasin, Cicioni, Cliff, Eliach, Feinstein, Harrowitz, Kremer, Langer, Patruno, Sayre, Signorini, Sodi.} Mattioda, Enrico. L’ordine del mondo: saggio su Primo Levi. Naples: Liguori, 1998. Mattioda, Enrico, ed. Al di qua del bene e del male: la visione del mondo di Primo Levi. Atti del convegno internazionale, Torino, 15–16 dicembre 1999. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2000. {See citations in the journals section for: Barenghi, Bartezzaghi, Belpoliti, Bidussa, Calcagno, Cavaglion, Gordon, Guagnini, Mattioda, Porro, Scarpa, Tesio, Vasari.} Messineo, Daniela. Il viaggio di Ulisse da Dante a Levi. Florence: Firenze Atheneum, 1995. Moliterni, Fabio, Roberto Ciccarelli, and Alessandro Lattanzio. Primo Levi: l’a-topia letteraria, il pensiero narrativo, la scrittura e l’assurdo. Naples: Liguori, 2000. {See citations in the journals section for: Ciccarelli, Lattanzio, Moliterni.} Momigliano Levi, Paolo and Rosanna Gorris, ed. Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia. Atti del convegno, “Giornate di studio in ricordo di Primo Levi,” SaintVincent (Aosta), 15–16 ottobre 1997. Florence: Giuntina, 1999. {See citations in the journals section for: Camilleri, Cases, Cavaglion, Cereja, Faü, Gorris, Momigliano Levi, Moscati, Tedeschi, Tibaldi, S. J. Woolf.} Monicelli, Francesco and Carlo Saletti, ed. Il Racconto della catastrofe: il cinema di fronte ad Auschwitz. Verona: Società Letteraria di Verona, 1998. {See citations in the journals section for: Ascarelli, Belpoliti, Saletti.} Neiger, Ada, ed. Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare, il dovere di ricordare. Atti del convegno, Trento, 14 maggio 1997. Fossombrone: Metauro, 1998. {See citations in the journals section for: Affinati, Bianchi, Camon, Carpi, Covito, De Angelis, Neiger, Pauletto, Rizzante, Rutigliano, Scarsella, Sessi, Tesio.} Nezri-Dufour, Sophie. Primo Levi, una memoria ebraica del Novecento. Florence: Giuntina, 2002. Nystedt, Jane. Le opere di Primo Levi viste al computer: osservazioni stilolinguistiche. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993.

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Patruno, Nicholas. Understanding Primo Levi. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. Pramotton, Luciana and Chiara Minelli. Storie e storia: Émile Chanoux, Primo Levi, Émile Lexert e Idra Desandré tra resistenza e deportazione. Aosta: Le Chateau, 2001. Pugliese, Stanislao G., ed. The Most Ancient of Minorities: The Jews of Italy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. {See citations in the journals section for: Gold, Orton, Petrov Bumble.} Rudolf, Anthony. At an Uncertain Hour: Primo Levi’s War Against Oblivion. London: Menard Press, 1990. Sodi, Risa. A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz. New York: P. Lang, 1990. Spadi, Milvia. Le parole di un uomo: incontro con Primo Levi. Rome: Di Renzo, 1997. Tarrow, Susan, ed. Reason and Light: Essays on Primo Levi. Ithaca, NY: Center for International Studies, Cornell University, 1990. {See citations in the journals section for: Biasin, Cannon, Feldman, Gilman, Girelli-Carasi, Gunzberg, Harrowitz, Klein, Cl. Segre.} Tesio, Giovanni. Piemonte letterario dell’Otto-Novecento: da Giovanni Faldella a Primo Levi. Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. {See citations in the journals section for Tesio: “Premesse su Primo Levi poeta,” “Primo Levi,” “Primo Levi tra ordine e caos,” “Su alcune giunte e varianti di Se questo è un uomo.”} Thomson, Ian. Primo Levi. London: Hutchinson, 2002; New York: Metropolitan, 2003. Toscani, Claudio. Come leggere “Se questo è un uomo” di Primo Levi. Milan: Mursia, 1990. Varchetta, Giuseppe. Ascoltando Primo Levi: organizzazione, narrazione, etica. Milan: Guerini, 1991. 2nd ed., 1998. Vincenti, Fiora. Invito all lettura di Primo Levi. Milan: Mursia, 1973. 7th ed., 1993. Volpato, Chiara and Alberta Contarello. Psicologia sociale e situazioni estreme: relazioni interpersonali e intergruppi in “Se questo è un uomo” di Primo Levi. Bologna: Pàtron, 1999. Woolf, Judith. The Memory of the Offence: Primo Levi’s “If This is a Man.” Market Harborough, England: University Texts, 1996. Zaccaro, Vanna. Dire l’indicibile: Primo Levi tra testimonianza e racconto. Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 2002.

Articles from Periodicals, and Essays from Books Actis-Grosso, Maurice. “ ‘Zakhor!’ o della poesia leviana.” Narrativa [Nanterre] 3 (January 1993): 77–102. Affinati, Eraldo. “Primo Levi: la responsibilità della parola.” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 57–62. ———. “Responsabilità.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 426–433. Amsallem, Daniela. “Ebraismo, scienza e creazione letteraria: Primo Levi e i miti ebraici di Lilít e del Golem.” In L’ebraismo … , ed. Carlà and De Angelis, 1995, 123–151.

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Amsallem, Daniela. “Illuminista.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 361–371. ———. “Primo Levi e i tedeschi.” Narrativa [Nanterre] 3 (January 1993): 115–134. ———. “Primo Levi, un ebreo torinese tra scienza e Qabbalah.” In Hebraica: miscellanea di studi in onore di Sergio J. Sierra per il suo 75. compleanno, ed. Felice Israel, Alfredo M. Rabello, and Alberto M. Somekh, 91–113. Turin: Istituto di Studi Ebraici, Scuola Rabbinica “S.H. Margulies—D. Disegni,” 1998. ———. See also: Levi, Primo. Angress, Ruth K. “Primo Levi in English.” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 3 (1986): 317–330. {Review of The Periodic Table and If Not Now, When?} Arci Biffoni, Betül. “La fragilità del bene in Primo Levi.” Problemi: periodico quadrimestrale di cultura no. 110 (January/April 1998): 73–93. Aristobulo. “Tropismi dell’inconscio: qualche straccio di Es (sulle Radici di Primo Levi).” Poliorama [Bologna] no. 7 (1990): 278–282. Ascarelli, Emanuele. “Ritorno ad Auschwitz: intervista con Primo Levi.” In Il Racconto della catastrofe … , ed. Monicelli and Saletti, 1998, 91–101. Bárberi Squarotti, Giorgio. “Il sistema della scrittura.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 102–120. Bareil, Jean-Philippe. “La Giudeità de Primo Levi: Une Dialectique de l’exclusion.” Narrativa [Nanterre] 3 (January 1993): 135–146. Barenghi, Mario. “La memoria dell’offesa: ricordare, raccontare, comprendere.” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 143–165. Baross, Zsuzsa. “On the Ethics of Writing, after ‘Bosnia’ (1): The Revenant …” International Studies in Philosophy ⫽ Studi internazionali di filosofia 30, no. 1 (1998): 1–17. ———. “On the Ethics of Writing, ‘after Auschwitz, after Bosnia’ (2): Anachronie.” International Studies in Philosophy ⫽ Studi internazionali di filosofia 31, no. 1 (1999): 1–21. ———. “On the Ethics of Writing, after ‘Bosnia’ (3): Primo Levi’s Suicide.” International Studies in Philosophy ⫽ Studi internazionali di filosofia 31, no. 2 (1999): 39–68. Bartezzaghi, Stefano. “Cosmichimiche.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 267–314. ———. “Primo Levi giocatore.” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 129–141. Baumgarten, Murray. “Primo Levi’s Periodic Art: Survival in Auschwitz and the Meaningfulness of Everyday Life.” In Resisting the Holocaust, ed. Ruby Rohrlich, 115–132. Oxford: Berg, 1998. Baumgarten, Murray, ed. “Primo Levi, Witness.” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 48, no. 1 [189] (Winter 1999): 49–83. {Special section of journal issue, see citations in this section for: Boone, Cheyette, Gordon, Wilson.} Beccaria, Gian Luigi. “ ‘L’altrui mestiere’ di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 130–136. Also published in Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 157–163. Beccaria Rolfi, Lidia. “La memoria dopo il ritorno.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 54–58.

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Bell, Michael. “Novel, Story and the Foreign: Cervantes, Thomas Mann and Primo Levi.” In Cervantes and the Modernists: The Question of Influence, ed. Edwin Williamson, 85–102. London: Tamesis, 1994. Belpoliti, Marco. “Animali.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 157–209. ———. “Animali e fantasmi.” In L’ultimo Natale di guerra, Levi, 2000, 129–141. ———. “Le occasioni di Primo Levi.” In Il racconto della catastrofe … , ed. Monicelli and Saletti, 1998, 77–83. ———. “Se questo è un sogno: sogni, incubi e risvegli nell’opera di Primo Levi.” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 59–74. Bertone, Giorgio. “Antologia.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 210–221. ———. “Italo Calvino e Primo Levi.” In Italo Calvino: il castello della scrittura, Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Also published as “Primo Levi e Italo Calvino.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 236–260. ———. “Una nota su Primo Levi in occasione del decennale della morte.” Igitur: semestrale di lingue, letterature e culture moderne [Rom] 9, no. 2 [16] (July/December 1997): 73–79. Bertone, Manuela. “Primo Levi o del dolore antico.” Narrativa [Nanterre] 3 (January 1993): 51–75. Bianchi, Marina. “Il lavor di riparazione: il messaggio di Primo Levi e il nostro compito, oggi.” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 105–108. Biasin, Gian Paolo. “Contagio.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 254–266. ———. “The Haunted Journey of Primo Levi.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 3–19. ———. “Our Daily Bread—Pane—Brot—Broid—Chleb—Pain—Lechem— Kenyer.” In Primo Levi as Witness … , ed. Frassica, 1990, 1–21. Also published as “Our Daily Bread … Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo.” In The Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel, 128–142. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Published in Italian as “Il nostro pane … quotidiano.” In I sapori della modernità: cibo e romanzo, 183–204. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. ———. “Till My Ghastly Tale is Told: Levi’s Moral Discourse from Se questo è un uomo to I sommersi e i salvati.” In Reason and Light … , ed. Tarrow, 1990, 127–141. Published in Italian as “Il ghetto e il treno: sul discorso morale di Primo Levi.” L’Asino d’Oro 2, no. 4 (November 1991): 129–141; and in Le periferie della letteratura: da Verga a Tabucchi, 105–119. Ravenna: Longo, 1997. Bidussa, David. “Tempo storico e tempo cronologico nella scrittura di Primo Levi.” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 109–127. ———. “Verbi.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 504–515. Birkerts, Sven. “Primo Levi.” In An Artificial Wilderness: Essays on TwentiethCentury Literature, 179–185. New York: Morrow, 1987. Block, Alan A. “ ‘If I Forget Thee … Thou Shall Forget’: The Difficulty of Difficult Memories.” In Difficult Memories: Talk in a (Post) Holocaust Era, ed. Marla Morris and John A. Weaver, 25–44. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Bobbio, Norberto. “Addio a Primo Levi.” Nuova Antologia 122, no. 2162 [v. 557] (April/June 1987): 202–204.

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Bobbio, Norberto. “Primo Levi, perché.” Nuova Antologia 123, no. 2166 [v. 559] (April/June 1988): 108–110. Also published in Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 13–15; and in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 387–390. ———. “Primo Levi, ‘Se questo è un uomo.’ ” Nuova Antologia 132, no. 2202 [v. 578] (April/June 1997): 19–23. Bodrato, Aldo. “Nel racconto la verità di Auschwitz: in ricordo di Primo Levi.” Humanitas: rivista bimestrale di cultura [Brescia] n.s. 44, no. 1 (February 1989): 51–73. Bolzoni, Francesco. “Presentazione del Film, Jona che visse nella ballena. Lettura del film secondo Levi.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 217–229. Boone, Susan L. “Unvarnished Truth: The Chemistry of Shame in Primo Levi.” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 48, no. 189 (Winter 1999): 72–83. Borioni, Gianfrancesco. “ ‘Quaestio de centauris’: storia, mito e umanesimo in Primo Levi.” Narrativa [Nanterre] 3 (January 1993): 31–50. Borri, Giancarlo. “Primo Levi tra scienza e letteratura.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 207–215. Bravo, Anna. “Una memoria per tutti.” In Primo Levi, memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 33–39. Bravo, Anna and Daniele Jalla. “Primo Levi, un uomo normale di buona memoria.” Passato e Presente [Florence] no. 18 (September/December 1988): 99–108. Also published in Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 67–78. Bravo, Anna and Federico Cereja. “Ex deportato Primo Levi: un’intervista [27 January 1983].” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, no. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 299–330. Bruck, Edith. “L’amico, il parente, il fratello.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 48–51. Bucelli, Daniela and Luca Vallario. “Quando finisce la speranza: il suicidio di Primo Levi.” Giornale Storico di Psicologia Dinamica 13, no. 25 (January 1989): 91–103. Bura, Claudio. “Primo Levi, La chiave a stella.” Gli Annali [Università italiana per stranieri] 8 (January/June 1987): 111–180. Calcagno, Giorgio. “Un alchimista fra le ciminiere.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 31–45. ———. “Dante dolcissimo padre.” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 167–174. Calvino, Italo. “Un libro sui campi della morte, Se questo è un uomo.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 113–114. Originally published in L’Unità (May 6, 1948). ———. “Primo Levi, La ricerca delle radici.” Also published in Saggi 1945–1985, Vol. I, 1133–1137. Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Originally published in La Repubblica (June 11, 1981). Also published as “Le quattro strade di Primo Levi,” in Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 133–136. Calvo Montoro, María J. “Visitatore.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 516–522.

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Camilleri, Danielle. “Écriture e responsabilité: Giorgio Bassani et Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 111–131. ———. “ ‘Razza ebraica,’ ‘sangue straniero’: la problematica dell’identità nelle opere di Giorgio Bassani e Primo Levi.” In Lo Straniero: atti del convegno di studi, Cagliari, 16–19 novembre 1994, ed. Mario Domenichelli and Pino Fasano, Vol. 2, 797–833. Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Camon, Ferdinando. “Primo Levi e la non-esistenza di Dio.” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 13–16. Cannon, Joann. “Canon-Formation and Reception in Contemporary Italy: The Case of Primo Levi.” Italica 69, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 30–44. ———. “Chemistry and Writing in The Periodic Table.” In Reason and Light … , ed. Tarrow, 1990, 99–111. ———. “Storytelling and the Picaresque in Levi’s La tregua.” Modern Language Studies 31, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 1–10. Carpi, Anna Maria. “La tregua, lingua materna, lingue di babele.” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 39–44. Carroll, David. “The Limits of Representation and the Right to Fiction: Shame, Literature, and the Memory of the Shoah.” Esprit Créateur 39, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 68–79. Casarin, Carmine. “Il mare e la zuppa.” In E c’è di mezzo il mare: lingua, letteratura e civiltà marina, atti del XIV Congresso dell’A.I.P.I., Spalato (Croazia), 23–27 agosto 2000, ed. Bart Van den Bossche, Michel Bastiaensen, Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, Vol. I, 21–25. Florence: F. Cesati, 2002. Cases, Cesare. “Difesa di un cretino.” In his Patrie lettere, 1987, 138–143. Originally published in Quaderni Piacentini 6, no. 30 (1967). ———. “Levi racconta l’assurdo.” In his Patrie lettere, 1987, 137–138. ———. “Levi ripensa all’assurdo.” L’indice dei libri del mese 3, no. 7 (July 1986): 6–7. Also published in his Patrie lettere, 1987, 144–150. Published in English as “Rethinking the Absurd.” L’indice dei libri del mese 3, no. 8 (October 1986): 4–5. ———. “L’ordine delle cose e l’ordine delle parole.”“Introduzione” in Opere, Vol. I, Levi, 1987, ix–xxxi. Also published in L’indice dei libri del mese 4, no. 10 (November 1987): 25–31; and in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 5–33. ———. “Ricordo di Primo Levi.” In Tre Narratori … , ed. Folena, 1989, 99–103. ———. “La scoperta di Primo Levi come scrittore.” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 89–96. ———. “Sodio e potassio: scienza e visione del mondo in Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi as Witness … , ed. Frassica, 1990, 21–30. Caspar, Marie-Hélène, ed. “Primo Levi.” Narrativa [Nanterre] 3 (January 1993). {Special journal issue, also published as a book, see the books section. See citations in the journals section for: Actis-Grosso, Amsallem, Bareil, Bertone, Borioni, Gargiulo, Geerts, Samuel, Santagostino.} Castegnaro, Alberto. “Due lettere di Primo Levi.” Testo: studi di teoria e storia della letteratura e della critica [Brescia] no. 14 (July/December 1987): 119–120.

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Castelli, Ferdinando. “Con Primo Levi nell’inferno del Lager: Elie Wiesel.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 142–184. Cataluccio, Francesco M. “Sopravissuti.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 476–484. Catani, Maurizio. “ ‘Even if we were to tell it, we would not be believed’: A Lesson from the Work of Primo Levi.” Current Sociology/La Sociologie Contemporaine 43, nos. 2/3 (Autumn/Winter 1995): 137–160. Cavaglion, Alberto. “Argon e la cultura ebraica piemontese (con l’abbozzo del racconto) [di Primo Levi].” Belfagor: rassegna di varia umanità 43, no. 5 [257] (September 1988): 541–556, 556–562. Also published in Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 169–187, 187–196. ———. “Alle radici di un libro: un contributo a Quattro mani su ‘Minerva Medica’ [Includes ‘Se questo è un uomo è nato così’ di Levi e Debenedetti].” Millelibri 6, no. 52 (April 1992): 53–55, 55–57. ———. “Asimmetrie.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 222–229. ———. “Dostoevskij presso Primo Levi.” Belfagor: rassegna di varia umanità 56, no. 4 [334] (July 2001): 429–435. ———. “ ‘Leonardo ed io, in un silenzio gremito di memoria’: sopra una fonte dimenticata di Se questo è un uomo. [Appendice: ‘Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per Ebrei di Monowitz (Auschwitz-Alta Silesia)’ di Dott. Leonardo Debenedetti e Dott. Primo Levi].” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 64–68, 69–84. ———. “Primo Levi era un centauro?” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 23–32. ———. “La questione dello ‘scrivere dopo Auschwitz’ e il decennale della morte di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 97–110. ———. “Il ‘ritorno’ di Primo Levi e il memoriale per la Minerva medica. [Includes: ‘Rapporto sulla organizzazione igienico-sanitaria del campo di concentramento per Ebrei di Monowitz (Auschwitz-Alta Silesia)’ di Dott. Leonardo Debenedetti e Dott. Primo Levi].” In Il ritorno dai Lager: atti di un convegno internazionale, 23 novembre 1991, Consiglio Regionale del Piemonte e ANED, ed. Alberto Cavaglion, 221–222, 223–240. Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1993. ———. “La scelta di Gedeone: appunti su Primo Levi, la memoria e l’ebraismo.” In Storia e memoria della deportazione: modelli di ricerca e di communicazione in Italia ed in Francia, ed. Paolo Momigliano Levi, 97–113. Florence: Giuntina, 1996. Also published in Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies no. 4 (1996): 187–198. ———. “Il termitaio: Primo Levi e Se questo è un uomo.” L’Asino d’Oro 2, no. 4 (November 1991): 117–128. Also published in: L’ebraismo … , ed. Carlà and De Angelis, 1995, 107–121; and in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 76–90. ———. “Tre note per Se questo è un uomo.” In L’ombra lunga dell’esilio: ebraismo e memoria, ed. Maria Sechi, Giovanna Santoro, and Maria Antonietta Santoro, 233–248. Florence: Giuntina, 2002. ———. See also: Novati, Laura.

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Cereja, Federico. “Appendice [Interviste con tre ex deportati che hanno accompagnato a Primo Levi nelle scuole a discutere con i ragazzi il tema della deportazione: Ferruccio Maruffi, Lidia Rolfi, Giuliana Tedeschi].” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 213–234. ———. “Primo Levi e la costruzione della memoria storica.” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 51–62. ———. “La testimonianza di Primo Levi come documento di storia.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 289–298. Also published in Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 95–104. ———. See also: Bravo, Anna. Cheyette, Bryan. “The Ethical Uncertainty of Primo Levi.” In Modernity, Culture and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, 268–281. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Also published in Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 48, no. 189 (Winter 1999): 57–67. Ciccarelli, Roberto. “Primo Levi: del pensiero narrativo.” In Primo Levi: l’a-topia letteraria … , Moliterni et al., 2000, 63–110. Cicioni, Mirna. “Bridges of Knowledge: Re-Reading Primo Levi.” Spunti e Ricerche: rivista d’italianistica no. 3 (1987): 59–94. Published in Italian as “I ponti della conoscenza: rileggendo Primo Levi.” Trans. Guido Franzinotti. La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 245–270. ———. “ ‘Different Springs and Different Airs’? Primo Levi’s Multiple Autography.” Menorah: Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 3, no. 2 (December 1989): 20–31. ———. “Moral Snares and Parables: Between Science Fiction and Midrash.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 75–87. ———. [as Mirna Risk]. “Razionalità e coscienza etica di Primo Levi.” Italian Studies 34 (1979): 122–131. Clarke, Bruce. “Aspects of the Daemonic in Primo Levi’s Periodic Table.” In The Literature of Science: Perspectives on Popular Scientific Writing, ed. Murdo William McRae, 169–185. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Cliff, Brian. “On Language and Violence.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 105–114. Collotti, Enzo. “Leggendo il revisionismo in Primo Levi.” Belfagor: rassegna di varia umanità 44, no. 1 [259] (January 1989): 98–102. ———. “Primo Levi e il revisionismo storiografico.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 112–118. Colombo, Arturo. “Primo Levi: ad Acqui quella sera.” Nuova Antologia 122, no. 2163 [v. 558] (July/September 1987): 207–211. Colombo, Furio. “Primo Levi: chi parla, chi ascolta.” In Il destino del libro e altri destini, 122–128. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1990. Comolli, Giampiero. “Lo sterminio del senso: I sommersi e i salvati di P. Levi” Aut Aut n.s. no. 216 (November/December 1986): 11–21. Also published in Risonanze: saggi sulla scrittura, il mito, l’Oriente, 69–81. Rome: Theoria, 1993. Contri, Cristina. “ ‘Un sasso gettato in uno stagno’: una riflessione sull’educazione attraverso Primo Levi.” Il Quadrante Scolastico 18, no. 63 (1994): 188–195.

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Coslovich, Marco. “Primo Levi e il Gulag: alcune considerazioni sulle recenti pubblicazioni di Varlam Salamov.” Qualestoria [Trieste] 21, no. 1 (1993): 127–143. Covito, Carmen. “L’influenza di Primo Levi su una generazione che non ha conosciuto fame e guerra: una testimonianza.” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 73–79. Cristini, Giovanni. “Perché scrive lo scrittore.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 202–216. D’Angelo, Giovanna. “La chiave a stella di Primo Levi: una sfida al labirinto.” In Letteratura e industria … , ed. Bárberi Squarotti and Ossola, 1997, Vol. II, 1059–1074. Davico Bonino, Guido. “Primo Levi come per caso, a teatro.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 141–146. Also published in Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 152–156. De Angelis, Luca. “Se questo è scrivere: una nota il più possibile chiara su Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi, il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 81–104. Debenedetti, Leonardo. See: Cavaglion, Alberto (2). d’Eramo, Luce. “Il male di Levi.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 119–120. Originally published in Studi Cattolici 15, no. 124 (June 1971): 479. {Review of Vizio di Forma.} De Luca, Vania. “Nota Bibliografica.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 281–292. ———. “Tra l’ordine e il caos: le radici spirituali di Primo Levi.” Studium [Rome] 88, no. 2 (March/April 1992): 285–297. ———. “Le vie della salvazione.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 216–223. De Marco, Giuseppe. “Primo Levi o la tentazione della poesia.” Testo: studi di teoria e storia della letteratura e della critica [Brescia] no. 15 (January/June 1988): 95–104. Della Terza, Dante. “Primo Levi, the Story Teller: Memories, Technology, Invention.” Italiana [Selected Papers from the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Italian] 9 (2000): 258–272. Italiana 9 also published with the monographic title, The Craft and the Fury: Essays in Memory of Glauco Cambon, ed. Joseph Francese. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera Press, 2000. Delmay, Bernard. “Primo Levi, un’epica in contrappunto.” Paragone—Letteratura 27, no. 318 (August 1976): 114–119. Also published in Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 121–124. Doro, Donatella. “Primo Levi: la testimonianza come valore etico.” Il Margine: mensile della Libera associazione culturale Oscar A. Romero [Trento] 17, no. 3 (March 1997): 31–34. Dovara, Isolina. “Scienza, tecnica e industria nella vita e nell’opera di Primo Levi.” In Letteratura e industria … , ed. Bárberi Squarotti and Ossola, 1997, Vol. II, 1053–1058. Druker, Jonathan. “Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved: From Testimony to Historical Judgment.” Shofar [West Lafayette, IN] 12, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 47–58.

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Dudai. Rina. “Primo Levi: Speaking from the Flames.” PsyArt: A Online Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts 6 (January/June 2002). http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ ipsa/journal/2002/dudai01.htm. Dwan, David. “Empathy and the Ethics of Reading in Primo Levi, Jorge Semprun, and Bernhard Schlink.” Journal of Holocaust Education 8, no. 2 (Autumn 1999): 85–98. Eberstadt, Fernanda. “Reading Primo Levi.” Commentary 80, no. 4 (October 1985): 41–47. Egan, Susanna. “The Drowned and the Saved: Primo Levi and Paul Steinberg in Dialogue.” History and Memory 13, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2001): 96–112. Einaudi, Giulio. “Primo Levi e la casa editrice Einaudi.” In Primo Levi as Witness … , ed. Frassica, 1990, 31–42. Also published in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 393–399. Eliach, Yaffa. “Primo Levi and His Concept of Time: Time of the Gun, Time of the Spirit.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 21–34. Emmett, Lucie. “ ‘L’uomo salvato dal suo mestiere’: Aspects of Se questo è un uomo Revisited in Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico.” Italian Studies 56 (2001): 115–128. Epstein, Adam. “Primo Levi and the Language of Atrocity.” Bulletin of the Society for Italian Studies no. 20 (1987): 31–38. Farinelli, Giuseppe. “Primo Levi e la difesa dell’uomo umano: quale insegnamento?” Otto/Novecento 19, no. 1 (January/February 1995): 147–166. Also published in Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 55–91. Faü, Jean-Francois. “La mémoire éditoriale de l’oeuvre de Primo Levi traduite en francais.” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 133–138. Feinstein, Stephen C. “Bridging the Narrative and Visual: Primo Levi as a Source of Inspiration for Contemporary Artists.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 133–172. Feinstein, Wiley. “Primo Levi and Jewish Identity: The Question of Jewish Languages.” Italiana [Selected Papers from the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Italian] 5 (1988): 189–201. Feldman, Ruth. “Primo Levi’s Poetry: Darkness and Light.” In Reason and Light … , ed. Tarrow, 1990, 142–147. ———. “Moments of Reprieve.” Trans. Guido López. La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 207–213. Ferrero, Ernesto. “La fortuna critica.” In his Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, 1997, 303–384. Ferrucci, Franco. “La casa di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi as Witness … ,ed. Frassica, 1990, 43–53. Finco, Aldo. “Primo Levi: lo spettro di Auschwitz.” Rivista di Studi Italiani 12, no. 2 (December 1994): 54–60. ———. “Primo Levi: sopravvivere ad Auschwitz per raccontare.” Rivista di Studi Italiani 15, no. 1 (June 1997): 127–134.

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Fine, Ellen S. “Literature as Resistance: Survival in the Camps.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1, no. 1 (1986): 79–89. {Compares Jean Améry, Elie Wiesel, Charlotte Delbo, and Levi.} Finter, Helga. “Primo Levi’s Stage Version of Se questo è un uomo.” In Staging the Holocaust: The Shoah in Drama and Performance, ed. Claude Schumacher, 229–253. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Fiore, Elio. “L’opera poetica di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 46–50. Fontanella, Luigi. “Il poeta come testimone: per una lettura della poesia di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi as Witness … , ed. Frassica, 1990, 54–62. Fonzi, Bruno. “L’uomo a zero.” Il Mondo 10, no. 30 (July 29, 1958): 8. Also published in Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 115–118. {Review of Se questo è un uomo.} Forti, Marco. “I sommersi e i salvati di Primo Levi, dieci anni dopo.” Nuova Antologia 131, no. 2197 (January/March 1996): 203–217. Fortini, Franco. “L’opera in versi.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 137–140. Also published in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 163–166. ———. “I suoi libri sono i nostri.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 146–147. Originally published in L’Espresso (April 26, 1987). Frassica, Pietro. “Aspetti della narrativa italiana postbellica (Beppe Fenoglio e Primo Levi).” Forum Italicum 8, no. 3 (September 1974): 365–380. ———. “Primo Levi: eroe, antieroe or ‘alter ego.’ ” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 25–32. Friese, Heidrun. “Silence, Voice, Representation.” In Social Theory after the Holocaust, ed. Robert Fine and Charles Turner, 159–178. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Also published in Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone, 147–167. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2001. {Compares Paul Celan, Sarah Kofman, and Levi.} Galante Garrone, Alessandro. “Il grido di Primo Levi. [Appendice: ‘I forni crematori della ditta Topf e Figli’].” Nuova Antologia 122, no. 2163 [v. 558] (July/ September 1987): 212–224, 225–227. Appendix originally published in La Stampa (September 28, 1961). ———. “A vent’anni dalla scomparsa di Primo Levi: ricordi e confessioni.” Nuova Antologia 132, no. 2201 (January/March 1997): 44–49. Gambetta, Diego. “Gli ultimi momenti di Primo Levi.” Belfagor: rassegna di varia umanità 54, no. 3 [321] (May 1999): 325–339. Published in English as: “Primo Levi’s Last Moments.” Boston Review 24, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 25–29. ———. “Primo Levi’s Plunge: A Case Against Suicide.” The New York Times (August 7, 1999): A15, A17. Gargiulo, Gius. “Levi e la trasparenza di Auschwitz.” Narrativa [Nanterre] 3 (January 1993): 147–162. Garosci, Aldo. “Se questo è un uomo … [Questa è la prima recensione a Se questo è un uomo, pubblicata in L’Italia Socialista (December 27, 1947)].” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 229–232. {Note: two

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reviews appear to predate Garosci’s; Arrigo Cajumi, La Stampa (November 26, 1947), and Lorenzo Gigli, La Gazzetta del Popolo (December 7, 1947).} Geerts, Walter. “L’ ‘esperienza’ di Primo Levi: la rottura dell’immediatezza.” Narrativa [Nanterre] 3 (January 1993): 163–172. Giffuni, Cathe. “An English Bibliography of the Writings of Primo Levi.” Bulletin of Bibliography 50, no. 3 (September 1993): 213–221. Giglioli, Daniele. “Narratore.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 397–408. Gilbert, Peter. “A Letter for Primo Levi.” Jewish Quarterly 34, no. 3 [127] (1987): 10–12. {Review of Moments of Reprieve and The Wrench.} Gilliland, Gail. “Self and Other: Christa Wolf ’s Patterns of Childhood and Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo as Dialogic Texts.” Comparative Literature Studies 29, no. 2 (1992): 183–209. Gilman, Sander L. “To Quote Primo Levi: ‘Redest keyn jiddisch, bist nit kejn jid’ [If you don’t speak Yiddish, you’re not a Jew].” Prooftexts 9, no. 2 (May 1989): 139–160. Also published in Inscribing the Other, 293–316. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. ———. “Primo Levi: The Special Language of the Camps and After.” Midstream 35, no. 7 (October 1989): 22–30. Also published in Reason and Light … , ed. Tarrow, 1990, 60–81. Ginzburg, Natalia. “Fra guerra e razzismo.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 125–127. Originally published in Il Corriere della Sera (May 25, 1975). {Review of Il sistema periodico}. ———. “Per Primo Levi.” Paragone—Letteratura n.s. 38, no. 3 [448] (June 1987): 3–4. Gioanola, Elio. “Diversità della letteratura, letteratura della diversità: qualche osservazioni generale sull’opera di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 1–17. Girelli-Carasi, Fabio. “The Anti-Linguistic Nature of the Lager in the Language of Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo.” In Reason and Light … , ed. Tarrow, 1990, 40–59. ———. “Strategie narrative del macro-testo autobiografico di Primo Levi.” Italiana [Selected Papers from the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Italian] 5 (1988): 203–223. Giuntella, Vittorio E. “La memoria dell’offesa.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 79–82. Glasberg, Ronald P. “The Dynamics of Domination: Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, Solzhenitsyn’s GULAG Archipelago, and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 21, no. 4 (December 1994): 679–694. ———. “Power in Western Civilization: Structural Parallels between the book of Job and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 19, no. 4 (December 1992): 597–614. Gold, Eva. “Narrating Auschwitz: Linguistic Strategies in Primo Levi’s Holocaust Writings.” In The Most Ancient of Minorities … , ed. Pugliese, 2002, 315–329.

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Goldhaber, Michael. “Understanding Primo Levi: An Exercise in Synthesis.” Mosaic: A Review of Jewish Thought and Culture [Cambridge, MA] no. 3 (Fall 1987): 1–8. Goldstein, Maurice. “La réalité d’Auschwitz dans l’oeuvre de Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 83–94. Goodheart, Eugene. “The Passion of Reason: Reflections on Primo Levi and Jean Améry.” Dissent 41, no. 4 (Fall 1994): 518–527. Gordon, Robert S. C. “The Art of Listening: Primo Levi’s Ethics of Storytelling.” Jewish Culture and History 3, no. 1 (Summer 2000): 1–22. ———. “Etica.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 315–330. ———. “ ‘How Much Home Does a Person Need?’: Primo Levi and the Ethics of Home.” Annali d’Italianistica 19 (2001): 215–234. ———. “Per un’etica comune: le virtù quotidiane de Primo Levi.” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 87–107. ———. “ ‘Per mia fortuna … ’: Irony and Ethics in Primo Levi’s Writing.” Modern Language Review 92, no. 2 (April 1997): 337–347. ———. “Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Responses to the Lager in Italy 1945–47.” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 48, no. 1 [189] (Winter 1999): 49–57. ———. “Primo Levi: On Friendship.” In Sguardi sull’Italia: miscellanea dedicata a Francesco Villari dalla Society for Italian Studies, ed. Gino Bedani et al., 184–194. Series: Society for Italian Studies, Occasional Papers; no. 3. Exeter: Society for Italian Studies, 1997. ———. “Primo Levi, Storyteller.” European Judaism 23, no. 1 [44] (Spring 1990): 11–20. ———. “Primo Levi: The Duty of Memory.” In European Memories of the Second World War, ed. Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett, and Claire Gorrara, 131–140. New York: Berghahn, 1999. Gorris, Rosanna. “Da Sefarad a Zarphath: i fantasmi dell’esilio, da Primo Levi a Agota Kristof.” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 79–88. Gozzi, Alberto. “Primo Levi: testimone d’accusa [intervista alla radio, 8 gennaio 1985].” Leggere: mensile culturale [Milan] 6, no. 48 (march 1993): 42–45. ———. See also: Levi, Primo. Grassano, Giuseppe. “La ‘musa stupefatta’ di Levi: note sui racconti fantascientifici.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 164–189. Also published in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 117–147. Grazioli, Luigi. “Necessità.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 409–412. Greppi, Cesare. “Una figura nella poesia di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 147–151. Groppo, Bruno. “Primo Levi: il dovere di memoria e i limiti della testimonianza.” In Cinéma et enseignement de l’italien: “Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini,” Centre interuniversitaire et interacadémique pour la formation initiale et continue des enseignants d’italien (Paris), 1998, 373–381. Paris: CIRRMI, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, 1998. Guagnini, Elvio. “I ‘vagabondaggi’di un ‘letterato curioso’: le ‘culture’ di Primo Levi.” In Al di qua del bene e del male, ed. Marrioda, 2000, 75–85.

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Guglielminetti, Marziano. “Le radice capovolte.” In Primo Levi, memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 269–280. Guiso, Angela. “Tra vita e letteratura: la dialettica combinatoria di Primo Levi.” In L’ombra lunga dell’esilio: ebraismo e memoria, ed. Maria Sechi, Giovanna Santoro, and Maria Antonietta Santoro, 249–271. Florence: Giuntina, 2002. Gunzberg, Lynn M. “Down Among the Dead Men: Levi and Dante in Hell.” Modern Language Studies 16, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 10–28. ———. “ ‘Nuotando altrimenti che nel Serchio’: Dante as Vademecum for Primo Levi.” In Reason and Light … , ed. Tarrow, 1990, 82–98. Harrowitz, Nancy. “From Mt. Sinai to the Holocaust: Primo Levi and the Crisis of Science in The Periodic Table.” In Celebrating Elie Wiesel: Stories, Essays, Reflections, ed. Alan Rosen, 19–39. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998. ———. “Primo Levi’s Science as ‘Evil Nurse’: The Lesson of Inversion.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 59–73. ———. “Representations of the Holocaust: Levi, Bassani and the Commemorative Mode.” In Reason and Light … , ed. Tarrow, 1990, 26–39. Hartman, Geoffrey. “Testimony and Authenticity.” Yale Review 90, no. 4 (October 2002): 1–15. Hirsch, Herbert. “Survival and Suicide: Primo Levi and the Crisis of the Twentieth Century.” In Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, 1939–1989, ed. Alan L. Berger, 1–16. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. Hughes, H. Stuart. “The Chemist Primo: ‘Poet’ of the Concentration Camp,” and “ ‘Prisoners of Hope.’ ” In Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924–1974, 73–80, 80–85. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Published in Italian as, Prigionieri della speranza: alla ricerca dell’identità ebraica nella letteratura italiana contemporanea, 87–99, 101–103. Trans. Valeria Lalli. Bologna: Mulino, 1983. Izzo, Luigi. “Tra memoria e sogno: la rievocazione degli anni Venti e Trenta in Italia nella memorialistica ebraica.” Clio: rivista trimestrale di studi storici [Naples] 33, no. 4 (1997): 779–802. {Compares Vittorio Foa, Natalia Ginzburg, Carlo Levi, Vittorio Sereni, and Primo Levi.} Jagendorf, Zvi. “Primo Levi Goes for Soup and Remembers Dante.” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 12, no. 4 (Spring 1993): 31–51. Jalla, Daniele. See: Bravo, Anna. Karpowitz, Stephen A. “The Dilemma of Primo Levi: Biographical Roots.” European Judaism 28, no. 2 [55] (Autumn 1995): 61–67. Katz, Adam. “On ‘Maelstroms Large and Small, Metaphorical and Actual’: ‘Gray Zones’ in the Writings of Primo Levi.” Cultural Studies 13, no. 3 (July 1999): 423–447. Kiernan, Suzanne. “Reflections on the Lipogram.” Literature and Aesthetics: The Journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics 7 (October 1997): 43–53. {Compares Georges Perec, Luigi Casolini, and Levi.} Kelson, Wade. “Primo Levi and the Humaneness of Cultural Understanding.” In Cultural Dialogue and Misreading: Selected Papers from the International Conference on Cultural Dialogue and Cultural Misreading, 9–11 October 1995,

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Peking University, China, ed. Mabel Lee and Meng Hua, 396–399. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997. Klein, Ilona. “ ‘Official Science Often Lacks Humility’: Humor, Science and Technology in Levi’s Storie naturali.” In Reason and Light. … , ed. Tarrow, 1990, 112–126. ———. “Primo Levi and Bruno Piazza: Auschwitz in Italian Literature.” In Remembrance, Repentance, Reconciliation: The 25th Anniversary Volume of the Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, ed. Douglas F. Tobler, 127–135. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1998. ———. “Primo Levi: The Drowned, the Saved, and the ‘Gray Zone.’ ” Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual 7 (1990): 77–89. Kolsky, Stephen. “Clara Sereni’s Casalinghitudine: The Politics of Writing: Structure and Intertextuality.” Italian Quarterly 34, nos. 133/134 (Summer/Fall 1997): 47–58. {Compares Alice B. Toklas, Clara Sereni, and Levi.} Kluback, William. “Primo Levi, a Friend of Empedocles and Rabelais.” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 18, nos. 3/4 (August 1997): 164–173. Kremer, Roberta S. “Bibliography of Selected Works by and about Primo Levi.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 217–233. Kuhiwczak, Piotr.“Beyond Self: A Lesson from the Concentration Camps.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 19, no. 3 (September 1992): 395–405. {Compares Tadeusz Borowski and Levi.} Lagorio, Gina. “La memoria perenne e la poesia Ad ora incerta.” In Primo Levi as Witness … , ed. Frassica, 1990, 63–75. Lang, Ariella. “Reason as Revenge: Primo Levi and Writing the Holocaust.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 52, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 255–268. Langbein, Hermann. “Se questo è un uomo: un uomo straordinario.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 63–66. Langer, Lawrence L. “Legacy in Gray: The Ordeal of Primo Levi.” In Preempting the Holocaust, 23–42. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. ———. “Legacy in Gray.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 197–216. Lanza, Franco. “La critica intorno a Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 116–128. Lattanzio, Alessandro. “Primo Levi: la scrittura e l’assurdo.” In Primo Levi: l’a-topia letteraria … , Moliterni et al., 2000, 111–151. Lazzarin, Stefano. “ ‘Fatti non foste a viver come bruti’: a proposito di Primo Levi e del fantastico.” Testo: studi di teoria e storia della letteratura e della critica [Brescia] 22, no. 42 (July/December 2001): 67–90. Levi, Andrea. “Primo Levi e la scienza.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 271–280. Levi, Primo. “Argilla di Adamo.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 46–48. Originally published in La Stampa (February 15, 1987). ———. “L’asimmetra e la vita.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 38–45. Originally published in Prometeo [Milan] 2, no. 7 (September 1984). ———. “Calvino: con la chiave della scienza.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 29–30. Originally published in La Stampa (September 20, 1985).

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———. “Casa Galvani.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 21. Originally published in La Stampa (May 3, 1984). ———. “Conversazione con Alberto Gozzi [trasmissione radiofonica, RAI, 7 gennaio 1985.]” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 91–101. ———. “Conversazione con Anthony Rudolf.” Trans. Erminio Corti. In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 102–110. Originally published in English as “Primo Levi in London.” London Magazine 26, no. 7 (October 1986): 28–37. ———. “Conversazione con Daniela Amsallem.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 55–73. ———. “Conversazione con Paola Valabrega.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 74–82. ———. “Conversazione con Santo Strati e Franco Pappalardo La Rosa [trasmissione radiofonica, RAI, giugno 1982].” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 83–90. ———. “Ferri da cavallo chiodati.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 34–35. Originally published in La Stampa (March 22, 1981). ———. “Il Gabbiano di Chivasso.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 49–51. Originally published in Airone (March 1987). ———. “La giraffa dello zoo.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 52–54. Originally published in Airone (April 1987). ———. “Kafka: una misteriosa sensibilità.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 28. Originally published in Il Tempo (July 3, 1983). ———. “Nelle vicinanze non si vede un altro Adamo.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 36–37. Originally published in La Stampa: Tuttolibri (January 3, 1981). ———. “Le parole esportate.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 31–33. Originally published in La Stampa (February 17, 1978). ———. “L’ultimo Natale di guerra.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 22–27. Originally published in Triangolo Rosso 3, nos. 11/12 (December 1986). Levi, Primo and Leonardo Debenedetti. See: Novati, Laura; and Cavalgion, Alberto (3). Levi Della Torre, Stefano. “L’eredità di Primo Levi.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 191–204. Also published in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 245–262. ———, ed. “Scritti in memoria di Primo Levi.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989). {Special journal issue, see citations in this section for: Bravo/Cereja, Cereja, Cicioni, Feldman, Garosci, Levi Della Torre, An. Levi, López, Picciotto Fargion, Valabrega, Volder. Note: This issue is frequently cited incorrectly as vol. 56. This is due to a printer’s error that appears on the cover of the issue and on the contents (Sommario) page.} Levi Coen, Clara. “Come le donne ebree vedono Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 13–22. Levi-Montalcini, Rita. “Epilogue: Primo Levi’s Message.” In In Praise of Imperfection. My Life and Work, 212–214. Trans. Luigi Attardi. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Licata, Laura Baffoni. “L’ ‘incertezza dell’ora’ nella vicenda poetica di Primo Levi.” NEMLA Italian Studies [Selected Proceedings of the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, Italian Section] 21 (1997): 87–109.

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Lollini, Massimo. “Il caso Primo Levi e il problema della testimonianza.” Il Piccolo Hans: rivista di analisi materialistica no. 72 (winter 1991/1992): 193–210. ———. “Golem.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 348–360. ———. “Perché si scrive? Primo Levi e Paul Celan.” Rivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate 52, no. 2 (April/June 1999): 149–166. ———. “Pre-scrittura e scrittura ultima tra Primo Levi e Paul Celan.” Intersezioni: rivista di storia delle idée [Bologna] 19, no. 3 (December 1999): 449–459. ———. “La storia come ‘olocausto’: la testimonianza di Primo Levi.” RLA: Romance Languages Annual 2 (1990): 243–249. Lombardi, Andrea. “Etica e memoria in Primo Levi.” Il Cannocchiale: rivista di studi filosofici no. 1 (January/April 2002): 101–119. López, Guido. “Primo Levi: l’opera, gli avvertimenti, l’umanità.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 215–228. ———. “Se non lui, chi?” Shalom: mensile ebraico d’informazione [Rome] 21, no. 4 (April 1987): 22–24. Also published as a 23-page book, Se non lui, chi. Rome: Centro di cultura ebraica della Communità israelitica di Roma, 1987. Lorenz-Lindemann, Karin. “Wieviel Heimat braucht der Mensch? Aspects of Jewish Self-Determination in the Works of Jean Améry and Primo Levi.” In The Jewish Self-Portrait in European and American Literature, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schrader, Elliott M. Simon, and Charlotte Wardi, 223–230. Tübingen, Germany: Niemeyer, 1996. Originally published in German as “Wieviel Heimat braucht der Mensch? Überlegungen zu Jean Améry, Primo Levi und Henryk Broder.” In Jüdische Identität im Spiegel der Literatur vor und nach Auschwitz, ed. Eveline Valtink, 86–102. Hofgeismar: Evangelische Akademie Hofgeismar, 1989. Losey, Jay. “From Savage Elements: Epiphany in Primo Levi’s Holocaust Writings.” Journal of European Studies 24, no. 1 (March 1994): 1–21. Lowin, Joseph. “Primo Levi’s Unorthodox Judaism.” Jewish Book Annual 45 (1987/1988): 168–81. Also published in Jewish Book Annual 54 (1996/1997): 28–43. Magris, Claudio. “Epica e romanzo in Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 137–139. Originally published in Il Corriere della Sera (June 13, 1982). ———. “Ma questo è l’uomo.” In Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 51–52. Originally published in Corriere della Sera (April 12, 1987). Maitles, Henry. “Surviving the Holocaust: The Anger and Guilt of Primo Levi.” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 2 (June 2002): 237–251. Mancini, Rossella. “Primo Levi e la dignità dell’uomo.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 51–52. Marabini, Claudio. “Levi e Kafka.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 230–235. Marchis, Vittorio. “La meccanica come metafora: alcune considerazioni intorno alla Chiave a stella di Primo Levi.” Studi Piemontesi 31, no. 1 (June 2002): 71–74. Martellini, Luigi. “La persecuzione necessaria.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 92–115. Martin, Stephen. “The Quest for the Ultimate Sign: Binaries, Triads, and Matter in Primo Levi’s Il sistema periodico.” RLA: Romance Languages Annual 8 (1996): 225–231.

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Mattioda, Enrico. “Schemi visivi.” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 183–193. McRae, Murdo William. “Opposition and Reversal in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table.” Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association (1988): 115–124. Meghnagi, David. “La vicenda ebraica: Primo Levi e la scrittura.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 152–161. Also published in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 289–299. ———. “Primo Levi e la scrittura.” Lettera Internazionale [Rome] 6, no. 20 (April/June 1989): 18–20. Also published in Lettera Internazionale [Rome] 13, nos. 51/52 (January/June 1997): 55–56. Mendel, David. “Un incontro con Primo Levi.” Trans. Maria Cristina Costamagna. L’indice dei libri del mese 11, no. 5 (May 1994): 53–54. Originally published in The Sunday Telegraph (September 8, 1991). ———. “Italy, Great Britain and Jewish Identity: A Personal Comment on Primo Levi.” European Judaism 31, no. 2 [61] (Autumn 1998): 81–90. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. “Ciò che dobbiamo a Primo Levi.” In Tre narratori … , ed. Folena, 1989, 89–98. Also published in La tradizione del Novecento, Terza Serie, 299–312. Turin: Einaudi, 1991. ———. “Lingua e scrittura in Levi.” ‘Introduzione’ in Opere, Vol. III, Levi, 1990, vii–lxxxiii. Also published in La tradizione del Novecento, Terza Serie, 313–386. Turin: Einaudi, 1991; and in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 169–242. ———.”Ricordando con lucidità gli orrori dei lager.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 140–143. Originally published in La Nuova Venezia (June 12, 1986). {Review of I sommersi e i salvati.} Merialdi, Stefano. “Primo Levi.” Sìlarus: rassegna bimestrale di cultura 39, no. 205 (September/October 1999): 29–35. Mila, Massimo. “Il sapiente con la chiave a stella.” In Scritti civili, 348–350. Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Also published in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 391–392; and in Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 144–145. Originally published in La Stampa (April 14, 1987). Millu, Liana. “Primo Levi: tre momenti.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 59–63. Minoia, Carlo. “Le edizioni scolastiche di Se questo è un uomo e La tregua.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 105–111. Mlynarska, Henryka. “Primo Levi: la poesia all’ombra di Auschwitz.” In Lingua e letteratura I: atti del primo incontro degli italianisti polacchi, 26–29 settembre 1988, ed. Stanislaw Widlak, 147–153. Kraków: Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, 1990. Also published in Studia Italo-Polonica 4 (1991): 109–125. [Series: Zeszyty naukowe Uniwerstytetu Jagiellonskiego. Prace historyczne; z. 94.] Molino Signorini, Franca. “The Duty and Risk of Testimony: Primo Levi as Keeper of Memory.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 173–196. ———.“ ‘Uomini fummo … ’: Riflessioni su Primo Levi e Jean Améry.” La RassegnaMensile di Israel 57, no. 3 (September/December 1991): 463–477. Moliterni, Fabio. “Primo Levi: dell’a-topia letteraria.” In Primo Levi: l’a-topia letteraria … , Moliterni et al., 2000, 3–61.

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Momigliano Levi, Paolo. “L’esperienza della Resistenza nella vita e nell’opera di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 63–75. Mondo, Lorenzo. “Primo Levi e Dante.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 224–229. ———.“Lo sperimentatore arguto della materia.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 147–151. Moscati, Aldo. “Un breve ricordo di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 147–148. Moses, Gavriel. “Memorie sommerse e memorie salvate: leggere Levi in America.” In Memoria e tradizione nella cultura ebraico-americana: atti del convegno, “Memoria e tradizione nella cultura ebraica,” Centro Studi Sorelle Clarke di Bagni di Lucca, giugno 1988, ed. Guido Fink and Gabriella Morisco, 311–322. Bologna: CLUEB, 1990. Motola, Gabriel. “The Art of Fiction CXL: Primo Levi.” Paris Review 37, no. 134 (Spring 1995): 201–220. {Interview with Levi.} ———. “Children of the Holocaust.” TriQuarterly no. 105 (Spring/Summer 1999): 209–232. ———. “Primo Levi: His Life and Death.” European Judaism 21, no. 2 [41; 1988 Conference Issue] (December 1987): 42–46. ———. “Primo Levi: The Auschwitz Experience.” Southwest Review 72, no. 2 (Spring 1987): 258–269. ———. “Primo Levi: The Language of the Scientist.” Literary Review 34, no. 2 (Winter 1991): 203–207. ———. “The Varnish-Maker’s Dreams.” Sewanee Review 98, no. 3 (Summer 1990). {Review of Camon’s Conversations, and Levi’s Collected Poems, Mirror Maker, Dialogo.} Murawski, John. “In Order to Tell: Primo Levi and the Subversion of Literary Language.” Prose Studies 14, no. 1 (May 1991): 81–96. Murphy, Bruce. “Jenseits der Menschen: Mourning on the Other Side.” Pequod: A Journal of Contemporary Literature and Literary Criticism no. 36 (1993): 62–72. {Compares Paul Celan and Levi.} Neiger, Ada. “Il risentimento del sopravvissuto: una riflessione intorno a Jean Améry e Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 63–72. Neppi, Enzo. “Sopravvivenza e vergogna in Primo Levi.” Strumenti Critici: rivista quadrimestrale di cultura e critica letteraria n.s.11, no. 3 [82] (September 1996): 479–500. Also published in Appartenenza e differenza: ebrei d’Italia e letteratura, ed. Juliette Hassine, Jacques Misan-Montefiore, and Sandra Debenedetti Stow, 111–133. Florence: Giuntina, 1998. Nezri, Sophie. “Iterazioni.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 372–379. ———. “Primo Levi: un conflitto tra memoria e letteratura.” Studi Piemontesi 24, no. 2 (November 1995): 347–353. Nicoletti, Michele. “Ricordare e capire: l’eredità di Primo Levi.” Il Margine: mensile della Libera associazione culturale Oscar A. Romero [Trento] 7, no. 3 (March 1987): 11–16.

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Novati, Laura, ed. “Primo Levi.” Millelibri [Milan] 6, no. 52 (April 1992): 44–57. {Collection of short articles on Levi, by Novati: “Chronologia” [44–45], “Il racconto come salvezza ed espiazione” [46–47], “A Buchenwald, il Faggio di Goethe” [48–49], “Scrittore perché chimico” [49–51], “La banalitá del male” [51–52], “Un dilemma non risolto” [52–53]; by Cavaglion, “Alle radici di un libro: un contributo a Quattro mani su ‘Minerva Medica’ ” [53–55]; and by Levi and Debenedetti, “Se questo è un uomo è nato così” [55–57].} Nystedt, Jane. “I critici e l’opera letteraria di Primo Levi: panorma cronologico, 1947–1990.” Studia Neophilologica [Uppsala] 64, no. 1 (1992): 101–116. ———. “I forestierismi nel lessico di Primo Levi.” In Italianistica Scandinava 2: atti del terzo congresso degli italianisti scandinavi, Turku/Åbo, 4–6 giugno 1992, ed. Pauliina De Anna, Giuseppe La Grassa, and Lauri Lindgren, 301–314. Turku, Finlandia: Università di Turku, 1994. ———. “Lunghezza della frase e interpunzione: mezzi stilistici in Primo Levi.” Studi Italiani di Linguistica Teorica ed Applicata 21, nos. 1–3 (1992): 85–106. ———. “Primo Levi e il mondo animale.” In Actes du XIIe Congrés des Romanistes Scandinaves, Aalborg 11–15 août 1993, ed. Gerhard Boysen, Vol. 2, 407–419. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press, 1994. Ornaghi, Veronica, Mario Groppo, and Giovanna Perego. “La narrazione autobiografica nella prospettiva di Jerome Bruner: il caso di Primo Levi.” Orientamenti Pedagogici 46, no. 4 (1999): 705–722. Orton, Marie H. “Deporting Identity: The Testimonies of Primo Levi and Giuliana Tedeschi.” In The Most Ancient of Minorities … , ed. Pugliese, 2002, 303–314. Ozick, Cynthia. “The Suicide Note.” New Republic 198, no. 12 (March 21, 1988): 32–36. Also published as “Primo Levi’s Suicide Note” in Metaphor and Memory: Essays, 34–48. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Published in Italian as: “Il messaggio d’addio.” In Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 148–162. {Review of The Drowned and the Saved.} Paccagnini, Ermanno. “ ‘’La poesia può andare d’accordo con il computer?’: divagazioni su Primo Levi e le ‘macchine.’ ” Otto/Novecento 24, no. 3 (September/December 2000): 129–160. Paolin, Demi. “Se questo è Dio.” Studi, Fatti, Ricerche no. 91 (2000): 3–6. Pappalardo La Rosa, Franco. See: Levi, Primo. Patruno, Nicholas. “At an Uncertain Hour: The Other Side of Primo Levi.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 91–102. ———. “Primo Levi: Science and Conscience.” Italian Culture 10 (1992): 159–166. ———. Pauletto, Patrick. “ ‘ … E sceglierai la vita … ’ ” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare, ed. Neiger, 1998, 109–117. ———. “Frontiere.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 336–347. Perlini, Luca. “Le occasioni chimiche di Primo Levi.” Il Ponte: rivista di dibattito politico e culturale [Florence] 52, no. 4 (April 1996): 99–115. Peterson, Thomas. “The Art-Science Conjunction in Primo Levi’s Periodic Table.” Nemla Italian Studies 11/12 (1987/1988): 143–150. Petrov Bumble, Anna. “The Tower of Babel: Language and Power in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.” In The Most Ancient of Minorities … , ed. Pugliese, 2002, 331–342.

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Picciotto Fargion, Liliana. “Le informazioni sulla ‘Soluzione Finale’ circolanti in Italia nel 1942–1943.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 331–336. Pieracci Harwell, Margherita. “Primo Levi: storia e leggenda.” In Un cristiano senza chiesa e altri saggi, 77–94. Rome: Studium, 1991. Pierantoni, Ruggero. “Il sistema Aperiodico.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 165–168. Pireddu, Nicoletta. “Towards a Poet(h)ics of techne: Primo Levi and Daniele Del Giudice.” Annali d’Italianistica 19 (2001): 189–214. Poli, Gabriella. “La memoria come impegno e come lotta.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 23–30. Porro, Mario. “Un etologo del Lager.” In Al di qua del bene e del male, ed. Mattioda, 2000, 33–45. ———. “Scienza.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 434–475. Prosperi, Carlo. “ ‘La gioia liberatrice del raccontare’: una lettura de La Tregua di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione, ed. Ioli, 1995, 85–101. Quazza, Guido. “Primo Levi letto da uno storico.” Rivista di Storia Contemporanea 18, no. 1 (1989): 76–91. Also published in Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 29–47. Raboni, Giovanni. “Riesce a creare suspense col montaggio d’una gru.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 128–129. Originally published in La Stampa: Tuttolibri (December 23, 1978). {Critique of La chiave a stella.} Raffaeli, Massimo. “Memoria/ricordi.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 393–396. Reeb, Gerda. “Ironies of the Language of Testimony: Primo Levi’s Clarity and Paul Celan’s Obscurity.” Romance Languages Annual: RLA 7 (1995): 340–343. Regge, Tullio. “Gli interessi scientifici: alle origini di un ‘dialogo.’ ” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 162–164. Revelli, Nuto. “Non piegarsi di fronte alle improbabili certezze.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 17–19. Riatsch, C. and V. Gorgé. “Né sistema, né periodico: appunti per la lettura di Il sistema periodico di Primo Levi.” Esperienza Letterarie 16, no. 4 (October/December 1991): 65–81. Rigoni Stern, Mario. “Primo Levi, moderna odissea.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 148–151. Originally published in La Stampa (April 10, 1988). Risk, Mirna. See: Cicioni, Mirna Rizzante, Massimo. “Dell’ibrido: osservazioni su Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 45–52. Rosato, Italo. “Poesia.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 413–425. Rosenblum, Rachel. “And till the Ghastly Tale is Told, Sarah Kofman—Primo Levi: Survivors of the Shoah and the Dangers of Testimony.” European Judaism 33, no. 2 [65] (Autumn 2000): 81–103. Rosenfeld, Alvin H. “Primo Levi: The Survivor as Victim.” In Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Raul Hilberg, ed. James S. Pacy and Alan P. Wertheimer, 123–144. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Rosenthal, Raymond. “Translating Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi as Witness … , ed. Frassica, 1990, 76–85.

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Roth, Philip. “A Conversation in Turin with Primo Levi.” In Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work, 1–17. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Originally published as “A Man Saved by His Skills” in The New York Times [Book Review, Sec. 7] (October 12, 1986): 1, 40–41. Published in Italian as “Philip Roth intervista Primo Levi.” La Stampa (November 26, 1986). Rubenstein, Richard L. “The Elemental Survivor: Primo Levi.” In Threescore and Ten: Essays in Honor of Rabbi Seymour J. Cohen on the Occasion of the Seventieth Birthday, ed. Abraham J. Karp, Louis Jacobs, and Chaim Zalman Dimitrovsky. Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1991. Also published in Thinkers and Teachers of Modern Judaism, ed. Raphael Patai and Emanuel S. Goldsmith, 177–194. New York: Paragon House, 1994. ———. “Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi.” In Perspectives on the Holocaust: Essays in Honor of Raul Hilberg, ed. James S. Pacy and Alan P. Wertheimer, 145–165. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995. Rudolf, Anthony. “Pikolo, Three Great Poems, and Primo Levi’s ‘The Mensch.’ ” PN Review 19, no. 6 [92] (July/August 1993): 12–13. ———. See also: Levi, Primo. Ruf, Frederick J. “ ‘The Circle of Chalk’: Narrative Voice in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table.” In Entangled Voices: Genre and the Religious Construction of the Self, 51–62, 113–115. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Rugoff, Kathy. “Heinrich Boll, Primo Levi, and Saul Friedländer: Portrayals of Self and History.” Connecticut Review 13, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 41–49. Russell, John. “Primo Levi, The Periodic Table: Choreography.” In Reciprocities in the Nonfiction Novel, 107–129, 235–236. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000. Rutigliano, Enzo. “Canetti—Levi: la metamorfosi nel Lager.” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 119–124. Ryan, Michael. “Authenticity and Authority.” TriQuarterly no. 100 (Fall 1997): 181–189. {Compares Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, and Levi.} Sachs, Dalya M. “The Language of Judgment: Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo.” MLN 110, no. 4 (September 1995): 755–784. Saletti, Carlo. “Superstes Primo: aporie della testimonianza.” In Il racconto della catastrofe … , ed. Monicelli and Saletti, 1998, 85–90. Salvarani, Brunetto. “Primo Levi, una testimonianza laica.” Studi, Fatti, Ricerche no. 38 (April/June 1987): 12–14. Samuel, Jean. “Depuis lors, nous nous sommes revus souvent.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 23–28. ———. “Témoignage sur Primo Levi.” Narrativa [Nanterre] 3 (January 1993): 103–114. Santagostino, Giuseppina. “Dalle metafore vive alla poetica di Primo Levi.” Letteratura Italiana Contemporanea 13, no. 35 (January/April 1992): 237–253. ———. “Destituzione e ossessione biologica nell’immaginario di Primo Levi.” Letteratura Italiana Contemporanea 12, no. 32 (January/April 1991): 127–145. ———. “Forme della letterarietà in Primo Levi: dieci anni di critica (1987–1997).” Italian Quarterly 38, nos. 149/150 (Summer/Fall 2001): 47–62.

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Santagostino, Giuseppina. “L’immagine della cultura francese nell’opera di Primo Levi.” Franco-Italica: serie contemporanea 2, no. 4 (1993): 55–82. ———. “Un intertesto alla deriva in Primo Levi.” In Interferenze di sistemi linguistici e culturali nell’italiano. Atti del X congresso internazionale dell’Associazione Internazionale Professori d’Italiano (A.I.P.I.), Università di Malta, 3–6 settembre 1992, ed. Joseph Eynaud, 101–113. Malta: A.I.P.I., 1993. ———. “Nuove perspettive nell’interpretazione della narrativa fantascientifica di Primo Levi.” Narrativa [Nanterre] 3 (January 1993): 7–30. ———. “Primo Levi, dalla memorialistica al mito.” In Atti del convegno internazionale: rinnovamento del codice narrativo in Italia dal 1945 al 1992, Leuven— Louvain-la-Neuve—Namur—Bruxelles, 3–8 maggio 1993, ed. Serge Vanvolsem, Franco Musarra, and Bart Van den Bossche, Vol. 1, 227–261. Rome: Bulzoni, 1995. ———. “Primo Levi e le facce nascoste del tempo.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 190–206. ———. “Tecnologia e rappresentazione in Primo Levi.” In Letterature e industria … , ed. Bárberi Squarotti and Ossola, 1997, Vol. II, 1039–1052. Sanvitale, Francesca. “In margine a un incontro di Primo Levi con gli studenti di Pesaro.” In Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 34–39. Originally published in Primo Levi [Serie: Il gusto dei contemporanei. Quaderni; no. 7], 25–26. Pesaro: Banca Popolare Pesarese e Ravennate, 1990. Sanyal, Debarati. “A Soccer Match in Auschwitz: Passing Culpability in Holocaust Criticism.” Representations no. 79 (Summer 2002): 1–27. Sayre, Patricia; and Vacca, Linnea. “On Language and Personhood: A Linguistic Odyssey.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 115–130. Scarlini, Luca. “Teatro.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 485–499. Scarpa, Domenico. “Chiaro/oscuro.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 230–253. ———. “Lager e Gulag, Levi e Herling: scrittori della responsibilità.” Lo Straniero: arte, cultura, società [Rome] 1, no. 1 (Summer 1997): 100–112. ———. “ ‘Tutta si confessa’: Primo Levi e il grigiore del passato.” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 47–58. Scarsella, Alessandro. “Il centauro e la sirena: nota su Levi e Tomasi.” In Primo Levi: mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 53–56. ———. “José Saramago e Primo Levi: gli ultimi centauri.” In L’acqua era d’oro sotto i ponti: studi di Iberistica che gli amici offrono a Manuel Simões, ed. Giuseppe Bellini and Donatella Ferro, 280–284. Rome: Bulzoni, 2001 Schehr, Lawrence R. “Primo Levi’s Strenuous Clarity.” Italica 66, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 429–443. Schenk McCord, Janet. “The Psychaches of Primo Levi and Jerzy Kosinski: Some Preliminary Considerations.” Journal of Psychology and Judaism 18, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 259–277. Sebregondi, Maria. “Triangolazioni.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 500–503. Segre, Cesare. “Se questo è un uomo di Primo Levi.” In Letteratura italiana, le opere: Volume quarto, Il Novecento, II. La ricerca letteraria, ed. Alberto Asor Rosa. Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Also published as “Lettura di Se questo è un uomo.” In Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 55–75.

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———. “Gli scritti d’invenzione di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 121–129. ———. “Primo Levi nella Torre di Babele.” In Primo Levi as Witness … , ed. Frassica, 1990, 86–97. ———. “I romanzi e le poesie.” ‘Introduzione’ in Opere, Vol. II, Levi, 1988, vii–xxxii. Also published in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 91–116. Segré, Claudio G. “Primo Levi: A Man for All Seasons.” Midstream 36, no. 7 (October/November 1990): 33–35. ———. “Italian Jews and the Resistance: The Case of Primo Levi.” In Reason and Light … , ed. Tarrow, 1990, 14–25. ———. “Primo Levi, Witness of the Holocaust.” In Why Germany? National Socialist Anti-Semitism and the European Context, ed. John Milfull, 227–240. Providence, RI: Berg, 1993. Segre Amar, Sion. “Primo Levi, ebreo scrittore o scrittore ebreo?” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 18–24. Sessi, Frediano. “Finzione.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 331–335. ———. “La letteratura concentrazionaria tra verità e finzione a partire da Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 17–30. Sherman, Kenneth. “Primo Levi and the Unlistened-to Story.” Brick: A Literary Journal no. 47 (Winter 1993): 63–69. Sherwin, Byron L. “Primo Levi and Arnost Lustig on Moral Implications of the Holocaust.” Shoah: A Review of Holocaust Studies and Commemorations [NY] 1, no. 4 (1979): 24–29. Revised version published as “Moral Implications of the Holocaust in Holocaust Literature: Levi, Lustig, Kosinski.” In In Answer, The Holocaust: Is the Story True? Why Did the World Community Not Respond? What are the Lessons?, ed. Franklin H. Littell, Irene G. Shur, and Claude R. Foster, Jr., 301–319. West Chester, PA: Sylvan Publishers, 1988. Sica, Paola. “ ‘Piombo’ e ‘Mercurio’ in Il sistema periodico di Primo Levi: un microcosmo fantastico in un macrocosmo autobiografico.” Italian Quarterly 34, nos. 131/132 (Winter/Spring 1997): 33–38. Simborowski, Nicoletta. “ ‘Il ritegno’: Writing and Restraint in Primo Levi.” Romance Studies 19, no. 1 (June 2001): 41–57. Sodi, Risa. “An Interview with Primo Levi.” Partisan Review 54, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 355–366. ———. “The Memory of Justice: Primo Levi and Auschwitz.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 4, no. 1 (1989): 89–104. Also published in Remembering for the Future: Working Papers and Addenda, ed. Yehuda Bauer et al., Vol. 2, 1393–1403. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1989. ———. “Primo Levi: A Last Talk.” Present Tense [NY] 15, no. 4 (May/June 1988): 40–45. {Interview with Levi.} ———. “The Rhetoric of the Univers concentrationnaire.” In Memory and Mastery … , ed. Kremer, 2001, 35–55. Stark, Jared. “Suicide after Auschwitz.” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 93–114. Starnone, Domenico. “Lilít nel fango del Lager: nuove storie di Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 130–132. Originally published in Il Manifesto [Rome] (December 13, 1981). {Review of Lilít e altri racconti.}

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Stavans, Ilan. “Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist.” In The Inveterate Dreamer: Essays and Conversations on Jewish Culture, 109–111. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001. Originally published as “Primo Levi in Person,” in The Jewish Chronicle (November 8, 1998). Steiner, George. “Book-keeping of Torture.” The Sunday Times no. 8450 (April 10, 1988). Published in Italian as “Contabilità della tortura.” Trans. Domenico Scarpa. In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 152–155. Stille, Alexander. “Primo Levi and the Art of Memory.” In Primo Levi as Witness … , ed. Frassica, 1990, 98–107. ———. “Primo Levi and the Jews of Piedmont.” Present Tense [NY] 16, no. 6 (September/October 1989): 50–53. ———. “Primo Levi negli Stati Uniti.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 203–211. ———. “What the Holocaust Meant: The Thinking of Primo Levi and Jean Améry.” Dissent 37, no. 3 (Summer 1990): 361–366. Originally published as the Foreword to Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits, vii–xv. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. Strata, Max. “Primo Levi: un uomo al lavoro.” Critica Letteraria 20, no. 2 [75] (1992): 369–384. Strati, Santo. See: Levi, Primo. Tager, Michael. “Primo Levi and the Language of Witness.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts [Detroit] 35, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 265–288. Tagliacozzo, Franca. “Memoria e catarsi: didattica della storia dopo Auschwitz.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 63, no.1 (January/April 1997): 107–120. Tarrow, Susan. “Remembering Primo Levi: A Conversation with ‘Il Pikolo del Kommando 98.’ ” Forum Italicum 28, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 101–110. Tedeschi, Eugenio Gentili. “La Valle di Primo.” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 141–145. Tesio, Giovanni. “A proposito di una biografia mancata.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 261–268. ———. “Excursus marginale sulla poesia Ad ora incerta di Primo Levi.” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 175–181. ———. “Libertino Faussone in cerca del suo lettore ideale.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 129–141. {Critiques La chiave a stella.} ———. “Premesse su Primo Levi poeta.” Studi Piemontesi 14, no. 1 (marzo 1985): 12–23. Also published in his Piemonte letterario … , 1991, 197–223. ———. “Primo Levi, scrittore di scrittura.” In Primo Levi: il mestiere di raccontare … , ed. Neiger, 1998, 31–38. ———. “Primo Levi tra ordine e caos.” Studi Piemontesi 16, no. 2 (November 1987): 281–292 Also published in: Primo Levi as Witness … , ed. Frassica, 1990, 108–128; and in his Piemonte letterario … , 1991, 225–248; and in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 40–50. ———. “Ritratti critici di contemporanei: Primo Levi.” in Belfagor: rassegna di varia umanità 34, no. 6 (November 1979): 657–676. Also published as “Primo Levi,” in his Piemonte letterario … , 1991, 141–172.

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SCHOLARLY WRITINGS ON PRIMO LEVI

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———. “Su alcune giunte e varianti di Se questo è un uomo.” Studi Piemontesi 6, no. 2 (November 1977): 270–278. Also published in his Piemonte letterario … , 1991, 173–196. Thomson, Ian. “Primo Levi in Conversation with Ian Thomson.” PN Review 14, no. 2 [58] (1987): 15–19. Tibaldi, Italo. “Primo Levi e i suoi ‘compagni di viaggio’: ricostruzione del trasporto da Fossoli ad Auschwitz [Appendice 1: Elenco dei deportati sopravissuti e di quelli uccisi ad Auschwitz dopo il trasporto da Fossoli del 22 febraio 1944; Appendice 2: Elenco steso da Primo Levi di quanti, deportati con lui da Fossoli ad Auschwitz, furono destinati al campo di Buna-Monowitz.].” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 149–158, 159–231, 232. Todorov, Tzvetan. “Ten Years without Primo Levi.” Salmagundi nos. 116/117 (Fall/Winter 1997): 3–18. Published in French as “Dix ans sans Primo Levi.” Esprit no. 240 (February 1998): 125–139. Toscani, Claudio. “Primo Levi.” In La voce e il testo: colloqui con Bassani, Bernari, Berto, Brignetti, Chiusano, Dessì, Primo Levi, Moretti, Pomilio, Prisco, Silone, Strati, Tombari, Ulivi, 119–132. Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libraria, 1985. Tosi, Giuseppe. “Dall’attesa alla storia-esilio: la memoria e l’identità in Se non ora, quando? di Primo Levi.” Annali d’italianistica 20 (2002): 285–305. Traverso, Enzo. “La memoria ebraica e la storia di tutti: note su Jean Améry e Primo Levi.” Ventesimo Secolo: prosecuzione di movimento operaio e socialista 3, nos. 7/8 (January/August 1993): 7–25. Truglio, Maria. “The Task of the Witness: Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo.” Forum Italicum 34, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 136–156. Tuscano, Pasquale. “La dignità dell’uomo nella letteratura contemporanea.” In Primo Levi: la dignità dell’uomo … , ed. Brambilla and Cacciatore, 1995, 187–201. Usher, Jonthan. “Primo Levi’s Science Fiction and the Humanoid.” Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 4 (1996): 199–216. Valabrega, Paola. “Mano/cervello.” In Primo Levi, ed. Belpoliti, 1997, 380–92. ———. “Primo Levi e la tradizione ebraico-orientale.” Studi Piemontesi 11, no. 2 (November 1982): 296–310. Also published in Primo Levi: un’antologia della critica, ed. Ferrero, 1997, 263–288. ———. “ ‘Il segreto del cerchio’: la percezione del tempo nell’opera di Primo Levi.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 281–287. Also published in L’ebraismo … , ed. Marisa Carlà and Luca De Angelis, 1995, 153–159. ———. See also: Levi, Primo. Vallario, Luca. See: Bucelli, Daniela. Vasari, Bruno. “La prevalenza della ragione sul sentimento nella testimonianza di Primo Levi.” In Al di qua del bene e del male … , ed. Mattioda, 2000, 195–201. ———. “Primo Levi e il dovere di testimoniare.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 52–62. ———. “Il presente del passato: Primo Levi e la testimonianza.” In Primo Levi: memoria e invenzione … , ed. Ioli, 1995, 40–53.

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Verdenelli, Marcello. “La chiave a stella e la scrittura ‘in bolla d’aria.’ ” In Ioli, Primo Levi, memoria e invenzione … , 1995, 121–146. Vitale, Ermanno. “Auschwitz come unicum: riflessioni su Jean Améry e Primo Levi.” Teoria Politica [Milan] 4, no. 2 (1988): 149–160. Volder, Jan de. “Scrivere e sopravvivere.” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 55, nos. 2/3 (May/December 1989): 233–244. Volpato, Chiara and Alberta Contarello. “Towards a Social Psychology of Extreme Situations: Primo Levi’s If This is a Man and Social Identity Theory.” European Journal of Social Psychology 29, nos. 2/3 (March/May 1999): 239–258. Weinberg, Helen A. “The Sorrow of Primo Levi.” Congress Monthly 55, no. 7 (November/December 1988): 12–14. Wiesel, Elie. “Io e Primo Levi.” Nuova Antologia 127, no. 2182 [v. 567] (April/June 1992): 204–208. Wilde-Menozzi, Wallis. “A Piece You’ve Touched is a Piece Moved: On Primo Levi.” Tel Aviv Review 2 (Fall/Winter 1989/1990): 149–165. Wilson, Jonathan. “Primo Levi’s Hybrid Texts.” Judaism: A Quarterly Journal of Jewish Life and Thought 48, no. 1 [189] (Winter 1999): 67–72. Wilson, Rita. “Narrated Memories: The Writings of Primo Levi.” Acta Germanica: Jahrbuch des Germanistenverbandes im Südlichen Afrika 23 (1995): 93–106. ———. “Primo Levi: The Craft of Narration.” In Literary Responses to the Holocaust, 1945–1995, ed. Yehoshua Gitay, 25–39. San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1998. Wohlgelernter, Maurice. “ ‘Down There’ or Primo Levi’s Ending: A Review Essay.” Modern Judaism 9, no. 1 (February 1989): 121–128. Also published as “Down There: Primo Levi.” In Jewish Writers, Irish Writers: Selected Essays on the Love of Words, 50–58. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2000. {Review of The Drowned and the Saved.} Wood, Nancy. “The Victim’s Resentments.” In Modernity, Culture, and “the Jew,” ed. Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus, 257–267. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Woolf, Stuart J. “Primo Levi e il mondo anglosassone.” In Primo Levi, il presente del passato … , ed. Cavaglion, 1991, 197–202. ———. “Primo Levi: Drowning and Surviving.” Jewish Quarterly 34, no. 3 [127] (1987): 6–9. ———. “Primo Levi’s Sense of History.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 3, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 273–292. Published in Italian as “Il senso della storia per Primo Levi.” In Primo Levi: testimone e scrittore di storia … , ed. Momigliano Levi and Gorris, 1999, 25–49.

Contributors

Marie L. Baird is Associate Professor of Theology at Duquesne University. Her work examines the role of religious conversion in the overall transformation of personal identity. She has published several articles on religious conversion as well as “Hope and the Experience of Death Camp Survival.” Her current research projects include the development of a model of spiritual theology that is capable of addressing the realities of life in extremity, an inquiry into Eric Voegelin’s notion of historical form and its relevance to contemporary Christian spirituality, and an examination of the twelfth-century French hagiographic depiction of female saints as ethical subjects. Isabella Bertoletti is Assistant Professor of Italian at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY. Professor Bertoletti has also taught at Cooper Union, Queens College, and Hunter College. A specialist on medieval, Renaissance, and modern Italian literature, she worked at the New Yorker for a decade and has published essays in a variety of fields and is a contributor to The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature. Timothy C. Campbell is Assistant Professor of Modern Italian Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He is presently completing a study of early radio and modern poetry entitled Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi. His research interests include the cultural history of pasta, Italian trash cinema of the 1970s, and Italian fascism. Jonathan Druker is Assistant Professor of Italian at Illinois State University. He has published articles on Primo Levi in Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, Italian Culture: The Journal of the American Association of Italian Studies, and in Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust, a volume in the Modern Language Association’s “Option for Teaching” series. He is currently working on a book, tentatively titled Primo Levi and the Fate of Humanism after Auschwitz, which will reassess Levi’s Holocaust memoirs and essays in light of the posthumanist theories of Adorno, Blanchot, Levinas, and Lyotard. Dan Leshem is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Emory University. His research interests primarily include twentieth-century Jewish intellectual history, contemporary French ethical philosophy, survivor and witness literature, and Holocaust theory. Jay Losey is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in English at Baylor University. He is the coeditor of Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth-Century

268

CONTRIBUTORS

England and is presently writing a book Refashioning Epiphany: Wordsworth to Heaney. William McClellan is Associate Professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY. He has published articles on literary and cultural studies and is currently working on a book titled Chaucer and Us: The Tale of Griselda, Sovereign Power and Bare Life. James Tasato Mellone is Social Sciences Librarian and Assistant Professor at Queens College, CUNY. He is a book reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and History: Reviews of New Books, an abstracter for Historical Abstracts, and the author of the forthcoming Fascist Italy: A Bibliography of Works in English, 1919–2000. David Mendel is a retired British cardiologist who befriended Prime Levi late in life; they engaged in an extensive correspondence Dr. Mendel has lectured on Levi in the United Kingdom and the United States and has written on Levi and translation as well as on Levi and Judaism. His latest publication is an introduction to the Folio Society’s edition of The Truce. Fred Misurella has published a book-length study of Milan Kundera’s novels, Understanding Milan Kundera: Public Events, Private Affairs and a novella about an Italian American in Vietnam, Short Time. In addition he has published fiction and nonfiction in Partisan Review, Salmagundi, Voices in Italian-Americana, Tel Quel, L’Atelier du roman, The New York Times Book Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Altre Italie, and other journals and magazines. He is a Fulbright Scholar who teaches literature and writing at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania. Sergio Parussa is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Wellesley College. His publications include articles in contemporary Italian and French literature and a translation of a novel by Ginevra Bompiani, The Great Bear. He is currently conducting research on contemporary Jewish Italian writers. Nicholas Patruno is Professor of Italian at Bryn Mawr Collge. He is a former director of the Bryn Mawr-University of Pennsylvania Summer Institute in Florence. His major publications include Language in Giovanni Verga’s Early Novels and Understanding Primo Levi. He is currently conducting research on Primo Levi and the deportation of Italian women to Nazi camps. Antoine Philippe is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Puerto Rico. He is a specialist of contemporary French literature, critical theory, and cinema. His research interests include comparative literature, critical theory, and anthropology. Stanislao G. Pugliese is Professor of History at Hofstra University. He is a former visiting research fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and Oxford University. A specialist on the Italian antifascist Resistance and Italian Jews, he is the author of Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile and editor of Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Resistance in Italy, 1919–2003, as well as The Most Ancient of Minorities: The Jews of Italy. His most recent book is Desperate Inscriptions: Graffiti from the Nazi Prison in Rome, 1943–1944. He is presently writing a biography of Ignazio Silone to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

CONTRIBUTORS

269

Timothy E. Pytell is Assistant Professor of History at California State University, San Bernardino. A specialist on Viktor Frankl, he has published several articles in German, American, and international journals. His essay, “Redeeming the Unredeemable,” appeared in Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Raniero M. Speelman is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at Utrecht University, Holland. As a specialist on Renaissance and modern Italian literature as well as translation studies, he has published several articles in the field of Italian Judaism as well as on the relationship between Italy and the Ottoman Empire. Besides a translation of an anthology of Italian short stories, Professor Speelman has translated several of Primo Levi’s works into Dutch. Alexander Stille is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the “Arts & Ideas” section of The New York Times. He is the author of Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism; Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic; and, most recently, The Future of the Past. Marla Stone is Associate Professor and Chair of the history department at Occidental College. The recipient of a 1995 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome in the history of art, she has published widely on Italian fascist politics and culture. She is the author of The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy and coeditor of When the Wall Came Down: Responses to German Reunification. Her most recent publication is, “The Last Film Festival: The Venice Biennale Goes to War,” in (Re)viewing Fascism: Fascism and Film. Her work emphasizes questions of culture, politics, and the state in the twentieth century. Professor Stone is also a specialist in the history of genocide and the conflict in the Balkans. She is currently working on a book-length study of anticommunism in Italy, 1919–1970. Joseph Sungolowsky is Professor Emeritus of French Literature and Jewish Studies at Queens College, CUNY. Among his publications are biographies of Alfred de Vigny and Beumarchais. A former visiting professor at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, Professor Sungolowsky was awarded the Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French government in 1994. He is presently working on a study of Emile Zola and the Jewish condition. Ian Thomson is a journalist from London whose work has appeared in the Sunday Times Magazine; The Independent Daily; Daily Telegraph, Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement. His books include Southern Italy; Death of an Inqusitor; Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti, and—most recently—Primo Levi: A Biography (London: Hutchinson, 2002; New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). Joran Warmund is Professor of History at Long Island University, Brooklyn. He first arrived at LIU in 1963 and has held a variety of teaching and administrative positions. Professor Warmund is the coeditor of Jackie Robinson: Race, Sports, and the American Dream. A specialist in modern German and diplomatic history, he has recently developed a research interest in Holocaust studies. He is a two-time recipient of the Fulbright Award, as well as the recipient of a D.A.A.D. award.

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Index Acocella, Joan, 218–219 Ad ora incerta, 119–121 Adler, Alfred, 180–181 Adorno, Theodor, 128 “After R.M. Rilke” (Levi), 133 Agamben, Giorgio, 126–129, 147–152, 153–159, 193–196, 198, 201 alterity, 153, 156, 158–159 AM, see L’altrui mestiere Améry, Jean, 81, 103, 166, 184–185, 188–189, 209, 223–228 Angier, Carole, 6, 189, 211, 213–215, 217–219 Antelme, Robert, 130, 154 anthropological insights in Levi’s writings, 126–130 anti-Semitism, 3–5, 12, 61–67, 71, 84, 89, 138, 164 Antonicelli, Franco, 6, 55–56 Arendt, Hannah, 128, 157, 166

Camon, Ferdinado, 10, 12–14, 117, 196, 204, 209–211, 219 “The Canto of Ulysses” (Dante), 36, 38, 40, 48–49, 53, 106, 111, 114, 120–121 Catholic Church, 5, 12, 63–64, 67, 69–70, 90, 157 Celan, Paul, 223–225 Ceremony of the Kick, 63 Chance, 70–71 characterization, 56, 81, 88, 90–92, 155, 194, 202–203, 205 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 25, 151–152 Cheyette, 125, 130–131, 146 Clendinnen, Inga, 165–166, 168–173, 175 Commedia (Dante), see Divine Comedy communication theory, 97, 103 cultural patrimony, 33

Bauer, Yehuda, 149, 164, 174–175 Bellow, Saul, 11, 53, 72 Benigni, Roberto, 135–140, 142–146 The Betrothed (Manzoni), 47 Biasin, Gian Paolo, 11, 14, 117, 223 Blanchot, Maurice, 130–131 Bobbio, Norberto, 6, 10, 13, 210 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 17, 25, 151 “Buna” (Levi), 161

Dante (Alighieri), 9, 17–18, 20–22, 33–36, 38–40, 42, 45, 48–50, 54, 57, 101, 105–106, 111, 114–118, 120, 123–124, 213 De Vulgari Eloquentia (Dante), 17 Debenedetti, Leonardo, 24, 62 Debski, Tadeusz, 165–169, 173, 175 Diaspora, 72, 76, 85, 89 The Divine Comedy (Dante), 17–18, 20–21, 34–35, 45, 48–49, 114–116, 118, 124

Cajumi, Arrigo, 56 Calvino, Italo, 11, 41, 54–57, 107, 117

272

INDEX

The Drowned and the Saved (Levi), 4, 19, 25, 31, 39, 55, 81, 97, 103–104, 106–107, 109–112, 115–117, 119, 122–124, 146–147, 156, 160, 165, 175, 191, 202, 204–206, 209–210, 217–219, 225–231 DUCO (Du Pont de Nemours & Company), 45–46, 51–52, 54 Ebreo, Leone (aka Jehuda Abravanel), 88 education, 22, 33, 35, 49, 54, 62, 82, 84, 183 Einaudi (publisher), 3, 8, 12–13, 23–26, 29, 31, 33, 53–54, 56, 94, 104–106, 116–117, 131, 145–146, 204, 216, 229–230 Eliot, George, 24, 45, 66 Escobar, Roberto, 142, 146 Esposito, Elena, 98–99, 104 Fabre, Jean-Henri, 49, 145 Fascism, 13, 50–51, 54, 68, 90, 136–138, 140–141, 144, 146, 178 Frank, Anne, 19 Frankl, Viktor, 177–178, 180–190 internment at Theresienstadt, 182–184 Friedländer, Saul, 164–165 Gans, Eric, 127, 129 ghettos, 4–5, 29, 62–64, 71, 80, 88, 141, 167, 169–170, 173, 176, 182, 184–185, 202 Ginzburg, Natalia Levi, 3, 8, 11, 24, 41, 54, 58, 84, 105, 117 Göring Institute, 180–181 Gramsci, Antonio, 18 Gray Zone, 4, 9, 81, 110, 140, 143, 146, 159, 161, 163, 165, 169–170, 172–174, 177, 193 as a complex of tensions, 194–195 extension of beyond camp walls, 201–203

and tension between complicity and victimhood, 200–201 and tension between second reality and it-reality, 197–198 and tension between thing-reality and it-reality, 195–197 and tension of experienced immanence, 198–200 Guido (La vita è bella), 136, 138–139, 142 Hilberg, Raul, 163–164 Hitler, 5, 12, 46, 51, 65, 67, 69–70, 72, 79–80, 105, 108, 166, 176, 197–198, 203–206 Hitler and the Germans (Voegelin), 197–198, 203 Hobbes, Thomas, 9, 126, 129, 131, 150 Holocaust, 4, 9–12, 19, 22, 25, 75, 84, 112, 119, 121, 125, 131, 147, 149, 151, 171, 174–178, 182, 190, 193, 204–205, 217–218, 221–231 American understanding of, 136, 139, 144 Holocaust memory, 135–136, 144 Holocaust testimony, 153–158 representation of, 136, 139–142, 144 study of, 163–168 human behavior, Levi’s observations of, 34–35, 169–170, 172, 174 humanity, 4, 10, 17–18, 20–22, 30, 36–37, 42, 51–52, 85, 93, 108, 110–111, 125–131, 137, 139, 143, 148, 157, 170, 176, 179, 186–188, 194, 199, 209, 213, 225–226 humor, 24, 27, 29, 47, 76, 78, 81, 120, 123, 138, 146, 177 Huxley, Aldous, 6, 49 “I Sintetici” (Levi), 28 I sommersi e i salvati, see The Drowned and the Saved If Not Now When? (Levi), 20, 25, 31, 69, 78, 81, 83, 85, 89, 122

INDEX

If This Is a Man (Levi), 4, 13, 18–20, 22, 24–26, 31, 33, 40, 79–80, 83–85, 97, 99, 103–106, 116–117, 120, 124–125, 131, 147, 176–177, 188, 190, 204, 210, 213–215, 217, 227, 230 captivity in Auschwitz, 42–43 characterization in, 80–81 critics’ reaction to, 56–57 De Silva version, 33 Dr. Pannwitz, 36–38, 49, 56 “October 1944,” 49–50 references to Dante, 33–40 rejection by Italian publishers, 53–55 title changes, 55 see also Levi, Primo, and Eastern European Jews “Il sesto giorno” (Levi), 27, 30 Iliad, Levi’s aversion to, 106–107 “In fronte scritto” (Levi), 28 Inferno (Dante), 18, 20, 35–36, 38, 48–49, 106, 111, 114, 118, 120–121, 124 Canto, XXVI, 36, 106, 111, 114 see also “Canto of Ulysses” interpretation, 12, 24–25, 136, 164, 166, 176, 199, 214, 222, 228–230 Italian Jews, 3–7, 13, 42, 61–69, 71–72, 88, 116, 121, 135–136 and claim that there is no antiSemitism in Italy, 64, 67 ghettoes, 62–63 and Italian literary tradition, 88–89 and Race Laws of 1938, 61, 65–69 Italian Renaissance, 17, 19–20, 22 Italy coming to terms with the Holocaust, 135–144 transition to republic, 50–51 Jean the Pikolo, 36, 38 Jewish community, 42, 62–63, 70, 84 Judaism, 7, 11, 59, 61, 69, 72–73, 76, 84, 87–91, 93, 146, 191

273

Kaplan, Harold, 225, 229–230 König, Joel, 83 Kroll, Pamela, 138, 145 Kuhn (If This is a Man), 50, 82 L’altrui mestiere (Levi), 25, 30–31 L’osteria di Brema (Levi), 119–120 see also Shemà L’ultimo Natale della guerra (Levi), 25, 30–31, 117, 131, 205 La ricerca delle radici (Levi), 106, 116, 230 La tregua (Levi), 4, 104–106, 112–116, 124, 135–137, 140–144, 146 Rosi’s film interpretation of, 141–144 La vita è bella (Levi), 136–140, 142–145 Begnini’s film interpretation of, 136–141 Langer, Lawrence, 177–178, 186–188, 190–191, 205, 222 Levi, Anna Maria, 44, 58 Levi, Primo and anti-fascist Resistance, 53–54, 138, 140 awareness of Jewish identity, 30, 33, 61–62, 67–73, 75–77, 81, 85, 87, 89–91, 179 biographies of, 3, 6, 9, 19, 26, 28–29, 62, 76, 107, 121, 135, 181, 183, 189, 203, 209, 211–212, 214, 217–219, 222, 224, 229 career as chemist, 4, 6, 11, 24–26, 36–37, 41–43, 57, 69, 75, 105–106, 178, 189, 210, 214, 221 and Eastern European Jews, 5, 71, 75, 77–79, 84, 141, 176 and extremism, 71 frame stories, 25–30 and importance of Jewish homeland, 84 and “impurity” of Jewish race, 11, 68, 75–76 and Jewish education, 84–85 legend surrounding writing of, 46 poetry, 9, 119–123

274

INDEX

Levi, Primo—continued pseudonym, 26–27, 89 repatriation, 77, 113, 195 short stories, 23–26, 29–31, 81–82, 122 suicide, 66, 84, 116, 122, 144, 180, 203, 205, 209–212, 216–218, 221–230 and writing as cathartic tool, 44–50 and Zionism, 67, 72, 81 Levi-Montalcini, Rita, 62, 66, 73, 229–230 Levinas, Emmanuel, 153, 156, 158–160 Lilít ed altri racconti (Levi), 25, 80, 83, 89, 92, 100, 122, 176 Lyotard, Jean-François, 153, 157, 160

Muselmann, 128, 130, 147–149, 151, 155, 198–199 Mussolini, Benito, 4, 6, 12, 18, 51, 61, 65–66, 68

Manzoni, Alessandro, 47, 49, 92, 200 Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew (Segre), 68 memory, 84–85, 95, 97–104, 107, 115–117, 119–124, 131, 159, 176, 179, 188, 198, 216, 219, 225, 229–230 actualization of, 99 “Americanization of memory,” 136 Holocaust memory, 135–136, 139–142, 144 models of, 100–102 protection of, 98 relation between objects and, 103 social memory, 98–99 Mendel (If Not Now, When?), 69, 78, 81, 83, 216, 230 “Mercurio” (Levi), 24 midrashim, 23, 30 mimesis, 129–130 Moments of Reprieve, see Lilít ed altri racconti Momigliano, Mila, 44–45, 58 morality, in writings of Primo Levi, 10–12, 20, 27, 33–34, 42, 44, 46, 48, 53, 57, 64, 70, 79, 87, 126, 135–136, 140, 143, 148, 171, 177–178, 189–190, 193, 195, 197, 199–202, 204–205, 217, 221–222, 227–228 Morpurgo, Lucia, 55, 214

Pavese, Cesare, 6, 8, 53–55, 217 The Periodic Table (Levi), 24–25, 31, 72, 76, 79, 85, 120, 124–125, 189, 204, 215, 217–219 perpetrator, 163–166, 168–174, 177, 195, 227 Piaget, Jean, 102, 104 “Piombo” (Levi), 24 poetry, 8–10, 39, 45, 69, 88, 91, 119–120, 123–124, 142, 224–225 political sovereignty, theory of, 149–150 post-Holocaust, 75, 84, 229 printing, as tool for preserving memory, 98–99 “A Profession” (Levi), 15 “Psalm” (Levi), 45, 55

Nahum, Mordo (La tregua), 9, 112–113, 141 Nelson, Tim Blake, 193 “The Grey Zone,” Nietzsche, 51, 123, 178, 185, 188 observations, 25, 34, 91, 99–100, 127, 157, 165, 170 The Odyssey, 105–109, 111–112, 114–116, 131 Ostjuden (Levi), 59, 77, 120

Race Laws, 61, 65–69, 89, 135 Rappoport, Leon (Moments of Reprieve), 80 reality, 25–26, 30, 37, 39, 77, 100, 102, 104, 108, 112, 115, 120, 137, 142–144, 151, 177–178, 182–184, 186, 188–190, 193–205, 224 it-reality, 194–200, 203 second reality, 193, 195, 197–199, 201–203 thing–reality, 195, 204

INDEX

The Reawakening (Levi), 155, 160, 215 Referendum Day, 50 rejected, 55, 140, 188 Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (Agamben), 128, 131, 147, 152–153, 159, 204–206 Rosi, Francesco, 4, 135–137, 140–144, 146 Rumkowski, Chaïm (Moments of Reprieve), 29, 80–81, 176, 202–203 Sachs, Dalya, 126–127, 131 Samuel, Jean, 36, 48, 52, 58 Sayre, Patricia, 125, 130–131 Schindler’s List, 19, 137, 139, 144 Schönberg, Arnold, 87–88, 91, 93 Schwarz, Daniel, 125, 130–131, 180 Scorcese, Martin, 140 Se questo é un uomo, see If This is a Man The Search for Roots (Levi), 82–83, 85 Segre, Dan Vittorio, 68, 73 Serra, Bianca Guidetti, 212, 219 The Servant (Levi), 81–82 sexuality, 51, 108, 213–214, 217 shame, 45, 50, 69, 109, 153–157, 159, 211, 214–215 “Shemà” (Levi), 34, 45, 55, 119, 121–122 Shoah, 4, 23, 29, 33, 70, 89–90, 97–98, 116, 137, 147 SK (Sonderkommandos), 170–173 SN, see Stori naturali Sofsky, Wolfgang, 127–128 SS mindset, study of, 165–168, 171–172, 176, 189, 193 see also Debski, Tadeusz Storie naturali (Levi), 25–27, 29–31 “The Story of Ten Days” (Levi), 46–48 quiet humor of, 47–48 storyteller, 44, 115 Survival in Auschwitz (Levi), see If This is a Man survivor testimony, 153–159 symbolization, 193–195, 197–201, 205

275

systematicity, lack of in Levi’s writings, 125–126 Tagliacozzo, Lia Montel, 70 Thomson, Ian, 211–213, 216–219 Todorov, Tzvetan, 193, 201 trauma, 3–6, 9, 43, 90, 97–99, 103, 119–123, 136, 138, 140–141, 144, 159, 185 Treves, Camillo, 52 The Truce, 4, 20, 24–26, 121, 124, 146, 209, 219 Ulysses, 20–21, 33, 36, 38–40, 48–49, 53, 57, 59, 106–107, 111, 114–116, 118, 120–121 UN, see L’ultimo Natale della guerra “Unfinished Business” (Levi), 122–123, 207 Vacca, Linnea, 125, 130 VF, see Vizio di forma victimhood, 200–202 vision of Auschwitz, 34 Vizio di forma (Levi), 25, 27–30 Voegelin, 193–206 Wiesel, Elie, 8, 10, 19, 71, 82, 154, 157, 166, 210, 219, 223 The Wrench (Levi), 24–26 writing as act of testimony, 90–92 and ethics, 10–11, 13–14, 34, 87–93, 128–131, 146–149, 151–153, 155–159, 182, 193–194, 199, 201, 205 Yiddish, 5, 24, 66, 71, 77–79, 85–86, 164 see also If Not Now, When?; Levi, Primo, and Eastern European Jews Yona, Anna, 53 Zevi, Tullia, 67 Zionism, 67, 72, 81