Tevye’s Daughters, by Sholem Aleichem (Translated by Frances Butwin) – 1949 [Unknown Artist] [Updated post…]

[This is one of my earlier – earliest? – posts, having been created in November of 2017.  (Tempus fugit, eh?)  It’s now updated with additional information and photos.]

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While the artist who created the cover painting for Crown Hill’s 1949 collection of Sholom Aleichem’s tales – published under the title Tevye’s Daughters – is unknown, the translator of the stories is known, her name clearly displayed:  She was Frances Butwin. 

However, when I first created this post, her name was simply that, “a name”, for I was then unfamiliar with the story of her life as a bibliophile, bookseller, and especially translator of Yiddish.  She pursued this latter activity in collaboration with her husband Julius, continuing this work after his sudden death in 1945.

Move “forward” (double entendre there…) a few years to June of 2019, I was happily startled to see this image on display at a Facebook post by Washington University’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies.  There, I at long last learned who Frances Butwin was.  Or, in the words of the Stroum Center:

“Have you ever read Sholom Aleichem’s stories in English?  Chances are, you’ve read the work of translators Frances and Julius Butwin – Professor Joe Butwin’s parents.

A Polish refugee of the Nazis and a child of Russian Jewish émigrés, Frances and Julius met through the pages of The Forward, through an essay contest titled “I am a Jew and an American.”

After 4,000 pages of correspondence, the couple married, and became some of the very first translators of Sholom Aleichem’s work into English – before Julius’ tragic early death at age 41.

Professor Joe Butwin of UW English Department shares his parents’ remarkable story, and discusses his own career as an advocate for Yiddish and Jewish literature at the UW, in a profile by Denise Grollmus.”

You can learn much more about the lives of Frances and Julius Butwin in Denise Grollman’s article “Professor Joe Butwin reflects on how his academic career always led him back to his family roots“, which includes two images of the couple (shown below), as well as images of Professor Butwin, Aharon Appelfeld, and Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran Ed Lending. 

“Julius and Frances Butwin in Wisconsin Dells, Wi., shortly after their marriage in 1933.”

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“Frances Butwin at a book signing for her and Julius’s translation of Sholom Aleichem’s “The Old Country,” alongside author John Bennet, 1946.”

You can learn more about the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies here, and, follow the Center on Facebook, here

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Reading about the lives of the Butwins and their literary endeavors sparked my curiosity (not a hard thing to spark, I suppose).  To that end, the three following book reviews – one from The Philadelphia Inquirer by Mortimer J. Cohen, and two from The New York Times (by Orville Prescott and Thomas Lask) – present views of the Butwin’s work from the perspective of mainstream American literary culture during the late 1940s.  A fourth item – Sheldon Harnack’s 1972 essay in the (New York) Daily News – delves into Jerry Bock, Joe Stein, and Harnack’s use of the stories in Frances Butwin’s translation of Tevye’s Daughters as the basis for a certain musical known as “Fiddler On The Roof”. 

Harnack’s comment about his difficulty is locating a copy of Butwin’s book (in New York City, of all places) is as ironic as it is charming: “Incredibly, this classic was out of print and it was very difficult to locate two extra copies.  We did manage to find one copy, unexpectedly, in a bookstore whose specialty was religious literature – mostly Catholic, at that – an irony I’m sure Sholom Aleichem would have relished.” 

Well, I discovered my own copy (cover displayed above) at a used Bookstore in Atlanta, Georgia.  So, there you go!

As for Lask’s review?  Like many reviews in the Book Review section of the Sunday Times, it’s accompanied by an illustration: in this case, an imagined view of our hero Tevye.  Very (very!) close inspection of the drawing reveals that the artist’s name is “B. Gumener Nutkiewicz”, who I’m certain is Betty Gumener Nutkiewicz, a 1947 graduate of the Wayne State University Art Education Department and wife of N. Nutkiewicz, one of the editors of the Detroit edition of the Forward, as described in The Jewish News (Detroit) on June 23, 1950.

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Books of the Times

By ORVILLE PRESCOTT

The New York Times
June 24, 1946

THE OLD COUNTRY.  By Sholem Aleichem.  Translated by Julius and Frances Butwin.  434 pages.  Crown.  $3.

SHOLEM ALEICHEM, who was born in Pereyeslav in the Ukraine in 1859, died in Brooklyn in 1916.  Although he is unknown to most of the world, he is generally considered to have been one of the greatest of all Yiddish writers.  More than a million copies of his books have been sold. His collected works comprise twenty-eight volumes.  It is told of him that when he first came to New York Mark Twain went to call upon him.  “I wanted to meet you,” he said, “because I understand that I am the American Sholem Aleichem.”  Of his grand total of 300 short stories twenty-seven may now be found in “The Old Country,” translated into English for the first time by Julius and Frances Butwin.

Yiddish literature is unknown territory to most of us.  Little of it has been translated, and some of that little has proved of limited appeal.  Today Sholem Asch’s great religious novels about Christ and St Paul, “The Nazarene” and “The Apostle,” are the only Yiddish works known to most readers even by name.  Much more representative, I presume, was Sholem Aleichem, who, wrote of his own people as he had known them in the Jewish villages of imperial Russia.  The stories he tells of them are very similar to another notable Yiddish work which was published here last September, “Song of the Dnieper,” by Zalman Shneour.  It is quite possible that Mr. Shneour was influenced by the elder writer.  But he was also obviously influenced by the literary and political atmosphere of a later generation.  There is far more violence, misery, corruption and ignorance in “Song of the Dnieper” than in “The Old Country.”

Stories Are Simple and Colloquial

Sholem Aleichem would be called a regional writer if we could transplant that word to a foreign literature.  His stories sometimes are intricately plotted, and some of them present well-individualized characters; but the first concern of them all seems to be atmosphere, the habits of thought and turns of speech, the customs and superstitions of a special way of life.  With humor and affection and zest Aleichem wrote of the villagers of Kasrilevka and Zolodievka, their poverty, their religion, their loquacity and their unconquerable delight in wit and learning.  The Jews of Old Russia, as Aleichem saw them, were devout and honorable, simple in a tunelessly provincial fashion and at the same time emotionally sophisticated.

Nobody could be more humbly fatalistic than the man who contemplated his poverty and the riches of others and sighed, “If it should have been different it would have been.”  Slightly more cynical was a subsequent thought, “to some people butter rolls, and to others the plague.”  But fleshly comforts are not to be scorned either.  “God is God, but whisky is something you can drink.”

These stories are written in a simple, colloquial style as if their author were one of the villagers spinning a tale about his neighbors.  The matter, too, as well as the manner, contributes to the general folk air.  Holy days and festivals, marriages and deaths, drunkenness and barter, the hazards of various occupations, these are Aleichem’s themes.  They are more important than the characters themselves.  This is the way it was in the old country, he seems to be saying.  This is the way the people lived and died.  And, most important of all, this is the way they talked. “The Old Country” is filled with marvelous talk that has survived the perils of translation surprisingly.  The special rhythms of Yiddish speech, the dependence on quotation and allusion, the sly wit, are all wonderfully well conveyed.  Those who know Aleichem’s work in the original may have other ideas, but this book is not intended for them.

One Hero Is Dogged by Bad Luck

Much the most interesting character in “The Old Country” is Tevye, the hero of several stories which he tells in the first person. Tevye was a shlimazl, a man dogged by bad luck.  Tevye’s idea of a cheerful greeting to strangers was “What is it you want?  If you want to buy something, all I have is a gnawing stomach, a heart full of pain, a head full of worries, and all the misery and wretchedness in the world.”  Tevye was usually down, but never out.  He was colossally ignorant, but he prided himself on his learning.  He tried to seem fierce, but he had the kindest heart in the village.  He loved to talk and to misquote and merely to live, although he knew few enough of the pleasures of life.  Tevye is a humorous triumph.

But his presence makes many of the other stories in “The Old Country” seem somewhat insipid in comparison.  No matter how authentic it may be, local-color writing soon palls.  No matter how adroit and understanding, fiction on the folk level soon becomes tedious.  After a few stories in “The Old Country” one is inclined to think, “how delightful!”  After a good many one is likely to be bored and fretful.  Charm and atmosphere aren’t enough.  Something more substantial into which he, the reader, can set his teeth is needed, some ideas, some deeper penetration into character, some more adult storytelling.  “The Old Country,” by ignoring Russia and the Russians, doesn’t even have anything to say about that other aspect of life in the old country, the aspect which sent so many Jews fleeing to other countries.

There can be no question that Sholem Aleichem was an accomplished writer.  Whether he wrote the kind of fiction that will appeal widely to non-Yiddish readers is another matter.

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Humor That Is Poignant

TEVYEH’S DAUGHTERS.  By Sholom Aleiehem.  Translated by Frances Butwin.  302 pp.  New York: Crown Publishers.  $3.

By THOMAS LASK

The New York Times
January 23, 1949

SO appealing, so warm and quick with life are the writings of Sholom Aleichem that he has stimulated translators all over the world.  His work has appeared in such various tongues as Lettish, Esperanto and Japanese.  Although an early translation in English came out in 1912, only six volumes have appeared altogether, and these of uneven merit.  Today, though he remains a major literary figure, the number of those who can read him in the Yiddish original has become steadily fewer.  Thus, Mrs. Butwin, who with her husband brought out a previous book of stories, “The Old Country,” in telling the story of Tevyeh and his daughters, has performed a major service.  Tevyeh is company too good to be barred from us by foreign syllables.

But even to so expert a workman as Mrs. Butwin there must be a large element of frustration in this enterprise, for she surely knows better than others how difficult it is to get that picturesque, flavor-some, idiomatic folk tongue into equivalent English speech.  Yet it is precisely his handling of this folk language that sets off his greatness.  Sholom Aleichem could fashion an effective short story as well as the next one; but in his use of the common Yiddish speech he stands alone.  It is both the substance and the medium, and he has wedded it to characters who raised dialect to the stature of art.  These were the Jews of the Russian pale who flourished before the holocaust and who were so poor that the spoken word was their only permanent possession.  Their poverty was a function of their lives, and “they raised it to “an art, a calling, a career.”  But through their speech they squared themselves with their condition, their assorted misfortunes, even with the Almighty Himself.  As Maurice Samuel has remarked, life got the better of them, but they got the better of the argument.

But if Mrs. Butwin’s stories are not the equal of the originals (and she would be the last to claim that they are), there is still a great deal that is amusing and delightful.  Her versions are always mellifluous, and at least two of the stories can be recommended without qualifications.  In “Another Page From the Song of Songs,” she has caught the tender wistfulness of a spring day; and in “Schprintze” she has retained the melancholy that was a quality of the original.

Moreover, Mrs. Butwin has had the intelligence to concentrate on one of the most popular and effective of Sholom Aleichem’s portraits, Tevyeh the Dairyman.  Tevyeh had two major afflictions: his livelihood (or lack of one) and his seven marriageable daughters.  No matter how he contrived or plotted to arrange suitable marriages, the girls had minds of their own and insisted on making their own destiny – with lamentable results.  One spurns a rich man and marries a poor tailor who dies and bequeaths her a roomful of children.  Another insists on marrying a revolutionary and sharing his exile.  A third marries a Christian, and Tevyeh cuts the apostate from his life if not his heart.  One, finally, does marry a rich magnate from Yehupetz, but this is the worst marriage of all – for money has been substituted for love and pride.  In spite of his outward show, Tevyeh admires their independence.  Throughout it all he struggles with his poverty, fences and argues with his wife, curses and communes with his nag and hides his sorrow.

ALL this may not seem the raw material for comedy, yet Tevyeh is one of the great humorous figures in literature.  He has become so from his wit, from the play of his mind on the events, from his intellectual sprightliness.  He is irrepressible.  For every situation he has the quotation or twist of phrase that redeems it.  His humor doesn’t derive from the situation, but from the language that applies to it.  It is a bittersweet optimism that is found so frequently in Sholom Aleichem’s writings.  It can be seen in the note that Yosrolik writes to his friend after the Kishinev massacre: “Pogrom?  Thank God we have nothing to fear.  We have already had two of them and a third won’t be worth while.”

Mrs. Butwin has also included a few stories which depend for their effect on their narrative qualities.  “The German,” in which a cheated traveler takes a long and subtle revenge, would fit very well in any contemporary collection; and “Gymnasia,” a passionate parent’s plan for her son’s education, is a study in organized chaos.  And there are a number of other tales that reveal indirectly the ramshackle, confined towns and life in the pale – and in the distance the movement and mutter of the outside world that was already stirring, not only to destroy this life, but also the people who lived it.

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Eternal Clash of New and Old

TEVYE’S DAUGHTERS, BY Sholom Aleichem, Crown Publishers: New York, 302 pp. $3.

The Philadelphia Inquirer Book Review
February 27, 1949

By Mortimer J. Cohen

TEVYE the Dairyman is the main hero of this volume of short stories by the great Yiddish writer, Sholom Aleichem.

Tevye is the symbol of a world that has passed away, a world that had its physical locale in the Russian-Polish Pale of Settlement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but whose real foundations were in the hearts of a great Jewish community now destroyed by Hitlerism.

Undoubtedly Sholom Aleichem, who has been favorably compared to our American Mark Twain, intended to write a family chronicle in these tales about the seven daughters of Tevye, who circle about him like planets around the sun.  Among the planets, of course, moves Golde, Tevye’s beloved wife.  Through all the stories runs a single theme: “The never-resolved conflict between the younger and older generations.”

TEVYE, who sells milk, butter and cheese to the folks of the neighboring towns for a living, is a man of simple piety whose deep religious faith enables him to meet the challenge of poverty, trial and sorrow.

Tevye’s “old-fashioned” ideas are strongly challenged by the stormy times in which he lives: the last days of Czarist Russia with its political unrest and the revolutionary struggle of 1905-6.

Within Jewry at the time strong ferments are at work: Zionism and the spread of secular culture through the Haskalah, or Enlightenment.

Tevye’s daughters are infected by these currents and counter-currents, and they in turn rebel against Tevye and Golde and the patriarchal way of life they represent.

But Tevye loves his daughters, whom he considers the most beautiful creatures in the world, and he even finds ways to justify them, blaming their actions upon “an evil fate” which they cannot control.

THROUGH all his experiences, Tevye remains patient, profoundly human, compassionate, understanding and lovable.  His humor lights up the dark places he travels through.  And to the very end he is sustained by his religious faith.

Not all the stories in this volume deal with Tevye and his daughters.  The translator, Frances Butwin, who has done a superb job, has intertwined the chronicles of Tevye the Dairyman with the other stories in such a way that the latter become interesting not only in themselves but as backgrounds.

This is an admirable volume of stories that will bring smiles and tears to the reader.

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Book Is the Thing in ‘Fiddler’

Daily News (New York)
June 11, 1972

By SHELDON HARNICK

Around 1940, when I was in my 2nd or 3rd year at Chicago’s Carl Schurz High School, my friends and I stumbled on the work of Bob Benchley.  Talk about serendipity!

After devouring everything of his we could lay our hands on, in rapid succession we went on to revel (wallow might be a better word) in the heady concoctions of S.J. Perelman, James Thurber, Stephen Leacock and a few other dispensers of “wonderful nonsense.”  Knowing that I was hooked on this type of humorous writing, a friend recommended that I try Sholom Aleichem, the alleged “Yiddish Mark Twain.”

I remembered having seen “The Old Country” Country” among my father’s books.  So I read it.  (It was in English: I couldn’t read Yiddish then and, regrettably, still can’t.)  I didn’t like it; that is, although the stories were not without interest I didn’t find it funny in the way Benchley, Perelman, et al, were funny.  I was looking for that particular kind of screwball humor, that verbal dexterity which characterized my favorites.  Sholom Aleichem, I decided, wasn’t even in the same league.  I never even thought to ask myself whether he had lost something in translation.

Looking for an Idea

Cut to 20 years later.  Jerry Bock and I are looking for a suitable subject for a musical.  A friend suggests Sholom Aleichem’s “Wandering Star.”  I, secure in the wisdom of the conclusion reached when I was 15 or 16 years old, can be heard asserting to Jerry, “Well, let’s not expect too much.  I read some stuff of his years ago and it wasn’t so hot.”

So we read the book.  Of course, by this time I was no longer in frenzied pursuit of hilarious literary outbursts.  We were looking for a story rich in emotion, peopled with the sort of characters who might be legitimately expected to burst into song.  “Wandering Star” had all of that in abundance.

Well, Jerry and I were so taken with the novel that we asked Joe Stein to read it.  Joe liked it as much as we did but pointed out that there was too great an abundance of just about everything in it.  He doubted that it could be pared down and molded into manageable theatrical shape.  Joe, who was familiar with other Sholom Aleichem works (and in Yiddish, yet!) suggested that we explore more of his stories.  He smiled as he recalled how funny some of them were.  I nodded skeptically.  I knew better.

Not long after this we discovered “Tevye’s Daughters” (I think Joe may have owned a copy) and knew that we wanted to try to translate it to the stage.  Incredibly, this classic was out of print and it was very difficult to locate two extra copies.  We did manage to find one copy, unexpectedly, in a bookstore whose specialty was religious literature – mostly Catholic, at that – an irony I’m sure Sholom Aleichem would have relished.

Begin Studying

So, the three of us began to study the various stories that comprise Tevye’s Daughters (in the Frances Butwin translation).  As far as I know, these stories were not written to form one continuous novel; each was written as a self-contained entity and they are scattered through several collections of miscellaneous tales.  The largest number of them in any single volume is in the book entitled “Tevye’s Daughters,” which also includes “The Little Pot,” an initially amusing but ultimately heartbreaking story narrated by a character named “Yenta.”  As I read the- stories over and over, literally immersing myself in them, a startling thing happened.  To paraphrase Mark Twain’s celebrated comment concerning his father, it was amazing how much Sholom Aleichem’s writing had improved in 20 years!

Since the narrative style of “Tevye’s Daughters” is simple and straightforward (deceptively so), the beauty and the intensely moving quality of the stories is apparent on a single reading.  Repeated
readings began to reveal the subtleties of his writing, as well as the extraordinary depth of his knowledge and understanding of his characters.  And the more we understand these characters, how richly human they were, the funnier and sadder they became.

More Than Ethnic

We also began to realize that the humor, the pathos, the humanity, and the meaning of these stories went far beyond any ethnic frame or any tour-de-force of mere verbal dexterity.  Sholom Aleichem may have been writing specifically for a Yiddish speaking audience,-but his is an eloquence that far transcends language.

To state, as did Irving Howe in his review of “Fiddler” in “Commentary” that “The action in his stories tends to be slight, for everything rests on language, a kind of rippling monologue in which the full range of nuances is available only to the cultivated Yiddish reader,” is to glorify style at the expense of the universality which we found so profoundly moving.  It was this we worked so hard, under Jerome Robbins’ loving and scrupulous supervision, to re-create on the stage.

Because of the immensity of “Fiddler’s” success and the resultant vast amount of publicity the show has received, I find that (speaking for myself) there is a tendency to accept my share of the credit and praise and let Sholom Aleichem’s monumental achievement slide quietly into the background.  Oh, yes, we always mention his name in passing but that’s about all. Now that “Fiddler” is about to become the longest running show in Broadway’s history, I feel an obligation to set the record straight.  If you put all of us who put “Fiddler” together on one side of a balance, and Sholom Aleichem along with his inspired creation: Tevye and his world, on the other, the balance would quickly tip in Sholom Aleichem Tevye’s direction.

I only wish that everyone who has seen “Fiddler” and enjoyed it would buy, rent, or borrow a copy of “Tevye’s Daughters” (now back in print, one of the nicer spin-offs from the show’s success) and read all the “Tevye” stories.  After all, we only used four of them, and have no intention of writing either “Son of Fiddler” or “The Further Adventures of Tevye and his Daughters.”  Go, read.

That Hideous Strength, by C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis) – 1965 (1946) [Bernard Symancyk] – Macmillan # 8692 [Ever-so-slightly updated…]

that-hideous-strength-cs-lewis-1946-1977“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled.
All our difficulty comes with the others.
When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?
He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles.
He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs
about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats.
He is our problem.

We have to recondition him.

But the educated public,
the people who read the highbrow weeklies,
don’t need reconditioning.
They’re all right already.

They’ll believe anything.”

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Since completing this post, I’ve made innumerable attempts to learn more about the NICE’s current incarnation, but information about the organization – at least, beyond what C.S. Lewis presents in his novel – is remarkably elusive.  (Understandable:  Much has changed since 1946, not least the fact that the NICE is no longer headquartered in England.)  Despite extensive searches using DuckDuckGo, and, that o t h e r search engine (y’know, the one headquartered in Mountain View, California, at which the arc of human history is tacitly understood to “progress” (Babel-like?) ever forward; always upward; ever higher…), I’ve been unable to identify either the Institute’s home page, or, links to the organization through any other website, whether governmental or private; whether in the Americas, Western or Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia.    

Likewise, though the Institute assuredly has a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, these too remain elusive.  

Well, not entirely true:  I did come across one possible link.  But, I’m not going to click on it.  (Y’never know what might happen…!)

(Okay, just kidding!  I thought it would be fun to indulge in brief speculation about parallel universes and alternate histories….)

But, I did find the image below:  It’s conceptual art of a promotional / propaganda poster for the NICE, fittingly done in 1940s “atomic” style: The kind of image you’d see – 1984-like – in abundance, weather-marked with tattered corners yet always freshly replaced – upon the walls of any urban center.   

The poster is one of many works created by J.P. Cokes as conceptual illustrations for That Hideous Strength, and can be viewed at Behance.  J.P. Cokes has also created a great series of stylistically similar illustrations for Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which – like That Hideous Strength; like so many other works of science fiction and fantasy (A.E. van Vogt, anyone?) – merits transfer from the printed page to animation, or, the “live” screen.  

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You can view the cover of Avon Books’ 1958 abridged version of That Hideous Strength, published under the title The Tortured Planet (Avon # T-211), here

(See review and discussion at Chicago Boyz website…) 

Astounding Science Fiction – October, 1953 (Featuring “The Gulf Between”, by Tom Godwin) [Frank Kelly Freas] [Updated post… [Yet further updated…]]

[Update – December 26, 2020: My search for additional sightings of Frank the Robot has been successful.  I’m happy to report that he’s been captured on video on many occasions, and entirely un-UFO-like, his identity has been definitively verified by amateur and professional observers from locales the world over.  It turns out that he’s not at all reticent about public appearances, seeming to quietly revel in and appreciate public recognition.  True, he doesn’t say much.  (Actually, he doesn’t say anything at all.)  After all, if you’re a metallic man several stories tall, your presence alone speaks for itself.

I’ve also included numerous links about Frank’s creator, Frank Kelly Freas.  Oh, yes…  Note Frank’s resemblance to the robot in Freas’ black & white illustration for Tom Godwin’s story “The Gulf Between”.  A distant relative?

So, to view a better Frank sighting, scroll down a little – just below Stewie Griffin – and enjoy.]

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“What the hell is that, a killer robot monster?!”

Frank Kelly Freas’ art gets around, in ways quite unexpected: 

I recently discovered that the plaintive, puppy-dog-eyed, giant robot featured on the cover of the October 1953 issue of Astounding Science Fiction – the inspiration for the cover art of Queen’s 1997 album “News of the World” – was encountered in the latter form by none other than Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin, in the series’ 2012 episode “Killer Queen”.  As you can see in the clip below (original here), Stewie’s introduction to the un-named metal monstrosity – courtesy of Brian Griffin – is a meeting quite memorable.

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A MACHINE DOES NOT CARE

“You wanted obedience Cullin – now you have it.
You climbed a long way up by forcing human beings to behave like machines.
But you were wrong in one respect;
no human can ever be forced to behave exactly like a machine,
and no machine can ever be constructed that
will behave exactly like a human.
Machines are the servants of humans, not their equals.
There will always be a gulf between Flesh and Steel.
Read those five words on the panel before you and you will understand.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

It was a good ship,
built to travel almost forever,
and it hurled itself on through the galaxy
at full acceleration;
on and on until the galaxy was a great pinwheel of white fire behind it
and there was nothing before it.

On and on,
faster and faster,
into the black void of Nothing;
without reason or purpose
while a dark-eyed robot stared at a skeleton
that was grinning mirthlessly at a five-word sentence:

A MACHINE DOES NOT CARE
(Tom Godwin, “The Gulf Between”, p. 56)
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“God, why does he look sad?!  He’s already destroyed mankind; what else could he want?!”

“I’ll tell you what the news of the world is, we’re in a lot of #@%$*! trouble!”

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From the YouTube channel of TroyDouglas917, here’s Frank’s opening for Queen + Adam Lambert’s  November 25, 2017, show at 3Arena in Dublin, with great views of Adam Lambert and Brian May.

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Illustration by Frank Kelly Freas, for Tom Godwin’s story “The Gulf Between” (p. 35).

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Illustration by Richard Van Dongen, for James H. White’s story “The Scavengers” (p. 121).

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Illustration by Richard Van Dongen, for James H. White’s story “The Scavengers” (p. 136).

References

Killer Queen, at Internet Movie Database

Adam Lambert – Official Website

Adam Lambert – Wikipedia

Brian May – Official Website

Brian May – Wikipedia

Queen – Official Website

Queen – Wikipedia

Queen + Adam Lambert – Wikipedia

Frank Kelly Freas

Official Website

Wikipedia

SFE – The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

FindAGrave

JVJ Publishing (Illustrators)

Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists

Internet Speculative Fiction Database

GoodReads

Galaxy Press

Wikimedia Commons (Cover Art) – 47 images

Comic Art Fans – some classic, “clickable” (relatively) full-size cover art

Dangerous Minds

invaluable – The World’s Premier Auctions and Galleries – original art for sale

Mad Magazine Covers by Frank Kelly Freas – Doug Gilford’s Mad Magazine Cover Site

1/28/17 – 9/7/20 — 3/23/18 1735

Night Fighter, by Cecil F. “Jimmy” Rawnsley and Robert Wright – 1957 (June, 1967) [Edward I. Valigursky]

A very nice cover by Edward I. Valigursky for Ballantine Books’ 1967 edition of Cecil F. Rawnsley and Robert Wright’s Night Fighter, bearing the artist’s surname at the lower right…

Though the depicted aircraft are (in theory) Mosquito night fighters of Number 85 Squadron RAF, close (well … very, very close) inspection of the plane at the lower left reveals that it bears the code letters “ED I” on its fuselage.  Not so coincidentally, this matches the initials of the artist’s given and middle names: “Edward Ignatius”!  In reality, the squadron code carried by No. 85 Squadron’s warplanes was “VY”. 

Edward Valigursky was an enormously productive and versatile artist, his oeuvre encompassing the fields of military aviation, space exploration, and adventure.  As for the realm of science fiction, during the mid to late 1950s his work frequently appeared as cover art for Amazing Stories and Fantastic, interior art, and, the covers of Ace paperbacks.

Flight Lieutenant Cecil Frederick “Jimmy” Rawnsley

References

Hess, William N., The Allied Aces of World War II, Arco Publishing Inc., New York, N.Y., 1966

Flight Lieutenant Cecil Frederick “Jimmy” Rawnsley, at Wikipedia

Flight Lieutenant C.F. Rawnsley (portrait), at “The Royal Air Force 1939-1945, Vol. I: The Fight at Odds”, at ibiblio.org/hyperwar

Number 85 Squadron Royal Air Force, at Wikipedia

Edward I. Valigursky

Biography, at Pulp Artists

Biography, by Arnie Fenner, at Muddy Colors

Examples of his science fiction art, at 3rdART

Some GGA (“Good Girl Art”), at Grapefruit Moon Gallery

2018 08 31 – 2018 10 14

The Tortured Planet (That Hideous Strength), by C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis) – 1958 (1946) [Richard M. Powers] – Avon # T-211 [Slightly updated…]

Here’s the cover of Avon Books’ 1958 edition of the third and final novel of the Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, published under the awkward title The Tortured Planet.  (Ugh.)  I don’t know the reason for the title change, though it may relate to this Avon edition being – as stated on the cover – C.S. Lewis’ abridged version of the original work. 

This edition’s cover art, which looks like two factory-reject Christmas tree ornaments floating confusedly in space, is by Richard Powers, and is the “weakest” of the cover illustrations of Avon’s three 1950s-era volumes of Lewis’ trilogy.  This is more than ironic, given the typically exceptional quality – in terms of complexity, symbolism, and originality – of Powers’ oeuvre.  

You can view the cover art of Macmillan’s 1965 edition of That Hideous Strength here.     

Here are two discussions concerning That Hideous Strength / The Tortured Planet – at ChicagoBoyz.  Both by David Foster, they are “Summer Rerun – Book Review: That Hideous Strength” (September 15, 2017), and, “Summer Rerun – Lewis vs. Haldane” (August 31, 2019).

A (the?) central plot element of the novel concerns an organization dubbed NICE., the National Institute for Coordinated Experimentation.  As stated by Foster, Lewis describes NICE as “the first fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world.”  Though thankfully there’s no congruent analogue of N.I.C.E. in our world, perhaps the Institute can be taken to represent the long-reigning academic / corporate / media “complex”, which has wielded, and continues to wield, vastly more power than than the stereotyped (albeit a somewhat hackneyed stereotype) “military industrial complex”. 

Just sayin’.

Oh, here’s a quote by, “…the Head of the Institutional Police, a woman named Miss Hardcastle … nicknamed the Fairy, who explains to sociologist Mark Studdock [a professor “on the make” at Bracton College], the ease with which the news media can manipulate the public.  (Specifically alluding to that portion of the public that is “educated”, credentialed, and perhaps meritocratic?) 

Whether in the world of the Space Trilogy or our world, her point is valid. 

Thus:

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled.
All our difficulty comes with the others.
When did you meet a workman who believes the papers?
He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles.
He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs
about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats.
He is our problem.

We have to recondition him.

But the educated public,
the people who read the highbrow weeklies,
don’t need reconditioning.
They’re all right already.

They’ll believe anything.”

________________________________________

Since completing this post, I’ve made innumerable attempts to learn more about the NICE’s current incarnation, but information about the organization – at least, beyond what C.S. Lewis presents in his novel – is remarkably elusive.  (Understandable:  Much has changed since 1946, not least the fact that the NICE is no longer headquartered in England.)  Despite extensive searches using DuckDuckGo, and, that o t h e r search engine (y’know, the one headquartered in Mountain View, California, at which the arc of human history is tacitly understood to “progress” (Babel-like?) ever forward; always upward; ever higher…), I’ve been unable to identify either the Institute’s home page, or, links to the organization through any other website, whether governmental or private; whether in the Americas, Western or Eastern Europe, Africa, or Asia.    

Likewise, though the Institute assuredly has a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, these too remain elusive.  

Well, not entirely true:  I did come across one possible link.  But, I’m not going to click on it.  (Y’never know what might happen…!)

(Okay, just kidding!  I thought it would be fun to indulge in brief speculation about parallel universes and alternate histories….)

But, I did find the image below:  It’s conceptual art of a promotional / propaganda poster for the NICE, fittingly done in 1940s “atomic” style: The kind of image you’d see – 1984-like – in abundance, weather-marked with tattered corners yet always freshly replaced – upon the walls of any urban center.   

The poster is one of many works created by J.P. Cokes as conceptual illustrations for That Hideous Strength, and can be viewed at Behance.  J.P. Cokes has also created a great series of stylistically similar illustrations for Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, which – like That Hideous Strength; like so many other works of science fiction and fantasy (A.E. van Vogt, anyone?) – merits transfer from the printed page to animation, or, the “live” screen.  

________________________________________

Note: December 2, 2020 – Having created this post only five days ago, I was happily surprised to discover Dr. Pedro Blas González’ essay, “Good and Evil in C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy“, at NewEnglishReview

The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction – Third Series, Edited by Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas- 1952 (1953, 1954) [Edmund A. Emshwiller] [Updated post…] – Ace D-422 / G-712

Dating from June of 2017 (gadzooks!), this was one the earliest posts at WordsEnvisioned: The cover of the third volume (or, third series, as it were) of stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction during 1953.

The post originally showing a rather bedraggled copy of the book, which I purchased at a flea market some decades ago.  (See image at bottom.)  It’s now been updated with a pristine copy, which presents Edmund Emshwiller’s cover art in its complete imagination and intricacy.  In this case, for Kay Rogers’ tale “Experiment”. 

This is also a great example of how “Emsh” sort of “hid” his nickname in his illustrations:  In this case, “EMSH” appears in tiny blue letters in the center of the aquatic space-alien’s chest.  Uh, assuming the space-alien has a chest…

“Attitudes”, by Philip Jose Farmer, October, 1953

“Maybe Just a Little One”, by Reginald Bretnor, February, 1953

“The Star Gypsies”, by William Lindsay Graham, July, 1953

“The Untimely Toper”, by L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, July, 1953

“Vandy, Vandy”, by Manly Wade Wellman, March, 1953

“Experiment, by Kay Rogers, February, 1953

“Lot”, by Ward Moore, May, 1953

“Manuscript Found in a Vacuum”, by Philip Maitland Hubbard, August, 1953

“The Maladjusted Classroom”, by Homer Czar Nearing, Jr., June, 1953

“Child by Chronos”, by Charles L. Harness, June, 1953

“New Ritual”, by Idris Seabright, January, 1953

“Devlin”, by William Bernard Ready, April, 1953

“Captive Audience”, by Anne Warren Griffith, August, 1953

“Snulbug”, by Anthony Boucher, May, 1953 (originally in Unknown Worlds, December, 1941)

“Shepherd’s Boy”, by Richard Middleton, March, 1953 (originally in The Ghost Ship & Other Stories, May, 1912)

“Star Light, Star Bright”, by Alfred Bester, July, 1953

Reference

The Best From Fantasy and Science Fiction – Third Series, at Internet Speculative Fiction Database

6/19/17

The Artful Astronaut: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – November, 1962 [Edmund Emshwiller]

Four short months after the appearance of his cover illustration for the June, 1962, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Edmund Emshwiller – “Emsh” – created cover art for the magazine’s November issue that was utterly different in style and mood.  Though this painting, too, depicted an astronaut, this space explorer seems to be a person quite different from “George”, the intergalactic dispenser of unknown elixers!

Taken at first (and second?) glance, the viewer might be hard-pressed to think that the two illustrations were products of the same hand.  November’s astronaut is painted in bold, rough-edged, unrefined strokes.  His spacesuit is odd:  His visor is a little confining, if it is a visor: It iincorporates a set of vertical bars.  His helmet is decorated with two cylindrical, mechanical protrusions: While they could be thrusters for maneuvering in space, they look all the world like something a little more earthbound:  Spigots.  Beer spigots, that is.  Well, there is lots of ambiguity going on here, which is reflected in the astronaut’s pensive countenance.

The sky behind provides an interesting contrast: Rather than appearing as gradations of a particular shade of color, or a series of colors gradually blending into and away from one another, the sky appears as distinctly-edged waves of green, purplish-brown, medium blue, and dark blue, with a few small stars floating just above the horizon:  The feel is vaguely reminiscent; lightly akin, to Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night, albeit spacecraft were not known to have existed during van Gogh’s lifetime.  At least, as far as is known.  At least, on earth.

Something else; a tiny detail:  Ed Emshwiller typically signed his art with the four-letter moniker “EMSH” tiny in capital letters, often “hiding” his diminutively-written signature somewhere within the details of his finished work, whether painting or black & white interior illustration.  For example, in the June, 1962 issue of TMFandSF, “EMSH” appears on the sole of the astronaut’s left boot.

But, November’s cover is anonymous: EMSH is nowhere to be found.  And, another similarity with June:  This, too, is a “stand-alone” illustration:  The painting pertains to none of the stories within the issue, and, is un-named in the table of contents.

Perhaps we’re supposed to supply the story?

The Artful Astronaut: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – June, 1962 [Edmund Emshwiller]

Whimsy is an interesting thing.

Usually, we think of whimsicality in terms of the play of words and sentences. 

But, the visual arts can be whimsical as well.

Case in point, the work of Edmund Emshwiller (or, “EMSH”, for short).  An artist whose extraordinarily prolific output was only exceeded by his sense of imagination and creativity, Emsh’s oeuvre primarily comprised cover art for softcover books and pulp magazines, as well as – perhaps more abundantly – black and white interior illustrations.  His cover paintings for both literary formats are characterized by boldness and variety of color, an almost camera-like, stop-motion “capture” and portrayal of action (whether of individual men and women, machines, or both), and, an almost physicalized and detailed crispness and clarity to alien worlds and imagined future technology, the latter particularly in terms of the interiors of spacecraft, as well as spacesuits, weapons, and related equipment.

But on occasion, his art took a different (or latent?!) turn:  It could be humorously insightful, as shown on the cover of the January, 1955 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction.

Or, it could playful, as seen in cover of the June, 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Here, while the taken-for-granted scenario of an astronaut floating in the void of intergalactic space might conventionally focus on the rather – um, er, ah – challenging (?!) aspects of this predicament most dire, Emsh – presumably inspired by illustrations of spacesuits prevalent at the time, particularly Randall F. White and George J. Scott’s 1961 design for a full pressure flight suit (below), from Patent Room.com – takes a different turn. 

Our hero George (or, is he an anti-hero!?) is equipped with an air tank decorated with the phrase “GEORGE’S ELIXIR – GUARANTEED MONEY BACK IF NOT COMPLETELY SATISFIED.”     

On his arm, where a tattoo would be: “MOTHER”

Oh his torso, where a tattoo could be: an octopus, a pair of dice, and the shield from the Great Seal of the United States. 

On his thigh, where a tattoo might be: a nude image of “ROSIE”, and, the head of a bald eagle.

On his calf, where a tattoo almost certainly is: “HOME SWEET HOME”.

Alas.  This is a stand-alone illustration:  While the table of contents lists the artist as “Ed Emsh”, no title attached to the painting, and the painting pertains to no story. 

Perhaps George’s story is ours to imagine.

Words in Print: Primo Levi – Book Review by Victor Brombert – “174517”, The New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1999 [Andrea Ventura and Tullio Pericoli]

Victor Brombert’s review of Myriam Anissimov’s biography of Primo Levi, Primo Levi – Tragedy of an Optimist, appeared as the cover review (not “cover article” as such, I guess!) of the January 24, 1999 edition of The New York Times Book Review.  As such, the review presents a bold portrait of Levi by Italian artist (and sometime Berlin resident) Andrea Ventura, and a whimsical sketch of Levi by Tullio Pericoli, whose variations on a theme of another sketch of Levi can be viewed here.  

Professor Brombert’s concluding paragraph has as much relevance in 2020 as it did in 1999:

“The deeper message of Levi goes beyond the honesty, dignity and self-respect of his testimony.  It demonstrates humanistic pride in the power of words and in the human struggle against matter.  It speaks of the essential fragility of human institutions and of tragedy when they are allowed to collapse.  For without civilized institutions, human nature is naked and raw.”

________________________________________

174517
A biography of the Italian chemist who survived Auschwitz to bear witness to the Holocaust.

PRIMO LEVI
Tragedy of an Optimist.
By Myriam Anissimov.
Translated by Steve Cox.
Illustrated.  452 pp.  Woodstock, N.Y.:
The Overlook Press.  $37.95.

By Victor Brombert

The New York Times Book Review
January 24, 1999

Illustration by Andrea Ventura

THE voice of Primo Levi (1919-87) is perhaps the most moving to have come out of the hell of the Nazi death camps.  Its special resonance has much to do with tragic paradoxes at the core of his work.  Levi wanted to speak for those who did not survive, yet he questioned his trustworthiness as a witness.  He saw it as a sacred duty to tell the story of those who had reached the bottom of abjection, but considered himself unworthy, even guilty, because he came out alive.  He felt compelled to denounce the horrors perpetrated, but preferred to understand rather than judge.  At Auschwitz he had stared into the face of irrational cruelty, but he did not give up his optimistic faith in rationality.  After the lager, or camp, there was no way for him to believe in divine providence.  Yet the same man who referred to the stories that emerged from the camps as a “new Bible” ended up committing suicide.

Sketch by Tullio Pericoli

When Myriam Anissimov’s biography of him appeared in France in 1996, it was hailed as an important event.  It was the first full-length account of the salient episodes of Levi’s life: his growing awareness of the personal threat of Fascism, his capture by the Fascist militia in a Resistance hideout in the Alps, his deportation to Auschwitz, his liberation a year later by Soviet troops, the railway odyssey of his return to his native Turin, his work as a chemist and then as the manager of a chemical factory, his gradual emergence as a major writer and intellectual figure.  Anissimov’s book, now appearing in a shortened English translation, provides a serious, lively, at times fervently told story that is always sympathetic to Levi’s shy personality and restrained tone.

Anissimov is at her best evoking Levi’s gentleness, his somewhat puritanical and introverted reserve, his compulsion to talk about what he saw and suffered in the camp.  She deals perceptively with his rude awakening to anti-Semitism in the late years of Mussolini’s rule, when the unexpected racial laws of 1938 stunned not only Italian Jews (some of whom had been loyal Fascists since the early days of the regime) but most other Italians as well.  Levi belonged to a thoroughly assimilated, well-to-do Piedmontese Jewish family.  Like most of his friends, he attended the liceo classico, and then obtained a doctorate in chemistry.  (This later saved him from the gas chambers at Auschwitz when he was put to work as a specialized slave laborer in a laboratory.)  His cultural references were Dante and Manzoni, even Melville and Conrad, rather than Jewish lore, with which he was altogether unfamiliar.  Auschwitz, with Yiddish as the dominant language, was for him a culture shock.

Levi’s background helps explain why, at one of the high moments in “Survival in Auschwitz” (the correct title is “If This Is a Man”), he refers at length to the 26th canto of Dante’s “Inferno,” dealing with the figure of Ulysses, and describes his own victorious struggle to reconstitute in his mind half-forgotten lines of poetry.  Some readers might have wondered why a Jewish victim of the Shoah should have turned to a medieval Christian poem when bearing witness to a collective atrocity that could not possibly be justified in theological or poetic terms.  But for Levi the recourse to Dante’s poem in order to teach Italian to a French-speaking Alsatian fellow inmate in a German extermination camp deep inside Polish territory became a symbol of universality and of the possible survival of meaning.

Levi’s reputation is largely based on his account of the monstrous Nazi machine for reducing human beings to beasts before dispatching them to the gas chambers.  The lager is described as a geometric nightmare filled with the cries of hunger and pain in all the languages of Europe.  With a sobriety made more sharply painful by occasional humor, Levi depicts the unspeakable: the deportation of entire families in sealed wagons, the beatings, the gruesome work, the cold and filth, the merciless struggle for survival, the “selections” for extermination.  But Levi’s most original contribution, later elaborated in “The Drowned and the Saved,” is the analysis of what he called the “gray zone,” the contaminating conditions under which victims are tempted into becoming accomplices in the atrocities committed against them.

The existence of such a gray zone is corrosive of moral values and moral choices.  To be a victim does not exclude guilt.  Levi deals lucidly with a particularly dehumanizing reality of the camps, where the SS structured a hierarchy of violence that delegated to selected prisoners, known as Kapos, arbitrary and often homicidal power over others.  At the lowest rung of this hierarchy of degradation were the Sonderkommando squads of Jews forced to stoke the crematoriums with the gassed Jewish victims.

It has been suggested that Levi’s love of science and his training as a chemist explain his disposition to observe, describe and analyze under the most appalling circumstances.  His faith in rational understanding led him to view the lager experience, in his own terms, as a “gigantic biological and social experiment.”  He detected fundamental truths about human nature in the social structures of the camp, claiming that this “cruel laboratory” was a “ferocious sociological observatory.”  He concluded, hoping not to be misunderstood, that for him and others the lager, the camp, “had been a university.”  Rather than indulge in self-pity, Levi preferred to exercise, perhaps as a form of self-preservation, an anthropologist’s curiosity.  Throughout his life, he retained his faith in the clarity of thinking, his reverence for language and communication.  His love of philology went along with a durable distaste for obscure writing.  In “Other People’s Trades” he denounced the cult of the ineffable and of hermetic literature as a form of suicide.

IT is not easy to write a biography of an author whose books are largely autobiographical.  Paraphrase is a constant danger.  But Anissimov has done conscientious research and provides valuable background on the Jewish community in Turin, the details of camp brutalities (about which Levi is himself often reticent), the involvement of the industrial empire I.G. Farben in the exploitation of cheap slave labor in the camps, the slow recognition in Italy of Levi’s literary accomplishments.  She makes sound use of interviews and newspaper accounts.  And she can be moving, as when she recounts the last night 650 Jews spent in the Italian transit camp in Fossoli di Carpi before they were deported by the Germans.

This important book is not always served well by Steve Cox’s translation.  Rendering into English a study written in French about an author who wrote in Italian poses certain problems.  It does not help that the English version makes cuts, and often reshuffles the materials in an obvious effort to shorten the original at the risk of producing discontinuities.  Even more damaging are the liberties taken with the text by sometimes adding parts of sentences to what the author said, or by making her say what she did not say.

Levi’s range is wider than is generally known.  He wrote some poetry – not technically ambitious, but expressive in a dark mood of the recurrent anguish and anger of the survivor.  In addition to the two books devoted to the death camp experience and to the colorful narrative of his homeward journey through Eastern Europe in “The Reawakening” (better translated as “The Truce”), he has written short stories (“Moments of Reprieve”), cautionary tales in the form of science fiction (“The Sixth Day and Other Tales”), two significant novels (“If Not Now, When?” – a colorful story of Jewish guerrilla fighters in the forests of Belarus – and “The Wrench,” about the epic technological adventures of an expert rigger), as well as an un-classifiable masterpiece, “The Periodic Table,” which blends autobiographical elements with a humorous essayistic fantasy.

LEVI led an essentially sedentary existence.  Auschwitz had been the one adventure of his life.  After his return to Turin, he continued to live in the apartment where he was born, and he died in the same building.  He remained attached to his Piedmontese roots and his Italian heritage.  Like most Italian Jews, he continued to feel at home among his countrymen, the vast majority of whom were not anti-Semitic and who, even in the darkest moments of the war, had shown much humaneness.  But he had learned to be critical, retrospectively, of political blindness.  He deplored the lethargy of his generation, which had viewed Fascism with distaste and ineffectual irony without actively opposing it.  Auschwitz taught him a political lesson.  It also taught him a great deal about the broader community of Jews, especially the almost eradicated Ashkenazi culture of Eastern Europe, which he came to admire.  Before writing “If Not Now, When?” he set out to learn Yiddish.

His eagerness to listen and understand has appeared to some as a limitation.  His generally optimistic stance, it is true, does not seem to come to grips with the irrational.  But his hope that problems can be solved by good will and reason also explains his deep frustration, even despair, as he began to realize that the younger generation no longer wanted to listen to him.  His depression over revisionist denials and the impossibility of a meaningful dialogue with the young may be related to his suicidal impulse, though Anissimov is ever so delicate about suggesting any clear causal relation.

The deeper message of Levi goes beyond the honesty, dignity and self-respect of his testimony.  It demonstrates humanistic pride in the power of words and in the human struggle against matter.  It speaks of the essential fragility of human institutions and of tragedy when they are allowed to collapse.  For without civilized institutions, human nature is naked and raw.  In that sense, Levi was hardly a naive optimist.  And we might do well to ponder the warning given in his last book, “The Drowned and the Saved,” of how stripped we are when we allow the ideology of death to take over: “Reason, art and poetry are no help in deciphering a place from which they have been banished.”

Victor Brombert teaches romance and comparative literatures at Princeton University.  His new book, “In Praise of Antiheroes,” will be published this spring.

Words in Print: Primo Levi – Retrospective by Irving Howe – “The Utter Sadness of the Survivor”, The New York Times Book Review, January 10, 1988

After the publication of John Gross’ review of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved in the “weekday” New York Times on January 5, 1988, Irving Howe’s review of the book appeared the following Sunday, in the New York Times Book Review.  Given the very format of the Review, Howe was by definition able to delve at length into Levi’s biography and origins as a writer, and draw upon the book’s text to discuss the “world” described by Levi – the world physical; the world psychological; a world inexpressible but consequently demanding expression – of existence in Germany’s concentration camp system. 

In the conclusion of his review, Howe makes passing reference to the book’s brevity.  This is true: it’s not that long in terms of measured length, but its power, attributable to Levi’s literary skill in confronting personal experiences and historical events – the nature of which can neither be captured in words nor by accepted “wisdom” – is inversely related to its size.

Howe’s review also includes a portrait of Levi by a photographer surnamed “Giansanti”. 

“…Levi sternly rejects the cant of those high-minded folk who in the name of universal guilt blur the distinction between murderers and victims. “I do not know and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer.  I know that the murderers existed.””

________________________________________

The Utter Sadness of the Survivor
By Irving Howe

THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED
By Primo Levi.

Translated by Raymond Rosenthal.
203 pp.  New York:
Summit Books.  $17.95.

The New York Times Book Review
January 10, 1988

Photograph by Giansanti (Sygma)

TO the vast literature on the Holocaust, this modest little book forms no more than a footnote.  But it’s a precious footnote – a series of ripe meditations about the experience of Auschwitz, where the Italian-Jewish writer Primo Levi worked as a slave laborer during the Second World War.

Shortly before his suicide last April, Primo Levi remarked that in writing about “the tragic world” of the camps he hoped to avoid the frayed rhetoric of pathos or revenge; he chose instead to “assume the calm, sober language of the witness.” His new and final book, in Raymond Rosenthal’s lucid translation, employs exactly that language: humane, disciplined and, in its final impact, utterly sad.

Born in 1919, Primo Levi grew up in a cultivated middle-class Jewish family in Turin.  As a youth he knew very little about Jewishness: it seemed “a cheerful little anomaly”‘ for someone living in a Catholic country.  Young Levi trained to become a chemist, and would in fact work at that profession for most of his life.  All might have gone smoothly, in pleasant bourgeois fashion, but for a sudden blow which disrupted his life and career in the late 1930’s: Mussolini, the brutal clown who ruled Italy, began to copy the anti-Semitic obscenities of his friend Hitler.

Levi’s life was torn apart, his mind opened up.  He learned about the tiny nuclei of anti-Fascists in Milan and in 1934, after laboring at various nondescript jobs, he joined a group of partisans in the hills of Piedmont.  Betrayed by an informer, the group was soon captured and Levi, questioned by the Fascist police, admitted to being a Jew, “partly out of fatigue but partly out of a sudden …  surge of haughty pride.” In February 1944 he was handed over to the Nazis and shipped off to Auschwitz in a “railroad convoy [that] contained 650 persons; of these 525 were immediately put to death.” It was only Levi’s skill as a chemist, plus a measure of luck, that enabled him to live through the ordeal of Auschwitz.

After his liberation Levi wrote two books, now acknowledged classics, about his imprisonment in the camps: “Survival in Auschwitz” (1947) (the Italian title was “Se Questo E un Uomo” or “If This Is a Man”) and “The Reawakening” (1963) (“La Tregua” or “The Truce”).  These summonings of memory reveal a touch of the scientist’s training in precise description: they are also notable for delicacy of style.  “The Drowned and the Saved,” while a smaller work, represents Levi’s concluding effort to understand an experience that, as he had himself often indicated, must finally seem beyond the reach of human understanding: an evil so vast, systematic and sadistic that no available theory about the nature of evil can cope with it.

About the death camps Levi asks: “Were we witnessing the rational development of an inhuman plan or a manifestation (unique in history and still unsatisfactorily explained) of collective madness? Logic intent on evil or the absence of logic?” His answer, necessarily, is: both.

The “apotheosis of the German race,” that corrupt fantasy with which the Nazis soiled the imagination of so many of their countrymen, prepared the ground for “the Final Solution,” while the madness with which the Nazi leaders infected their followers enabled the SS to perform mass murders.  Logic and anti-logic, ideology and insanity, rationality and sadism: all came together as Hitler led the scum of the earth to power.  Yet it should also be remembered that the bohemian hooligans, demi-intellectuals and street thugs who formed the Nazi cadres were able to draw on a powerful tradition of German big business, and found sustenance in a popular demonology that had long encrusted European Christianity.

One of Levi’s most striking chapters, entitled “Useless Violence,” details the cruelty of the camp overlords which seemingly had no purpose other than, perhaps, the pleasure that can come to some human beings from tormenting others.  With his gift for the exact detail, Levi describes this “useless violence” – from the terrors of the train transports to the humiliations of strip-pings, beatings, endless roll calls, tattoos and torture.  It turns out, however, that from the Nazi point of view this “useless violence” was not quite useless.  Asked by an interrogator, “Considering that you were going to kill them all …  what was the point of the humiliations, the cruelties?” the former commandant of the Treblinka camp, Franz Stangl, answered: “To condition those who were to be the material executors of the operations.” (In plain English, that meant those who would man the gas chambers.) As Levi puts it, “Before dying the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less burdened by guilt.” This was “the sole usefulness of useless violence.”

Nazi logic was clear.  Systematically to dehumanize both guards and prisoners meant to create a realm of subjugation no longer responsive to the common norms of civilized society; and from this very process they had set in motion, the Nazis could then “conclude” that indeed Jews were not human.  The Nazi enterprise drew upon, it could not be undertaken without, sadism; but at least among the leaders it was to be distinguished from commonplace sadism.  It rested upon an abstract rage, the most terrible of all rages.

Bravely, without flinching, Levi confronts the consequences of this Nazi logic: that the dehumanization of the victims had to be enacted by the victims themselves, within their own ranks.  In a troubling sentence he writes: “It is naive, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system” such as the Nazis created in the camps “sanctifies its victims: on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.”

Step by step Levi shows how the humiliating stratification within the camps depended on a series of small “privileges” – small, but often making the difference between life and death.  There was the “ritual entry” by which a new prisoner was dazed into submission.  There were the little “jobs” which gave a minority of prisoners a bit of extra nourishment.  There were the “better” jobs occupied by “low-ranking functionaries, a picturesque fauna: sweepers, kettle washers, night watchmen, bed smoothers (who exploited to their minuscule advantage the German fixation about bunks made up flat and square), checkers of lice and scabies, messengers, interpreters, assistants’ assistants.  In general, they were poor devils like ourselves who worked full time like everyone else but who for an extra half-liter of soup were willing to carry out these …  functions.” Such prisoners could be “coarse and arrogant, but they were not regarded as enemies.”

Moral judgment becomes more “delicate” with regard to those who occupied seemingly more advantageous positions: the barracks chiefs; the clerks, sometimes complicit in dreadful things, sometimes manipulating SS officers to soften a blow or spare a life; and the Kapos of labor battalions, brutes with the power of life and death over fellow prisoners.

Who became a Kapo? Common criminals.  Political prisoners “broken by five or ten years of sufferings.” “Jews who saw in the particle of authority being offered them the only possible escape from ‘the final solution.’“ And finally, grimly, “power was sought by the many among the oppressed who had been contaminated by their oppressors and unconsciously strove to identify with them.”

Levi hesitates to judge, dealing compassionately with the “gray cases,” those wretched prisoners who worked for and, if they could, against the Nazis.  Even with regard to the Sonderkommandos (the details assigned to dispose of corpses in the gas chambers), Levi tries to maintain a balance of response that may be beyond human capacity: “I believe that no one is authorized to judge them, not those who lived through the [camp] experience and even less those who did not.” And indeed, since most of these poor creatures also ended in the gas chambers, what is the point of judging them? The 20th century has taught us there are situations so extreme that it becomes immoral to make moral judgments about those who have had to confront them.

AT the same time, Levi sternly rejects the cant of those high-minded folk who in the name of universal guilt blur the distinction between murderers and victims.  “I do not know and it does not much interest me to know, whether in my depths there lurks a murderer, but I do know that I was a guiltless victim and I was not a murderer.  I know that the murderers existed.”

Primo Levi’s little book offers more of value, especially a discussion of the shame and guilt felt by survivors of the camps.  Let me, however, turn to Levi’s concluding essay, in which he recounts the correspondence he conducted with a number of Germans who read his early books about the camps and then troubled to write him.  These were by no means the worst of the Germans; quite the contrary.  Yet one grows a little sick at reading their pleas of extenuation, sometimes their whining evasions.  Of course these correspondents don’t defend the Nazis, but rarely do they confront the crucial question: How was it possible that so many Germans could vote for and then yield themselves to the Nazis?

With unruffled dignity Levi answers his correspondents, pointing out, for example, that the claim of “not having known” is often impossible to believe; that anti-Semitism, far from being a Nazi invention, was deeply imbedded in German culture; and that there are clear cases of complicity – “no one forced the Topf Company (flourishing today in Wiesbaden) to build the enormous multiple crematoria…”

Whoever has come under the sway of Primo Levi’s luminous mind and lovely prose will feel pained at the realization that we shall not be hearing from him again.  At a time when the Holocaust, like almost everything else in our culture, has been subjected to the vulgarity of public relations, Primo Levi wrote about this most terrible event with a purity of spirit for which we can only feel grateful.  This was a man.

Both in the Same Trap

I intend to examine here the memories of extreme experiences, of injuries suffered or inflicted….

Here, as with other phenomena, we are dealing with a paradoxical analogy between victim and oppressor, and we are anxious to be clear: both are in the same trap, but it is the oppressor, and he alone, who has prepared it and activated it, and if he suffers from this, it is right that he should suffer; and it is iniquitous that the victim should suffer from it, as he does indeed suffer from it, even at a distance of decades.  Once again it must be observed, mournfully, that the injury cannot be healed: it extends through time, and the Furies, in whose existence we are forced to believe, not only rack the tormentor…  but perpetuate the tormentor’s work by denying peace to the tormented.

From “The Drowned and the Saved.”

Irving Howe has most recently co-edited “The Penguin Book of Modern Jewish Verse.”