Tag: Primo Levi

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.”

Words in Print: Primo Levi – Retrospective by Alexander Stille – “Primo Levi – Reconciling the Man and the Writer”, The New York Times Book Review, July 5, 1987

Almost two months after Primo Levi’s death in 1987 (his obituary, by John Tagliabue, having appeared in The New York Times on April 11 of that year) author and journalist Alexander Stille’s essay, “Primo Levi: Reconciling the Man and The Writer”, appeared in the Times’ Book Review.  Mr. Stille’s essay was accompanied by a portrait of Levi taken by a photographer surnamed “Giansanti” (first name unknown) of the Sygma agency, in which Primo Levi focuses his gaze directly upon the photographer.  And perhaps, not-so-indirectly upon us?   

With great sensitivity and perception (perception “human” as much perception historical) Mr. Stille attempts to understand and reconcile Primo Levi’s suicide within the context of his life as a whole, rather than defining Levi – as a person – only through his experiences in the Shoah.  As such, Stille considers Levi’s postwar life in Turin, relationships with family members (specifically, Levi’s mother), physical health, and his perhaps lesser known work as a writer of fiction, such as the collection of short stories The Monkey’s Wrench.  But, perhaps the “gravity” of Levi’s experience in the Shoah was always too deeply present, if not omnipresent; if not physically, at the very least symbolically. 

And in this, Mr. Stille makes an astute observation about the power of speech versus the power of silence.  Namely:

In our psychoanalytic culture
we tend to believe that those who talk are better off and happier than those who don’t.
But those who prefer silence and forgetfulness
may have a successful self-protective strategy.
Those who talk are also those who remember.
________________________________________

Primo Levi:
Reconciling the Man and the Writer
By Alexander Stille

The New York Times Book Review
July 5, 1987

Photo by Giansanti (Sygma)

WHEN a writer commits suicide it is difficult not to reinterpret his books in light of his final act.  The temptation is particularly strong in the case of Primo Levi, much of whose work stemmed from his own experience at Auschwitz.  The warmth and humanity of his writing had made Levi a symbol to his readers of the triumph of reason over the barbarism of genocide.  For some, his violent death seemed to call that symbol into question.  An article in The New Yorker went so far as to suggest that perhaps “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.”  An author’s suicide is seen as the logical conclusion of all he has written or as an ironic contradiction – rather than as the result of a purely personal torment.

Since learning of Levi’s suicide I have been trying to reconcile in my mind the writer and the man I had come to know with his violent death.

Levi bore none of the obvious emotional scars common among Holocaust survivors, none of the usual reticence in discussing his past.  He was a person of remarkable serenity, openness and good humor, with a striking absence of bitterness.  He was able to describe a Nazi prison guard with the same objectivity and understanding he showed in writing or speaking of his fellow prisoners.  It seemed a kind of miracle that a person of such gentle temperament and finely tuned intellectual balance could have emerged from the nightmare of Auschwitz.  Levi retained the shy sensitivity and inquisitiveness of the chemistry student he was before the war, and yet he had the wisdom and toughness of a survivor who has seen more of life than anyone should.

Levi was free of the vanity and self-importance of many writers perhaps because he had worked for 30 years as a chemist in a paint factory.  He was unfailingly generous in response to the many demands on his time and politely answered even the most stupid questions.  Slight of build, almost wiry, with a thick shock of white hair and alert eyes, he had a simplicity of manner that belied his considerable intellectual sophistication.

Unlike some survivors who remained rootless after the war, Levi had profound ties to his family and his city.  After Auschwitz, he returned to live in the Turin apartment his family has occupied for three generations.  He contributed regularly to the Turin newspaper La Stampa and stood by the Turinese publishing house Einaudi even after it went into receivership and most of its other prestigious authors had abandoned it.

As a writer Levi grew from being simply an eloquent witness of the Holocaust into a full-blown imaginative novelist.  After his first two volumes of memoirs about his wartime experience (“Survival in Auschwitz” and “The Reawakening”), he drew on his life as a chemist to produce “The Periodic Table,” “The Monkey’s Wrench” and two collections of short stories not yet translated into English.  Throughout, he remained in the stately old apartment building on Corso Umberto where he and his wife spent much of their time caring for his ailing 92-year-old mother.  Their son lived just down the hall.  Writing his books in the room in which he was born, working on a computer, Levi seemed both deeply rooted in the past and still intensely curious about the present.  But last April 11, just outside his fourth-floor apartment, he hurled himself down the building’s central stairwell to his death.

The last months of Levi’s life were dominated by personal problems.  In November his mother suffered a paralytic stroke, requiring around-the-clock care.  Levi himself had been hospitalized for two prostate operations, which, although minor, tired and depressed him.  A doctor had placed him on antidepressant drugs, and some have suggested that a reaction to a change in dosage may have led to his seemingly impulsive act.  While these circumstances may account for the timing of his death, it is difficult not to search his Holocaust experience for the origin of his underlying despair.

Levi’s final nonfiction book, “The Drowned and the Saved,” which has not been translated into English and which I had occasion to discuss with him in Turin a year ago, sheds some light on the last period of his life.  While “Survival at Auschwitz,” “The Reawakening” and “The Periodic Table” are ultimately hopeful books, “The Drowned and the Saved” is a dark meditation on the meaning of the Nazi exterminations after the passing of 40 years.  In it he recalls how the Nazis tormented prisoners by telling them that even if through some miracle they managed to survive, no one would believe them when they returned home.

While this was not literally the case, it contains a larger truth.  By the end of his life Levi had become increasingly convinced that the lessons of the Holocaust were destined to be lost as it took a place among the routine atrocities of history.  Levi was troubled by the sentimental distortions of survivors and sympathetic historians and by the collective amnesia of those responsible for the exterminations.  In recent years he had spoken often to students and joined the board of his former high school.  He was acutely aware of how remote his experience had come to seem to the youngest generation.

“Holocaust survivors,” Levi said in one of our talks, “can be divided into two distinct categories: those who talk and those who don’t.” Levi, clearly, was in the first category.  In our psychoanalytic culture we tend to believe that those who talk are better off and happier than those who don’t.  But those who prefer silence and forgetfulness may have a successful self-protective strategy.  Those who talk are also those who remember.  Levi said he could remember literally everything that happened during his year and a half of imprisonment.  Forty years later he could recall entire sentences he had heard in languages he did not even know: Polish, Yiddish, Hungarian and Greek.

Explaining why he kept returning to the subject of Auschwitz, Levi wrote in “Moments of Reprieve,” a collection of autobiographical sketches, that “a host of details continued to surface in my memory and the idea of letting them fade distressed me.  A great number of human figures especially stood out against that tragic background: friends, people I’d traveled with, even adversaries – begging me one after another to help them survive and enjoy the ambiguous perennial existence of literary characters.”

In “The Drowned and the Saved,” Levi writes about the tremendous difficulty of living with Holocaust memories.  Suicide is, in fact, a major preoccupation of the book.  He dedicates an entire chapter to the Belgian philosopher Jean Amery, who had been with Levi at Auschwitz and who killed himself in 1978.  While any suicide, Levi writes, “is open to a constellation of different interpretations,” he believes that in the case of Holocaust survivors the origin is likely to reside in their war experiences.  For survivors, he writes, “the period of their imprisonment (however long ago) is the center of their life, the event that, for better or worse, has marked their entire existence.” In a passage he quotes from Amery, Levi may have left us an interpretive key to his own death: “He who has been tortured remains tortured.  …  He who has suffered torment can no longer find his place in the world.  Faith in humanity – cracked by the first slap across the face, then demolished by torture – can never be recovered.”

But while Amery was a man who tried to retaliate against violence, Levi described himself as “personally incapable of responding to a blow with a blow.”  He responded to the violence of Auschwitz by internalizing it.  Acutely sensitive to the suffering of others, he was particularly subject to feelings of guilt for having been unable to do more for those who suffered and died around him.

WHILE many of his readers viewed him as an example of the triumph of good over evil, Levi would probably have rejected that view as an oversimplification.  When I spoke with him in Turin, he said that he was especially concerned by a tendency to view the Holocaust in black and white terms, with the Germans as the bad and the Jews the good.  “The world of the Lager I witnessed was much more complex,” he said, “just as the world outside it is much more complex.”  The architects of the Holocaust created a system that delegated much of the physical punishment of prisoners to other prisoners.  By creating an infinite number of subtle divisions and privileges, they pitted the inmates against one another in a brutal struggle for survival.

But to Levi, Darwin’s laws were thrown into reverse.  “The worst survived: the violent, the callous, the collaborators and the spies,” he said.  Levi himself did not resort to collaboration – he survived largely through the help of an Italian worker who brought him food and through his job as a chemist in a camp factory – but he was nonetheless tormented by the memory of companions he was unable to help.  In his last book he wrote: “Each of us [who survived] supplanted his neighbor and lives in his place.  …  It’s deeply hidden like a moth.  You can’t see it from outside but it gnaws and bites.”

During his last months Levi had been talking extensively about his past with the Turinese literary critic Giovanni Tesio, who was gathering material for a biography.  A few days before his death, Levi broke off their conversations because the memories of Auschwitz were becoming too painful, Mr. Tesio said recently in an interview.  Other friends spoke about a nightmare Levi often had.  In the dream, he told them: “I would see myself at the dinner table with my family or at work or in a green countryside.  A relaxed atmosphere.  And yet I felt a subtle anxiety, the sense of an imminent threat.  Then as the dream proceeded, the scene dissolved.  The family disappeared.  There was no more work.  No more countryside.  I was still in the camp.  And there was nothing real outside of the camp.”

Alexander Stille writes frequently on Italian subjects and is at work on a book about the experience of Italian Jews under Fascism.

Words in Print: Primo Levi – Interview by Philip Roth – “A Man Saved by His Skills”, The New York Times Book Review, October 12, 1986

Here’s Philip Roth’s interview of Primo Levi, which appeared in The New York Times five months before Levi’s April, 1987 death.  Though including nothing significant in the way of art (!), it does include two photographs:  One a photo of Levi and Roth (perhaps in Levi’s book-lined study?), and another a portrait of Levi by Cesare Bosio.  A portrait of Levi by Bosio also appeared in John Gross’ review of The Drowned and The Saved in January, 1988.

________________________________________

A Man Saved By His Skills
By Philip Roth

The New York Times Book Review
October 12, 1986

Photograph by Cesare Bosio (La Stampa)

Photograph by Giansanti (Sygma)

ON the September Friday that I arrived in Turin – to renew a conversation with with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before – I asked to be shown around the paint factory where he’d been employed as a research chemist and, afterwards, until retirement, as factory manager.  Altogether the company employs 50 people, mainly chemists who work in the laboratories and skilled laborers on the floor of the plant.  The production machinery, the row of storage tanks, the laboratory building, the finished product in man-sized containers ready to be shipped, the reprocessing facility that purifies the wastes – all of it is encompassed in four or five acres a seven-mile drive from Turin.  The machines that are drying resin and blending varnish and pumping off pollutants are never really distressingly loud, the yard’s acrid odor – the smell, Levi told me, that clung to his clothing for two years after his retirement – is by no means disgusting, and the skip loaded with the black sludgy residue of the antipolluting process isn’t particularly unsightly.  It is hardly the world’s ugliest industrial environment, but a very long way, nonetheless, from those sentences suffused with mind that are the hallmark of Levi’s autobiographical narratives.  On the other hand, however far from the prose, it is clearly a place close to his heart; taking in what I could of the noise, the stench, the mosaic of pipes and vats and tanks and dials, I remembered Faussone, the skilled rigger in “The Monkey’s Wrench,” saying to Levi – who calls Faussone “my alter ego” – “I have to tell you, being around a work site is something I enjoy.”

On our way to the section of the laboratory where raw materials are scrutinized before moving on to production, I asked Levi if he could identify the particular chemical aroma faintly permeating the corridor: I thought it smelled a little like a hospital corridor.  Just fractionally he raised his head and exposed his nostrils to the air.  With a smile he told me, “I understand and can analyze it like a dog.”

He seemed to me inwardly animated more in the manner of some little quicksilver woodland creature empowered by the forest’s most astute intelligence.  Levi is small and slight, though not quite so delicately built as his unassuming demeanor makes him at first appear, and still seemingly as nimble as he must have been at 10.  In his body, as in his face, you see – as you don’t in most men – the face and the body of the boy that he was.  His alertness is nearly palpable, keenness trembling within him like his pilot light. 

It is probably not as surprising as one might think to find that writers divide like the rest of mankind into two categories: those who listen to you and those who don’t.  Levi listens, and with his entire face, a precisely-modeled face tipped with a white chin beard that, at 67, is at once youthfully Pan-like but professorial as well, the face of irrepressible curiosity and of the esteemed dottore.  I can believe Faussone when he says to Primo Levi early in “The Monkey’s Wrench,” “You’re quite a guy, making me tell these stories that, except for you, I’ve never told anybody.” It’s no wonder that people are always telling him things and that everything is recorded faithfully before it is even written down: when listening he is as focused and as still as a chipmunk spying something unknown from atop a stone wall.

IN a large apartment house built a few years before he was born – and where he was born, for formerly this was the home of his parents – Levi lives with his wife, Lucia; except for his year in Auschwitz and the adventurous months immediately after his liberation, he has lived in this same apartment all his life. 

The apartment is still shared, as it has been since the Levis met and married after the war, with Primo Levi’s mother.  She is 91.  Levi’s 95-year-old mother-in-law lives not far away, in the apartment immediately next door lives his 28-year-old son, a physicist, and a few streets off is his 38-year-old daughter, a botanist.  I don’t personally know of another contemporary writer who has voluntarily remained, over so many decades, intimately entangled and in such direct, unbroken contact with his immediate family, his birthplace, his region, the world of his forebears, and, particularly, with the local working environment which, in Turin, the home of Fiat, is largely industrial.  Of all the intellectually gifted artists of this century – and Levi’s uniqueness is that he is even more the artist-chemist than the chemist-writer – he may well be the most thoroughly adapted to the totality of the life around him.  Perhaps in the case of Primo Levi, a life of communal interconnectedness, along with his masterpiece “Survival in Auschwitz,” constitutes his profoundly civilized and spirited response to those who did all they could to sever his every sustaining connection and tear him and his kind out of history. 

In “The Periodic Table,” beginning with the simplest of sentences a paragraph describing one of chemistry’s most satisfying processes, Levi writes, “Distilling is beautiful.” What follows is a distillation too, a reduction to essential points of the lively, wide-ranging conversation we conducted, in English, over the course of a long weekend, mostly behind the door of the quiet study off the entrance foyer to the Levis’ apartment.  Levi’s study is a large, simply furnished room.  There is an old flowered sofa and a comfortable easy chair; on the desk is a shrouded word processor; perfectly shelved behind the desk are Levi’s variously colored notebooks; on shelves all around the room are books in Italian, German and English.  The most evocative object is one of the smallest, an unobtrusively hung sketch of a half-destroyed wire fence at Auschwitz.  Displayed more prominently on the walls are playful constructions skillfully twisted into shape by Levi himself out of insulated copper wire that is coated with the varnish developed for that purpose in his own laboratory.  There is a big wire butterfly, a wire owl, a tiny wire bug, and high on the wall behind the desk are two of the largest constructions – one the wire figure of a bird-warrior armed with a knitting needle, and the other, as Levi explained when I couldn’t make out what the figure was meant to represent, “a man playing his nose.” “A Jew,” I suggested.  “Yes, yes,” he said, laughing, “a Jew, of course.”

ROTH: In “The Periodic Table,” your book about “the strong and bitter flavor” of your experience as a chemist, you speak of a colleague, Giulia, who explains your “mania about work” by the fact that in your early 20’s you are shy of women and don’t have a girlfriend.  But she was mistaken, I think.  Your real mania about work derives from something deeper.  Work would seem to be your obsessive subject, even in your book about your incarceration at Auschwitz.

Arbeit Macht Frei – Work Makes Freedom – are the words inscribed by the Nazis over the Auschwitz gate.  But work in Auschwitz is a horrifying parody of work, useless and senseless – labor as punishment leading to agonizing death.  It’s possible to view your entire literary labor as dedicated to restoring to work its humane meaning, reclaiming the word Arbeit from the derisory cynicism with which your Auschwitz employers had disfigured it.  Faussone says to you, “Every job I undertake is like a first love.” He enjoys talking about his work almost as much as he enjoys working.  Faussone is Man the Worker made truly free through his labors.

LEVI: I do not believe that Giulia was wrong in attributing my frenzy for work to my shyness at that time with girls.  This shyness, or inhibition, was genuine, painful and heavy, much more important for me than devotion to work.  Work in the Milan factory I described in “The Periodic Table” was mock-work which I did not trust.  The catastrophe of the Italian armistice of Sept. 8, 1943, was already in the air, and it would have been foolish to ignore it by digging oneself into a scientifically meaningless activity.    

I have never seriously tried to analyze this shyness of mine, but no doubt Mussolini’s racial laws played an important role.  Other Jewish friends suffered from it, some “Aryan” schoolmates jeered at us, saying that circumcision was nothing but castration, and we, at least at an unconscious level, tended to believe it, with the help of our puritanical families.  I think that at that time work was actually for me a sexual compensation rather than a real passion.

However, I am fully aware that after the camp my work, or rather my two kinds of work (chemistry and writing) did play, and are still playing, an essential role in my life.  I am persuaded that normal human beings are biologically built for an activity that is aimed toward a goal, and that idleness, or aimless work (like Auschwitz’s Arbeit) gives rise to suffering and to atrophy.  In my case, and in the case of my alter ego Faussone, work is identical with “problem-solving.”

At Auschwitz I quite often observed a curious phenomenon.  The need for lavoro ben fatto – “work properly done” – is so strong as to induce people to perform even slavish chores “properly.” The Italian bricklayer who saved my life by bringing me food on the sly for six months hated Germans, their food, their language, their war; but when they set him to erect walls, he built them straight and solid, not out of obedience but out of professional dignity. 

ROTH: “Survival in Auschwitz” concludes with a chapter entitled “The Story of Ten Days,” in which you describe, in diary form, how you endured from January 18 to January 27, 1945, among a small remnant of sick and dying patients in the camp’s makeshift infirmary after the Nazis had fled westward with some 20,000 “healthy” prisoners.  What’s recounted there reads to me like the story of Robinson Crusoe in hell, with you, Primo Levi, as Crusoe, wrenching what you needed to live from the chaotic residue of a ruthlessly evil island.  What struck me there, as throughout the book, was how much thinking contributed to your survival, the thinking of a practical, humane, scientific mind.  Yours doesn’t seem to me a survival that was determined by either brute biological strength or incredible luck, but was rooted, rather, in your professional character: the man of precision, the controller of experiments who seeks the principle of order, confronted with the evil inversion of everything he valued.  Granted you were a numbered part in an infernal machine, but a numbered part with a systematic mind that has always to understand.  At Auschwitz you tell yourself, “I think too much” to resist, “I am too civilized.” But to me the civilized man who thinks too much is inseparable from the survivor.  The scientist and the survivor are one.

LEVI: Exactly – you hit the bull’s-eye.  In those memorable 10 days, I truly did feel like Robinson Crusoe, but with one important difference.  Crusoe set to work for his individual survival, whereas I and mv two French companions were consciously and happily willing to work at last for a just and human goal, to save the lives of our sick comrades. 

As for survival, this is a question that I put to myself many times and that many have put to me.  I insist there was no general rule, except entering the camp in good health and knowing German.  Barring this, luck dominated.  I have seen the survival of shrewd people and silly people, the brave and the cowardly, “thinkers” and madmen.  In my case, luck played an essential role on at least two occasions: in leading me to meet the Italian bricklayer, and in getting sick only once, but at the right moment. 

And yet what you say, that for me thinking and observing were survival factors, is true, although in my opinion sheer luck prevailed.  I remember having lived my Auschwitz year in a condition of exceptional spiritedness.  I don’t know if this depended on my professional background, or an unsuspected stamina, or on a sound instinct.  I never stopped recording the world and people around me, so much that I still have an unbelievably detailed image of them.  I had an intense wish to understand, I was constantly pervaded by a curiosity that somebody afterwards did, in fact, deem nothing less than cynical, the curiosity of the naturalist who finds himself transplanted into an environment that is monstrous, but new, monstrously new.

ROTH: “Survival in Auschwitz” was originally published in English as “If This Is a Man,” a faithful rendering of your Italian title, “Se Questo E un Uomo” (and the title that your first American publishers should have had the good sense to preserve).  The description and analysis of your atrocious memories of the Germans’ “gigantic biological and social experiment” is governed, very precisely, by a quantitative concern for the ways in which a man can be transformed or broken down and, like a substance decomposing in a chemical reaction, lose his characteristic properties.  “If This Is a Man” reads like the memoirs of a theoretician of moral biochemistry who has himself been forcibly enlisted as the specimen organism to undergo laboratory experimentation of the most sinister kind.  The creature caught in the laboratory of the mad scientist is himself the very epitome of the rational scientist.

In “The Monkey’s Wrench” – which might accurately have been titled “This Is a Man” – you tell Faussone, your blue-collar Scheherazade, that “being a chemist in the world’s eyes, and feeling … a writer’s blood in my veins,’ you consequently have “two souls in my body, and that’s too many.” I’d say there’s one soul, capacious and seamless; I’d say that not only are the survivor and the scientist inseparable but the writer and the scientist as well.  ‘

LEVI: Rather than a question, this is a diagnosis that I accept with thanks.  I lived my camp life as rationally as I could, and I wrote “If This Is a Man” struggling to explain to others, and to myself, the events I had been involved in, but with no definite literary intention.  My model (or, if you prefer, my style) was that of the “weekly report” commonly used in factories: it must be precise, concise, and written in a language comprehensible to everybody in the industrial hierarchy.  And certainly not written in scientific jargon.  By the way, I am not a scientist, nor have I ever been.  I did want to become one, but war and the camp prevented me.  I had to limit myself to being a technician.

I agree with you on there being only “one soul … and seamless,” and once more I feel grateful to you.  My statement that “two souls … is too many” is half a joke, but half hints at serious things.  I worked in a factory for almost 30 years, and I must admit that there is no incompatibility between being a chemist and being a writer: in fact, there is a mutual reinforcement.  But factory life, and particularly factory managing, involves many other matters, far from chemistry: hiring and firing workers; quarreling with the boss, customers and suppliers; coping with accidents; being called to the telephone, even at night or when at a party; dealing with bureaucracy; and many more soul-destroying tasks.  This whole trade is brutally incompatible with writing.  Consequently I felt hugely relieved when I reached retirement age and could resign, and so renounce my soul number one.

ROTH: Your sequel to “If This Is a Man” (“The Reawakening”: also unfortunately retitled by one of your early American publishers) was called in Italian “La Tregua,” the truce.  It’s about your journey from Auschwitz back to Italy.  There is a real legendary dimension to that tortuous journey, especially to the story of your long gestation period in the Soviet Union, waiting to be repatriated.  What’s surprising about “La Tregua,” which might understandably have been marked by a mood of mourning and inconsolable despair, is its exuberance.  Your reconciliation with life takes place in a world that sometimes seemed to you like the primeval Chaos.  Yet you are so tremendously engaged by everyone, so highly entertained as well as instructed, that I wondered if, despite the hunger and the cold and the fears, even despite the memories, you’ve ever really had a better time than during those months that you ;all “a parenthesis of unlimited availability, a providential but unrepeatable gift of fate.”

You appear to be someone whose most vital needs require, above all, rootedness – in his profession, his ancestry, his region, his language – and yet when you bund yourself as alone and uprooted as a man can be, mu considered that condition a gift.

LEVI: A friend of mine, an excellent doctor, told me many years ago, “Your remembrances of before and after are in black and white; those of Auschwitz and of your travel home are in Technicolor.” He was right.  Family, home, factory are good things in themselves, but they deprived me of something that I still miss: adventure.  Destiny decided that I should find adventure in the awful mess of a Europe swept by war. 

You are in the business, so you know how these things happen.  “The Truce” was written 14 years after “If This Is a Man”: it is a more “self-conscious” book, more methodical, more literary, the language much more profoundly elaborated.  It tells the truth, but a filtered truth.  Beforehand, I had recounted each adventure many times, to people at widely different cultural levels (to friends mainly and to high school boys and girls), and I had retouched it en route so as to arouse their most favorable reactions.  When “If This Is a Man” began to achieve some success, and I began to see a future for my writing, I set out to put these adventures on paper.  I aimed at having fun in writing and at amusing my prospective readers.  Consequently, I gave emphasis to strange, exotic, cheerful episodes – mainly to the Russians seen close up – and I relegated to the first and last pages the mood, as you put it, “of mourning and inconsolable despair.”

As for “rootedness,” it is true that I have deep roots, and that I had the luck of not losing them.  My family was almost completely spared by the Nazi slaughter, and today I continue to live in the very flat where I was born.  The desk here where I write occupies, according to family legend, exactly the spot where I first saw light.  When I found myself “as uprooted as a man could be” certainly I suffered, but this was far more than compensated afterwards by the fascination of adventure, by human encounters, by the sweetness of “convalescence” from the plague of Auschwitz.  In its historical reality, my Russian “truce” turned to a “gift” only many years later, when I purified it by rethinking it and by writing about it. 

ROTH: “If Not Now, When?” is like nothing else of yours that I’ve read in English.  Though pointedly drawn from actual historical events, the book is cast as a straightforward, picaresque adventure tale about a small band of Jewish partisans of Russian and Polish extraction harassing the Germans behind their eastern front lines.  Your other books are perhaps less “imaginary” as to subject matter but strike me as more imaginative in technique.  The motive behind “If Not Now, When?” seems more narrowly tendentious – and consequently less liberating to the writer – than the impulses that generate the autobiographical works.

I wonder if you agree with this – if in writing about the bravery of the Jews who fought back, you felt yourself doing something you ought to do, responsible to moral and political claims that don’t necessarily intervene elsewhere, even when the subject is your own markedly Jewish fate.

LEVI: “If Not Now, When?” followed an unforeseen path.  The motivations that drove me to write it are manifold.  Here they are, in order of importance:

I had made a sort of bet with myself: after so much plain or disguised autobiography, are you, or are you not, a full-fledged writer, capable of constructing a novel, shaping characters, describing landscapes you have never seen? Try it!

I intended to amuse myself by writing a “Western’ plot set in a landscape uncommon in Italy.  I intended to amuse my readers by telling them a substantially optimistic story, a story of hope, even occasionally cheerful, although projected onto a background of massacre. 

I wished to assault a commonplace still prevailing in Italy: a Jew is a mild person, a scholar (religious or profane), unwarlike, humiliated, who tolerated centuries of persecution without ever fighting back.  I seemed to me a duty to pay homage to those Jews who in desperate conditions, had found the courage and the skills to resist.

I cherished the ambition to be the first (perhaps only) Italian writer to describe the Yiddish world.  I intended to “exploit” my popularity in my country in order 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, except by some sophisticated readers of Joseph Roth [the Austrian novelist who died in 1939}, Bellow, Singer, Mala-mud, Potok and of course yourself. 

Personally, I am satisfied with this book mainly because I had good fun planning and writing it.  For the first and only time in my life as a writer, I had the impression (almost a hallucination) that my characters were alive, around me, behind my back, suggesting spontaneously their feats and their dialogues.  The year I spent writing was a happy one, and so, whatever the result, for me this was a liberating book.

ROTH: Let’s talk finally about the paint factory.  In our time many writers have worked as teachers, some as journalists, and most writers over 50 have been employed, for a while at least, as somebody or other’s soldier.  There is an impressive list of writers who have simultaneously practiced medicine and written books, and of others who have been clergymen.  T.S.  Eliot was a publisher, and as everyone knows Wallace Stevens and Franz Kafka worked for large insurance organizations.  To my knowledge only two writers of importance have ever been managers of a paint factory, you in Turin, Italy, and Sherwood Anderson in Elyria, Ohio.  Anderson had to flee the paint factory (and his family) to become a writer; you seem to have become the writer you are by staying and pursuing your career there.  I wonder if you think of yourself as actually more fortunate – even better equipped to write – than those of us who are without a paint factory and all that’s implied by that kind of connection.

LEVI: As I have already said, I entered the paint industry by chance, but I never had very much to do with the general run of paints, varnishes, and lacquers.  Our company, immediately after it began, specialized in the production of wire enamels, insulating coatings for copper electrical conductors.  At the peak of my career, I numbered among the 30 or 40 specialists in the world in this branch.  The animals hanging here on the wall are made out of scrap enameled wire.

Honestly, I knew nothing of Sherwood Anderson till you spoke of him.  No, it would never have occurred to me to quit family and factory for full-time writing, as he did.  I’d have feared the jump into the dark, and I would have lost any right to a retirement allowance. 

However, to your list of writer/paint manufacturers I must add a third name, Italo Svevo, a converted Jew of Trieste, the author of “The Confessions of Zeno,” who lived from 1861 to 1928.” For a long time Svevo was the commercial manager of a paint company in Trieste that belonged to his father-in-law, and that dissolved a few years ago.  Until 1918 Trieste belonged to Austria, and this company was famous because it supplied the Austrian Navy with an excellent antifouling paint, preventing shellfish incrustation, for the keels of warships.  After 1918 Trieste became Italian, and the paint was delivered to the Italian and British Navies.  To be able to deal with the Admiralty, Svevo took lessons in English from James Joyce, at the time a teacher in Trieste.  They became friends and Joyce assisted Svevo in finding a publisher for his works. 

The trade name of the antifouling paint was Moravia.  That it is the same as the nom de plume of the noted Italian novelist is not fortuitous: both the Triestine businessman and the Roman writer derived it from the family name of a mutual relative on the mother’s side.  Forgive me for this hardly pertinent gossip.  No, no, as I’ve hinted already, I have no regrets.  I don’t believe I wasted my time in the factory.  My factory militanza – my compulsory and honorable service there – kept me in touch with the world of real things.

Words in Print: Primo Levi – Obituary by John Tagliabue, The New York Times, April 11, 1987

Primo Levi’s obituary by John Tagliabue of Bates College, as it appeared in The New York Times on April 11, 1987.

A minor error: The title “The Damned and the Saved,” is incorrect, and should of course be The Drowned and the Saved. 

A minor point:  Previously, I’d been unaware of Primo Levi’s use of the pseudonym “Damiano Malaballa”, probably because – until learning more – I always associated Primo Levi with non-fiction.

________________________________________

Primo Levi, Author of Works On Holocaust, Is Found Dead
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
Special to The New York Times

The New York Times
April 11, 1987

ROME, April 11 – Primo Levi, whose autobiographical writings drew on his experiences as an Auschwitz survivor and his training as a chemist, died today in Turin.  He was 67 years old. 

The authorities said they were treating the-death as a suicide.  Mr. Levi was found by members of his family and neighbors at the foot of a stairwell in the home where he was born, in the Crocetta neighborhood, and he was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital.

Renzo Levi, the writer’s son, said by telephone from Turin that his father had had serious bouts of depression in recent months.

“The elder Mr. Levi had undergone minor surgery recently, and friends suggested he was deeply troubled about the condition of his 92-year-old mother, who was partially paralyzed by a stroke last year.

Already well known in Europe, Mr. Levi became prominent among American readers with the appearance in 1984 of the third volume of his autobiographical reflections, “The Periodic Table,” in which he used the chemical elements as a bridge to weave an unusual account of his experiences in the Nazi death camps.

Pseudonym Sometimes Used

His other books include “Survival in Auschwitz,” the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy; “The Reawakening,” the second volume; “Moments of Reprieve,” a series of sketches of the author’s acquaintances from the camps, and, most recently, “The Damned and the Saved.”  He also wrote works of fiction, some of it under the pseudonym Damiano Malaballa.

Primo Levi was born in Turin on July 31, 1919, a descendant of Jews who had settled in the Piedmont, in northern Italy, after the expulsion of Jews from Spain.  He studied chemistry at the University of Turin, even after the Mussolini regime barred Jews from institutes of higher learning in 1938, and received a degree in 1941.

In 1943, he quit his job at a Milan pharmaceutical laboratory to join Italian Partisans fighting the Fascist fprces of Germany and Italy.  “I was not a very good Partisan,” Mr. Levi told Herbert Mitgang in The New York Times in 1985.  “When my unit was betrayed by an informer, I was interrogated by Italian Fascists and handed over to the Germans.  I was put on a train with hundreds of other Jews and sent to Monowitz-Auschwitz, the factory part of the camp that used slave labor.”

Number Tattooed on Arm

It was his experiences there, as No. 174517 – the number was tattooed on his left arm, a few inches above the wrist – that were to shape his life and work.

His 1947 account, “Survival in Auschwitz” – also published under the title “If This Is a Man” – described daily life in the death camps in rich detail, creating a monument to the triumph of lucid intelligence over Nazi barbarism.

He attributed his survival in the camp to luck, to the Germans’ need for chemists – he was given a job in a synthetic-rubber factory – and to an acquaintanceship with a fellow inmate, an Italian bricklayer who was not Jewish, who brought him bread and soup.

In “The Reawakening,” published in 1963, the author described his long and bizarre journey home to Turin after being liberated from the camp by Soviet soldiers.

He also drew on his Partisan days in a novel, “If Not Now, When?”  The novel, published in Italy in 1982, chronicled the exploits in the closing months of the war of a band of Eastern European Jewish Partisans who dream of finding freedom in Palestine.

A Turn to Fiction

In recent years, Mr. Levi turned increasingly to works of fiction, including novels and short stories, and was a regular contributor of poetry to the Turin newspaper La Stampa. 

He was the winner of several literary prizes, including the Strega Prize, a prestigious Italian award, in 1979.  In 1985 he and Saul Bellow shared the Kenneth B. Smilen fiction award, sponsored by the Jewish Museum in New York.

While devoted to his writing, Mr. Levi continued his career as a chemist, working for a Turin paint factory, SIVA, for almost 30 years.  From 1961 to 1974, he was the plant’s general manager.

In an interview with The New York Times in December 1984, Mr. Levi described himself as “a chemist by conviction,” but added.  “After Auschwitz, I had an absolute need to write.”

“Not only as a moral duty,” he said, “but as a psychological need.”

That need was reflected in a Yiddish proverb he used as an epigraph for “The Periodic Table”: “Troubles overcome are good to tell.”

Mr. Levi wrote in an Italian enriched by snatches of the disappearing jargon of the Piedmontese Jews, which combined Hebrew roots with local endings and inflections.

Mr. Levi, who came from a middle-class family of assimilated Jews, once wrote that “a Jew is someone who at Christmas does not have a tree, who shouldn’t eat salami but does, who has learned a little bit of Hebrew at 13 and then forgotten it.”

But he remained close to the Italian Jewish community and two years ago he contributed an introduction to the catalogue of a newly opened Jewish museum in Turin.

The novelist Phillip Roth, whose account of a conversation with the Italian appeared last October in The New York Times Book Review, said of Mr. Levi today:

“With the moral stamina and intellectual poise of a 20th-century titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose.  He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible.”

Mr. Levi is survived by his wife, Lucia; a daughter, Lisa, and a son, Renzo.

The Drowned and the Saved, by Primo Levi – 1986 (1988) [Fred Marcellino] [Updated post…]

This is one of my earlier posts.  It displays Fred Marcellino’s cover art for Summit Books’ 1988 edition of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and The Saved, and includes -paralleling Summit Books’ edition of Primo Levi’s The Monkey’s Wrench – a portrait of author Levi, probably (it looks like…) at his home, in Turin, Italy.  Given that Mr. Levi was wearing the same suit and tie in two different portraits, the images were probably taken within a single session by photographer Jerry Bauer. 

The post now includes John Gross’ review of The Drowned and The Saved, which appeared in The New York Times – the main paper, not the Book Review – in January of 1988, and includes a less formal portrait of Primo Levi by a photographer from La Stampa, Cesare Bosio. 

Though the nature of Marcellino’s cover art isn’t immediately apparent – red bricks and a blue sky? – “stepping back”, it soon becomes clear that he has depicted a chimney, a terrible, and terribly appropriate, symbol of Levi’s subject matter.  In this respect, reviewer Gross has admirably presented the central aspects, or more appropriately questions, of the book, which focus on the challenge (or near-impossibility) of communicating that-which-cannot-be-communicated; the fallibility of memory – whether that memory be personal or historical; and particularly, the “gray zone” in which prisoners of the German concentration camp system found themselves enmeshed.

I think it quite fitting that Gross ends his review of The Drowned and The Saved with the very verse (from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of The Ancient Mariner) with which Primo Levi opened the book:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns,
And till my ghastly tale is told
This heart within me burns.

(Photograph of Primo Levi by Jerry Bauer)

Books of The Times

By John Gross

THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED.  By Primo Levi.
Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal.
203 pages. Summit Books. $17.95.

The New York Times
January 5, 1988

Photograph by Cesare Bosio (La Stampa)

IF you are a writer, and you have come back from hell, you really only have one subject.  It may be important for you to write about other subjects, too, in order to show that hell doesn’t have the last word; and yet in the end there is no shedding your burden.  In some of his later books Primo Levi moved away from the agonies of the Holocaust, but it was to the Holocaust that he finally returned.

“The Drowned and the Saved,” which Mr. Levi completed shortly before his death last April, is a series of meditations on some of the more perplexing aspects of “the Lager phenomenon” – the world of the extermination camps.  Like all Mr. Levi’s books, it is distinguished by courage, lucidity and intelligence, by a steadfast honesty and a refusal to take refuge in the consolations of rhetoric.

The guards and the prisoners in the camps had at least one thing in common.  Both groups knew that by the standards of the outside world, what they were taking part in was incredible.  Even if someone lived to tell the tale, who was going to believe him?

An agreeable thought for the tormentors, and a source of despair for their victims.  Most survivors, Mr. Levi tells us, can recall a recurrent dream that afflicted them during their nights of imprisonment: “They had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved one, and were not believed, indeed were not even listened to.”

In the event, the Nazis failed – not for want of trying – to destroy all the evidence and wipe out all the witnesses.  Yet as a relatively “privileged” prisoner, spared the worst on account of his usefulness as a scientist, Mr. Levi felt strongly that the full horrors would never be known, since almost all firsthand descriptions of the camps are the work of “those who, like myself, never fathomed them to the bottom.”  By contrast, very few “ordinary” prisoners survived, and very few of those who did, paralyzed as they were “by suffering and incomprehension,” were able to offer more than fragmentary testimony.

None of this made it less important, in Mr. Levi’s eyes, to bear witness as best he could.  There were the tricks that memory plays that had to be guarded against, for one thing – and the tricks we play on memory.  These can be seen at their most glaring in the case of the Nazi killer who “doesn’t remember” what he did: “The rememberer,” as Mr. Levi says, “has decided not to remember and has succeeded.” But among victims, too, though for very different reasons, the past is readily refashioned; indeed, Mr. Levi’s observations in Auschwitz had shown him that “for purposes of defense, reality can be distorted not only in memory but in the very act of taking place.”

Between them, defective memories and defective understanding have given rise to the stereotypes that Mr. Levi was anxious to clear away.  The one that he deals with at greatest length, and that raises the most sensitive issues, is the notion that relationships in the camps could be reduced to a simple contrast between oppressors and oppressed, that every prisoner was a victim and nothing but a victim.

Anyone who supposes this has a very inadequate idea of how monstrous the whole system was.  For it was an essential aim of the Nazis to destroy their victims morally as well as physically, to implicate them and drag them down.  At the most extreme, there were the special squads of prisoners given the job of running the crematories: organizing such squads, in Mr. Levi’s view, was “National Socialism’s most demonic crime.”  But there were many other levels of “privilege,” and immense pressures to take advantage of fellow prisoners in order to cling to life or gain a respite from pain.

Mr. Levi gives an eloquent account of “the gray zone” in which prisoners were set against one another, beginning with the blows from “privileged” prisoners that greeted and utterly disoriented new arrivals.  He doesn’t perhaps allow enough for the fact that some people are bound to seize on the existence of such a zone as an excuse for indulging in the comfortable game of “blame the victim,” but his own reactions are as nuanced and undogmatic as the situation demands.  He never loses sight of where the primary responsibility for Auschwitz lay, and he knows that a gray zone calls for gray judgments.

He is particularly good, too, on the sense of shame that overcame prisoners, and on the “unceasing discomfort that polluted sleep and was nameless.” It would be absurd, he says, to call this last a neurosis; it was more like the “tohu-bohu” of Genesis, the meaninglessness of a universe from which the spirit of man was absent.

Other topics he discusses include the situation of the intellectual prisoner, the reactions of German readers to his books and what “communicating” meant amid a babel of languages, where many prisoners understood little or nothing of the commands they were receiving.  (At one camp, a rubber truncheon was called “the interpreter.”)  Reflecting on the violence and oppression that still abound in the world, he doesn’t rule out the possibility that something comparable to the Holocaust could happen again – indeed, he reminds us that in Cambodia, it already has.

At the beginning of “The Drowned and the Saved,” Mr. Levi quotes a verse from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns,
And till my ghastly tale is told
This heart within me burns.

Extremely powerful in themselves, these lines somehow become even more powerful in the new context he gives them.  But it isn’t only a ghastly tale that he offers; in telling it, he also provides a heroic example of humane and civilized understanding.

March 9, 2018

The Monkey’s Wrench, by Primo Levi, Translated by William Weaver – 1978 (1986) [Anne Bascove] [Updated post…]

Created in April of 2018, this post displays Anne Bascove’s cover art and Jerry Bauer’s portrait of Primo Levi, for Summit Books’* 1986 edition of the Levi’s The Monkey’s Wrench.  Being that the post has long lain “dormant”, it’s now enhanced with Alfred Kazin’s review, which appeared in The New York Times Book Review in October of that year.

Aside from the insight offered by Mr. Kazin, his essay, typical of the lengthier items in the Times’ Book Review, is accompanied by a illustration.  In this case, artist Steven Madson depicts Levi’s central character “Faussone” – an oil-derrick rigger from Turin – represents and embodies Levi’s interwoven themes of nature and science, and the intersection of human physicality with the natural world. 

*Then a division of Simon & Schuster. 

______________________________

Contents

“With Malice Aforethought”

Cloistered

The Helper

The Bold Girl

Tiresias

Offshore

Beating Copper

Wine and Water

The Bridge

Without Time

The Bevel Gear

Anchovies I

The Aunts

Anchovies II

(Photograph of Primo Levi by Jerry Bauer)

______________________________

________________________________________

Life and Steel: A Rigger’s Tale
THE MONKEY’S WRENCH
By Primo Levi.
Translated by William Weaver.
174 pp.  New York: Summit Books.  $15.95.

By Alfred Kazin

The New York Times Book Review
October 12, 1986

Illustration by Steven Madson

AN Italian Jewish chemist who is a survivor of Auschwitz and was for 30 years the manager of a paint factory has in his quiet way turned out to be one of the most valuable writers of our time.  After 10 months in Auschwitz, Primo Levi was carted off to the Soviet Union before his liberators could manage transportation for him back to Italy.  By the time Mr. Levi got home to Turin, he had experienced so much degradation and exile that it is astonishing to find in his books “Survival in Auschwitz” and “Moments of Reprieve” writing consistently objective, sober, all-observant and even witty.  In the tormented literature of the concentration-camp universe, Mr. Levi represents something rare and astringent: his training as a scientist, the reflex resistance to evil offered by a man with nothing on his side but an indestructible belief in reason.

As a chemist who was drafted into one of three I.G. Farben laboratories at Auschwitz, Mr. Levi was spared the gas chambers.  His work, lifting him above the starvation and daily horror with which he still had to live, made him realize how much work itself can be man’s salvation.  With his passion for chemistry and his ability to aid in Italy’s industrial renewal after the war, he attained a special sense of homo faber, man as maker and craftsman, a creature often elevated only by his skills.  This became explicit in his wonderful series of autobiographical tales, “The Periodic Table,” which wove together the intimate relation of man to the chemical elements with accounts of his own scientific inquiries.

“THE MONKEY’S WRENCH” is an equally unexpected book, more genial and even amusing than its predecessors.  It consists for the most part of monologues, each a tale of hazardous work, by a character more or less fictional – Faussone, a professional rigger of derricks for oil exploration, bridges, all sorts of superheavy industrial equipment.  Faussone is called to jobs in Calabria, Alaska, Africa, India.  He is a rough-talking character, cocky and irreverent, a womanizer when he has the time, a pain to his stiff-necked maiden aunts back in Turin.  Talking to Mr. Levi as his recorder and not altogether trustful of writers, he struts his way through one hair-raising assignment after another, unsure that he should be telling all this.  (The excellently responsive translator, William Weaver, had quite a job of turning Faussone’s swaggering street expressions in Piedmontese dialect into such energetic English.  Faussone often sounds like a New York cabbie looking for someone to punch.)  Mr. Levi, feeling enriched by Faussone’s roughness, is getting everything down as the best current example of man’s dedication to work he is good at. 

In “The Periodic Table,” Mr. Levi lamented the excessively intellectual training his Jewish family fostered.  “What were we able to do with our hands?  Nothing, or almost nothing …  Our hands were … regressive, insensitive: the least trained parts of our bodies … they had learned to write, and that was all.  [They] were unfamiliar with the solemn, balanced weight of the hammer, the concentrated power of a blade, too cautiously forbidden us, the wise texture of wood, the similar and diverse pliability of iron,-lead, and copper If man is a maker, we were not men; we knew this and suffered from it.”

By contrast, Faussone boasts of every risk he has taken, exalts the physical dangers he has passed through.  Mr. Levi, quietly listening, open to every detail and to the man’s resilient, showy character, makes it clear that getting Faussone squarely on the page is also hard, skillful labor.  Like the “monkey” (actually an ape) who in one unnamed country watched Faussone at work so closely that he tried to imitate him (almost ruining the job), Mr. Levi means to convey Faussone’s skill in all its risk, bravado and physical exhilaration.  Of course he brings a writer’s irony to Faussone’s boastful tales, but he is also humble: “Certain feats you have to perform in order to understand them.” 

Mr. Levi is a bit of mystery to Faussone: “I swear, you really want to know everything.” “But you know something?  You’re quite a guy, making me tell these stories that, except for you, I’ve never told anybody.” Faussone is generally full of himself.  Recounting a monstrous assignment in Alaska – rigging a derrick with platform to be hauled out to sea – he complains “they never find oil in great places, say at San Remo or on the Costa Brava.  Not on your life.” But he admits “I don’t like staying in the city.  What I mean is, I can’t be in neutral.  You know, like those engines that have the carburetor a bit off, and if you don’t keep gunning them, they die on you, and you risk burning the points.”

The derrick in Alaska, lying on its side unfinished, was 250 feet long.  Faussone could not understand the head engineer, “because he talked without opening his mouth; but, you know, in America they teach them that in school: that it’s not polite to open your mouth.” All operations had to be done on a set day and hour because of the tide.  While waiting for the tide to turn, Faussone went off for a ride; he was caught in an Alaskan snowstorm and reflected on the contrast between his adventurous life and that of his coppersmith father, forever banging away at his sheets of metal. 

Assembled on its side, Faussone’s derrick was mounted on three sledges resting on ramps of reinforced concrete and steel.  Faussone relishes every detail of the trapezoid with six legs, three of which were thicker than the others – floats.  The platform was to be slipped onto steel barges that worked as pontoons.  Before these could be brought up, the waves became too high, work was suspended, and the “redskin” member of his crew invited Faussone home.  There “I realized he was motioning me to go to bed with his wife …  In his tribe this was the custom, to offer your wife to your superiors.  But (the other workers} said I was right not to accept, because these people washed only with seal grease, and not that often.”

The monster structure was moved out and set on its legs in the midst of a sea that tilted the platform like a ship about to sink.  “We finished the job all the same, but you know how it is: as a rule I want to do my work with a bit of class.” Faussone, “the big expert who has been brought specially from the other side of the world,” with his socket wrench hanging from his belt as if it were the sword of knight “in olden times,” is now a monkey himself, vomiting into the sea from a great height. 

There is a wonderful description of a “laying-bridge” on a job in Calabria that “reminds you of a pregnant animal as it moves from pier to pier…  I don’t know why, but seeing huge things move slowly and quietly, like …  a ship setting out, has always had an effect on me.” His most hair-raising assignment was in India, where the Dakota flying him to the job site landed with a hop, skip and jump in order to drive off vultures.  “They looked like huddled-up old women …  in India a thing always looks like something else.”

He had been hired to draw the cables of a suspension bridge.  The piers already in place looked shaky, the river, even when it was low, carried so much sand that the excavations kept filling up as soon as they were dug.  Then the river broke through the embankment on one side; water poured in “like a mean animal bent on doing harm.” The Indian laborers on the job had their own problems; “there was one with a sixteen-year-old son who was already shooting dice and his father was worried because the boy always lost.” When the cables were in place and it was time to lay the deck, a terrific wind came on.  “Something was happening that you wouldn’t believe.  It was like, in that breath of wind, the bridge was waking up.” The bridge began to move vertically, rippling from one end to the other, and as the vertical suspensions snapped, the noise resembled cannon shots.  When everything stopped, “it was like a photograph, except the river kept on flowing as if nothing had happened …  It was like somebody had wanted to do all that damage and afterward was satisfied.”

THE book ends in the Soviet Union.  Mr. Levi’s factory had contracted with a Soviet food directorate to make impermeable enamel linings for cans.  Everything goes well on the Italian side, but in the Soviet Union the enamel does not hold up.  Recounting his post-Auschwitz experiences in the Soviet Union in “Moments of Reprieve,” Mr. Levi, weary of politics, made a point of emphasizing the Russian character, which he often found unaccountable.  As he seeks to discover what happens to enamel in Russia that does not happen in Italy, he finds the Russians kind, madly hospitable, as erratic as the soldiers after the war who took him there before sending him home to Italy. 

After a lot of detective work, the problem with the enamel turns out to be the rags the Russians use to clean it.  This is Mr. Levi’s last adventure as a chemist.  “With nostalgia, but without misgivings,” he says that he has chosen “another road, since I had that option and still felt strong enough: the road of a teller of stories …  Having spent more than thirty years sewing together long molecules presumably useful to my neighbor and performing the parallel task of convincing my neighbor that my molecules really were useful to him, I might have learned something about sewing together words and ideas, or about the general and specific properties of my colleague, man.”

Ezra Pound said that more writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.  Everything in Mr. Levy’s excellent book represents an eminently healthy character expressing itself as curiosity, intelligence, a love of man at his positive best – man at work.

Alfred Kazin is the author of “An American Procession” and “A Writer’s America,” a forthcoming study of landscape in American writing.

March 9, 2018