I came to Levi’s Stories and Essays having read only his more sobering works. So when I read the Stories it was like meeting an old friend after a long time and being surprised by aspects of him that I hadn’t noticed. What struck me as most refreshing was the playfulness and whimsy I found in some of the pieces I worked on—so very different from the Lager encounters—along with a touching humility. The fanciful tale of the girl who grows wings (“The Great Mutation”) and the interview of the ant queen by the journalist (“The Ant’s Wedding”) seem like lighthearted flights of the imagination.
There are darker notes, to be sure. Along with the touches of irony and humor, echoes of the Lager experience are not absent among the pieces that make up the collection. In “The Commander of Auschwitz” we get a glimpse of man’s monstrous nature: the blindly loyal lackeys who slavishly carried out orders, without whom brutal savages like Hitler would have been impotent. In “That Quiet Town of Auschwitz” Levi refers to those flunkeys as “the lords of evil.” Mertens, who is at once Levi’s opposite and twin, a doppelgänger turned upside down, an “almost-me,” is one of them.
Signs of the man of science are also prominent in the stories, and not just in lexical choices like “parachrono” or “rubidium maleate” or “pipette.” In “Hatching the Cobra” Levi makes a case for individual responsibility. Noting that science is not always neutral, and that the results of scientific research are just as likely to be injurious to mankind as they are to be beneficial, he urges conscientious engagement. The scientist should know whether he is developing a new medicine or formulating a nerve gas; he should be able to assess whether a dove or a cobra will emerge from the egg he’s hatching.
In “An Erector Set Made with Love” we see a tender side: an eleven-year-old Levi in love with nine-year-old Lidia, whose magical rapport with a German shepherd, aggressively intimidating to everyone else, enchanted him. He might have been Dante catching his first glimpse of the girl Beatrice when he was nine and she was eight.
Humility may be the feature that most consistently marks Stories and Essays. Stylistically, the unassuming nature expresses itself in the conversational, sometimes almost chatty, spirit of the narration. It is also expressly articulated in the Foreword. From the outset Levi invites tolerance for the variety of subjects addressed in the pieces, asking the reader to indulge his latitude. An equally clear note of modesty is sounded in Levi’s request not to look for messages in the stories, not to assign him a role that he felt didn’t fit him. Levi did not want to wear the clothes of a visionary or a prophet: I sensed that he considered himself an ordinary man, maybe only a survivor.
—ANNE MILANO APPEL