What would Primo Levi say?
Though he died in 1987, the question persists. Last year, in a New York Times column recounting shock and revulsion over ISIS’s beheading American journalists and a British aid worker, Roger Cohen recalled a passage in If This Is a Man (1947), Levi’s memoir of surviving Auschwitz. An Italian Jew, he had been sent to the Nazi death camp in 1944 after being captured in an anti-Fascist resistance group. After a guard commits a gratuitous act of cruelty, Levi asks: “Warum?” (Why?). Cohen takes the guard’s reply — “Hier ist kein warum” (Here there is no why) — as a general truth about the inscrutable nature of evil.
Levi’s writings have been applied to a litany of contemporary woes, including the Guantánamo Bay detention camp, Darfur, Gaza, Iraq, and climate change. Christopher Hitchens appropriated a line from Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1986) as epigraph to his 2007 anthology The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Non-Believer: “I too entered the Lager as a nonbeliever, and as a nonbeliever I was liberated and have lived to this day.” (Levi had been indifferent about his Jewish heritage, but he did tell an interviewer in 1975, “At Auschwitz I became a Jew.”)
In 2011, Nina Martyris, writing on the website of the Arab Studies Institute, examined the extrajudicial executions of Osama bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki, and Muammar el-Qaddafi and asked: “Would Primo Levi have condoned these kangaroo killings?” Though Levi was a reluctant and inept warrior, whose career in the Italian underground lasted only a few weeks, he was not a pacifist, and though he spoke out against the Soviet gulag, the French subjection of Algeria, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian carnage, and the 1982 Israeli incursion into Lebanon, he supported the grim judgments at Nuremberg. It is not entirely clear what he would have to say about any current global crisis. Essential to Levi’s wisdom is the recognition that there are no human oracles; we cannot rely even on Primo Levi for the difficult judgments we must continue to make.
However, as a survivor of genocide who wrote with clarity, rigor, and dispassion, Levi continues to exert a special moral authority. Entire courses devoted to his work are offered at several institutions, including Notre Dame, Pepperdine, Michigan, and NYU. Last year Boston University’s Padua Summer Program focused on “Primo Levi and the Holocaust in Italy.” Many other colleges incorporate Levi into more general offerings on the Holocaust and in Jewish studies, Italian literature, ethics, history, and political science.
Essential to Levi’s wisdom is the recognition that there are no human oracles.
He is the subject of dissertations, biographies, and scholarly commentary; there is a Primo Levi International Studies Center in the author’s native Turin and a Centro Primo Levi in New York. Le Centre Primo Levi, in France, was created in 1995 to treat victims of political torture. Publication last year of Approaches to Teaching the Works of Primo Levi, in the Modern Language Association’s venerable Approaches to Teaching World Literature series (which includes volumes devoted to such luminaries as Euripides, Emily Dickinson, and Marcel Proust), confirms his canonical status.
It is absurd to speculate about “What would Primo Levi say?” without first determining “What did Primo Levi say?” For the Anglophone reader, an answer to that question is now more convenient with the publication of The Complete Works of Primo Levi (Liveright). Edited by Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, it gathers for the first time in English all of Levi’s memoirs, essays, novels, short stories, and poems. Some of the works have never appeared in English before, and all are newly translated. The project encompasses three hefty volumes, a total of around 3,000 pages. (Though he was prodigiously prolific, Levi refused to consider himself a professional writer rather than an Ancient Mariner compelled to tell a woeful tale.)
Captured by the Fascist militia on December 13, 1943, he naïvely declared himself an “Italian citizen of Jewish race.” Transported to Auschwitz, he escaped immediate death because of a shortage of laborers for the German war machine. Assigned to lay bricks, he was kept from starving by extra rations slipped to him by a sympathetic Piedmontese mason. Levi’s scientific background then got him assigned to a camp laboratory and somewhat better conditions. In the final days of the war, he contracted scarlet fever and was confined to the infirmary when most other inmates were dying on a forced march toward Buchenwald to escape the advancing Russian army. Levi’s story is a lesson in the arbitrariness of fate; those who survived were no more virtuous or hardy than those who did not.
If This Is a Man was one of the first — and still one of the most incisive — chronicles of life, and death, in the Lager (the universe of the Nazi camps). Lucid, patient, and sober, it is remarkably lacking in melodrama or self-pity. Levi begins his account with characteristic irony, even incongruous geniality: “It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944.” He was a chemist by profession and composed his first book as if he were writing up a scientific report. Repeatedly rejected by major Italian publishers, If This Is a Man was published by a small press, De Silva, and sold only 1,500 copies. By 1958, when it was republished by Einaudi, the word “Holocaust” was starting to catch on, and the world was finally ready for a harrowing tale told by a Jew from Turin. The book became required reading far beyond Italy. It helped make Auschwitz synonymous with hell.
Jillian Edelstein, Camera Press, Redux
In an appendix to the book, Levi insists: “If I hadn’t had the experience of Auschwitz, I probably would not have written anything.” Yet if the Lager was the necessary condition for the birth of a writer, it was not a sufficient one; many others were caught up in the infernal machinery of genocide without becoming writers. Few others write about the concentration-camp universe as trenchantly and wisely as Levi. But Auschwitz figures overtly in only a small fraction of his vast literary output. Levi did continue his personal story of survival in The Truce (1963), which recounts his circuitous and often treacherous journey from Poland back to his home in Turin. “Lilith” (1981) follows the fates of individuals he encountered in Auschwitz. And The Drowned and the Saved analyzes the Lager as a “gray zone” devoid of absolute monsters or saints. Many miscellaneous essays are informed by Levi’s experiences as a Häftling, an involuntary worker in the most notorious of the Nazi camps. The year that Levi, reduced to the number 174517, spent there affected him profoundly.
Still, it would be another injustice to reduce him solely to the category of “Holocaust writer.” Levi’s restless mind ranged well beyond the Lager, to topics including birds, beetles, butterflies, and hopscotch. A binge reader of The Complete Works of Primo Levi will encounter science fiction, natural histories, and accounts of young love. Levi not only plunders chemical terminology for metaphors describing human affairs (his memoir The Periodic Table is a brilliant example) but also holds up precise, restrained scientific analysis as a model for prose. The profession of chemist, he wrote, “educated me to concreteness and precision, to the habit of ‘weighing’ each word with the same scrupulousness as someone carrying out a quantitative analysis.” He bridged the chasm between science and the humanities that in 1959 — the same year If This Is a Man was first translated into English — was being lamented by C.P. Snow in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.
Reciting Dante from memory to a young student in Auschwitz, Levi himself is moved, “as if I, too, were hearing it from the first time.”
Before choosing chemistry in late adolescence, Levi nursed ambitions of becoming a linguist, and a fascination with language pervades his work, including a late essay recounting his efforts to learn a new language in his 60s. As a young Italian Jew who does not speak the Yiddish of most of the other prisoners, and who is befuddled by the commands barked at him in German, he encounters the Lager as Babel, and its jumble of strange tongues exacerbates his terror. “For those of us who survived, and who were scarcely polyglot,” he recalls in The Drowned and the Saved, “the first days in the Lager have remained impressed on our memories in the form of a blurry and frenzied movie filled with sound and fury signifying nothing: a hubbub of nameless, faceless people drowned out by a constant deafening background noise through which no human word could be heard.”
Levi eventually became proficient enough in German to translate Franz Kafka’s The Trial into Italian, and he utilized his command of French to translate the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. Levi went on to become a master of the Italian language, for whom writing clearly was an ethical imperative: “I’d like to say that in my opinion writers should never write in an obscure manner, because writing is that much more valuable and has that much greater a chance of being read and remembered, the easier it is to understand and the less it lends itself to equivocal interpretations.” Levi also became a connoisseur of Yiddish and multilingual enough to supervise the translation of his writing into several other languages. The etymology of words is often the starting point for his discussion of a concept. In The Periodic Table, he is fascinated by the traces of Hebrew in the Piedmontese spoken by his fellow Jews in Turin.
In a 1978 essay about the suicide of Jean Améry, the Austrian writer who had survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, Levi quotes Améry: “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained.” It is hard not to read the essay as reflexive and prophetic; in 1987, Levi would write to Ruth Feldman, one of his American translators, that “I am going through the worst time of my life since Auschwitz, in some ways, even worse than Auschwitz, because I am older and less resilient.”
A few days later, he would be dead, under enigmatic circumstances, at the bottom of a stairwell. The Turin police and most commentators have concluded that Levi took his own life, grotesquely, not by ingesting some efficient chemical cocktail he had concocted but by hurling himself over the banister on the third floor of Corso Re Umberto 75, where he had lived for almost all of his 67 years. Like Améry, Bruno Bettelheim, Tadeusz Borowski, Paul Celan, Jerzy Kosinski, and Piotr Rawicz, he had managed, against all odds, to survive extermination but not his own fatal depression. The desperation of suicide makes the equipoise of his prose seem all the more heroic.
If there is a theme that links Levi’s meticulous description of how the Nazis stripped their victims of clothing, hair, and identity to the rigger in The Wrench who makes a meaningful life by solving industrial problems to the ruminations, in The Drowned and the Saved, on why some survived the Lager and others did not, it is a question that marks Levi as heir to the Italian Renaissance: What is it to be human? “I am human, and nothing that is human is alien to me,” proclaimed the Italian humanists — though what it means to be human remained unresolved.
Toward the end of If This Is a Man (whose very title, Se questo è un uomo, offers the conditional clause of a question that remains open), Levi befriends Jean, an Alsatian student who serves as errand boy in the Auschwitz chemical unit on which Levi toils. Hoping to teach his French-speaking friend some Italian, Levi recites from memory, and imperfectly, a passage from Dante’s Commedia, from Canto XXVI of The Inferno. Ulysses, who is, like Levi and Jean, suffering the torments of hell, explains how he roused his fellow mariners to undertake the transgressive journey that would damn them all: “Consider well the seed that gave you birth:/ you were not made to live your lives as brutes,/ but to be followers of worth and knowledge.” As he recites those lines, amid the misery and horror of a human abattoir, Levi himself is moved, he explains, “as if I, too, were hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am.” He would survive to be a follower of worth and knowledge.
Levi was human and not clairvoyant, and it is idle to speculate over what he might have said about any particular contemporary issue. However, it is worth considering how he would consider the subject and how he would express himself. “I believe in reason and discussion as supreme tools of progress,” he explained as the motive for his first book, “and so I place justice before hatred. For that very reason, in writing this book, I deliberately assumed the calm and sober language of the witness, not the lament of the victim or the anger of the avenger.” Amid the bluster and bilge of the violent moment, we need that kind of voice more than ever.
Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His books include Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton) and The Translingual Imagination (University of Nebraska Press).
