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.”
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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.
