Letter to the Editor of Commentary

I am responding to Fernanda Eberstadt’s article, “Reading Primo Levi” [October 1985]. I neither wish to nor am I able to discuss Miss Eberstadt’s opinions on the literary merits of my books; to our common good fortune, in your country as in mine, freedom of criticism exists. I would like, however, to comment on several passages in the article.

1. “It was only with the first sign of a decisive Allied victory and with the collapse of the Fascist regime on July 25, 1943, that Levi found within himself the will to resist” (p. 43). This assertion amounts to an accusation of opportunism, and it strikes me as insulting. I was not the only one to take up arms so late. I am not speaking here of the minuscule Italian Jewish community, but the entire resistance movement against the Nazis, in all of Europe, did not begin until after the German invasion; before that it would not have made sense. A soldier, even if animated by the best will in the world, does not mobilize alone, spontaneously, against an enemy who is not there. The decision to fight militarily was taken when it was possible to take it, but my anti-Fascist commitment and that of my family and the group of friends I belong to, goes back many years earlier (see, for example, the chapters “Zinc” and “Iron” in The Periodic Table), in fact, to the years of my adolescence.

A little further on: at the moment of my arrest by the Fascists, “Levi . . . thought it safer . . . to declare himself a Jew.” That was the least important part of the motives that led me to declare myself a Jew. I expressed them clearly in The Periodic Table: “in part out of weariness, in part also out of an irrational point of pride.”

2. On p. 45 and elsewhere I am accused of omission: that is of not having tried to demonstrate that the slaughter of the Jews was provoked by the Nazi terror and by Hitler’s racist ideology. Such a drastic statement can spring only from an extremely superficial reading of my books, especially If This Is a Man (now reissued in English under the title Survival in Auschwitz). Even if one simply relies on the narrated facts, the revulsion against and condemnation of Nazism leap from every page.

Moreover, the explanation which Miss Eberstadt seems to put
forward—that Jews are persecuted where and when they tend to
assimilate—seems to me false, or at least not generally true. They weren’t assimilated in Spain in 1500, and yet they were burned or expelled. They were assimilated in Italy, where they would have remained undisturbed or almost so if it had not been for the German invasion in the course of the Second World War. They were and are assimilated in Bulgaria, whose (pro-Fascist) government opposed their deportation. They rejected assimilation in Poland and Russia in the last century and were paid back with pogroms. In short, I see no correlation between assimilation (desired or attained) and anti-Semitism. The anti-Semite hates the Jew no matter what: if he assimilates, because he “tries to hide himself”; if he remains faithful to tradition and religion, “because he is different.”

3. I am accused of irreligion. I am not religious; furthermore, the experience of Auschwitz led many religious people, Jewish and not, to doubt. All the same, I profoundly respect, and sometimes envy, those who have the support of a faith. The pious Lithuanian Jew on whom Miss Eberstadt dwells (p. 45) is plainly a positive character, and the episode described in the story in which hse appears really happened. The line of reasoning has been misunderstood: it is known to everyone (even to me) that “cooking” on Yom Kippur is prohibited, but the discussion described hinges on whether it is permitted to “keep the soup warm,” that is, not to let it get cold. Whether this is allowed or not I personally do not know; my character, Ezra, maintains that it is not.

As for the suspension of the fast by rabbinical authorities, Miss Eberstadt must take my word for it; there was no communication between the camps and the outside world, and Ezra could not have been aware of this concession. However, in my opinion, he observed the fast because of his personal heroic zeal, and I remember quite well that he was not the only one.

In none of my books does there appear a malevolent representation of religious zeal; however, the way in which quotations taken from my books are used does seem inexplicably malevolent.

4. Even the characters in If Not Now, When? are not very religious. This fact should not surprise or scandalize anyone: most of them were born and raised in the Soviet Union, where all religions, and the Jewish religion in particular, were openly discouraged.

5. I am implicitly criticized for being assimilated. I am. There do not exist Jews in the Diaspora who are not, to a greater or lesser degree, if for nothing else than for the fact that they speak the language of the country in which they live. I reassert, for myself and for everyone, the right to choose the level of assimilation that best suits their culture and their environment.

I would finally like to say to Miss Eberstadt that likening me to Ausonius is inappropriate. I have not retired, like that late Roman gentleman, to cultivate roses and compose anagrams, nor have I ever eaten oysters; on the contrary, my civic involvement has been daily and constant, a fact well-known not only in Italy. But I must thank Miss Eberstadt nevertheless for the praise she has bestowed on me, despite her manifest distaste.

PRIMO LEVI

Commentary, February 1986, written in response
to the article “Reading Primo Levi,” by Fernanda Eberstadt
published in the issue of October 1985