Even the most rigorously objective and determinedly “clear” and literal language cannot do justice to the Holocaust without recourse to myth, poetry, and “literary” writing.
—Hayden White
PRIMO LEVI’S TASK was to render the reality of the Nazi concentration camps through a fiction that was faithful to that historical reality. Especially in Levi’s later works, there is some tension between memory, which he calls a fallacious instrument, and the demands of a story or a narrative. He was well aware that the history of that period would be told time and again and that the stories might well take the place of memories and, eventually, would have to take their place, once there were no more living survivors. In his last years, he gave a set of interviews including some in which he was asked about his relationship to Jewishness, to Israel, and to the abiding ethical and political implications of the Shoah for thinking through politics in the early eighties. But, toward the end of his life, he asked not to speak about this topic in interviews anymore. How do we understand Levi’s relationship to what can be spoken about, and what not, and how does that which seems unspeakable or irretrievable come to be conveyed through the language he uses?
Let’s assume that not only in the cases of historical trauma that beset an author like Primo Levi but in life more generally there are gaps or fissures in the accounts we give and we have no account to give of why that part of life cannot be recalled or given in narrative form. This becomes especially acute when we demand that others, or ourselves, give an account of a set of actions in order to locate or assign responsibility for injurious consequences. In such cases we depend upon the capacity of another to give an account in order to determine responsibility and, when and where that capacity breaks down, we may turn to other kinds of evidence to determine the agency of the action at issue. This surely happens in legal contexts, and in courts of law such a juridical notion of responsibility is operative, and clearly must be, as we saw with the Eichmann case. But are we right to import such a model of responsibility into nonjuridical domains of human relationality? For Levi, the very possibility of telling a story was necessary to refuse the revisionists, but the trauma that inflects and interrupts every story and even the modes of forgetfulness that allowed him to live as long as he did seem to work against this important historical and juridical demand to give a clear account of what happened.
A narrative invariably proceeds by way of figures, and these might include irony and ellipsis. The moment of ellipsis is precisely one in which something is not told, a moment of withdrawal or lapse within the narrative, but also part of narrative, a formal feature of its possible trajectory. Hence, if traumatic events make giving an account difficult or impossible, or if they produce elision or ellipsis within a narrative, then it would seem that precisely what is not spoken is nevertheless conveyed through that figure. What is unspoken is nevertheless relayed or conveyed in some way, suggesting that the narrative has to be understood as well as a mode of address, one that makes a bid for our understanding. Views that claim that narrating the self is one way of bringing the self into being presuppose the “I” to be the inaugural moment of a sequence of acts situated at the center of the action in question. But what is the status of such a narrative when a series of circumstances and actors are acting upon the scene at once, all of which are acted upon by other circumstances and actors, the history of which cannot be fully known or narrated at the time, if ever? The “I” is neither the first and foremost “cause” in a sequence of events nor the fully passive “effect” of such a sequence, which led Hayden White, in his vexed and interesting essay “Figural Realism in Witness Literature,” to wonder whether it might not be possible to reanimate the middle voice to enunciate the fully equivocal status of a subject acted upon and acting at once.1
I would add that there might be some humility to be valued in recognizing that one’s actions do not always completely and utterly originate with the “I” that one is and that, correspondingly, there is some forgiveness, if you will, correlated with this acknowledgment that giving a full account of oneself in this sense is impossible. The impossibility follows not only from an inability to secure the subject as the first cause of a historical sequence of events but also because language falters when it is charged with the task of elaborating that sequence in terms of its content alone. Giving an account is thus, for this latter reason, not so much a matter of disclosing or concealing the truth of what has happened (elaborating a content in and by language); the ideal of full disclosure leads to certain failure, and not necessarily or only because the narrator is deceitful. The impossibility of the ideal of full disclosure exposes a fallibility at the heart of narrative itself, and this fallibility is elaborated through those figures that do something other than convey a positive content, understood as the delineation of “what happened.”
I want to suggest provisionally a link between such figures and fallibility that might assist us in separating the question of the “what” that is conveyed, and the mode of address that may well seek an audience, even when, or precisely when, it may not be possible to give a seamless narrative account. Something is still nevertheless said, and it is said to someone (even if that someone is only figured anonymously through apostrophe). That narrative reconstruction falters is a sign that there is such a mode of address; indeed, there can be no reach without that fallibility and faltering. Although the emphasis on the scene of address implied by this account of narrative suggests that testimony has to be something other than securing a verifiable sequence of events, it is bound up with the communication of a reality. Indeed, the task of communicating such a reality, as Hayden White points out, involves making use of the rhetorical features of language to convey the emotional reality that runs counter to the positivist demand that language act only and always transparently to convey the facts.
There are at least two points to be made here from the outset. The first is that the suturing of a sequence of events is only one way to communicate a reality. The second is that the reality communicated consists not only in “what happened” but also that it happened, and the that requires language to assert its reality and its force. There is a task at work in testimony that is different from the transmission and preservation of a sequence of events. For the account to communicate a reality, it needs to relay the meaning of the events in question, even when, precisely when, the events produce a crisis for meaning-making activity. The communication does not take place if the mode of relaying events seeks to separate the happening of those events from their affective and psychic dimensions. Theoretically, this means that the demands of evidence require figuration and that we cannot usefully separate content from form. White argues that such accounts rely on figures precisely to relay an affective reality: “The most vivid scenes of the horrors of life in the camps produced by Levi consist less in the delineation of ‘facts’ as conventionally conceived than of the sequences of figures he creates by which to endow the facts with passion, his own feelings about and the value he therefore attaches to them” (FR, 119). If White is right, then a sequence of figures may sometimes be more important than a sequence of facts. Indeed, it may well be that no communication of the facts can take place without a linguistic assertion of those facts that relies to some extent on figuration. As will be seen, sometimes the figures are required to convey an emotional reality, and other times Levi invokes them precisely to mark a certain distance between the story of what happened and the memory of the emotional reality.
One figure that recurs in Primo Levi’s work is crystallization. It marks a problem that emerges when the linguistic effort to convey what happened is reiterated over time. It comes up for him most prominently when, in trying to refute the revisionists by offering a definitive account of what happened, he finds that he must recount the events and that this recounting actively affects his memory. As White points out, Levi tries to void his account of figures, only to produce an account for which no such evacuation is possible (FR, 115). On the one hand, Levi seeks a clear and transparent language, one that might rise to the level of scientific rigor in order to refute those revisionists who are ready to claim that the reports on the Shoah are “just stories.” On the other hand, he is aware of how the stories of memory congeal and “crystallize” over time, which suggests they are anchored in something other than memory. How does he broker this crystallization effect? Does the Shoah assume a linguistic life that unanchors it from memory and historical reality? Can such an effect be countered? And what consequences does it have for us, in the present, as we consider the discursive life that the Shoah has assumed?
The linguistic form in which Levi preserves and conveys the historical experience of the camps produces at least two different kinds of difficulties, and these, in turn, constitute two different political problems. On the one hand, there are the revisionists who must be refused through a reconstitution of the historical and experiential record; on the other hand, there are those who “use” the Shoah to justify excessive Israeli militarism, an exploitation of that history that Levi also openly opposed. What is it in language that gives rise to both the denial and the exploitation of the Shoah in such instances? How can these forms of effacement and deployment be averted, and is there something in language that resists these two political trajectories, both of which Levi finds unacceptable? At stake is not only a political position, but a way to position himself morally in relation to the experience he has undergone. He needs to tell the story to preserve its historical status against those who would deny it, but he also needs to tell the story in order to come to terms with his own accountability. The first task seems to require that language be transparent, and the second demands that a sequence be secured for the events in question in order to negotiate the status of his own agency and complicity.
In at least two of Levi’s books, Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved, he focuses on the need to preserve and convey through language the lives and deaths of those in the camps with him, but also to determine his moral position in that context.2 Although there are times when he simply maintains that there were victims and executioners, there are also times when he points to what is called the “grey zone” where lines of accountability are more difficult to ascertain. Describing that zone, he points to the actions that prisoners took under constraint, indeed, under the threat of death, and seeks to show that, though they participated in activities that could be said to maintain the death and labor camps, their actions were in large part coerced. He portrays yet other prisoners, though, who became the notorious kapos, and identifies in them an overreaching, zealous if not sadistic, entry into the lower ranks of the SS and so into a collaborationist practice that he finds morally repugnant. Levi vacillates between holding himself accountable for surviving, seeing his survival as evidence of a certain guilt, and insisting that the responsibility for the destruction of human lives in the camps resides with the SS and the explicit collaborators.
At one point Levi claims that inmates made the assumption that, if they were arrested and imprisoned, they must be guilty of something, and so lived their days in an effort to expiate a guilt that was nameless and without any basis in reality (DS, 76). It was only after the camps were liberated that suicide rates increased for former prisoners. He elaborates the tragic form of psychic reasoning that leads to this conclusion:
Suicide is born from a feeling of guilt that no punishment has attenuated; now, the harshness of imprisonment was perceived as punishment, and the feeling of guilt (if there is punishment, there must have been guilt) was relegated to the background, only to re-emerge after the Liberation. In other words, there was no need to punish oneself because of a (true or presumed) guilt: one was already expiating it by one’s daily suffering.
(DS,76)
Levi clearly sees that the guilt is induced unjustly, that establishing the self as the “cause” follows from a need to find a reason for the internment. And, though he can outline this faulty line of reasoning, Levi sometimes succumbs to its terms. He clearly understands it is by accident that he himself survived. For instance, he relays how he came down with an illness that landed him in an infirmary at the time when the rest of his barracks was taken out for a death march in the late spring of 1944, leading to his inadvertent survival and rescue. He writes with clarity: “I do know that I was a guiltless victim and that I was not a murderer” (DS, 48). At other times, though, it would appear that Levi thought that he survived at the expense of someone else, that his own action or inaction was accountable for the deaths of others, and that it was unbearable that he should survive when another could not. He understands, it would seem, that he survived in the place of another and so experienced his survival as an illegitimate usurpation of another person’s place in life. Thus, he writes, “It is no more than a supposition, indeed the shadow of a suspicion: that each man is his brother’s Cain, that each one of us (but this time I say ‘us’ in a much vaster, indeed, universal sense) has usurped his neighbor’s place and lived in his stead. It is a supposition, but it gnaws at us; it has nestled deeply like a woodworm; although unseen from the outside, it gnaws and rasps” (DS, 82).
Usurp is clearly an active verb and fortifies the conviction that one’s survival is the cause of another’s death. If, according to this economy, one takes life at the expense of another, then to give up one’s life is to let the other live. One might well come to wish for one’s own death as a way of reanimating the other’s life. If Levi’s portraits of various characters in the camp were efforts to “bring back to life” those who were killed, we might consider that this “reanimating” function of literary portraiture prefigures suicide. In suicide the insupportable logic of usurpation is reversed: one does not live at the expense of the other, but one gives one’s life so that the other may live. Such a logic of guilt inflates the power of the subject to decide matters of life and death, installing the cause of the other’s death in the surviving subject. This can only be read as a painful displacement of the machinery of mass death onto and into the causal agency of the self, effectively refiguring the self, an incarcerated victim, as the machinery of mass death.
In the time that he did survive, however, Levi tried to tell the stories of Auschwitz again and again, not only to keep the historical record straight and perhaps come to terms with his own position in the camps but also to make sure that such a phenomenon could not recur in history. His reflections on politics are profoundly informed by this extraordinary experience of suffering and his enormous commitment to witnessing, even as he understood himself as someone who could not give a full or adequate testimony to what happened there. As he took stands on political issues, he was alert to the threat and excesses of fascism, to the persistence of anti-Semitism, but also to the way in which the Shoah itself could be used to justify a politics he thought no survivor could or should condone.
This text began with the conundrum that to offer a criticism of the State of Israel could be construed as anti-Semitic or, indeed, as aiding and abetting a new destruction of the Jewish people. Primo Levi understood it as his public responsibility as a Jew and as a survivor to make clear his opposition to the bombing of Beirut and the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla in 1982. Although he clearly valued the founding of Israel as a refuge for Jews from the Nazi destruction, and even as a place where Jews might maintain a right of return, he sought to distinguish between an argument that valued Israel’s existence as permanent refuge for the Jews from then contemporary Israeli state policies. As a result, he became critical of both Begin and Sharon in the early eighties and called for their resignations after the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla.3 In interviews he insisted on a distinction between Jewish values and the State of Israel, rested his hope in the left demonstrations against the state within Israel, and remarked that the “blood spilled” in that region pained him, not just the Jewish blood, but the blood of everyone.4 After he called for the resignation of Begin and Sharon in La Repubblica, he received letters from Israelis criticizing him for taking a public stand against Israel (though in actuality he was taking a public stand against some Israeli military actions, not Israel as such).
Levi opposed the bombings of Beirut, which devastated much of southern Lebanon and killed thousands of Arabs living there. And he opposed the building of settlements in the occupied territories. And, months later, he decried the killing of defenseless Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla, attacks reported to have included gruesome killings, hacking people into pieces and disemboweling pregnant women. Such actions, Levi maintained, caused him “shame and anguish,” and yet he held out for the possibility that conditions could change. In a 1982 interview with Giampaolo Pansa, “Primo Levi: Begin Should Go,” he writes, “I am not such a pessimist as to think that Israel will always be like this.”5 And when asked by his interlocutor how he responds to the letters from Israel, from those who ask him whether or not he can see “all the Jewish blood spilled in all these years,” he replies:
I reply that the blood spilled pains me just as much as the blood spilled by all other human beings. But there are still harrowing letters. And I am tormented by them, because I know that Israel was founded by people like me, only less fortunate than me. Men with a number from Auschwitz tattooed on their arms, with no home nor homeland, escaping from the horrors of the Second World War who found in Israel a home and a homeland. I know all this. But I also know that this is Begin’s favorite defense. And I deny any validity to this defense.6
In denying any validity to this defense, Levi maintains that it will not do to call upon the Shoah as a way of legitimating arbitrary and lethal Israeli violence against civilian populations. It is a moment in which Levi, though tormented by the letters he received from Israelis rebuking him for his public criticism, clearly does not fall prey to a sense of guilt that would lead him to retract his public views. Instead, he asserts the authority of the “I” to deny validity to this defense. And he surely knows that this “I” is not any “I” but the first-person declaration of the most articulate and influential of European survivors of the Shoah. It would seem that the torment might have silenced him. In the place of that silence, however, he reasserts the “I” that would not instrumentalize the historical memory of the Shoah to rationalize contemporary military violence against Palestinians. At the same time, it is important to note that Levi refused the identification of Israel with Nazi Germany, and he decried the upsurge of anti-Semitism that became public in Italy after 1982. He worried that Israel itself might be responsible for fostering anti-Semitism, but he also was very clear that neither the Israeli state violence of the time nor anti-Semitism would ever be acceptable to him.
I mean to point out at least two dimensions of the Shoah that seem to be at work not only for Levi, but more broadly in the available discourses we have on this topic even now. On the one hand, the Shoah is what traumatizes and what disrupts or deforms the possibility of giving an account of himself. It is a set of memories that cannot always be maintained or sustained, and it makes very difficult any full or comprehensible accounting, even, at times, for Levi, any exhaustive understanding of accountability in light of the “grey zone” in which the agency of the prisoner is afflicted by coercion and the threat of death. On the other hand, it is clear that the Shoah can be used to rationalize state violence, and to this Levi delivers a clear and unequivocal moral and political objection. Can we then think about the relationship between a discourse interrupted and confounded by trauma, on the one hand, and available to political instrumentalization, on the other?7 As traumatic, the Shoah makes use of Levi’s language, the language of those who survive and those who continue to live in the aftermath of that horrific destruction of human life. As instrumentalized, the Shoah becomes a way of silencing critique, rationalizing state violence and lending legitimacy to Israeli practices that ought properly to be objected to and refused, as Levi clearly did.
But perhaps we have gotten ahead of ourselves. After all, Levi has two predominant problems that follow from a certain seizure of memory by discourse. He has to solve these problems somehow in order to refuse both revisionism and the political exploitation of memory. Let us then recount how these problems emerge for him in order to understand how these discursive formations produce both the possibility and liability of communication. If what I am calling here “discursive seizure” and what White specifies as a “sequence of figurations” are not to be understood as mere “constructions” that abandon the reality they are meant to communicate, then it seems we have to understand in what sense these discursive seizures are modes of referentiality. White makes clear, for instance, that a series of portraits Levi provides of camp interns constitutes a “sequence of figurations [that] is fully and explicitly referential” (FR, 122). The fact that Levi’s description “expresses the moral charge which inspires its form” (FR, 122) is not a reason to debunk the referentiality of the form. Rather, it is a reason to understand the moral charge as part of the objective reality being transmitted. How precisely that is done, and with what effect, remains for us to explore in the latter part of this essay.
Primo Levi starts his book The Drowned and the Saved by letting his readers know that the Nazis sought not only to destroy lives, but to eradicate the evidence of their destruction. The Third Reich, he writes, “waged a war against memory” (DS, 31). Thus, the narrative voice in Levi’s text not only relays this fact, but, in its very existence, constitutes a kind of evidence. Insofar as Levi gives us a text that, in its telling, proves that this one was not fully destroyed and so, in this way, foils the plot the Nazis devised to eradicate any evidentiary trace of their exterminations. That there is still a speaking subject is itself refutation of that attempted effacement. If the Nazis thought, as Elie Wiesel surmised, that no one would believe such a thing (that is, they understood themselves to be enacting the unbelievable) or that no one would survive to testify, then Levi, in testifying, disrupts their plan and sabotages their ongoing machinery, since they sought not only to act during the war years, but to continue to act upon any future in which a history might be told about what they did. Levi’s telling, his story, proves that their machinery broke down. He will be a surviving witness, provide evidence and so confirm what they would deny.
As soon as Levi begins this task of establishing evidence, he is beset by problems, since he is writing forty years later, and he must inquire about the veracity of his memory, an inquiry that for him raises the relationship of memory to trauma or, at least, to what resists remembering, as well as the relationship between memory and story. Can he still tell the story? And does his story confirm his memory? Did the Nazis perchance succeed in making the event untellable, unnarratable? If the narration proves not to be fully tellable, would that be a Nazi success story? Or can we safeguard the fallibility in and of narrative for another purpose? Is there a way to consider the fallibility of narrative, its very breakdown, as the evidentiary trace of trauma itself?
Although the book starts with a strong claim about the Nazis seeking to destroy memory, to render the future witness impossible, it turns within a few pages to the problems that obstruct a simple reconstruction of memory. Calling memory a “suspect source” (DS, 34), especially the memory of suffering, he notes first that the memory of suffering has a way of “crystallizing” as story. This crystallized story then takes on a life of its own. And further, the memory, in being told and crystallized in this way in turn begins to restructure memory itself. Indeed, the telling of the story performs a crystallization of that memory of suffering that transforms memory such that some of the original memory is lost. Thus the story takes on a life that comes at the expense of the memory itself. Paradoxically and painfully, the story can actually become the means by which the original suffering becomes lost to memory. Here is Levi’s language: “a memory invoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in stereotype, in a form tested by experience crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense” (DS, 24).
The idea is, of course, frightening that the more such a story is told, the more it crystallizes, the more we lose the memory of suffering that prompts the story. And though Levi resists the consequences of this insight, he is truthful enough to articulate it anyway. We might consider that what Levi fears, and also what he knows to be partially true, is that there can be a loss of the loss itself and that this can be the result of the story we tell. Of course, the story is told in order to make sure that the Nazi project does not achieve the goal of destroying evidence, and it is told precisely against the revisionists who would question the very facts of the extermination camps. The story is there to establish evidence, to acknowledge that there was an enormous, if not unfathomable, loss of life, and to provide the explicit recognition of loss that mourning requires. But if the story makes more remote the memory of suffering and loss, then the story might be said to institute a kind of melancholia in which the suffering and loss are denied. The story threatens to substitute for the events it relays, and crystallization is the means of that substitution. The substitution comes at the cost of the event, and so it would seem that a certain strict accountability applies: the story is purchased at the expense of the event itself, just as the life of the survivor is understood to come at the expense of the dead.
That crystallization, however, is not strictly responsible for the loss of the referent. The unbearability of loss and guilt gnaws at the referential capacity of language. But it would also have to be said, along with White, that the “moral charge that inspires the form” is part of the objective reality to be relayed (FR, 122). If referentiality is still troubled, this has to do with the difficulty of remembering or recalling that suffering, a difficulty that afflicts the very capacity to retain a form for memory. Levi points out that “many survivors of wars or other complex and traumatic experiences tend unconsciously to filter their memory.… They dwell on moments of respite.… The most painful episodes … lose their contours” (DS, 32). He refers earlier to this loss of contour in the context of those who recite their memories, substituting descriptions for memories and moving from bad faith to good faith. Of those who seek to substitute a description for a memory, he writes that “the distinction between true and false progressively loses its contours, and man ends up fully believing the story he has told so many times and continues to tell” (DS, 27). This situation starts as a moral failure, although it becomes a form of self-deception sustained by no explicit intention to falsify. But then, in the next paragraph, he suggests that this capacity of the story to substitute for memory may well happen as “events fade into the past.” Under such conditions, “the construction of convenient truth grows and is perfected” (DS, 27). It is only pages later that he returns to this problem to suggest that it may well be the painfulness of the memory itself that prompts the story form that ends up taking its place. At this point, the story emerges briefly, no longer as a sign of moral failure, but rather one of trauma.
The trauma works to undo the painful memory as a bounded event, and, in crystallizing the memory, the story offers relief from precisely this traumatic encounter. It seems worth considering that the story works in tandem with a certain forgetfulness, a forgetfulness that is actually needed for survival. The story, which seeks to establish evidence of suffering on the basis of memory, crystallizes suffering, inducing a forgetfulness that helps the teller survive. It would seem that the requirements of survival sometimes work against the requirements to provide evidence. The story does not return to the original memory, but helps to vanquish it, and though Levi believes that the original memory, preserved, will lend veracity to his telling, his telling is also in the service of his surviving and so must act upon that memory, alleviate its traumatic effect, and even take its place. What is communicated as a result is the effect that trauma has on storytelling, and this written reflection that worries whether the story will be rooted in reality communicates precisely this reality of a trauma that unsettles the conventional function of the story. Although Levi’s writing contains stories and portraits, vignettes, historical forays, and speculations, they do not settle on a single form. Something is to be communicated here that makes form into a problem that registers in the forms Levi provides. It is in this sense that we can continue to maintain the referentiality of his writing, despite his own doubts, for the reasons that White supplies: the moral charge inspires the form and so, too, we might add, does the fear of moral failure. Further, one writes not only in relation to the event but also in relation to the audience, and Levi had to struggle to make the story believable. That struggle also registers at the level of form.
Levi’s struggle with truth and narrative is not uniquely his own. Charlotte Delbo, for example, writes in the forward to Auschwitz and After, “When I talk to you about Auschwitz, it is not from deep memory (sense memory), but from memoire externe (external memory), memory linked with thinking.”8 This last is a memory that precisely does not relive the event in order to tell it. If she were reliving it, she would not be able to tell it. Indeed, in her own work that narrative capacity occasionally breaks down as sense memory interrupts external memory. This suggests that “telling” is always at some remove from reliving, and must be. At one point, she relates a story about standing in the roll call at Auschwitz, in the early hours of the morning in freezing weather, and claims that as she stood there she thought to herself, one day I will tell the story of standing here at roll call. In the next sentence, she says, that is actually not true at all. I was thinking nothing. I could not think at all. And that this is why it is not reasonable to think that anyone who underwent this experience would be able to give an account of it. They are not. This does not mean, though, that therefore no account should be given. On the contrary: to paraphrase Derrida, precisely because one cannot give an account, one must give an account. The capacity for narration suspended or debilitated by the trauma is precisely what emerges as the sign and evidence of a capacity to live on and survive. And Delbo, when she reflects upon the veracity of her own account, concludes that she does not know whether it is true, but she knows that it is truthful.9
So, given the complex relations among memory, story, and trauma at work here, it makes sense to ground an evidentiary refutation of revisionists on something other than the claim of memory to veracity. Of course, the archives of survivor stories are based on memory, but let us be clear that the story can only aspire to truthfulness and perhaps not to truth. Testimony acts in ways that memories cannot, and memories depend on stories to be transmitted and to endure.
Language does not only record, preserve, and transmit, though on occasion it does all those things. Language also invariably works upon the material it records, preserves, and transmits. Hayden White, for instance, argues that for Levi testimony “produces the referent,” and we have to be careful here to understand what he means. This production of the referent has to be distinguished from the view that says there is no referent, only language, that is, the point of view that language nullifies referentiality as such. White’s view is that if those events are to be transmitted to an audience, they must be relayed in rhetorical terms that produce or orchestrate the referent for us, that bring it into legibility and endow it with sense. At one point, White argues, figures are needed in order to “grasp … a real situation” (FR, 116). In the same essay, he remarks as well that Levi’s turn away from realist representation, when it happens, “has the effect of actually producing the referent rather than merely pointing to it—and much more vividly than any kind of impersonal registration of the ‘facts’ could ever have done” (FR, 119).
If, against the revisionists, one wants language to preserve the referentiality of events, to act archivally, as it were, it may be that the means by which they are both preserved and transmitted are the very means by which language acts upon the referent. There seems to be no way around this, and we might even speculate that the psychoanalytic notion of “working through” depends precisely on this possibility of language acting upon past events. But there are at least two even stronger points. First, to preserve the referent, one must act upon it, and to act upon it is to transform it in some way; without acting on the referent, the archive cannot be preserved. Second, for the reality to be communicated—which means that conditions of incredulity must be overcome—language must act on the facts to produce them as a graspable reality. This last is no easy task, since it means coming up with forms that will communicate this reality, a task at once rhetorical and referential.
Stories, of course, are not the only discursive means by which memories are acted upon and displaced. It may be that when we refer to trauma, we are indexing that which is not quite on the order of a memory, although it constitutes a past; it is distinguished as a past that does not stop happening. The trauma continues, but not seamlessly; it must repeat, and its repetition invariably takes a certain syntactical form. Moreover, to be known or communicated, the retelling must be, to some extent, a reliving; otherwise, to read or, indeed, to listen to what is said will not lead to a comprehensive account of what White calls the “emotional reality” of the narrative sequence of events (FR, 123). To say that certain narrative retellings are traumatic is to maintain that the means, the syntax, of that retelling is not precisely decided but, rather, compelled. But then we are in a complex situation, indeed, in which a crystallization of events that is meant to preserve and transmit the reality of those events not only acts upon those events to achieve those purposes, but takes on new discursive effects that exceed the purposes for which the narrative crystallization was devised. Something makes use of the story that is not the choice of the narrator, and we can see this not only in the quasi-independence of the crystallization effect (is that my story, another’s story, the story I have told so often that I no longer know precisely what is the narrative account, and what the referent?). Crystallization names a certain operation of discursive seizure, one that is necessary and unavoidable.
To say there is a repetition of storytelling that belongs to a traumatic compulsion to repeat is already to say we cannot fully control the discursive uses of the story that is told. If there is no retelling and reliving of the narrative without acting upon it, then this acting upon is crucial to the relaying of the story and forms one of its necessary rhetorical dimensions. But those who receive the story also retell it, and, though the traumatic effect is transmitted—along with the crisis of volition that comes with that trauma—it can become unmoored from its original aims. This seems to me to be the invariable risk of crystallization.
Crystallization thus seems to be both the condition and risk of the archive and hence the precondition for refuting revisionism. But as we have seen, this very process of crystallization is linked with an acute sense of accountability. It is this latter, I would suggest, that is at work in the political exploitation of the Shoah. The primary aim of that exploitation is to heighten a sense of accountability of a certain kind and to mobilize this accusation as a way of rendering an opposing political viewpoint morally reprehensible. The rhetorical invocation reanimates the trauma in the service of an accusation that works to render the contemporary enemy into an “effective Nazi,” and so legitimate any and every violence against that enemy.
In such political contexts the reanimation of the trauma does not preserve a referential history, even when its slogan is “never again!” Rather, it intervenes with a discursive weapon in the field of contemporary politics. Can we understand this as another permutation of crystallization? In this case, discourse substitutes for memory not simply to establish a distance from unbearable suffering and guilt for the subject, but to level an accusation in which guilt is fully (and infinitely) externalized, and the other is constituted as fully accountable for one’s continued suffering. The accusation reanimates the suffering to support the accusation, and the accusation, in turn, seeks to alleviate a baseless guilt through identifying its “cause” as the contemporary other, thus continuing that traumatic temporality in which the past does not cease being past, eclipsing the historical distance between then and now. The transferability of the affect, the transmissibility of the trauma, is essential to this historical transposition from one political reality to another. I am not sure how to locate agency in this process, since, as I have suggested, the traumatic aspect confounds usual recourse to volition. And yet, we can see, on both sides of the political debates on Israel, a certain strategic use or exploitation of this nexus of trauma and language to wage an accusation of paralyzing proportions. The discursive means by which the Holocaust is reinvoked is precisely a way of calling upon the pain of its repetition and mobilizing that repetition and pain for other means. The question is whether it is mobilized for political purposes with the consequence of displacing the pain (and closing the historical gap between present and past) and losing the referent itself.
This can and does happen on various sides of the political issue. Those who are willing to engage in a peace process have been criticized for sending the Jews to the gas ovens again, and those who criticize the state have been accused of making the Jews vulnerable to another Holocaust.10 But the allegation happens by Israelis against Israelis, by critics of Israel against Israelis, by Israelis against Jews in the diaspora.11 Tom Paulin’s reference to the “Zionist SS” is one case in point.12 The speculation that the Israeli state now traumatically mimics the Nazi regime is a presumptively satisfying claim for some who are critical of Israel. So it would seem that those who defend the state and those who oppose it, or, at least, some of its policies and practices, are both subject to the accusation of being Nazis in different ways.13
If Levi is right that the story of the Holocaust or Shoah can grow at the expense of the memory of suffering, the story of the Holocaust can also grow at the expense of apprehending human suffering. And this can happen in at least two ways: first, by denying the Shoah and its continuing traumatic significance; second, by exploiting its traumatic significance in order to justify all military aggression as a necessary self-defense. It is unacceptable to claim, as some do, that the Holocaust is “nothing but an ideological smokescreen” and an emotionally laden way of stigmatizing opposition. Some go so far as to claim that the Holocaust is a fictive phenomenon, contrived to provide a false legitimation for Israel. On the other side, and no more acceptably, the enemy can sometimes be figured as the resurgent Nazi, and those Jews who are critical of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians are figured as self-hating or collaborationist. The Holocaust is invoked in order to debunk its historical reality or significance or to reanimate its moral horror for the purposes of justifying new military aggression. Both tactics fail to consider what kind of ethical and political framework might usefully be derived from the Holocaust for the present. To ask this question is to consider, first, that it may not be the most useful paradigm for thinking about the present. But it is also to consider that some historical translations have to be made that allow the Holocaust to become history rather than the kind of trauma that knows no historical distinction between then and now.14
The historian Idith Zertal points out that references to the Holocaust were infrequent during the founding of Israel in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Israel sought to counter the image of the abased concentration camp intern and to establish a new norm of masculine aggression. She points to some key historical moments in which the discourse on the Holocaust was most poignantly animated within Israeli politics: the Eichmann trials (and hence the dismissal of Hannah Arendt’s critical perspective); the 1967 war, in which the state built a common consensus that nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish people was once again at stake (IH, 91–127). What distinguishes Zertal’s analysis, however, is that, though she underscores the tactical deployment of the Holocaust for political purposes, she objects to this deployment on the grounds that it demeans and devalues the suffering of those who survived the camps. She writes:
According to circumstances of time and place, the Holocaust victims were brought to life again and again and became a central function in Israeli political deliberation, particularly in the context of Israeli-Arab conflict, and especially at moments of crisis and conflagration, namely, in wartime. There has not been a war in Israel from 1948 to the present ongoing outburst of violence which began in October 2000, that has not been perceived, defined, and conceptualized in terms of the Holocaust. This move which, initially goal-restricted and relatively purposeful, aimed at constructing Israeli power and consciousness of power out of the total Jewish powerlessness, became in due course, as the Israeli situation was further removed in time and circumstances from the Holocaust, a rather devalued cliché. Auschwitz—as the embodiment of the total, ultimate evil—was, and still is, summoned up for military and security issues and political dilemmas which Israel has refused to confront, resolve, and pay the price for, thus transmuting Israel into an ahistorical and apolitical twilight zone, where Auschwitz is not a past event but a threatening present and constant option.
(IH, 4)
Zertal’s book offers a nuanced and capacious effort to trace the way that the Holocaust was remembered and forgotten in the first decade of Israeli statehood, the Eichmann trial, and the expansion and justification of the Israeli armed forces. What is for me remarkable about this book, and even qualifies this book as the political inheritor of Primo Levi’s own complexity and honesty on this issue, is the insistence, on the one hand, of the enormously traumatic effect of the Holocaust or Shoah on the Jewish people and the warning, on the other hand, against the exploitation of this suffering to authorize further unnecessary violence. She reconstructs various episodes from Israel state formation in order “to examine the discrepancy between the historical dimension of events and the national memory molded upon them” (IH, 5). Here we can see that Zertal suggests Levi’s formulation needs to be revised. It is not only that memory is acted upon by story and discourse and becomes transformed as a result, but that story and discourse can produce a national memory that is significantly separate from the course of historical events.
Zertal cites Levi at length, especially his claims about the difficulty that survivors faced in being able to give an account of their suffering. For Levi, those who would be true witnesses were rendered mute by the brutality of what they underwent. Those who survived to tell often lost the memories they needed, because of trauma, or could only reiterate stories without finally knowing the extent to which they had become unanchored from memory itself. According to Elie Wiesel—and also Jean-François Lyotard—one of the founding aims of the Israeli state was to provide a place and a framework for that telling. Levi comes to form his own view on the founding aims of the Israeli state: “The State of Israel was supposed to change the history of the Jewish people, but in a very precise sense: it was supposed to be a life raft, the sanctuary to which Jews threatened in other countries would be able to run. That was the idea of the founding fathers, and it preceded the Nazi tragedy; the Nazi tragedy multiplied it a thousandfold. Jews could no longer do without that country of salvation. Nobody stopped to think that there were Arabs in that country.”15 In 1976, though, he tells an interviewer: “I must admit that after 1950 this image of the Jewish homeland gradually faded in me.”16 Indeed, there were more than seventy-five hundred thousand Palestinians who were forcibly dispossessed of their lands and their homes through the establishment of Israel in 1948, and surely the Israeli army did have those Arab populations in mind when it seized those lands. And in 1950–53 the laws that justified the transfer of those properties to Israelis were put into place in defiance of UN resolutions for reparation and return.
It would doubtless be a mistake to say that the answer to this problem is to forget the Holocaust and live in the present. That imperative cannot work, only because of the profound way that history itself changed for the Jews after the Nazi concentration camps. The challenge, rather, is to ask in what way history has changed. And it would seem to me that writers like Levi and Zertal both ask whether the Shoah and its suffering might contribute to an ethical and political framework for the present that speaks up against state-sanctioned violence that serves no aim but to control, intimidate, and demean a population that is for the most part living in conditions of unacceptable restriction, political disenfranchisement, and poverty. Arendt also would have to be included here, since her primary objection to political Zionism articulated in 1944 is that it would fortify the nationalism of the nation-state and produce statelessness for a massive population for an indefinitely long time.
In The Holocaust Is Over, We Must Rise from Its Ashes, Avraham Burg argues that in Israel “the Shoah is woven, to varying degrees, into almost all of Israel’s political arguments. Unlike other events of the past, the Shoah does not recede but is coming closer all the time. It is a past that is present, maintained, monitored, heard, and represented.” His point is twofold: on one hand, he writes, “Because of the Shoah, Israel has become the voice of the dead, speaking in the name of those who are no longer, more than in the name of those who are still alive.” On the other hand, the daily references to the Shoah rationalize war, maintain Israel in a defensive and victimized position, and keep Israel from generalizing the political lesson of the Nazi genocide against the Jew: such racism, such deportation, such murder should never happen again to anyone, ever. He laments the loss of optimism, the cooperative spirit, and affirmative ethics that he finds in contemporary Israeli life. He writes, “The Shoah is our life, and we will not forget it and will not let anyone forget us. We have pulled the Shoah out of its historic context and turned it into a plea and a generator for every deed. All is compared to the Shoah, dwarfed by the Shoah, and therefore all is allowed—be it fences, sieges, crowns, curfews, food and water deprivation, or unexplained killings.”17
In the midst of this political analysis, Burg offers an anecdote that suggests that there are those who have effectively adopted the Shoah as a personal history and trauma even when they have no “direct” historical connection with the event. It is supposed to be a humorous and ironic moment, but it inadvertently raises the question of how trauma is communicated transgenerationally or, indeed, extragenerationally. Burg notes that the mass immigration of Sephardim and Mizrachim (Jews originally derived from the Spain and Arab Jews) produced a problem for the historiography of Israel. Often such immigrants arrived in conditions of poverty, destitution, political exile, on unstable boats, with traumatic experiences of displacement of their own. Burg notes that “a silent dialogue must have taken place among all carriers of trauma. Nothing was said explicitly and no formal policy was written, but when unspoken traumas were compared, the Ashkenazi overpowered the Sephardic.… The obsession with the Shoah shoved aside any discussion on other Israeli suffering.”18 Burg tells the story of Mr. D., an Israeli who went on a trip to Poland, expecting to be away there for a few weeks, only to return abruptly after a few days. Burg asks Mr. D. why he cut his visit short. Mr. D. replies,
“I couldn’t bear it anymore.… Everything came back to me. I landed in Warsaw and it was cold and snowy. The same day we traveled into the Polish hinterland to check on a few opportunities.… The snowy plains blinded me. It was cold to the bone and all we saw were birch forests and shrubbery. We spent the night there and then continued on a night train. The train traveled for many hours. The wheels and the cars shook and the ticket conductor was aggressive. Then a sudden ticket control. I just couldn’t bear it anymore. Polish trains are too much for me. The following day, I hopped on a plane and came back home.” The next day, Burg calls the man and says, “Tell me … where are your parents from?” And Mr. D. answers, “from Iraq.”19
OK, so we get the joke, or it would seem that we do, since the man has borrowed a history that is not his, even relives a trauma that is not passed on through the historical ties of family. The anecdote is only humorous on the condition that we accept that trauma is passed down through generations framed within familial logics. Burg concludes that the story shows “that Middle Eastern Jews were embracing Israel’s survivor narrative. The Shoah made us all one and the same.”20 But is this the necessary conclusion? Did this man embrace a history that was not his, or did he find that history entering him by virtue of living within proximity to others who bear this history more proximately? Was it his identification with the nation that led him to take on or absorb this other history? Or is there another way trauma is transmitted that does not get examined in this analysis? For instance, can trauma be transmitted laterally as well as generationally, or do “generations” emerge within certain national frameworks that gather people together under dominant narratives that diverge from their biographical histories?
Although Burg’s story is an important one for showing how a dominant narrative recruits those who have no historical basis to identify with the narrative, it succeeds less well in explaining why people come to identify as they do. Are we to conclude that the problem is that Mr. D. has embraced a survivor narrative that does not belong to him precisely because the survivor narrative has become a discursive condition, registered at elemental affective levels, for national belonging in Israel? On the one hand, I take Burg’s point that this has become the case, and that the political imaginary of Israel is severely affected by this precondition. I would argue further that when persecution and survival become the only coordinates for political self-understanding on the part of a powerful nation-state that continues a decades-long policy of violent occupation, then it is no wonder that every act of aggression on the part of that state is renamed as self-defense. On the other hand, I want to keep the question open: is there an explanation of how and why this man would have to leave Poland in the early part of the twenty-first century, even though his family emigrated from Iraq? In other words, does trauma sometimes relay in ways that are lateral and dispersive, defying the notion of generation that tracks only along biological kinship and reproductive ties? Following the discussion of the uses of Benjamin for theorizing the trauma of the Naqba, can we use this example to underscore the ways in which one historical trauma resonates with another or how vocabularies articulated to relay one set of traumatic events enable the articulation of another? How do we take account of the spatial and temporal relay of some historical traumas at the same time that the transmission of other forms of historical trauma are systematically thwarted? Of course, Burg’s example is supposed to alert us to the appropriation of trauma for the purposes of legitimating cultural belonging. And he is right to do so. But, if we were to rest with his conclusion, we would fail to distinguish firmly enough between (a) the need to remember and oppose any form of historical revisionism that would consign to oblivion the destruction and forcible displacement of any people (a task that assumes a crucial connection between memory and critical opposition) and (b) the absolute need to reject all instrumentalizations of historical traumas, such as the Shoah, for the purposes of legitimating an illegitimate regime.
Primo Levi was mindful of both imperatives. In some ways, this dual track of trauma follows from its repetitive character. Trauma breaks into the present and reabsorbs the very possibility of the present into the past, maintaining those who are traumatized in an uncertain historical time in which the agents who inflict traumatic suffering repopulate one’s world and foreclose the possibility of opening to a different future. There was a symptomatic moment in 1982 when Begin, after encircling Beirut with armed forces, announced, “I feel as though I have sent an army to Berlin to wipe out Hitler in the bunker.”21 Can we read in that transposition something like the work of trauma to reabsorb every present circumstance into the recurrent and ravenous pain of the past? What would it mean to awake to a present that would learn from the Holocaust the necessity of opposing fascism, racism, state violence, and forcible detention? It would mean that we have to understand that those kinds of actions can and do recur, in different historical circumstances, that they are not always the same, but that they are to be opposed, vocally and insistently, wherever and whenever they do recur. It would also mean that no one is exempt, by historical fiat, from occupying the position of the oppressor or the perpetrator, and this Levi already knew when he considered the actions of the Jewish collaborators. There is no innocence that pertains to Jews or Palestinians as such. There is only the historical demand to produce a political practice and mode of engagement that respects and institutionalizes protection for the precariousness of life itself.
There is a difference between a politics that is animated by trauma and seeks, tactically, to reanimate trauma for its own uses and a politics that reflects on what political conditions would be necessary to foreclose crimes against humanity such as these. This latter is surely an ethical and political framework derived from the Holocaust or the Nazi genocide. But it is one that must derive principles from a past for the purposes of living in and negotiating a present. That transposition or translation can only work if there is an apprehension of the difference between “then” and “now,” but it cannot work if the “then” replaces and absorbs the “now,” since that can only produce a blindness toward and in the present. Indeed, paradoxically, only by allowing the Shoah to become past can we begin to derive those principles of justice and equality and respect for life and land on the basis of that experience. It would be a different way never to forget, because it would not install the past as the present, but rather consult the past in order to conduct the comparative and reflective work that would allow us to derive principles of human conduct that would make good on the promise not to reiterate in any way the crimes of that historical time.
Trauma does not in itself legitimate a political claim, except perhaps the claim that conditions that ameliorate trauma are imperative for every conceivable person regardless of ethnicity, religion, or race. Trauma does not produce entitlement, though it can lead us to reflect upon how best to institutionalize entitlements such that trauma is ameliorated and foreclosed for every possible human. In a reactive relation to trauma, the trauma determines us unilaterally, even as we operate within its horizon and by way of its internal logic. The refusal of the present and of what we might call the concrete other is the consequence of this kind of hermeticism, which is why waking from trauma is the only way to forestall its endless reiteration. Indeed, in this way we might say that trauma presents us with a specific responsibility precisely because it threatens to render us as pure victims who, by definition, cannot take responsibility for the conditions we impose on others. Although trauma cannot be willed away, it can be worked through to the extent that we become mindful of the way it threatens to absorb the present into the past or, rather, reenact the past as the present, and so bypassing the experience of historical distance, the interval needed to reflect upon and consider how best to make a history now in light of such a past.
Levi’s own reflections led him over time to consider that a “diasporic” condition for the Jewish people was the better alternative, a position that brought him closer to the political views of Hannah Arendt. In 1984, three years before his death, Levi spoke again about Israel after a self-imposed period of censorship: “I have thought about this a great deal: the center is in the Diaspora, it is coming back to the Diaspora.… I would prefer the center of gravity of Judaism to stay outside Israel.” And then again: “I would say that the best of Jewish culture is bound to the fact of being dispersed, polycentric.” And: “The history of the Diaspora has been a history of persecution but also of interethnic exchange and relations, in other words, a school for tolerance.”22
A Holocaust survivor living in Leiden wrote to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz to say that she was offended that the Gaza settlers who returned to Israel analogized their situation to those who were forced into trains and conveyed to concentration camps. She worked with all sorts of historical details to argue that the two situations were empirically distinct. It was, in my mind, a laudable gesture, given that she thought, by virtue of her standing as a living witness, that she might debunk the power of this most exploitative, insulting, and paralyzing use of the Holocaust. She wanted to debunk it as traumatic metaphor and restore it to an empirical reality. But can one speak reason to this traumatic discourse? Her words are good and true, but is the issue any longer one of evidence? Or has the discourse now taken on a life of its own, one that grows at the expense of the memory itself, one that is no longer in the service of furnishing evidence to counter the Nazi war on memory, but rather of constructing political legitimation for land seizure and increased military aggression?
Levi understood the Holocaust to provide a moral framework for his own criticisms of Israel, and he would not listen to those who said that, in his position, he ought to remain silent. On the eve of his departure to revisit Auschwitz in 1982, he signed the open letter in La Repubblica calling for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon. He refused to understand the Israeli army as representing a persecuted minority. The discourse of persecution should not be used for such a purpose. Over and against those who would revive the images of the camps to authorize Israeli aggression, he wrote provocatively in Il Manifesto: “Everybody is somebody’s Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”23 Of course, that is a controversial claim, and we are surely right to reject it as unwise. After all, if Levi says that the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis, he is transposing the victimized position of the “Jews” under the Nazis to the victimized position of the Palestinians under the Israelis. We might think that this, too, is a crude and cynical use of a Holocaustal resonance, but consider that he is saying that just as the Jew was persecuted under the Nazis, so others can be in the position of being persecuted, and if we equate the Jew with the persecuted, then today others can be Jews, including Palestinians. Further, Israelis—understood as the Israeli government—are not the same as Jews. When asked later about his controversial formulation, he made clear that he did not think that Begin and Sharon were Nazis.24 And in response to an interviewer from La Repubblica who asked, “Are the Palestinians in the same position as the Jews under the Nazis?” he replied that he does not accept such simplistic analogies and that “there is no policy to exterminate the Palestinians.”25
After he joined publicly with other Italian and Jewish intellectuals to ask both Begin and Sharon to resign, he was also horrified by the anti-Semitic slogans that appeared on the walls of his town equating Jews with Nazis. This was a radically untenable situation, and it produced a conflict: could he continue to elaborate those principles derived from his experience of Auschwitz to condemn state violence without contributing to an anti-Semitic seizure of the event? This was the issue he had to negotiate. Within a few months, Levi fell silent on this issue, and even descended into a serious depression, one that doubtless had several causes, but could not have been helped by the impasse that was before him. His political predicament is not far from our own, since to speak at all against Israeli policies can excite those who would condemn not only Israel but Jews more generally in the spirit of anti-Semitism. Is this a reason not to speak, or does it mean that when and if we speak we must speak against that anti-Semitism at the same time that we articulate moral and political objections to wanton state violence? Similarly, if we say that the Holocaust is deployed for the purposes of justifying brutal state and military actions, we must also say that the Holocaust is not reducible to this deployment, that it devalues and effaces the specific suffering and political challenge of the Holocaust to make such a reduction.
It is crucial, as White has done, to show that the rhetorical means through which the Holocaust is relayed can be a way of trying to “grasp” the reality, to register its moral force in the form by which it is conveyed. It is equally crucial to understand that the “moral charge” of the story can be transposed and displaced and that this happens in ways that are open to debate. The problem is not rhetoric versus reference, but which rhetoric, for what purposes, and with what obligation to tell the story in a manner that attempts to do it justice. If Levi considered one quandary when he wrote The Drowned and the Saved, he found himself in the midst of another toward the end of his life. His effort to refute the revisionists continued in his efforts both to counter the anti-Semites as well as those who would mobilize that history for the purposes of legitimating brutal state power. The discursive seizure of the Holocaust was inevitable, even necessary, to rebut those who would deny it. But it brought along new risks, which seemed to imply nearly full muteness for Levi in relation to contemporary politics.
Levi spoke out in 1982, and then softened his remarks, often then saying he would only give interviews on the condition that questioners not bring up Israel. Something traumatic had to be set aside, and neither Levi nor any other individual could remake the political lexicon within which he was compelled to live and speak. But we know that muteness is no answer. His situation bids us not to follow him there. But a few political principles emerged from the impasse he faced. When asked whether he hated Germans, Levi said that he did not believe one should or could categorize an entire people on the basis of their national character. When asked about his alleged insensitivity to the loss of Jewish blood, he responded that Jewish blood ought not to be privileged over any other, and then his final word on the topic: we must not allow the sufferings of the Holocaust to justify everything.26
And if this simple sentence cannot be uttered, then we are doubtless learning the wrong lesson from the atrocities of World War II, namely, the lesson that we must not speak, that muteness is the only alternative to accusations of this kind. To separate that historical suffering from contemporary political exploitations of any kind is part of what must be done if we are to follow Levi’s lead to do justice to history and to struggle for justice in the present.
