IF THIS IS A MAN
“If This Is a Man is a book that was written immediately.” This statement, which Primo Levi made in Cuneo, in Piedmont, in November 1975, during a talk with readers, needs to be interpreted. Levi’s first book appeared in the fall of 1947—almost three years after the liberation of Auschwitz—by which point dozens of memoirs about the deportation had already appeared in Italy. Among these, however, only seven had to do with the deportation of the Jews. From the chapter “Die Drei Leute vom Labor” we know that Levi had already scribbled some brief notes in the Lager, just as we know that he had to destroy them, because if they had been found on him he would have been sent before a firing squad. He fixed them on paper just the same, to ensure for himself two things that were very rare in that place: solitude and thought—not only rare but a source of the most acute suffering, “the pain of remembering, the old fierce anguish of feeling myself a man again, which attacks me like a dog the moment my consciousness comes out of the darkness.”
So even in Auschwitz Levi had tried to write; but, as far as we know, he didn’t write in the months just after the liberation. The “truce” that gives his second book its title was an adventurous middle time of wandering through Europe. His traveling companions were fighters or survivors or victims like him; they were part of the same history, of the same geography as the Lager. They were people with whom he exchanged stories along the way, and doing so was consoling; but they were not an audience. The testimony—that is, “the evil tidings of what man’s audacity made of man in Auschwitz,” as the finale of the chapter “Ka-Be” solemnly chimes—had to be brought to the others: to those who were distant, those who would have preferred not to know, the indifferent, the unwilling, the incredulous, the torturers themselves and those who had supported them. This was the audience that Levi sought.
There was a notable exception to this abstention from writing before his return to Italy. In Katowice, in the spring of 1945, a commission from the Soviet government approached some three thousand former deportees of various nationalities and asked them to document their experience in the Lager of Oświęcim—the Polish name of Auschwitz. That early investigation depicted, concisely but reliably, the key role that Auschwitz played in the Final Solution, in the structure and functioning of the industry of death, in the number of victims. Among those who compiled testimony were two Jews from Turin: a forty-seven-year-old doctor, Leonardo De Benedetti, and a twenty-five-year-old chemist, Primo Levi. Report on the Hygienic-Sanitary Organization of the Concentration Camp for Jews in Monowitz (Auschwitz—Upper Silesia) probably had an early version (shorter, and perhaps drafted in French), which may someday be found in some archive in the former USSR. The Italian text is, instead, a version conceived for an audience that knew almost nothing about the Lagers. Levi and De Benedetti published it on November 24, 1946, in the prestigious journal Minerva Medica. The text was rediscovered in the 1990s, after decades of oblivion, thanks to Alberto Cavaglion, and has been translated into English (Auschwitz Report, edited by Robert Gordon; London: Verso, 2006).
The capacity apparent in Auschwitz Report to gather, remember, and organize information of minute complexity is astonishing—anthropological no less than clinical, political no less than scientific. The authors, De Benedetti and Levi, were prisoners at the bottom, at ground level; their ability to overcome the ignorance of space and time that was inflicted before every other humiliation is equally astonishing. The Report should be read and studied on its own, and not as an outline for If This Is a Man. It was the first evidence of a technical nature produced by survivors of the Lager: effective because it was concrete, addressed to the few who at the time were interested in knowing the reality of the extermination. And it was an engagé text, commissioned and written with the war still going on, or just concluded.
Auschwitz Report, then, really was “written immediately,” but the statement is also truthful with regard to If This Is a Man. During a TV broadcast in 1974, Levi answered a question on the origin of his first book “as a structure”: “It had no origin, it emerged from a series of stories. It originated upside down, and perhaps that’s visible. I wrote the last chapter first, because it was the most urgent, the freshest in memory, but I had no intention of writing a book. The structure emerged little by little, when I realized that these episodes were a tale, that they could be arranged chronologically, that they were, in other words, a chronology.”
In the second, definitive edition of 1958, the book concludes with the places and dates of its composition: “Avigliana–Turin, December 1945–January 1947.” The DUCO-Montecatini plant, where Levi went to work as a chemist on January 21, 1946, was in Avigliana. It was his first full-time job after returning to Italy, and from then on, work and writing were superimposed on each other, as he recounts in the chapter “Chromium” in The Periodic Table: “I had kindly been granted a rickety desk in the laboratory, a noisy, drafty workplace full of people coming and going with rags and cans, and had been assigned no definite task; unoccupied as a chemist and in a state of complete alienation (though it was not called that at the time), I wrote, in no order, page after page of the memories that were poisoning me, and my colleagues looked at me stealthily, as if I were a harmless lunatic. The book grew in my hands almost spontaneously, without plan or system, intricate and crowded as a termite nest.” Thus for weeks he made notes randomly, but impelled by the urgency of remembering, until a structure began to emerge. The date “December 1945” alludes to the first phase of this feverish pursuit of the facts.
The typescripts of the first drafts of the final chapter, “The Story of Ten Days,” are dated February 1946. Thus the earliest chapter that Levi was able to shape is the one with the simplest structure: a diary. The design of the work and the chronology of the facts related in it began to develop from that nucleus. If This Is a Man (in both versions, 1947 and 1958) perfectly melds the chronology of the facts recounted with the thematic progression in the witness-narrator’s discovery of the Lager. Every new subject confronted in the individual chapters—the journey, the entrance into Auschwitz, the infirmary, the forced labor, the selections for the gas chamber—corresponds to a deliberate step forward in the calendar, along the arc of the months and the seasons. Diary and story come together smoothly; the same is true for the descriptions of the events and the reflections on them.
We know the dates of the drafts (or at least the first drafts) of some of the book’s chapters, thanks to a typescript that Levi sent to his cousin Anna Yona, who lived in Massachusetts, in the hope of finding through her a publisher in the United States—that is, even before the work appeared in the original language. Thus, “The Canto of Ulysses,” February 14, 1946; “Kraus,” February 25; “Chemistry Examination,” March; “October 1944,” April 5–8; “Ka-Be,” June 15–20.
When Levi wrote “The Canto of Ulysses” he wasn’t aware that Jean Samuel, known as Pikolo, had survived the evacuation march from Auschwitz; like all the healthy prisoners, Jean had been forced to march through the night of January 17–18, 1945. He was tracked down by Charles Conreau, the French schoolteacher with whom Levi had spent his last days in the Lager. Charles, having returned from Auschwitz before Levi, had sent him a letter from France, which Levi found waiting for him upon his return. He answered right away, asking Charles, among other things, to look for Jean Samuel in Strasbourg. Charles found him in early March 1946 and gave him Levi’s address in Turin. Jean wrote to Levi on March 13; Levi answered on the 23rd with a long letter, telling him: “I’m writing: some poems, some essays, even some stories related to life in the Lager.” In “Chromium” Levi also tells us that in those first months after his return he wrote “short, bloody poems.” The fact that in that letter—contemporaneous
with the writing of his first book—he distinguishes “essays” from “stories” (and indicates that he considers the gesture of writing stories about Auschwitz particularly bold) means that, individually, he gave to the texts that were gradually emerging a character that was predominantly either narrative or nonfiction. Among the more essay-like—whether they were completed or still being written—were surely “This Side of Good and Evil” and “The Drowned and the Saved.”
In that first letter of March 23, Levi told Jean that he was writing about him in one of the stories: “You will find it odd.” Later, on May 24, Levi sent him a rough draft, in Italian, of “The Canto of Ulysses.” In a letter dated April 6, he gave a strange and extraordinary definition of the texts that he was producing: “machins,” that is, in French, as the historian Sergio Luzzatto puts it, “contraptions, thingies. . . . Certainly Levi said it out of modesty. But maybe he said it for another reason as well. Maybe the writer intuited, clearly, that his different ways of analyzing the experience of the Lager, contemporary and contextual, were outside the categories of traditional literary genres: altogether, they had the amphibious and ineffable quality of works that are sui generis.” Machins, therefore, against the Auschwitz machine, defined thus in the chapter “Initiation”: “precisely because the Lager was a great machine [Italian macchina] to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts.”
At the start of 1947 If This Is a Man was ready. Levi said, without providing many details, that he presented it to two or maybe three publishers, who rejected it. The only one about which we have definite information is Einaudi, in Turin. Cesare Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg, editors who were also writers, both read the manuscript. Ginzburg, née Levi, was Jewish. Her husband, Leone Ginzburg, had founded the publishing house with Giulio Einaudi, and was a celebrated Slavicist and anti-Fascist—he was, in fact, a leader of Justice and Liberty, the movement in which Levi was active during his brief time as a partisan. Leone Ginzburg had died in prison in Rome, on February 5, 1944, after being tortured by Nazi jailers.
The rejection of If This Is a Man on the part of a Turinese, anti-Fascist publisher that should, theoretically, have been sympathetic toward Levi, and should have readily grasped the value of the work, caused outrage not only in Italy. After Levi’s death, Ginzburg admitted that she had, forty years earlier, done something foolish. But in 1947 the war had been over for two years, and memoirs that recalled its horrors seemed to have saturated the market, even if few were about the deportation of the Jews. Einaudi wished to publish books that constructed the future: at first glance Levi’s did not seem such a book, and also its stylistic approach was far from the literary climate of the time; the neorealist writers modeled their style on American examples, especially Hemingway.
In the spring of 1947 Levi gave some episodes from his book to L’Amico del Popolo (Friend of the People), a Communist weekly published in Vercelli, outside Turin. The editor of the paper was Silvio Ortona, the unnamed author of the two lines “until one day / it will no longer make sense to say: tomorrow” that “run through” Levi’s memory in the chapter “Kraus.” The episodes that were published were, in shortened versions, “The Journey” (March 29, 1947); “On the Bottom” (April 5); another excerpt from “On the Bottom,” entitled “Häftlinge” (May 17); “Our Nights” (May 24); and “An Accident” (May 31, from “Ka-Be”). Included in this last excerpt was the future epigraph poem of If This Is a Man, here titled “Psalm.” On March 29, the paper, presenting the first excerpt, explained that the pieces were taken from “a forthcoming book, On the Bottom, about the extermination camp of Auschwitz.” The work was therefore complete but had not found its definitive title, and the uncertainty persisted until the last moment.
In the meantime Levi’s life continued on its course. At the end of June 1947 he quit DUCO and ventured into business in a private chemistry lab with his friend Alberto Salmoni; it was a commercial failure, which he tells us about in two stories in The Periodic Table, “Arsenic” and “Tin.” In September Levi got married, and at the end of that summer the Florence journal Il Ponte published, in its August–September issue, another important episode, “October 1944.”
At that point, the book had been accepted by the publisher De Silva, also based in Turin, and run by Franco Antonicelli (1902–1974), another figure with long experience in both publishing and the anti-Fascist struggle. He was at the time the president of the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale del Piemonte (National Liberation Committee of Piedmont), and Levi’s book reached him, as the literary critic Marco Belpoliti notes, “through Alessandro Galane Garrone, who had read the manuscript at the end of 1946 at the urging of Levi’s sister, Anna Maria, who was also a member of the CLN.” It was Antonicelli who came up with the title. At an early point, as we have seen, Levi had thought of calling the book On the Bottom, then he inclined toward The Drowned and the Saved. Antonicelli, deleting the imperative “Consider” from one of the lines of the epigraph poem, coined If This Is a Man. He had a brochure printed in which he presented it as “the work of a new writer,” and in which he insisted on not only the moral but the literary value of the work: “No book in the world on the subject of these tragic experiences has the artistic value of this one.” On the fourth and last page of the brochure the epigraph poem was reproduced, in Levi’s handwriting, with the line “Consider if this is a man” printed in red.
Levi undertook to publicize the book himself. In the October 1947 issue of L’Italia che Scrive, he wrote the magazine’s monthly “I Present My Book” column, under the title “If This Is a World”:
If not in fact, in intention and in conception, the origins of my book go back to the days of the concentration camp. The need to tell “others,” to make “others” share it, took on for us, before the liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with other elementary needs: the book was written to satisfy this need; in the first place, therefore, as an interior liberation.
This explains its fragmentary nature: the chapters were written not in logical succession but in order of urgency. The work of linking and unifying was carried out more deliberately, and is more recent.
I have avoided crude details and polemical and rhetorical temptations. Those who read it may have the impression that other, more atrocious accounts of prison have gone too far: it’s not true, everything that has been read is true, but this was not the face of the truth that interested me. Nor did it interest me to tell about the exceptions, heroes and traitors, but, rather, by inclination and by choice, I tried to focus attention on the many, on the norm, on the ordinary man, not vile and not a saint, whose suffering is all he has but he is incapable of understanding it and containing it. It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.
I am not able to judge my book: it may be mediocre, bad, or good. I hope that it is read, in any case: not only out of ambition but also in the small hope of making the reader understand that these things have to do with him.
The work with which Levi made his debut demonstrates in several ways his universal intention: he speaks here of the world, man in general, the many on whom he focuses his attention, the many he hopes will read his book, the warning that the facts narrated have to do with the reader, every reader. If This Is a Man came out in October 1947 as part of De Silva’s nonfiction series Biblioteca Leone Ginzburg (Ginzburg had been a close friend of Antonicelli); the cover featured a figure taken from Goya’s Disasters of War. In addition to the brochure, the publisher printed an advertising flyer, inserted in the book, for which the author concisely summarized the meaning of the work: “This book was not written to accuse, or even to provoke horror and hatred. The lesson that emerges from it is for peace: those who hate are violating not just a moral principle but, first of all, a law of logic.” That last sentence has the knife edge of Pascal’s pensées: if the law of the strongest that originates in hatred of those who are different is taken to its extreme consequences, the inevitable result will be the annihilation of the human race, of the species “man,” for whom the work is titled. In these words, just as in the book, Levi’s ethical fiber equaled his exactness as a witness and his power as a writer.
In the 1974 TV appearance mentioned above, Levi said that If This Is a Man was “a record of events reflected on afterward.” The title confirms this: the book offers evidence of the facts (this) and an interrogation of that same evidence (if): testimony entrusted to memory and subjected to a continuous critical test. Before entering into the heart of the story, the reader has to cross two more thresholds that lie beyond the title. First, a Preface, similar to the text published in L’Italia che Scrive, in which Levi fixes the tone that he intends to give to his own voice and the objective that he sets himself: “to furnish documentation for a
detached study of certain aspects of the human mind.” Detachment does not, however, imply coldness, and the reader will be surprised by the second “threshold,” immediately afterward: the epigraph poem, which in the book has no title. Its opening lines seem to be chanted in a rapt voice: a hum that develops in a spiral fashion, a spring compressed, and then, at the start of the second stanza, rushes out in a burst of anger, of crude battering sounds. The entire poem is a dense weave of phonic molecules, distributed symmetrically. The voice that addresses the reader reveals itself, line by line, as a voice that judges and commands. Its source is the voice of God, Alberto Cavaglion observes, a voice whose tone is found at the close of “October 1944,” in the invective against Kuhn after the selections for the gas chamber. But here, before the story begins, Levi intends to force his reader into a situation—created by the tools of rhetoric—similar to that which a prisoner was hurled into when he entered Auschwitz. Levi creates an acoustic shock that is converted to a moral shock: “consider,” “ponder,” “carve,” “repeat.”
The story that follows is also surprising. It’s not a simple autobiography, nor is it the lamentation of a helpless victim. Two nouns are sufficient to understand how complex and subtle the conceptual outline of the book is. The first is found in the Preface: “It was my good fortune.” The decisive role of chance in the events of the Lager, as Robert Gordon notes, and the intervention of a relative “good fortune” for the individual Levi inform us that the story told is always true but never simple. The second noun belongs to the same family as fortune: “relief.” Levi uses it twice at the start of the work. In the chapter “The Journey” we read a sentence that gives us chills: “We had learned of our destination with relief. Auschwitz: a name without significance for us at that time, but at least it implied some place on this earth.” If that is the announcement of the journey, the definitive arrival at Auschwitz is marked by the transfer of those chosen for forced labor to their barracks: in the truck, and under the guard of a German soldier who, instead of shouting at the prisoners, “Guai a voi, anime prave” (“Woe unto you, wicked souls”: Inferno III:84; it’s the first explicit citation of Dante in the book), asks them for their money and their watches. A thief, in other words, and not even very clever: “The matter stirs us to anger and laughter and a strange relief.” Autobiography and history, horror and the grotesque, humiliation and humor, all in a structure of paradoxical events and words. In hindsight, Levi can say that being deported in 1944 was his “good fortune,” for he now (1947) knows the history of the Third Reich and the Nazi Lagers, while both times he says “relief” it follows an immediate recognition of observable facts: only someone who knew nothing of Ausch-
witz could feel relief. In the same way, Levi the deportee realizes for the first time that he has fallen into an absurd place when he is induced to quote Dante. And he resorts to Dante not because he has to describe a horror that challenges every possibility of expression but because he is surprised at having found moral mediocrity where he expected incorruptible sadism.
Thus the story is introduced. But there are two distinct episodes in If This Is a Man that allow us to witness both the book’s material and its spiritual birth. The first is the episode cited above where Levi, left alone in the chemical laboratory at Buna, writes a few lines in pencil that he immediately afterward destroys. The second is “The Canto of Ulysses”: the urgency to communicate, using as amplifier, support, and filter of his own voice a famous text whose language is adequate to the need: the Divine Comedy. The structure of If This Is a Man is therefore visible—and in a certain sense directly commented on—within the work itself. For it is not a book of remembrances but, rather, a book in which the author revisits an absolute present, which concerns Everyman. When, in “Chemistry Examination,” Levi writes the sentence “Today, this very day, as I sit at a table and write, I myself am not convinced that these things really happened,” he is joining the two cognitive poles of his story, the during of Auschwitz and the now of the writing, delivering them to the always of reading and of literature, and uniting in a single figure the Häftling Levi and the writer Levi.
If This Is a Man is therefore rooted, first of all, in a need to speak not of oneself—not of one’s own humiliation, one’s own hunger, one’s personal misfortunes—but of an extreme condition, new in the world, which concerns every man because it represents a direct threat against any human being, and which can teach each of us something unprecedented. The need to communicate this universal news implies that If This Is a Man will not be the testimony of a category: not of Jews, not of political prisoners. The book is not entitled If This Is a Jew, although Levi quickly points out that Jews represent more than 90 percent of the victims of the Lagers.
Another consequence of this primary need is that Levi attributes equal importance to individuals and to the structure of Auschwitz. The story of men whose names have been taken away, If This Is a Man is also a prolonged, persistent exercise in restoring to each of them a name (and a personal history). Levi’s determination to construct a termite nest in which every insect is newly endowed with name and surname is the most profound feature that—beyond the many quotations and allusions, explicit or implicit—he shares with Dante Alighieri and his Comedy, which is crammed with individual stories, stories that without him would be condemned to eternal oblivion. Levi is close to Dante also in his moral imagination, in his capacity to elaborate—starting with what is seen in the netherworld—anthropological-interpretative categories. In terms of language, then, Levi had the intelligence, in If This Is a Man, to make use of two registers that proceed side by side but are completely distinct: the “new, harsh language” born of the Lager and reproduced with implacable acoustic memory, and the high tone that is the privilege of the narrator, and that describes the most despicable actions in a clear, educated courtroom-style diction. In Dante, Levi found the simultaneous presence of the two languages, and a representative realism with incomparable power.
Dante’s ability to carve reality by verbal means accounts for three further, particularly complex aspects of If This Is a Man. The first, as noted in the case of the word “relief,” is the active presence of the comic beside the tragic, animating grotesque human portraits. Second, the deeper one sinks into the inferno, the more the roles of victims and torturers tend to get mixed up, and here we are in the territory of collaborationism, on the path that leads to the “gray zone” of The Drowned and the Saved. Third, and last, is the empathic energy with which Levi tries to reason with the logic of someone else, even his torturers: an effort that, according to the Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, cost him inner peace, and which is an exercise in mimesis that owes much to the example of Dante. Finally, though, a Dantean element must be mentioned that is absent in Levi: forgiveness. Levi had no intention of forgiving his torturers.
If This Is a Man was favorably received. There were more than twenty reviews, a brilliant result for an author who was just starting out and for a work published, in an edition of 2500 copies, by a small publishing house. Most of the reviews were in left-leaning newspapers and journals in northern Italy. But the book was also reviewed in La Stampa, the main daily in Turin, and in the Corriere d’Informazione, the sibling of the most important national daily, Corriere della Sera, in Milan. One of the advertisements circulated by De Silva some months later carried the information that the “wife of the famous scientist Enrico Fermi” would translate the work for readers in the United States. Laura Capon Fermi was of Jewish origin, but her version was not completed. It’s probable that she worked on an intermediate version of the text, which precedes the edition of 1947; what remains of the translation is preserved in the University of Chicago Library.
The most farsighted review of If This Is a Man came out in the Piedmontese edition of the Communist Unità, on May 6, 1948. It was entitled “A Book About the Death Camps,” and was signed Italo Calvino. In a 1975 interview, Levi said, “I feel like Calvino’s brother and he like mine. If This Is a Man and The Path to the Spiders’ Nest came out almost at the same time. From then on, although we didn’t see each other much, the paths we traveled were close and parallel.” In La Stampa the debuts of Levi and Calvino were reviewed together, but what the two books shared was not completely evident in 1947. In effect both replaced the abstract myths of heroic prison and heroic resistance (forged immediately after the war in Italy for political reasons) with the raw truth of a story: truth was reached through style. Both books challenged those monumental representations of History, sowing doubts and raising questions, and punctuating with ironic and grotesque details the dramas described in their pages. In his review of Levi’s book, Calvino said openly what needed to be said: “With facts like the extermination camps it seems that any book has to be inferior to the reality in order to be able to sustain it. Yet Primo Levi has given us on this subject a magnificent book that is not only an extremely effective piece of testimony but has pages of genuine narrative power, which will remain in our memory as among the finest of the literature on the Second World War.”
Calvino used the adjective “fine,” praising the work for its form and not only for its content: he was the first to say that Primo Levi was a writer. A year later he confirmed his judgment, writing in an essay about diaries of the Lager: “I will confine myself to citing the one that, and I believe I am not mistaken, is the finest of all: If This Is a Man, by Primo Levi: a book that for sobriety of language, power of images, and psychological acuity is truly unsurpassed.”
In the summer of 1948 If This Is a Man was a candidate for the Viareggio Prize, one of the most prestigious in Italy. Levi was eliminated in the first phases of the contest, and yet, along with Calvino’s judgment, and with the literary attempts he was making in those same months (poems, stories) in directions different from that of the witness, his nomination for the prize is an indication of the wish to build for himself a possible path as a full-time writer. The attempt failed; but that same year Levi received a great moral and literary acknowledgment, although it was limited to a private exchange of letters. The poet Umberto Saba (1883–1957; his mother was Jewish, and his birth name was Umberto Poli) wrote to him on November 3:
Dear Signor Primo Levi,
I don’t know if it will please you to hear from me that your book If This Is a Man is more than a fine book, it’s a fated book. Someone had to write it: destiny willed that that someone should be you.
It is fated as, in the last century, Silvio Pellico’s My Prisons was. Was it successful? Was it not? I don’t know anything about it. Horror and, even more, disgust for what is happening isolate me increasingly from everything that is written and said today. And even your book I got by chance; unlikely that I would have bought it. But as soon as I began to read, I couldn’t stop. Now it is as if I had personally had the experience of Auschwitz. If it were possible, I would order that it be used as a school text. But those responsible (if men can be responsible for something) for the extermination camps will be careful not to. Unfortunately, the immense crisis of evil and stupidity that began in 1914 will need some centuries to wear itself out. I have the impression that your book will live even beyond the crisis. Because many others have described those horrors, but they have all done it from the outside; no one—at least as far as I know—has suffered them, and rendered them, from the inside.
Yours, with gratitude and affection
SABA
In 1949 De Silva, in financial difficulties, handed over its activities and its warehouse to a publisher in Florence, La Nuova Italia. Hundreds of copies of If This Is a Man remained unsold. The verb with which Levi notes the natural disaster that destroyed them, on November 4, 1966, is remarkable, tying them to the Lager and to Dante’s Ulysses: “They drowned in Florence during the flood because Nuova Italia, which had taken the rights, kept the volumes in a cellar.”
The Levi who made his debut was therefore appreciated as a writer, and at the end of the forties he received various invitations to contribute to journals. Despite his attempts at different kinds of writing, he did not neglect his book, which, because of the change in publisher, was now out of print. In 1952 he offered it a second time to Einaudi, for which he had started working as a translator of scientific books. In this attempt he had the support of Paolo Boringhieri, who a few years later set out on his own, founding the publishing house that bears his name. Now, again, Einaudi said no to “Primo Levi’s fine book,” which, according to Einaudi’s records, “having already been through the hands of two publishers, wouldn’t have much chance of success.”
However, the publisher had agreed that If This Is a Man was a “fine” book, and two years later it established a new series of works devoted to the deportation and the extermination of the Jews, bringing out Robert Antelme’s Espèce humaine (The Human Race), the diary of Anne Frank, and the Bréviaire de la haine: Le IIIe Reich et les Juifs (The Breviary of Hatred: The Third Reich and the Jews), by Léon Poliakov. The time was ripe, and, finally, ten years after the liberation, a third proposal was successful. The contract for a new Einaudi edition was signed on July 11, 1955. Almost three years passed before the book was printed: in 1956 Einaudi suffered a severe financial crisis and had to cut back its new publications. In compensation, Levi had time to reconsider the structure of his book. He didn’t rearrange it and didn’t rewrite, but he made many small corrections and some notable additions; the earliest and most orderly study of the variations was done by the critic and philologist Giovanni Tesio in 1977. Yet, even in the absence of a real remaking, If This Is a Man–1947 can be considered a work on its own.
Tesio explains that “the largest number of additions is in the first part of the book, up to and including the chapter ‘Our Nights.’ Afterward, only the chapter ‘The Last One’ has a substantial addition. Elsewhere it’s a matter of alterations in the order of a few lines or even a few words.” In particular, all the events leading up to Levi’s arrival at Fòssoli, in the chapter “The Journey,” are new: the 1947 version began with the sentence “In mid-February 1944 there were six hundred Italian Jews in the camp at Fòssoli.” Also new are the portrait of the child Emilia, the encounter with Schlome, and the background of the character of Alberto, who only in 1958 becomes a fully rounded figure; the biggest addition has to do with the three stratagems for survival related in the chapter “The Last One,” in whose 1958 version picaresque pages and dramatic pages end up coexisting. The end of “On the Bottom” is new, with the quotation from Dante and the soldier thief. Right after “On the Bottom,” Levi inserts a completely new chapter, “Initiation,” which, if we recall his letters to Jean Samuel, is perfectly balanced between the essay and the short story. Tesio notes that the “work of revision . . . appears to follow the sole criterion of adhering more closely to the testimonial and psychological truth of the material.” In the 1958 edition this truth is expressed by a structural symmetry as well: now that there are seventeen chapters in the book, “The Drowned and the Saved” occupies the ninth position, at the exact center of the work. The chapter of those who survive, either by force or by cunning, therefore appears as the fulcrum of the book, fittingly for a text that, after years of new reflections, will resonate with the pages on the gray zone in a work that bears the identical title.
The new edition of If This Is a Man, like the first, was part of a nonfiction series, “Saggi.” Starting in 1960, the pace of reprintings increased, and as early as mid-1959 the work of the German translator Heinz Riedt began, leading to the publication, in November 1961, of Ist das ein Mensch? In 1962 Radio Canada submitted to Levi an abridgment of the text that the author liked so much that, two years later and along the same lines, he put together a script for Italian radio. The director was Giorgio Bandini, one of the first directors to stage Beckett in Italy.
In 1966 a theater version, written by Pieralberto Marché and Primo Levi, and directed by Gianfranco De Bosio for the Teatro Stabile of Turin, was staged. For this production, Levi sent the costume designer, Gianni Polidori, letters and notes accompanied by drawings in which he described certain concrete aspects of the camp, such as the uniform and the crude utensils available to the Häftlinge. The theater version of If This Is a Man was published by Einaudi; in the Preface Levi compared himself—for the first time publicly—to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The show’s national premiere, scheduled for Florence, was canceled because of the flood that year (which thus “drowned” Levi’s work in two different ways). The show finally opened in Turin two weeks later, on November 18, and had around fifty performances; it was awarded the Saint-Vincent prize as the best theatrical text of 1966.
In 1972 If This Is a Man was published in an edition for middle schools, as The Truce had been in 1965. In this case, too, Levi wrote a preface intended for students (it is included in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980, in volume 2). Levi also compiled explanatory footnotes and added two maps, representing Nazi Europe covered by Lagers and the system of camps and subcamps making up Auschwitz; finally, he provided a bibliography on the subject. In 1976 he added to the school edition another appendix, in which he responded to the most recurrent questions asked by readers, especially students. Starting in 1979, this appendix was included in all Italian editions of the work.
Levi’s final work, The Drowned and the Saved, is a meditation on the Lager forty years after the events. But Levi never stopped reflecting on his first book, and answering questions about it. In 1985, when the Australian writer Germaine Greer asked him to talk about the literary quality of If This Is a Man, he confessed that in the course of decades he had
constructed a sort of legend around that book, that I wrote it without a plan, that I wrote it on impulse, that I wrote it without reflecting at all.
The other people I’ve talked to about [it] accepted the legend. In fact, writing is never spontaneous. Now that I think about it, I can see that this book is full of literature, literature absorbed through the skin, even while I was rejecting it (because I was a bad student of Italian literature). . . . When the time came, and I needed to write this book, and I did have a pathological need to write it, I found inside myself a whole “program.” And it was that literature I’d studied more or less unwillingly, the Dante I’d to do in high school, the Italian classics, and so forth.
Levi’s “and so forth” hints at a long list of sources. The ideal guide for this exploration is the edition of If This Is a Man with commentary by Alberto Cavaglion, published in 2012 by Einaudi. Among other things, Cavaglion points out the changing presence of Dante in Levi’s work: the Dante of The Truce “is already no longer the same as that of If This Is a Man,” while “Biblical Scripture loses its function as a frame for the narrative.” Other presences, from Dostoevsky to Eliot and Vercors, “are reduced or eliminated . . . as the result of a ruthless operation of self-
revision. Not to mention Baudelaire, literally removed.”
This library of the Primo Levi of If This Is a Man leads back to the image of the book written “immediately.” In 1995, fifty years after the Second World War ended, the Times Literary Supplement drafted a list of the hundred most important books published in the world since then. There were three Italian titles: Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and two works by Levi, If This Is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved. In the TLS chronology, If This Is a Man was placed in the 1950s, without, that is, account being taken of its first edition, written so soon after the events that it was narrating. “Immediately,” in 1947, Levi had been capable of describing Auschwitz to the entire world, with a unique balance of attention and vision, of empathy and detachment. It is often said that the horrors of the Lager are unspeakable and indescribable; people seldom consider, instead, the increase in expressiveness that, thanks precisely to Levi, has been gained from Auschwitz: the density of meanings, the patrimony of new images, the inexhaustible thesaurus of surprising and disturbing moral definitions that his deceptively clear pages offer.
What do we look for when we prepare to read Primo Levi? We look for truth: the truth of the facts. Yet there is a second truth: the truth of style, the presence of literature. Levi’s is not literature of the Shoah or on the Shoah. It is literature in the Shoah: as Umberto Saba saw, Levi’s first book speaks physically and mentally from within the Shoah, with the body, the voice, and the intellect of a witness, of a witness who discovers—as the reader, too, discovers—that he is a writer. If Levi is measured according to the dimensions of international literature, If This Is a Man really is a book written immediately: contemporaneously with Antelme’s Espèce humaine and Gramsci’s Letters from Prison, which also came out in 1947.
The first English edition of If This Is a Man, translated by Stuart Woolf, was published in 1959 by Orion Press, in New York, and Bodley Head, in London.
THE TRUCE
“I had a railway guide, so to speak, of my journey home. A sort of itinerary: such-and-such a day in such-and-such a place, in such-and-such other place. I found it, and I used it as an outline, almost fifteen years ago, for writing The Truce.” Primo Levi had an excellent memory: he nurtured it by keeping his attention focused and by recording the important facts. Yet he had a reflective temperament, and he didn’t write immediately. Significantly, If This Is a Man and The Truce were not composed right after the liberation of Auschwitz, or during the journey home—a journey that in the last chapter of The Truce Levi defines as “an interlude of unlimited openness, a providential gift of destiny, never to be repeated.” These words explain the noun “truce,” telling us that, during the eight and a half months (from January 27 to October 19, 1945) that elapsed between the arrival of the Red Army at the gates of Auschwitz and the return of the survivor Primo Levi to his home in Turin, the experience of Auschwitz was not over.
Before the completed act, there is the act that is being completed, the event in progress: this holds true for real events and for writing as well. A literary style is not ready-made, and certainly Levi’s was not. The Truce, published fifteen years after If This Is a Man, is a very different book. In a sense, Levi had to invent two languages, so as to be able to tell us about two worlds and two journeys, the downward journey of the Lager, the upward journey of freedom regained. We can identify the path of this work in one of the most famous episodes of the book, the story of Hurbinek, the child who cannot speak but utters “slightly different articulated words,” who carries out “experimental variations on a theme, a root, maybe a name,” and who “continued his obstinate experiments as long as he lived.” In this episode, Levi calls us to witness the very invention of language: a fundamental battle with the hunger to express oneself, a struggle for life that represents for the person describing it the invention of his own language, the construction of himself as a writer.
If This Is a Man ends in a state of suspension that is also a hope: with the name of a friend, Charles, with whom Levi has already, since the liberation, “exchanged long letters” (here is, again, writing), and whom he hopes “to see again one day.” His first book concludes at that point, but the impulse behind the story was not used up. It turns out that shortly after completing If This Is a Man, Levi had drafted at least the first chapter of the future Truce: “I had written one or two chapters . . . in ’47/’48, which became the first chapter of The Truce,” he said in an interview. A letter of December 4, 1947, from Levi to Arrigo Cajumi, the first reviewer of If This Is a Man, confirms his early intention of writing a second book, about the adventures of the journey home. Further evidence indicates that a first draft of the chapter “The Greek” goes back to 1954, while the episode of Ferrari, the ineffectual pickpocket of the chapter “Katowice,” appeared in the Turin daily Stampa Sera on December 19–20, 1959.
But writing, or the attempt to write, was in some sense secondary. For years Levi had been telling stories of his adventures on the way home through a war-ravaged Europe to friends, relatives, and also—as soon as he became a public figure, a writer invited to speak in public—high school students. It was in those performances that the structure of the individual episodes took shape, along with their rhythm, their humor, their style. Levi told Philip Roth that he had “retouched” each episode “en route so as to arouse [the] most favorable reactions.” When he started on his third career, as the public witness (alongside the chemist and the writer), Levi presented himself not only as a guardian of memory and as a survivor of the Shoah but as a character in an adventure novel: an epic that he was able to relate with the talents of an anthropologist and a humorist. He also told Roth: “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 your travel home are in Technicolor.’”
Levi declared repeatedly that he had written If This Is a Man in a rush, as if an interior voice were dictating it, sentence by sentence. Today we know that, on the contrary, a rich library of literary and figurative allusions stands behind the book, and that the author’s attention to his style was meticulous. And yet that sensation of being guided by a prompter was in some sense well founded: the naturalness of expression, the urgency to tell coincided with the creation of a literary language. When Levi finally decided to put into writing the stories of The Truce, the experience was diametrically opposite: “I had described that return journey a thousand times: it was as if I had dictated it.” This time, then, it was he himself who was dictating, guiding events with the consciousness of the professional writer. And it was he who decided when to begin: “Finally the moment arrived in which the equation between free time, desire, and the pressure from others was perfect.” At the end of the text we read the dates “Turin, December 1961–November 1962.”
The title that Levi initially gave the work was Vento Alto, or High Wind. The image is of regeneration after catastrophe, and contains a religious allusion: the high wind that God sent over the earth to dry it after the Flood: “And God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters assuaged.” The title The Truce was suggested later by Giorgio Lattes, an engineer who was a childhood friend of Levi. The book was published by Einaudi in April 1963. The Truce belongs to the so-called era of détente, the era of Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Pope John XXIII, which marked a truce in the cold war. Levi explained to Roth that “in Italy, for the first time, you could speak of the USSR in objective terms without being called a philo-Communist by the right wing and a disruptive reactionary by the powerful Italian Communist Party.”
The jacket copy, not signed, was by Italo Calvino: “As the miracle of If This Is a Man was a classical equanimity in the face of the atrocious material of the story, here, in The Truce, in this lively, colorful account of an unexpected springtime of freedom, there is a poignant note of anguish, of an incurable sadness.” This dark state of mind is most evident at the end of the book, with the dream of the Lager as the only permanent reality. That nightmare is not connected only to the first page, where Levi lays out the theme of the “shame of the survivor,” a theme that he returned to in The Drowned and the Saved. The dream in which “nothing outside the Lager was true” also corresponds to a line of the poem that opens If This Is a Man, in which Levi expresses the wish “May your house fall down,” addressing those who refuse to listen to and reflect on his story. This is exactly what happens in the final dream of The Truce, where “everything collapses and is destroyed around me. . . . I am alone at the center of a gray and murky void.” The wish comes true, but for the very person who flung it at his recalcitrant listeners. The detail is striking, as is the fact that “gray” is the color evoked. In fact, The Truce contains vivid examples of the two principal themes of The Drowned and the Saved: at the start of his investigation into “Shame,” Levi directly transcribes the first page of The Truce; and the “gray zone” is also represented, and not only in the color that pervades the final nightmare.
In The Truce Levi presents himself as a spectator-actor who lives in an in-between state: he is no longer a prisoner who has been stripped even of his name, but he is not yet a man fully reintegrated into his own life and the life of his country. This state is called “limbo,” or “Purgatory,” in the same pages in which Levi tells the story of Hurbinek. The only person in the entire Big Camp—the main Auschwitz camp—who is capable of communicating with Hurbinek, of offering him concrete help, is Henek, the fifteen-year-old Hungarian boy who “spent half his days beside Hurbinek’s bed,” and knew how to be “maternal rather than paternal.” Right after the conclusion of the story of Hurbinek we learn that Henek, during his months in Auschwitz, was the Kapo of the children’s Lager. “When there were selections in the children’s Block, it was he who chose. Did he not feel remorse? No: why should he? Was there another way to survive?” Henek, the only person in the entire limbo of the Big Camp who could have taught Hurbinek to speak, is a perfect representative of the “gray zone,” though in 1963 it did not yet have a name.
The Truce was immediately popular among Italian readers. Sales were high, reviews numerous and admiring. It came in third for the Strega Prize, and won the Campiello Prize, which, though only in its first year, was already prestigious. A professional jury made up of nine writers and critics chose five finalists, and, from among these, three hundred ordinary readers, from all over Italy, chose the winner. Levi was awarded the prize at the Campiello’s headquarters, at the Fondazione Cini, in Venice, on September 3, 1963. A journalist happened to observe Levi on the train to Venice: he was reading Isaac Asimov in English, “with the same devout scruples with which one would read a breviary.” Although The Truce was Levi’s second book, he didn’t frequent literary circles. Asimov was not mainstream literature (and Levi himself wrote and published science fiction stories), and Levi felt alien among professional writers.
Starting with The Truce, however, literature was destined to be, for Levi, an increasingly absorbing activity. He had described the adventure of the journey—even before his return—in a letter written in Katowice on June 6, 1945, and addressed to his friend Bianca Guidetti Serra: “I’m dressed like a tramp and I may arrive home without shoes, but in exchange I’ve learned German, and a little Russian and Polish, and also how to get by in many circumstances, not to lose courage, and to endure moral and physical sufferings. I’ve grown a beard again, to save on the barber; I know how to make cabbage-and-turnip soup, and can cook potatoes in a lot of different ways, none with seasonings. I know how to set up, light, and clean a stove. I’ve done an incredible number of jobs: mason’s helper, digger, garbage collector, porter, gravedigger, interpreter, bicyclist, tailor, thief, nurse, fence, stone breaker—even chemist!” From these vividly descriptive lines we have the proof that, if the writer did not yet exist, the narrator was already at work for the people close to him. This work continued through the years. In 1965, Einaudi published a version of The Truce for students, for which Levi wrote notes and an introduction (the latter can be read here in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980); in that edition the brief passages having to do with sexual desire, although innocent, were cut. In the spring of 1978, Italian radio’s Channel 1 broadcast a radio version of The Truce, under the direction of Edmo Fenoglio. Here, too, as for the radio and theater versions of If This Is a Man, the aim was to reproduce the book’s Babel of languages.
The first English translation of the work, by Stuart Woolf, was published in England in 1965, by Bodley Head, with the title The Truce and the subtitle A Survivor’s Journey Home from Auschwitz, and the same year in the United States by Atlantic Monthly Press, under the title The Reawakening.
NATURAL HISTORIES
In late 1965, Italo Calvino gave Primo Levi a copy of his book Cosmicomics, signing it: “To Primo Levi, who traveled down this path before me.” At that point, Levi had published only If This Is a Man and The Truce, but Calvino knew what he was talking about, because some years earlier, as an editor at Einaudi, he had considered a group of stories by Levi that had a completely different source. From his opinion as a reader, dated November 22, 1961, we can deduce what they were:
Dear Levi,
I finally read your stories. The science fiction, or rather biological fiction, ones, always appeal to me. Your fantasy mechanism, which takes off from a scientific-genetic starting point, has a power of suggestion that’s intellectual but also poetic, just like the genetic and morphological digressions of Jean Rostand. Your humor and your elegance easily save you from the danger of falling to a level of subliterature, a danger that those who use literary molds for intellectual experiments of this type often run into. Some of your inspirations are first-rate, like the Assyriologist who deciphers the mosaic of tapeworms; and the evocation of the origin of the centaurs has a poetic force, an impressive plausibility (and, my goodness, one would have said that writing about centaurs is impossible today, and you’ve avoided the Anatole France–Walt Disney–type pastiche).
Naturally, you still lack the confident hand of the writer who has a complete stylistic personality, like Borges. . . . You move in a dimension of intelligent digression on the edges of a cultural-ethical-scientific panorama that reflects the Europe we live in. Maybe the principal reason I like your stories so much is that they assume a common culture notably different from the one assumed by so much of Italian literature.
Calvino had thus hesitated for some time before reading the stories, fearing that they were “subliterature.” Now he could say to his colleague that they were authentically literature and, in addition, in a genre very different from what was being practiced at the time in Italy and elsewhere. The mere fact that he mentions Borges as a term of comparison attests to the sincerity of his opinion.
So, as early as 1961—that is, even before turning to the writing of The Truce—Levi wanted to present himself to the public as a writer, and as an author of fantastic stories. Calvino’s letter alludes to “Man’s Friend” and to an early version of “Quaestio de Centauris” entitled “The Centaur Trachi.” Both stories appeared in the Roman weekly Il Mondo, on January 16, 1962, and April 4, 1961, respectively.
Natural Histories was published by Einaudi in September 1966 under the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila, but the journey of the fifteen pieces collected in the volume had begun at least twenty years earlier. Levi wrote “The Mnemagogs” in 1946, and it was published on December 19, 1948, in L’Italia Socialista, a left-wing daily. Between 1946 and 1947 he had the idea for “The Sixth Day,” which appeared in the September–November 1958 issue of Questioni, a Turin literary journal. Calvino confided to Levi that that story had provided the first inspiration for Cosmicomics; that was the reason for the dedication. “Sleeping Beauty in the Refrigerator,” broadcast by Italian radio in June 1961, went back to 1952. Finally, Calvino had surely also read “The Versifier” and “Censorship in Bitinia,” which appeared in Il Mondo on, respectively, May 17, 1960, and June 10, 1961.
These facts demonstrate that the chronology of Levi’s writings has some notable surprises for readers and scholars. One of the biggest is that the need to bear witness to Auschwitz before the world (and to create a language suitable for communicating the experience) was accompanied from the start—from 1946, at least—by another, complementary vocation: one that led Levi to compose fantastic stories based on a vast technical-scientific knowledge, stories that are transparent but complex, in which the spark of invention and the organizing logic have roles of equal importance.
Thus Levi the witness and Levi the writer were born simultaneously, and simultaneously began to function. In fact, after the publication of Natural Histories Levi often described himself as a centaur, identifying with Trachi, the most successful character in the collection.
Calvino concluded that 1961 letter to Levi by encouraging him to continue in the new direction. He also advised him to find a proper home for his fantasy stories, so that they could appear with regularity, establishing a dialogue with an audience that would appreciate them. From then on Levi was working mainly on The Truce, but in 1962 he published two more stories in Il Mondo: “Man’s Friend” and “Angelic Butterfly” (August 14). “Cladonia Rapida” came out in August 1964 in the Milan monthly Panorama, while the last story in the series, “Retirement Package,” was published for the first time in Natural Histories. In the meantime, however, Levi had found the right home, the Milan daily Il Giorno, in which five more stories appeared: “Order at a Good Price” (March 22, 1964), “Some Applications of the Mimete” (August 15, 1964), “The Measure of Beauty” (January 6, 1965), “Versamine” (August 8, 1965), and “Full Employment” (February 27, 1966). It should be noted that in 1965 (a year after Levi, then), Calvino had begun to submit many of his Cosmicomics to the same journal: a further reason for the dedication.
In his letter Calvino specified that, rather than “science fiction,” Levi’s stories were “biological fiction.” It was no accident that when, five years later, Natural Histories was published, it had a cover band with the blurb “Science fiction?” The reader was supposed to guess that the book contained inventions cast in the future or in a distorted present, but that there was also something very different. Science fiction reached Italy in the early 1950s; the Italian word, “fantascienza,” had been coined by Giorgio Monicelli, a director of the publishing house Mondadori and the founder of Urania, the widest-circulation Italian science fiction magazine. There were many others, but throughout the fifties sci-fi remained a literary genre without much prestige—pure entertainment, like crime novels. Furthermore, the few attempts at sci-fi on the part of Italian writers appeared weak and far-fetched; Urania refused to publish them, accepting only sci-fi in English. A shift occurred in 1959, when Sergio Solmi, an essayist and poet, proposed to Einaudi that he put together a big sci-fi anthology. The book was enormously successful; given that a first-rank publisher like Einaudi was responsible for it, the major Italian literary critics discussed it, and so sci-fi (at least, the best sci-fi) gained the sort of attention usually reserved for mainstream literary genres. In 1961 Einaudi published a second anthology, edited by the writers and translators Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, which was also successful.
Levi, who for many years had been practicing his peculiar sci-fi, thus had to move within a fast-changing and tumultuous literary scene. His difficulty was twofold: to be accepted as an Italian writer of sci-fi, and to be accepted as a fantasy writer after publishing two memoirs that had their origin in the experience of deportation. Einaudi proposed a compromise, to which Levi agreed: to publish Natural Histories under a pseudonym, but let the identity of the author be evident from the jacket copy. As in the case of If This Is a Man and The Truce, it was Calvino who wrote the copy:
The fifteen “entertainments” that compose this book invite us to enter a future that is increasingly propelled by the frenetic impulse of technological progress, and is hence a theater of disquieting or utopian experiments, in which extraordinary and unpredictable machines act. And yet it’s not sufficient to classify these pages under the label of science fiction. Satire and poetry can be found here, nostalgia for the past and anticipation of the future, epic and daily reality, scientific formulation and the pull of the absurd, love of the natural order and a taste for subverting it, humanism and polite malice. The author is a chemist, and his profession filters through in the interest in how things are constructed, how they are recognized and analyzed. But he is a chemist who knows human emotions no less than he knows the law of mass action, and he disassembles and reassembles the secret mechanisms that rule human vanities, winking at us from the ironic allegories, the smiling morals that he offers.
At this point, Calvino introduced a letter sent by the author to the publisher:
I’ve written some twenty stories and I don’t know if I will write others. I wrote them for the most part straight off, trying to give narrative form to a point of intuition, trying to recount in other terms (if they are symbolic, they are so unconsciously) an intuition that today is not rare: the perception of a gap in the world we live in, of a small or large fault, of a “flaw of form” that nullifies some aspect of our civilization or our moral universe. . . . In the act of writing them I feel a vague sense of guilt, as of one who consciously commits a small transgression.
What transgression? Let’s see. . . . I entered the world of writing (unexpectedly) with two books about the concentration camps; it’s not for me to judge their value, but they were undoubtedly serious books, addressed to a serious audience. To offer this audience a volume of joke-stories, of moral traps, entertaining, perhaps, but detached, and cold: isn’t this commercial fraud, like someone selling wine in oil bottles? These are questions that I asked myself, in the act of writing and publishing these “natural histories.” Well, I wouldn’t publish them if I hadn’t noticed (not right away, to tell the truth) that between the Lager and these inventions a continuity, a bridge, exists: the Lager, for me, was the largest of the “flaws,” of the distortions I spoke of earlier, the most threatening of the monsters generated by the sleep of reason.
Levi’s “polite malice” is demonstrated by the German settings of two stories on the theme of eugenics, “Sleeping Beauty in the Refrigerator” and “Angelic Butterfly”: “There are reasons of an autobiographical nature that Germany has remained for me the country of violence. Setting a story of that type in that country is also a civilized form of reprisal.” His feelings of both uneasiness and confidence toward Natural Histories are revealed in the curious image of wine in oil bottles: why “commercial fraud,” if that wine and that oil are both genuine products? Levi’s new literary product was simply unexpected; and in Italy some attacked it as bad sci-fi, written, besides, by an author of much more serious books. Yet in 1967 Natural Histories received the Bagutta Prize, a long established and important literary award.
It remains to explain the mysterious pseudonym, Damiano Malabaila. St. Damian is, with St. Cosmo, the patron of doctors and pharmacists: the nonbeliever Levi always drew confidently on Catholic religious texts, and two doctors (the younger of whom, Morandi, is around his own age) are the main characters in the earliest story, “The Mnemagogs.” As for Malabaila, it means “bad nurse” or “bad nourisher” in Piedmontese dialect. Levi explained it thus: “As for the pseudonym, I thought about it a lot. Then it came by itself. Every morning going to work and every evening returning home I pass . . . a car electrician’s called Malabaila. It struck me, I appropriated it. Only later did I realize that it was right on the mark: that there was underneath an almost Freudian significance. We’ve all had a bad nourisher and we can all be bad nourishers of what we do. In my Natural Histories there is this vague odor of food that has become tainted, an evil alchemy.”
Starting in 1979, the book was reprinted with Levi’s name on the cover. Eleven of the stories in Natural Histories were published in English for the first time in 1990 in The Sixth Day and Other Tales by Summit Books; “Censorship in Bitinia” appeared in A Tranquil Star, published by Norton in 2007; in this edition, which matches the original Italian text, “The Versifier,” “Cladonia Rapida,” and “Quaestio de Centauris” appear for the first time in English.
FLAW OF FORM
Levi wrote the twenty stories in Flaw of Form in a short period of time, between 1967 and 1970. For Italy these were years of upheaval in society, in the economy, in politics, in public morality. “Sessantotto”—a date, 1968, written in letters—was the year of the student protests, while 1969 was marked by the union struggles of the so-called hot autumn and, just a little later, on December 12, in Milan, by a neo-Fascist act of terrorism: a bomb went off in a bank, leaving seventeen dead and eighty-eight wounded. Fears of a reactionary coup were widespread, and a period of extreme political tension began: what came to be called the “years of lead.” Politics was dominant, yet it doesn’t seem to trouble the stories in Flaw of Form, where Levi gives voice to other preoccupations. Here is the jacket copy (anonymous but surely written by the author) of the first edition, published by Einaudi in February 1971:
Will there be historians in the future—even, let’s say, in the next century? It’s not at all certain: mankind may have lost any interest in the past, preoccupied as it will surely be in sorting out the tangle of the future; or it may have lost the taste for works of the spirit in general, being focused uniquely on survival; or it may have ceased to exist. But, if there are historians, they will not devote much time to the Punic Wars, or the Crusades, or Waterloo, but will instead concentrate on this twentieth century, and, more specifically, the decade that has just begun.
It will be a unique decade. In the space of a few years, almost overnight, we’ve realized that something conclusive has happened, or is about to happen: like someone who, navigating on a calm river, suddenly observes that the banks are retreating backward, the water teeming with whirlpools, and hears the thunder of waterfalls close by. There is no indicator that is not soaring upward: the world population, DDT in the fat of penguins, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, lead in our veins. While half the world is still waiting for the benefits of technology, the other half has touched lunar soil and is poisoned by the garbage that has accumulated in a decade: but there is no choice, we cannot return to Arcadia; by technology, and by that alone, can the planetary order be restored, the “flaw of form” repaired. Before the urgency of these problems, the political questions pale. This is the climate in which, literally or in spirit, the twenty stories by Primo Levi presented here take place. Beyond the veil of irony, it is close to that of his preceding books: we breathe an air of sadness but not hopelessness, of distrust in the present and, at the same time, considerable confidence in the future: man the maker of himself, inventor and unique possessor of reason, will be able to stop in time on his path “heading west.”
At an early point, the book was to be entitled Anti-Humanism. In a television interview in the spring of 1971, Levi explained the ultimate title, Flaw of Form, saying that, by using that bureaucratic formula, he wanted to allude to an “error of substance”: to the failure, serious but perhaps not irremediable, of technology as a factor in progress. And he was careful to emphasize the importance of the science fiction model—visionary inventions based on technical-scientific knowledge—which turned out to be particularly well suited to confronting current sociological problems. Levi declared that he was opposed to despair, which “is surely irrational: it resolves no problems, creates new ones, and is by its nature painful.” He continued, rather, to claim a “faith that I would call biological, that saturates every living fiber,” but at the same time he said of the language of his new stories that it is “a language that I feel is ironic, and that I perceive as strident, awry, spiteful, deliberately anti-poetic.”
Unlike Natural Histories, published under a pseudonym, Flaw of Form came out with the author’s name on the cover. It’s an unusually unified work. Only one of the stories, “Observed from a Distance,” had appeared earlier, in an anthology, before being collected in the volume. Among the literary models for these stories Levi mentions Samuel Butler, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells, and he dedicates to Calvino the story “His Own Maker”; Levi had in fact expressed the intention of asking Calvino whether he could borrow the protagonist of Cosmicomics, the petulant Ofwfq, to play a role in one of the stories. Although he gave up this idea, the story he alludes to is “His Own Maker,” which, like the stories in Cosmicomics, has the structure of a monologue.
Twelve of the stories in Flaw of Form appeared in English in The Sixth Day and Other Tales, published by Summit Books in 1990, and two others in A Tranquil Star (Norton, 2007), while six stories appear here in English for the first time: “Protection,” “The Synthetics,” “Vilmy,” “Creative Work,” “Our Fine Specifications,” and “Written on the Forehead.”
THE PERIODIC TABLE
“I tried to write some stories about my life in the factory. They’re the worst. No, I’ll never succeed,” Levi made this gloomy confession to an interviewer in 1966, immediately adding, “It’s the other world that is realized in my books. The world that includes my experiences as a young man, the racial discrimination, my attempts not to be different from my schoolmates, and then my discovery of the Jewish tradition (Judaism as opposed to fascism, as freedom is to terror, because I also discovered that many principles of freedom are found within the substance of the purest Jewish tradition), and the partisan war, and, finally, the Lager.”
This passage contains allusions to many of the stories in the future Periodic Table, starting with the stories about the factory. The harsh judgment was justified. Shortly after If This Is a Man came out, Levi published two stories about work, “Maria and the Circle,” in L’Italia Socialista (September 19, 1948), and “Night Shift,” in the Piedmontese edition of L’Unità (August 31, 1950), and although they became chapters of The Periodic Table—with the titles “Titanium” and “Sulfur”—he was aware of their weakness. He had always harbored the ambition of writing stories based on his profession, but he lacked the right narrative key, as well as a structure that would provide some consistency. We know that in 1961 Italo Calvino had encouraged him to pursue his particular science fiction, but the rest had left Calvino puzzled: “There are fewer possibilities for the other kind of story. The ones about the Lager are fragments of If This Is a Man, which, detached from a broader narrative, have the limitations of the sketch. And the attempt at a Conradian mountain-climbing epic appeals to all my sympathies, but for now it remains an intention.” The “Conradian attempt,” titled “Bear Meat,” was published in 1961, in the August 29 issue of the weekly Il Mondo. It’s a first draft of the chapter “Iron,” less compact than the final version (it can be found in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980). Calvino’s mention of other “stories about the Lager” leads us to hypothesize that Levi had already showed him what became the chapter “Cerium,” whose date of composition is unknown. Speaking about “Cerium” to Turinese readers in 1975, Levi implicitly agreed with Calvino: “I did not put that episode in If This Is a Man so as not to contaminate it, because the episode is cheerful. Cheerful . . . well, the background isn’t cheerful, but it’s the story of a victory, of an audacious and risky undertaking, carried to its conclusion. And so it would have been jarring within that other context, which is, rather, a context of defeats, a context of tragedies, a dramatic context. I didn’t exactly reason it out like that; but, intuitively, it seemed to me that it didn’t belong in that other place.”
When Levi finally had the idea of linking to chemical elements some stories he had already written and other stories that he had wanted to write for a long time, he found the context that had been missing: the periodic table not only was an organizing principle but gave a new coloring to each narrative component. In the 1966 interview cited above, it’s not hard to recognize “Argon,” “Zinc,” “Gold,” and “Potassium” (none of which had been published in the fifties or sixties), plus the already mentioned “Iron.” We can deduce that at the time Levi didn’t think these stories could be part of a cycle that also included the stories about work: they were of a different type, autobiographical tales devoted to his upbringing, to his Jewish identity, to the struggle against fascism. The idea that turned out to be crucial for the new book had therefore two components: first, the bond between each story and a particular chemical element; second, the welding together of Levi’s two inspirations, private, autobiographical memory (which produced successful texts) and the experience of work (which until 1966 had produced disappointing texts).
In the space of barely two years, the idea of The Periodic Table proved to be effective: in October 1968, Levi confided to another interviewer, his Croatian translator Mladen Machiedo, that he had written “Hydrogen” and a first draft of “Carbon.” Among his stories, “Carbon” had the longest journey: from “Gold” we learn that the idea of writing it preceded his deportation to the Lager. And the testimony of Pikolo/Jean Samuel reveals that in Auschwitz Levi told him two stories: the first and better known, Dante’s canto of Ulysses, is a literary episode around which Levi constructed one of the finest chapters of If This Is a Man. The second was, in fact, the “story of a carbon atom.” Levi mentioned it frequently to Samuel, and the scientific idea made a stronger impression on him than did the lines of the Inferno.
Levi wrote “Carbon” in 1970 and published it in 1972 (Uomini e Libri, October) in a nearly final form, from which we can assume that the structure of the book had by then been established. Two years later, on November 12, 1974, Calvino (who, as an Einaudi consultant and by explicit wish of the author, was always the first to read Levi’s books) wrote from Paris, where he was living:
Dear Primo,
I’ve looked at the new draft of The Periodic Table and it seems to me it’s going very well. I read the new chapters “Iron,” “Phosphorus,” “Nitrogen,” “Uranium,” “Silver,” “Vanadium,” which enrich the “chemical” (and moral) autobiography.
Putting “Carbon” at the end, and having it symbolize the experience of the writer, is a good idea. And since the whole structure of the book is now stronger, the heterogeneity of “Lead” and “Mercury” (in italics) doesn’t disturb the whole.
As for “Argon,” I still have reservations about the fact that it’s at the beginning (in spite of its value as a prologue), because it’s the only chapter in which the chemical element is metaphorical; here, too, the structural difference wouldn’t be so obvious if the chapter were in the middle of the book. (For example: return from deportation; finding that the family has survived; reflection on the meaning of family continuity). But if the chapters are in order by atomic weight (with exceptions, I think) I won’t say anything else.
In short, in my view the book now exists, and I’m very pleased about it.
The letter tells us which stories were written last. Calvino, who names them in the same order in which they appear in the final table of contents, was also partly right about “Argon,” a story that is different from all the others in the book. Levi told a young student that he had started writing it in 1946, that is, at the same time as If This Is a Man. An early version of it, at least, must date from that time; others followed, in 1970 and 1973. Also in 1946, Levi had written the short poem “Ostjuden,” in which he paid homage to the Jews of Eastern Europe, whom he had met for the first time in the Lager. The two texts, “Argon” and “Ostjuden,” set up a sort of ethical and ethnic pairing.
It was Calvino who called The Periodic Table the most “Primo-Levian” of Primo Levi’s books. Levi, introducing “Carbon” in Uomini e Libri, explained that the future book had its origin in the same vein as Natural Histories and Flaw of Form: he thus emphasized the fantasy inspiration and the scientific content. Today, owing to the strength of the autobiographical elements, the reader tends to compare it, rather, to If This Is a Man and The Truce. (The chapters “Lead” and “Mercury” are exceptions, but they are historical fantasies, explicitly presented as youthful efforts; and so they, too, count as autobiography rather than as literary invention.) Perhaps it would be more balanced to conclude that The Periodic Table is “Primo-Levian” because, in twenty-one short pieces distributed along a chronological arc of more than thirty years, it gives expression to all of Levi’s talents as a writer. And yet, until a fairly late phase of its construction, Levi had an image of the book that was markedly different from the final result.
The Periodic Table was published by Einaudi in April 1975. It received excellent reviews (including one by Natalia Ginzburg, the author of Family Sayings, who praised in particular the linguistic and family epic “Argon”) and won the Prato Prize. In 2006, a contest sponsored by The Guardian awarded it a prize as “the best science book ever written.”
The Periodic Table was first published in the United States at the end of 1984 by Schocken Books.
THE WRENCH
When Primo Levi published The Wrench, in 1978, he had been writing full-time for more than a year, having given up his job as a chemist in September 1977. The idea for the book had come to him, however, during a journey connected to his work: in the fall of 1972 he had spent several weeks in the USSR, in Tolyatti, where a Fiat plant was under construction, an immense city-factory rising out of nothing in the middle of a forest. In The Wrench he pays homage to Russia, stating, “My curious destiny had determined that my life’s most decisive moments would occur in that great and strange country.”
The Wrench was published by Einaudi in December 1978; two chapters, the first and the eleventh, had appeared independently in La Stampa (on March 13 and June 12, 1977, respectively). The book’s jacket copy, by Italo Calvino (not signed), reveals its significance with respect not only to Levi’s work but to Italian literature and Italian society at the time:
In recent years a great number of Italians have been spending varying periods of time in remote, exotic countries as skilled workers on projects undertaken by Italian companies. It’s a new type of experience that is showing up in our fiction.
The Wrench recounts the adventures of a rigger of cranes, metal structures, suspension bridges, oil-drilling installations: a highly trained technician, who is called on to carry out extremely difficult projects on all continents, a superspecialized worker who spends his life with contracts and international commissions like a great orchestra conductor, and whose work takes place amid flooding rivers in India, Alaskan ice, African forests, Russian tundras. Only Primo Levi could represent this character completely in his two principal guises: the man of impassioned professional expertise for whom every adventure is also the story of a technical performance, a battle (won or lost) with materials and environmental conditions; and the man who leads the picaresque life of the world traveler, confronting every adventure with an amused and ironic attitude, with a foretaste of the pleasure of telling it to his fellow countrymen, of transforming it into dialect and technical language.
For it is always his voice that we hear in these pages: the voice of the rigger Faussone, a Piedmontese whose dialect is enriched by an inexhaustible store of invented jargon and professional metaphors, which Primo Levi records and transcribes and Italianizes just enough. A dual passion for careful work and vivid language animates the book, thanks to which the boldest technology and a confidence in moving through the world come to us through the lighthearted, unpretentious voice of this character with tenacious local roots, who never retreats in the face of the new and unusual but filters every experience through a vernacular, traditional common sense. (Behind him is an old and formal Turin of which Levi gives us a glimpse when he visits the aunts, but also a dynasty of worker-artisans who migrated from the countryside to the city on the waves of our industrial revolution.) And yet this clever, talkative Faussone is also a man who pursues an ideal with obsessive rigor, a stylist with a clear, sharp morality, an inhabitant of the air, up on the pylons that he is building and checking with his “wrench”; a man always ready to enjoy the pleasures of the world below but only after he’s sure that the cables will support the tension of their loads.
Primo Levi, who with The Periodic Table gave us a book that is not only a model but rare in our literature, a book about the moral education of a man of our era, in this new volume offers an image (happily “outmoded” with respect to the current mood) of that almost unknown civilization of expertise that still exists in Italy, and in which the ancient nobility of the artisan who makes things with his own hands is revived. And the “allegro” of his narration has been familiar to us ever since the journey described in The Truce, which was also picaresque but against a background of tragic devastation.
The chemist Primo Levi enters the book as well, conversing with his fellow Turinese Faussone, whom he encounters in far-off places, and comparing the experiences of the rigger of cranes with his own, in his two professions, as a “rigger of molecules” and as a “rigger of stories.”
The Wrench is better described as a cycle of stories rather than as a novel; Levi noted that the episode of the “sick duct” was entirely autobiographical, while only one story, about the monkey, was completely invented. For the language, he noted among his models Pier Paolo Pasolini, in particular the two novels The Ragazzi (1955) and A Violent Life (1959), both about the world of the Roman underclass.
In The Wrench, Levi filtered the Piedmontese dialect through the Italian language: the result is an Italian conceived in dialect. The syntax, the grammar, and many words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) of the dialect survive, along with a large repertoire of metaphors and idioms. To all this Levi adds humor and technical precision, his particular contribution. In an interview he explained that he had written The Wrench in “a demotic language, perhaps corrupted, which is the Italian of the factories. I had fun writing Faussone’s language: I’ve never written with such ease. . . . It would be very difficult to tell his stories in Italian. There are technical terms, which no one uses, or even understands. Man the maker speaks the language of men who are makers.” When, in 1983, Einaudi published an edition of the book for middle-school students, the linguist Gian Luigi Beccaria was brought in to provide notes.
The publication of The Wrench coincided with a dark phase of Italian history. A few months earlier, the terrorists of the Red Brigades had kidnapped and killed Aldo Moro, the leader of the Christian Democratic Party, which had headed every government since the war. The student protests against the political system were at their peak, as were the union struggles. Work, particularly factory work, was in those years considered a humiliating labor; that was why Calvino had written in the jacket copy that The Wrench was “happily ‘outmoded’ with respect to the current mood.” Levi in fact hinted at the possibility of freedom through work, if it was performed with passion and skill. He was also (in a book in which the Lager is absent) having a form of revenge against the sign Arbeit macht frei over the entrance to Auschwitz: Levi tells a story of work that really does make a man free.
The Wrench was very successful with the public and the critics (in 1979 it won the Bergamo Prize and the Strega), but it also stirred discussions and protests; some papers on the left and representatives of the working and union worlds judged it to be conservative. On January 14, 1979, La Stampa organized a debate on the book, with some of the most important sociologists and union officials in Italy participating.
The book appeared in English for the first time in 1986, under the title The Monkey’s Wrench, published by Summit Books.
UNCOLLECTED STORIES AND ESSAYS: 1949–1980
The majority of the texts that Primo Levi wrote between the late forties and the late seventies, and which at his death had not been published in collections, look like a swarm of meteorites out of the head of the comet If This Is a Man. Even in a story like “The End of Marinese” (1949), about the Resistance—the partisan struggle that Levi took part in for only a few weeks—the role of the witness has a decisive importance. And it should be remembered that the first ten or fifteen years after the war were, for the former deportees, a desert: in Italy public memory of the war was fading, political life was slipping into a moral swamp in which the former Fascists swam confidently, and the specific horror of the extermination of the Jews held no interest for historians or for civilian society. Thus, in the fifties, a tone of grim disappointment dominates, as in the essay “The Deported. Anniversary” (1955), yet we also find unfailingly two enduring qualities of Levi the witness: the persistence of his commitment and the precision of his gaze, his moral judgment.
Gradually, during the sixties and seventies, the themes that Levi took up became more varied. Newspapers and periodicals continued to approach him about writing on subjects related to the Lager, to the Germany of yesterday and today, to totalitarianisms other than that of the Nazis, to the violence spreading through Italian society and in Europe (the terrorism of the Red Brigades, new episodes of anti-Semitism, the first incursions of the Holocaust deniers), while publishers asked him for prefaces to works of littérature concentrationnaire—concentration-camp literature—and in fact in some cases it was Levi himself who proposed that a book be published. Notable among these initiatives was the Italian translation, from Dutch, of The Night of the Girondists (1976), by Jacques Presser, in whose foreword we can glimpse for the first time the notion of the “gray zone,” the subject of the second chapter of The Drowned and the Saved. Two years later, in 1978, Levi wrote an obituary for Jean Améry, who in the same book becomes a posthumous interlocutor, both empathetic and polemical. Finally, in this period, Levi gave a talk that, starting with its paradoxical title—“The Non-Writer Writer”—should be placed among his most illuminating self-definitions.
Meanwhile, Levi’s books began to travel in geographic space (German editions of If This Is a Man, 1961 and 1979, both with prefaces by him), in the temporal space between generations (the school edition of The Truce, 1965), and between different literary genres (a dramatic version of If This Is a Man, 1966). And Levi himself traveled; in 1968 he published his impressions of Israel. Starting in the midseventies, his presence in the pages of the daily newspapers became more regular. When he decided to put together a collection of his essays, Other People’s Trades (1985), he chose to document his passion for an encyclopedic knowledge, and he left out the texts—many written on commission—having to do with Auschwitz and its legacy. Thus, this first part of the uncollected essays might compose a new work of Levi’s on the Lager, a companion to the greater testimonies—from If This Is a Man to The Truce and the autobiographical chapters of The Periodic Table. This new book might even be titled, emulating an editorial that appeared on the front page of La Stampa in 1975, This Was Auschwitz. The last essay here is the text that Levi wrote in 1978 for the Italian Memorial at Auschwitz. It’s a succinct and powerful reconstruction of the depraved political acts that made possible fascism, then Nazism, and finally the Shoah. Here at last it can be read and reflected on in its entirety: in 1980, the project for the memorial was modified and only the concluding paragraph was posted at Auschwitz.
The pages of this section are translated and collected for the first time in English as a unit, based on the Italian edition of Levi’s complete works, Opere, published in 1997 by Einaudi and edited by Marco Belpoliti.
LILITH AND OTHER STORIES
Lilith and Other Stories was published by Einaudi in October 1981. Primo Levi wrote the concise jacket copy himself: “These stories, written between 1975 and 1981, have a variety of subjects and tones. I tried to sort them, and though I sometimes had to force the terms, I’ve made them into a first group that takes up themes from If This Is a Man and The Truce; a second that continues Natural Histories and Flaw of Form; and a third in which the characters are, to a certain degree, flesh and blood. I hope that each story properly fulfills its task, which is simply to condense into a few words, and convey to the reader, a precise memory, a state of mind, or even just a thought. Some are happy and some sad, because our days are happy and sad. As far as I know, there are no vital messages or revelations in them; if the reader finds them, it’s of his own goodwill.”
There are thirty-six stories: twelve in the first section, “Present Perfect”; fifteen in the second, “Future Anterior”; and nine in the last, “Present Indicative,” whose title partly refutes the intention not to send messages, since “indicative,” in this context, could also have the sense of “pointing to” something. Twenty-nine of the stories appeared in La Stampa or its cultural supplement Tuttolibri, eighteen of them—half the book—in the years 1977–78. The most recent (August 23, 1981) was “The Soul and the Engineers,” but Levi had subjected the two earliest stories to intense revisions. “Capaneus,” the story that opens Lilith, came out in Il Ponte in November 1959. That first version was saturated with literary references, including the title. Rappoport, the story’s protagonist, is compared to Dante’s Capaneus (Inferno XIV:63–72), the proudest and most hostile to God among the seven kings who attacked Thebes.
But in the few pages of the first draft of “Capaneus” there were also quotations from François Villon, Rabelais, and the Edda, and even a brief burlesque in Latin, confidently performed by Rappoport. In the new version that appeared in La Stampa on May 28, 1978, all this had disappeared, along with the first version’s singular opening: “Me, you know me. It may be that at that time and in that place, in those zebra-striped rags, with my beard rougher than usual and my head shorn, I looked very different from the way I do today; but it’s not important, the essence hasn’t changed.” Thus, before describing Rappoport, the narrator Primo Levi introduced himself, a man proud of no longer being the Auschwitz deportee (Levi was sending readers back to If This Is a Man, which in 1959 was the only book he had published) but also of having been that deportee without losing his dignity and his faculty of attention. Those initial words, which in Italian sound abrupt, colloquial, and proud—“Me, you know me”—recall another book very dear to Levi, Moby-Dick, and its opening: “Call me Ishmael.”
“A Disciple,” originally published in 1961 in Secondo Risorgimento, an anthology intended to commemorate both the Resistance and the centennial of the unification of Italy, was also rewritten, appearing in La Stampa on June 1, 1975. When, that year, Levi gave Calvino a group of stories to read (see the section on Natural Histories, above), “Capaneus” and “A Disciple” were undoubtedly among them. Calvino told him sincerely that the stories about the Lager were merely “fragments of If This Is a Man, which, detached from a broader narrative, have the limitations of the sketch.” Levi must have thought he was right, since he rewrote them; and later, signing a copy of Lilith for a friend, he described the stories altogether as “slightly faded.”
Even though “Tantalum” (Il Mondo, December 27, 1973), the third story in Lilith chronologically, has the name of a chemical element as its title, it wasn’t put into The Periodic Table, because it was really a science fiction tale that strayed humorously toward the supernatural, and would have been out of place in a work anchored in reality, autobiography, and factory work.
Seven stories did not appear in La Stampa; besides “Tantalum,” they are “Gladiators,” which appeared in L’Automobile (June 15, 1976); “Decoding,” in Prospettive Settanta (July–September 1976); “The Sorcerers,” “Children of the Wind,” and “Weekend,” in Notiziario della Banca Popolare di Sondrio (April and December 1977; August 1978); and “The Return of Lorenzo” (see below). But it would be worthwhile to look more closely at the last two stories of “Present Perfect,” a section whose twelve pieces are all moral portraits of characters—a type of writing at which Levi excelled.
“The Return of Lorenzo” is the only story that was published directly in Lilith, as if Levi felt ashamed to reveal in a newspaper the end of the man who had saved his life in Auschwitz. Lorenzo Perrone, upon returning to Italy, became voluntarily one of the “drowned,” letting himself die. This and the story that follows are in fact the only ones about the “drowned” in the whole collection. And they are symmetrical, because, unlike Lorenzo, Chaim Rumkowski, the “king of the Jews,” did everything possible to save himself, even if it was harmful to his people.
“The King of the Jews,” which appeared in La Stampa on November 20, 1977, is certainly the most important story in Lilith and is a first draft of what became the final episode of the chapter “The Gray Zone” in The Drowned and the Saved. Levi had for some years wanted to tell the story of Rumkowski. He spoke of it in a letter of March 9, 1975, to his cousin Anna Yona, who lived in the United States. The scholar Martina Mengoni has traced the sources of Levi’s interest. Levi read an article by Solomon F. Bloom, “Dictator of the Lodz Ghetto: The Strange History of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski” (it appeared in English in the December 1948 issue of Commentary); it was the first detailed account of the elder of L’viv (as Lodz is called in the text), and he drew on various passages from it in his own text. But he also knew The Rats, a collection of stories by the Polish Jewish writer Adolf Rudnicki, translated into Italian in 1967; one of the stories, “The Merchant of Lodz,” painted a historical-psychological portrait of Rumkowski. Finally, in the seventies, thanks perhaps to Anna Yona, Levi got in touch with the writer Leslie Epstein, who in 1979 published King of the Jews, a novel whose protagonist is Rumkowski.
“The King of the Jews” suggests that the twelve portraits of “Present Perfect” in Lilith are in reality pointing toward the future: toward the complexity of Auschwitz, toward the subtlety of the moral attention necessary to describe it with precision, toward the new concept of the “gray zone,” which Levi was elaborating in those years and which was to mark a turning point in the international debate on the Shoah.
This is the first full version of Lilith in English, conforming to the original structure of the Italian volume. However, the twelve stories in the section “Present Perfect” were published in 1986 (with the addition of three stories of the same type written after 1981, and the poem “The Survivor”) under the title Moments of Reprieve, by Summit Books; Levi wrote a preface for it, which appears here in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987. Four stories in “Future Anterior” (“A Tranquil Star,” “Gladiators,” “The Fugitive,” and “Tantalum”) and two in “Present Indicative” (“The Sorcerers” and “The Girl in the Book”) appeared in 2007 in A Tranquil Star, published by Norton. The eighteen other pieces are here collected in English for the first time.
IF NOT NOW, WHEN?
Right after leaving Munich, near the end of the journey described in The Truce, Primo Levi was surprised to observe that the train he was traveling on now had sixty-one cars rather than sixty. At the end was “a new car, crowded with young Jews, boys and girls from all the countries of Eastern Europe. None of them looked more than twenty, but they were extremely determined and confident: they were young Zionists, they were going to Israel, taking any route they could and by any means they could.” Levi admired them: “They felt immensely free and strong, masters of the world and of their destiny.”
This was the initial inspiration for If Not Now, When?, which was published by Einaudi in April 1982. Levi imagined the adventures that brought the youths to that point, and wrote his first and only book of pure invention: a “Western” about the Jewish partisan war, as he himself called it. He revealed a second inspiration in the Author’s Note that ends the novel: sometime in the midsixties, a friend, Emilio Vita Finzi, had told him about groups of young Jewish partisans whom he had helped in Milan, just after the war, on their aliyah to the Promised Land. In the Author’s Note Levi also explains the origin of the title, and specifies which characters and episodes are real and which are made up. This attitude of caution and responsibility is striking, and is motivated by the role of writer-witness he assumed whenever he spoke about historical events or on subjects related to Judaism. For the same reason, he concludes the Author’s Note by sheltering his inventions in a library of readings, thanks to which he was able to document the anti-Nazi struggle in Eastern Europe, Jewish traditions, the Yiddish world: peoples, historical events, rituals, languages—all of which were remote from the sensibility of Italian Jews and even further from the culture of non-Jewish Italian readers. Thus, before he started writing, he took some time to study the history books and even to learn Yiddish as well as he could: “eight months of preparation and total immersion.” At the end of the book Levi notes the period of the writing precisely, “Turin, January 11–December 20, 1981,” saying, in an interview, “It seemed to me appropriate to indicate what was for me a happy year.”
Levi knew that he was taking a risk with this first novel. He had written an introductory page, but at the last minute he eliminated it. Here is a passage: “The actors are ready, or almost. Their outlines are still veiled, they have not yet emerged from the blur, from the universe of things that don’t yet exist but wish to exist. They move about weakly, gray on a gray background; they speak softly, or maybe they don’t even speak but gurgle and wail, like newborn puppies: they wait, hope, and fear to make their entrance.” Levi must have felt that this preface was ingenuous, and in the end he launched into the narrative without preamble. He also discovered that the characters of a novel, endowed with a nature and a life of their own, at a certain moment decide independently what to do and where to go: “I had an outline, which I then ignored completely. I wanted to make [the characters] into Racinian heroes, whereas they preferred common, average roles, made up more of hard work than of memorable deeds.”
Once again, Levi delivered to Italian readers—transformed into language—a world they didn’t know: he had begun in 1947, with If This Is a Man, and continued with the strange science fiction of Natural Histories, the Jewish-Piedmontese dialect of “Argon,” in The Periodic Table, and, finally, the technological and dialect language of Faussone, in The Wrench. Now, thanks to him, Yiddish culture entered Italian literature, translated into Italy’s native language. In this novel Levi reflected on history, on its sufferings, and on the moral stature of ordinary men. His desire for epic and for a richness of representation probably owes something to the great example of Elsa Morante’s History (1974); also, Morante, in a 1965 essay, “For or Against the Atomic Bomb,” discussed the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909–1944), who, like Levi’s Martin Fontasch, composed his last lines a few moments before he was killed by the Nazis.
Levi drew on the painting of Marc Chagall for If Not Now, When? but he also claimed a great number of literary sources. He confessed that he had taken some landscapes from Turgenev and from Tolstoy, while the violent impulse of his partisans can be traced to the stories of Isaac Babel anthologized in The Search for Roots. The opening episode—in which the hours are marked by gunshots because the belltower has been destroyed—is taken from Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, but it’s also (very likely) an homage to the painter-writer who shared his name, Carlo Levi, and his political novel The Clock, of 1950. Most important, Levi declared, “among the great works that I kept before me while I was writing this book was the Bible. It was useful to me as secular reading.”
Levi wanted to be the first Italian writer of Yiddish inspiration. The experiment was well received in his homeland: If Not Now, When? sold 110,000 copies the first year and won two big literary prizes, the Viareggio and (for the second time, after The Truce) the Campiello. The novel was less successful in the United States, where authentically Yiddish literature was well-known and where his linguistic ideas seemed less original.
Although Levi could not have wanted or predicted it, If Not Now, When? came out at a bitter historical moment, shortly before the Israeli Army invaded Lebanon. He and other intellectuals of Jewish origin distanced themselves from those acts of war. Levi went so far as to call for the government of Menachem Begin to resign. On July 11, 1982, advertisements for the novel came out with the headline “Tyre Sidon Beirut, June–July 1982,” referring to the cities where the bloodiest clashes between Israelis and Palestinians had taken place. A Biblical quotation was addressed to each of the two peoples. To Palestine: “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. . . . But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” To Israel: “Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury. . . . How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace!” The title of the novel thus became a troubled question addressed to both sides in the conflict.
If Not Now, When? was published in English for the first time in 1985 by Summit Books.
COLLECTED POEMS
Primo Levi’s first literary publication was a poem, “Buna Lager,” which appeared on June 22, 1946, in L’Amico del Popolo, a Communist weekly published in Vercelli, outside Turin, and edited by his friend Silvio Ortona. Nine months later, the paper published the first of five episodes of If This Is a Man. Levi dates “Buna Lager” (later titled simply “Buna”) December 28, 1945; in the same month, he wrote “The Story of Ten Days,” the final chapter of If This Is a Man, which is presented in the form of a diary. As we know, in that chapter he describes a Lager abandoned by the Germans: Auschwitz in ruins. “Buna Lager,” on the contrary, describes an extermination factory that is working at full capacity, and it does so in hammering lines, full of assonances and alliterations, with pressured, mangled syllables.
Only recently did the publication of “Buna Lager” emerge, indicating that he initially shaped in verse the Lager that he had just begun to depict in prose. Between the last days of 1945 and the first weeks of 1946, Levi wrote a dozen poems, which he called (in the chapter “Chromium,” of The Periodic Table) “short” and “bloody.” Those poems, written before most of If This Is a Man, have a voice very different from that of his great first work. They are the book’s introductory chords, high-pitched and strident compared with the prose that follows.
On May 31, 1947, the fifth and last episode of If This Is a Man to appear in L’Amico del Popolo was accompanied by a poem, then titled “Psalm”: the book’s future epigraph. Levi retitled the poem “Shemà” when, in August 1964, he published it again, in the second issue of Sigma, a university journal in Turin; and it’s the title by which it is known today. Both “Psalm” and “Shemà” are religious titles, both from the Old Testament. “Shemà” has a clearer Jewish connotation, as the first word of the fundamental prayer of Judaism: “Shemà Israel,” Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one alone. The first lines Levi wrote in 1945–46 are presented as verses of a sacred text, and, as Alberto Cavaglion, in his commentary on If This Is a Man, writes, in “Shemà” Levi lets us hear the “voice of God” evoked at the end of the chapter “The Canto of Ulysses.” And yet Levi himself called the poem his “blasphemous interpretation of a Yiddish prayer.” That epigraph poem, a solemn, angry voice of command, is an atheist prayer, a counter-prayer that affirms the uniqueness of the extermination rather than the uniqueness of God, and scourges the indifference of the reader-spectator.
“Buna” was not Levi’s first poem; as a boy he wrote singsongs, satiric verses about his friends, humorous rhymes with scientific subjects. But there is also the poem, dated February 1943 and titled “Crescenzago,” that Levi always considered his first successful poem; in fact it opened all three collections of poetry that he published. If the texts of 1945–46 (and many poems written in the following years as well) contain the kernel of stories and even essays that Levi later wrote in prose, “Crescenzago” secretly preserves other chromosomes of the future writer. The poem, composed of six stanzas of six lines each, is based on a simple yet intelligent mathematical game: 6 × 6 = 36, a perfect square, in which 2 and 3 (an even and an odd) are prime factors, 22 × 32. Deliberately Pythagorean, the numerological structure projects into poetry the structural formulas of organic chemistry: the double bonds that, constructed in the form of regular hexagons, branch out from the hydroxyl groups and the carbon atoms.
Already during the war years and the period of semi-clandestine life under the racial laws, the young chemist had confided to his friends that he would like to write the story of a carbon atom. Not until 1970 did he actually write “Carbon,” but it contains a passage about hexagonal structures, the molecular chains into which the carbon atoms are inserted as a result of the synthesis of chlorophyll. And in February 1943, long before writing “Carbon,” Levi implicitly expressed his desire to do so by arithmetical means in the thirty-six lines of “Crescenzago.” He was already planning his periodic table.
Yet the chemical, structural, and mathematical game wasn’t the only one Levi played in “Crescenzago.” He was manipulating words and sounds and was aware of it. The twenty-three-year-old author was an agile, rhythmical poet, cheerful, but with a tinge of melancholy: “A Crescenzago ci sta una finestra, / E dietro una ragazza si scolora. / Ha sempre l’ago e il filo nella destra. / Cuce e rammenda e guarda sempre l’ora, / E quando suona l’ora dell’uscita, / Sospira e piange, e questa è la sua vita.” (In Crescenzago there’s a window, / And at it stands a girl who’s going pale. / She always holds her needle and her thread, / She sews and mends and always eyes the clock. / And when the whistle blows at the day’s end / She sighs and weeps; this is her life.)
In the filigree of these lines an Italian reader can recognize Leopardi (the Silvia of the Canti), Guido Gozzano (the Piedmontese seamstresses of “The Colloquies”), and the sorrows of Giovanni Pascoli. But the stanza begins with a parodic line, which Levi has skillfully stolen from a popular and prestigious art form, the classic Neapolitan song. It’s a musical passage known all over the world: “A Marechiare ce sta na fenesta” (1891), words by Salvatore Di Giacomo, music by Francesco Paolo Tosti.
Shortly after If This Is a Man came out, Levi tried twice—without success—to publish some of his poems: in 1948 in the monthly Il Ponte, in Florence, and in 1949 in the influential international journal Botteghe Oscure, as documented by a correspondence with Giorgio Bassani, its editor in chief. Before the fifties, Levi had written no more than fifteen poems altogether, among them “Get Up,” which became the epigraph for The Truce. One remarkable poem is “Epitaph,” dated 1952, which evokes an episode of violence among comrades in the partisan struggle. Levi was, with Beppe Fenoglio and Cesare Pavese, among the first writers who had the courage to confront, early on, that ungrateful subject; he devoted a powerful passage to it in the chapter “Gold,” in The Periodic Table. “Epitaph” and “Shemà” open the group of five poems that Levi published in Sigma in 1964; the other three are “Singing,” “Avigliana,” and “Crescenzago.”
Six years passed before Levi decided to collect his works in verse. In December 1970, he published a small volume, in a printing of just three hundred copies, without a title or the name of the author. The cover was cardboard, the twenty-three poems were typed on a typewriter. (Seventeen of them were previously unpublished; the last was “Lilith.”) In this completely anonymous object, Levi’s imprint is recognizable in that each poem is accompanied by a date—a habit not widespread among lyric poets. Since the poems are in chronological order, the book was like an intimate diary in which the “uncertain hour” of each poem was fixed with precision: Levi was a writer who had faith in uncertainty but sought exactness.
Five years later, Levi’s poems were brought out by a small, prestigious publisher, Vanni Scheiwiller, in Milan, who, starting in the thirties, with his All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro editions, had published such writers as Montale, Quasimodo, Ungaretti, Auden, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Cummings, Seferis, Guillén, Michaux, and Benn. The elegant plaquette, in fifteen hundred numbered copies and this time with Levi’s name on the cover, included twenty-seven poems (the twenty-three of the earlier collection plus four that were previously unpublished); the date of the printing was April 25, 1975, the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war in Italy. The last two poems were “The Dark Stars” and “Farewell,” and the title, L’osteria di Brema (The Beer Hall in Bremen), came from the poem “Arrival,” a translation-imitation of a lyric from the Buch der Lieder of Heinrich Heine.
“In the Beginning,” dated August 13, 1970, is one of the four new poems in The Beer Hall in Bremen. It ends, just like the story “Carbon,” with a “hand that writes”: the hand of Primo Levi. It’s a link between different kinds of writing but it’s also an announcement, because, starting in the second half of the seventies, Levi wrote poetry much more consistently. In 1976 and 1977, he published in Tuttolibri translations from Heine and from an anonymous Scotsman of the seventeenth century, and in the summer of 1978 his poems began appearing in the paper itself: the first, on July 28, was “Huayna Capac.” Of the thirty-six poems that Levi published between 1978 and 1984, thirty-four appeared in La Stampa; the exceptions were “Annunciation” (in L’Almanacco dell’Arciere, 1980) and “2000”(in a volume titled Vent’anni al Duemila; Twenty Years Until 2000).
Levi’s publisher, Einaudi, wasn’t interested in Levi as a poet, but his collected poems easily found a different home, with Garzanti, in Milan. The book’s title, Ad ora incerta (At an Uncertain Hour), was, significantly, drawn from Coleridge’s ballad of witness, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It came out in October 1984 and included sixty-three poems and ten translations. Previously unpublished were seven of the translations and three poems of a private nature, two of them dedicated to his wife, Lucia (“February 11, 1946” and “July 12, 1980”), and one with a Jewish-religious inspiration (“Passover”). On the other hand, Levi did not include in the book three poems that had already appeared in La Stampa: “To the Muse” (September 5, 1982), “Casa Galvani” (May 3, 1984), and “The Decathlete” (September 7, 1984). In this volume, they open the section “Other Poems.” Levi wrote jacket copy for At an Uncertain Hour that he signed with the initials P.L., and which appears at the start of the poems in Opere, and here.
In 1985, At an Uncertain Hour won the Abetone Prize, given by the province of Pistoia, and the national Giosuè Carducci Prize, in Pietrasanta. Ironically, the penultimate poem in the collection, “Pious,” consists of a parodic reversal of Carducci’s famous “Il bove” (“The Ox”), a poem that all Italian children of Levi’s generation learned by heart in elementary school.
In 1976, Menard Press, in London, published an English version of The Beer Hall in Bremen, under the title Shemà: Collected Poems of Primo Levi. In 1988 Faber & Faber published, in both Great Britain and the United States, a Collected Poems that included all the poems of Ad ora incerta except “The Last Epiphany” (a translation, going back to 1960, from the cycle “Dies Irae” of Werner Bergengrün) and “Pious”; obviously it did not include Levi’s translations. The volume ended with “Date Book” (La Stampa, January 2, 1985), which was written after the publication of Ad ora incerta. In the 1992 reprinting of Collected Poems by the same publisher, a section of eighteen “Previously Uncollected Poems” was added, opening with “Gedale’s Song,” from the novel If Not Now, When? For the present edition, Jonathan Galassi has retranslated and annotated all of Levi’s poems.
Thus, Collected Poems fully reflects the original structure of Ad ora incerta, with one significant exception. The latter ends with a group of translations of the following works: the ballad “Sir Patrick Spens”; eight poems from Heine’s Buch der Lieder: “Junge Leiden,” 4 (“Im Traum sah ich ein Männchen, klein und putzig”); “Lyrisches Intermezzo,” 33 (“Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam”); five poems from “Die Heimkehr”: 19 (“Ich trat in jene Hallen”), 20 (“Still ist die Nacht, es ruhen die Gassen”), 54 (“Teurer Freund, du bist verliebt”), 58 (“Zu fragmentarisch ist Welt und Leben!”), and “Donna Clara”; and “Die Nordsee” I, iv, “Die Nacht am Strande”; and “L’Envoi,” also known as “The Long Trail,” from Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads. These have been omitted here, as have the three “Other Poems” (“A Valley,” “The Thaw,” and “To My Friends”) that are part of Stories and Essays, and “Gedale’s Song” from If Not Now, When?
Galassi (who has expressed his indebtedness to his predecessors, Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann) writes:
Levi makes no great claims for his work in verse in the introduction to his collected poems, yet some see his poems as the place where he gave voice to his deepest, least repressed fears and concerns. As one of his biographers, Carole Angier, puts it, Levi’s poetry, which often reflects the clear influence of one of the greatest Italian pessimists, Giacomo Leopardi, “was where his darkness found expression: his sadness and isolation, his anger and fear—everything his moral and rational self suppressed.”
Levi once said that poetry simply came naturally after Ausch-
witz and after the publication of his novel about partisans and resistance fighters, If Not Now, When?, in 1982. Angier suggests that he wrote poems “in his ancient mariner moments, whenever ‘that agony returned’” and he felt the overwhelming need “to tell,” as he puts it in “Get Up.”
The telling came at a significant cost. Angier comments: “To write, he said, was to bare oneself to the world, even in one’s most careful, polished work. How much more must this be so, for him, in poetry . . . which ‘caught him in flagrante,’ which struck him like ‘a rash,’ like ‘an infection’?” Indeed, his friend and biographer Giovanni Tesio asserted that Levi’s collected poems should be paired with The Drowned and the Saved, his late meditation on the meaning of the Nazi exterminations, as representative of the writer’s dark side.
OTHER PEOPLE’S TRADES
Two books bear witness to the fact that, by the mideighties, Levi was considered a legitimate writer, as much by his publisher, Einaudi, as by the general reading public (academic criticism was the last to acknowledge this), and not only as the witness to a tragedy who later published works of fiction.
The first of these books, The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, appeared in 1981. The idea came from Giulio Bollati, the editorial director of Einaudi, who asked certain Einaudi writers (Italo Calvino, Leonardo Sciascia, and Paolo Volponi, in addition to Levi) to draw a map of the books that had shaped them. The project was intended for students, but Levi—who was the only one to complete it, and did so rapidly—delivered a work so personal and so “adult” that Einaudi decided to publish it for the general public.
The second book, Other People’s Trades, was published by Einaudi in February 1985. It is a collection of fifty-one essays, on a broad range of subjects. The two books are, like If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Periodic Table, autobiographical, but in this case they make up an intellectual autobiography. This autobiography includes praise of François Rabelais, of the precision of the language of chemists, and of clear writing, along with an interest in rites and games, in adventure (in an active life as well as in novels or epic poems), in the behavior of animals and the mysteries of the cosmos, and, finally, in the moral choices of human beings.
One theme is noticeably absent from Other People’s Trades: the Lager. Levi did not include in the new book the various writings on the Shoah that he had not yet collected, such as his many reviews of books on the subject. In Other People’s Trades Auschwitz is a sensory memory that appears only in the essay “The Language of Odors.”
Other People’s Trades is a book that originated almost entirely in the pages of newspapers. The oldest piece is the one on Rabelais: it dates to October 7, 1964, when Levi was contributing science fiction stories and literary articles to the Milan daily Il Giorno. Three other essays—on Huxley, Tartarin of Tarascon, and the moon landing—are from the sixties. Forty-three of the essays first appeared in La Stampa between 1969 and January 1985; “Ex-Chemist” came out in the spring of 1980 in a trade paper, Noi Chimici, and three pieces (“Novels Dictated by Crickets,” April 1976; “Why Do We Write?” August 1981; and “Going Back to School,” April 1983) in the house organ of a bank, Notiziario della Banca Popolare di Sondrio.
The essay that opens the book, “My House,” had not been published before. Levi probably wrote it for the occasion, as a last, eccentric autobiography, constructed through the rooms and objects of a life. The “involuntary interruptions” in living in the house he was born in, which he mentions in the first lines of the text, are an ironic allusion to the calamity of the Lager and to his professional travels as a chemist.
It might be said that in the first essays of Other People’s Trades Levi wanted to bear witness to his own prehistory as an essayist and, at the same time, set out the themes that were important to him. Then, from “Leggere la Vita” (August 29, 1979) to the end of the volume, the sequence is almost perfectly chronological. The book’s final essay, “The Eclipse of the Prophets” (July 8, 1984), is a warning, and its tone is more solemn than that of the rest of the book.
Many of the essays in Other People’s Trades touch on several subjects at the same time. The scientific element and the literary citation—often precious and odd—are almost always present, as is the synthesis of a moral. Perhaps the book’s most characteristic piece is “The Squirrel,” an ethical meditation wrapped in an autobiographical tale, whose subject is an animal, and which starts off from the language of the city of Turin. Nineteen of the essays contain autobiographical elements, and in seven Turin appears. Levi’s Jewish roots are visible in only two pieces, but they are among the most memorable: “Ritual and Laughter” and “The Best Merchandise.” He discusses science and technology in eleven essays, work in seven, and chemistry in six. But the fact that in this book Levi prefers to focus on professions that are not his is confirmed by his interest in animals (eleven essays), games (eight), literature (ten) and, especially, language as such, with eighteen essays.
The history of words, linguistic oddities, games connected to verbal expression are the most surprising aspect of Other People’s Trades, and, significantly, the first part of the collection culminates in a stand against “obscure writing,” published in La Stampa on December 11, 1976. The themes and the language of the book confirm Levi’s choice of clear but not simplistic writing, limpid but complex, accessible but precise—writing that is democratic, in every sense of the word.
The first edition of Other People’s Trades in English came out in 1989, published by Michael Joseph (London) and Summit Books (New York). It contained thirty-nine essays from the Italian volume, plus four taken from Stories and Essays. The twelve essays that were left out, perhaps not unexpectedly, all have to do with language (“Aldous Huxley,” “Tartarin of Tarascon,” “Congested Air,” “Guncotton Stockings,” “Leggere la Vita,” “The Squirrel,” “To Translate and Be Translated,” “Queneau’s Cosmogony,” “Inspector
Silhouette,” “Masters of Our Fate,” “Fossil Words,” and “The Language of Odors”), and here they return to their places for the first time in English.
STORIES AND ESSAYS
In the 1970s, some Italian daily papers began to put together collections of articles by their most prestigious contributors. Some, like La Stampa, to which Primo Levi had contributed regularly since 1968, even created a book series: Stories and Essays was the second volume of the series Third Page. (The series took its name from the fact that, from the start of the twentieth century, page 3 in Italian newspapers was traditionally devoted to culture and books.) Appearing in November 1986, this is the last book that Levi published in his lifetime. Apart from the review of the memoirs of Rudolf Höss (1960) and the article on Apollo 8 (1968), the fifteen stories and twenty essays in the volume had all appeared in the paper between 1977 and 1986 and are placed in chronological order in each of the two sections. But in the first edition of the book there were twenty stories as well. Levi reintroduced five stories that had already appeared in Lilith: “Disphylaxis,” “Bridge Builders,” “The Molecule’s Defiance,” “In Due Time,” and “The Soul and the Engineers.” They were placed in chronological order, between “Made for Each Other” and “The Great Mutation.” Here, the decision was made to avoid the repetition.
Including poems in a book of prose had been Levi’s habit ever since If This Is a Man. The three in Stories and Essays had appeared first in La Stampa: the book’s epigraph, “To My Friends,” on December 31, 1985, “The Thaw” (which opens the section “Stories”) on April 3, 1985, and “A Valley” (which opens the section “Essays”) on February 20 of the same year. These translations are by Jonathan Galassi.
Eleven of the stories and sixteen of the essays were published in English by Schocken Books in 1986, under the title The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays, and two stories appeared that same year in Moments of Reprieve, published by Summit Books. Two stories (“An Erector Set Made with Love” and “Frogs on the Moon”) and two essays (“A Bottle of Sunshine” and “The Hidden Player”) from the original Italian edition were included in the English version of Other People’s Trades, published in 1989 by Michael Joseph, in London, and Simon & Schuster, in New York. Two stories (“Peroxide Blonde,” and “‘Fair as a Flower’”) are collected here for the first time.
The first Italian edition of Stories and Essays was reserved for readers of La Stampa and was not sold in bookstores. This circumstance means that The Drowned and the Saved remains Levi’s true “last book”: it is such because of its value as an ultimate reflection on Auschwitz, and it is in fact. For this reason it has been placed after Stories and Essays.
THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED
On May 13, 1960, Levi wrote a letter to Heinz Riedt, who had just completed the German translation of If This Is a Man: “I am glad, and satisfied with the result, and grateful to you, and at the same time, a little sad. You see, this is the only book I wrote, and now that we have finished transplanting it into German I feel like a father whose son has come of age and leaves, and no longer needs his care.” The Preface that Levi wrote specifically for the German edition, which came out in November 1961, ended with a passage from that letter. In the year after the book’s publication, Levi received dozens of letters from his new German readers, and soon had the idea of collecting them in a book, along with his replies. In late 1962, he proposed to Einaudi what he called the “German project”; there wasn’t enough material for an entire book, however, so the idea was never realized.
“Letters from Germans,” the eighth and final chapter of The Drowned and the Saved, is thus at the origin of what we could consider Levi’s last book. This is not the only inversion of chronology and structure. The title itself—which comes from the opening of Canto XX of Dante’s Inferno: “Di nova pena mi conven far versi / e dar matera al ventesimo canto / de la prima canzon, ch’è d’i sommersi” (“I must make verses of new punishment / and offer matter now for Canto Twenty / of this first canticle—of the submerged”)—had been conceived initially as the title for If This Is a Man. It was still useful, and even more appropriate, decades later.
The Drowned and the Saved was published by Einaudi in May 1986. Right at the start of “Letters from Germans” Levi observes: “If This Is a Man is a book of modest dimensions, but, like a nomadic creature, it has left behind a long and tangled trail for forty years now.” It’s no coincidence that the sentence comes here, given that the final chapter is the earliest nucleus of the work. But it will be useful to ask when the idea of a postscript to If This Is a Man was transformed into the idea for a new book, and to reconstruct the steps that, in the course of twenty-five years, from 1961 to 1986, led Levi from the “German project” (that is, documenting his dialogue with the readers he was most eager to have) to a completely new reflection on Auschwitz, one that treated themes that were new or barely touched on in If This Is a Man, and which, emerging within a new historical-political context, found a public belonging to a new generation.
In the interviews that Levi gave after the publication of The Truce (1963), he frequently vowed that he would write nothing more about Auschwitz. Fortunately, he didn’t keep his promise. But those statements attest to the fact that he considered the “German project,” which he had not yet set aside, something that had to do mainly with his German readers and their relationship to the legacy of Nazism. It would have been a book written by others rather than by Levi. Paradoxically, we have to look farther back in time for the earliest source of The Drowned and the Saved.
“The Deported. Anniversary” (in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980) was published in 1955, in a small-circulation review, at a time when the memory of the Shoah had faded, in Italy as in Europe. In the essay, Levi examined the silence of the few survivors of the Lagers, pointing courageously to the root of that silence: “It is shame. We are men, we belong to the same human family that our executioners belong to. Before the enormity of their crime, we feel that we, too, are citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, and cannot be exempted from the charge that an otherworldly judge, on the basis of our own testimony, would bring against all humanity.” Shame was a new subject for reflection. In the following decades, others were added to it.
New ideas were likely suggested to Levi by the radio and theater versions of If This Is a Man (1964 and 1966). Both focused on the confusion of languages and the deadly harm that came to those who, like the Italians and the Greeks, didn’t know German, Yiddish, or Polish. Here should be sought the roots of the chapter “Communication.” Another new element was the fact that in the 1960s Italian publishers were bringing out more books that dealt with the Shoah. Levi himself proposed to Einaudi a translation of the most important of these—Menschen in Auschwitz, by Hermann Langbein (1972)—even before it came out in German, the original language. Einaudi didn’t listen. The book was published elsewhere, with a foreword by Levi, only in 1984, but, three years earlier, he had included a passage in his personal anthology, The Search for Roots, translating it himself. Menschen in Auschwitz was important because it drew the moral map of Auschwitz: it described the acts and the persons, the rules and the roles, the order and the disorder. Langbein confirmed for Levi that the inhabitants of the Lagers were a varied population, difficult to describe and to judge, and Levi was encouraged by this to elaborate the idea of what would ultimately be called the “gray zone.”
A key theme of The Drowned and the Saved, the collaboration of the Jewish prisoners with the German oppressors, emerges in the chapter “The Drowned and the Saved” in If This Is a Man, and, later, in The Truce, in characters like Henek and old Thylle and the Kleine Kiepura. In 1967 Levi heard of a short novel that in the original Dutch version, De nacht der Girondijnen (The Night of the Girondists), published in 1957, had appeared anonymously. The author was Jacob Presser (1899–1970), a historian who later published the most thoroughly documented history of the Nazi extermination in his country (Ondergang, 1965). Translated into German as Der Nacht der Girondisten, the novel was published, under the author’s name, by Rowohlt, in Hamburg, in 1959, together with another Dutch story of the war, Het bittere kruid (The Bitter Herb), by Marga Minco, the pseudonym of Sara Menco, which had also first appeared in 1957. According to Marco Belpoliti, on April 30, 1967, in a letter to Hety Schmitt-Maas (Levi’s principal interlocutor, Hety S., in the chapter “Letters to Germans”), Levi declared that he would get that volume directly from Rowohlt, and advised Hety to read it and then hand it on to others who might be interested.
It’s very likely then that Levi read De nacht der Girondijnen for the first time in German. In 1976 he presented it to Italian readers with these words: “I came across this story by accident, many years ago; I read it and reread it many times, and it stayed with me.” He had translated it into Italian himself, although he didn’t know Dutch; but he knew German, the language in which he had read it. In his foreword to Presser’s story Levi observes, for the first time, “There are many signs that the time has come to explore the space that separates the victims from the executioners.” Although these words return almost verbatim, ten years later, in the chapter “The Gray Zone” of The Drowned and the Saved, the new definition is not yet there.
The spring of 1974 saw the release of Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter, which misunderstood the gray zone in advance, so to speak. In the published screenplay, Cavani recounted that, years earlier, she had spent an entire afternoon talking to Levi: “I had the impression that Levi could, or rather could manage to, speak only about that period of his life, as if in spite of everything he had always remained there.” Levi’s work contradicts that impression, as the reality of the Lagers contradicts Cavani’s film, which Levi called “fine and mendacious.” Presser’s work contained more truth, although it was fiction; Levi suggested it to Einaudi in January 1975, and was rebuffed yet again. He fell back on Adelphi, because Luciano Foà, one of its cofounders, had been editor in chief at Einaudi when, in 1958, the definitive edition of If This Is a Man was published.
The translation of The Night of the Girondists occupied the last months of 1975. When the work was finished, Levi wrote to Gabriella Poli: “The whole time I was gripped by a violent emotion. Westerbork was the camp that the Dutch had set up for Jews who had fled Poland; under the Nazi occupation it became a sorting camp through which the convoys for the east passed. As I worked, I experienced Auschwitz again. And writing the Foreword cost me a great deal. But it’s time to confront even the subjects that are painful. The space between executioners and victims is a gray zone, not a desert.” As far as we know, this passage contains the earliest use of the expression “gray zone.”
Almost four years passed before Levi publicly articulated the new category: in a conversation with Giuseppe Grassano—which took place on September 17, 1979, but was not published until March 1981—he called it the fascia grigia (“gray band”). Between the nouns “band” and “zone” is a connection that goes back to the Greek origin, zōnē, of the Latin zona, meaning “belt” (a synonym for “band,” or fascia) and linked—in Levi’s high school memory—to the poetry of Catullus, who in his Odes uses zona to indicate the band-belt of the beloved: “Tam gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae / pernici aureolum fuisse malum / quod zonam soluit diu ligatam” (“As pleasing to me as, they say, to the swift girl was the golden apple, which loosed the long-tied belt”). “The space between executioners and victims is a gray zone,” Levi wrote to Poli. And the italics help to advance the hypothesis that the use of the expression zona grigia (gray zone) has a possible origin also in the idiomatic English expression “gray area”: referring to a region with an indeterminate color (moral as well). As he pointed out in the letter to Poli, such a region is not a desert, which would be left blank on a map.
“È tempo di affrontare (It’s time to confront),” Levi writes to Poli. “The time has come to explore,” he repeats, in the Foreword to Presser. Thirty years had passed since the liberation of Auschwitz. The hope was that the public was prepared to listen to more subtle, complex, and disturbing truths. Young people, with fresher minds, immune to the traumas and compromises of the past, would be able to do so. And by now the old should be able to as well, if they were willing to look at their own history calmly. In fact, the year 1975 turned out to be decisive for the future Drowned and Saved. In a letter of March 9 to his cousin Anna Yona, Levi declared his intention to write the story of Chaim Rumkowski, the president of the Lodz Ghetto. (The story appeared in La Stampa on November 20, 1977, under the title “King of the Jews,” and was collected in the fall of 1981 in Lilith and Other Stories.) Although Levi somewhat modified the style to make it suitable for a work of nonfiction, he used it again, in The Drowned and the Saved, where it concludes “The Gray Zone” chapter with a crescendo.
What is crucial is that, in the first draft of the text, in its short story version, Levi articulated, in a complete form, the new theme that was preoccupying him: corrupting—rather than inhuman—regimes like Nazism are endowed with the power “to create a broad band of gray consciences that stands between the potentates of evil and the pure victims: in this band Rumkowski should be placed.” It’s a description and, at the same time, an axiom. And it’s a law of moral science that, in its linguistic aspect, shows us how the word “band” precedes the word “zone,” and even suggests a possible reason for the replacement. Compared with “band,” the word “zone” implies a less uniform coloration and hazier borders: it implies, in other words, a more complex casuistry in the manifestation of evil, and prompts us to sharper attention and more vigilant caution in judging it.
From various hints we can deduce that around 1975 a period of reflection began that led to the writing of The Drowned and the Saved. A disquieting story like Presser’s and a misleading one like the tale brought to the screen by Liliana Cavani are intertwined with the political events of those years, during which, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe, the threat of a new fascism was perceived. Levi denounced it explicitly in the editorial “This Was Auschwitz,” which appeared in La Stampa on February 9, 1975, and again in “To the Visitor,” a text written in the autumn of 1978 that was to be displayed on the Italian Memorial at Auschwitz, and in which the existence of the extermination camps is presented as the extreme and logical result of European fascism (both are in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980). Also, in the late seventies the works of Holocaust deniers began to circulate, and Levi wrote several articles combatting their hypotheses. He also wrote an article about the death of a man who became in The Drowned and the Saved the opponent-interlocutor of the chapter “The Intellectual in Auschwitz” (“Jean Améry, the Philosopher-Suicide,” also in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1949–1980).
From the perspective of today, the year 1975 was decisive for another reason. The school edition of If This Is a Man had appeared three years earlier, but in 1975 Levi decided to write an appendix that would satisfy the curiosity of his readers by answering their recurring questions, especially those of the students he met in the schools: this was his true audience, the one that most excited him and, at the same time, made him anxious. In early 1976 the Appendix was ready. At first it was included only in the school edition, but beginning in 1979 it was printed in all editions of the book, including those meant for general readers. The eight questions and answers that Levi prepared are meant to offer a general historical-
political framework, but they also express his moral life after the book’s publication: the opening two questions concerned the possibility of forgiveness for the executioners (which Levi had no intention of granting), and the German people’s knowledge of their own history. A large part of the Appendix, however, was devoted to those who in The Drowned and the Saved are defined as “stereotypes,” and whom Levi tried here, for the first time, to describe and to analyze with the power of common sense and the precision of historical information.
In the intricate history of The Drowned and the Saved, we can observe certain fundamental ideas, starting with the “gray zone,” an expression that has become so popular, so widespread in every intellectual discipline, that it is by now detached from Levi’s text and—above all—from its original meaning. In the interviews of 1979 in which Levi spoke of his future book, there are two elements that help define the gray zone more precisely. In one of them Levi explains: “There is a theme, having to do with the Lager, that appeals to me and also seems relevant, and that is to look again at the experience after thirty-five years: to see it through my eyes, through the eyes of the indifferent, through the eyes of the young people who don’t know these things, and also through the eyes of the adversary. It seems to me that it could produce a sociological analysis about which I think I have something personal to say. That is, taking a stand in the face of ambiguity.” In the book that he was thinking about, Levi therefore intended to confront and develop very different, even irreconcilable points of view toward the Lager. Certainly he didn’t mean to declare that they were all equally legitimate: they were, rather, to be carefully distinguished, in such a way that one would arrive at “taking a stand in the face of ambiguity” (italics added). His reasoning continued: “Above all, the most simplistic interpretation should be rejected; that is, on one side the pure oppressor, without doubts, without hesitations, and on the other side the victim sanctified by his role as victim. It’s not like that. The human machine, the human animal is more complicated. There are intermediate stages. Those who have been called torturers were not torturers in a pure state: they were men like us, who took on the role of torturers for some reason. I intend to explain these reasons in a future book.” Analyzing the “intermediate stages” (an illuminating definition, which was not taken up in The Drowned and the Saved) does not mean accepting everything, and absolving everything; it means to understand and make distinctions with the most acute moral attention.
Levi sent a first draft of the essay on the gray zone to his friend Bianca Guidetti Serra on March 19, 1980: “Dear Bianca, this would be the first chapter of the book I am supposed to be writing.” The structure of the book was therefore different, at the time, from what it ultimately became. And it is telling that in the end Levi decided to place the chapter on memory first. The witness of Auschwitz—who, forty years later, returns to discuss the events with the tools of the essayist and (in some passages) the historian—first subjects his principal tool, memory itself, to a rigorous analysis. Only after completing this operation does he go on to examine the theme of “ambiguity.” A first draft of the chapter “The Memory of the Offense” was published in late 1982, in an anthology put out by the Campiello Prize of unpublished writings of five of the prizewinning authors (Levi won first prize that year, for If Not Now, When?).
It has already been said that the germ of the ideas fundamental to The Drowned and the Saved can be traced back to Levi’s first two books. The censors of the German Democratic Republic realized this, in their way, when between 1979 and 1982 they examined If This Is a Man and The Truce to evaluate the advisability of publishing them in Communist East Germany. Authorization was denied. The Truce offered an unorthodox image of Soviet Russia and the Red Army, while the description of the Lager that emerged from both books raised subtle ethical questions rather than presenting two clearly contrasting faces: of victims (noble, heroic, politically aware, ready to resist until death) and torturers (evil and disgusting, without nuances). In fact, the Ministry of Culture had granted a cautious assent to the books’ publication, but asked for a definitive opinion from the Committee of Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighters, an East German organization charged with “safeguarding the tradition of anti-Fascist resistance” and vigilant about the representation of the GDR as a German and anti-Fascist state. Its judgment was extremely negative, mainly because of Levi’s depiction of the role of the political prisoners, the majority of whom behaved toward the Jews as all the other Prominentz did. The committee objected: “An absurd accusation, which denies and slanders the heroic behavior of many political prisoners.” As if that were not enough, Levi ignored the incidents of resistance that occurred in Auschwitz.
Although the political censorship that Levi endured in East Germany appears grotesque, it’s an indication of how disturbing the ideas that he was articulating in The Drowned and the Saved might be elsewhere, too, and not only in Italy. Two more sources of distress and of encouragement that acted on Levi in those years can be pointed out. There is a hint of the first at the start of “Conclusion,” where Levi says that the events of the Lager are, for the young people of the time, “things of their grandparents: distant, blurry, ‘historical.’” The distance, the lack of interest, the incomprehension, even incredulity, that Levi more than once faced in his encounters with schoolchildren had a wearing effect on him, and at times this discouragement even led him to suspend his school visits; then, after an interval, refreshed, he would return to them. But if this was a new source of distress, connected to the present, old, painful memories were also working on him, from the inside.
There is an episode that was not included in If This Is a Man, and which Levi recounts in The Drowned and the Saved, as the culmination of the chapter “Shame.” He discovers some drinking water during an air raid and shares it with a single companion, keeping it hidden from a second. This man much later rebuked Levi for that failure, and Levi was ashamed. Before publishing an account of the incident, Levi had sketched it by allusion in “The Survivor,” a poem dated February 4, 1984. The poem begins with a line from Coleridge, “Since then, at an uncertain hour” (the line that provides the title for the Garzanti collection of Levi’s poems published that year). The crucial allusion (and literary source), however, is not The Rime of the Ancient Mariner but, as in If This Is a Man, the Divine Comedy.
“The Survivor”—a desperate entreaty to the poet’s drowned companions—ends: “Non è mia colpa se vivo e respiro / E mangio e bevo e dormo e vesto panni,” “It’s not my fault if I live and breathe / And eat and drink and sleep and put on clothes.” The reference is to the deepest places of the Inferno: Canto XXXIII, the ninth circle, in the so-called Ptolomea, where the traitors to guests serve their eternal punishment: they lie supine, fixed in an expanse of ice. Frate Alberigo de’ Manfredi di Faenza addresses Dante, a pilgrim in the world of the damned. Like the Ancient Mariner, he, too, wishes to pour out the grief that saturates his heart. He tells the story of the damned soul next to him, Branca Doria, who, in order to take over Logudoro (a region of Sardinia), had his father-in-law, Michele Zanche, killed after inviting him to a banquet. Alberigo reveals that, as soon as a sin of such gravity is committed, the soul of the traitor is removed from his body and descends to Ptolomea, while in its place a demon occupies the body, until the day of natural death. Thus Branca Doria, an infernal being, can still inhabit the Earth, “e mangia e bee e dorme e veste panni”: “and eat and drink and sleep and put on clothes.”
In the nineteen lines of “The Survivor,” Levi intended to refute the suspicion that he had survived in Auschwitz at the expense of others. And the reference to Dante—in which he identifies himself with a man-demon who, already damned, leads a virtual life on Earth, after traitorously taking the life of his neighbor—was probably a deliberate slip on his part. In this poem Levi therefore offered a summary of the chapter “Shame”; and in justifying himself before the mirror of his own conscience he used a line of the Inferno that was equivalent to an atrocious, and undeserved, self-accusation. This contradiction is enough to indicate what it cost him—to use the same word with which he defined the shame that, decades after the episode of the water, he still felt when he was confronted by his companion Daniele—to write The Drowned and the Saved.
The first English edition of The Drowned and the Saved was published in 1988 by Summit Books, New York.
UNCOLLECTED STORIES AND ESSAYS: 1981–1987
Scarcely more than six years separate the start of 1981 and the day of Primo Levi’s death. The uncollected essays of that brief span of time have an aspect completely different from those of the three preceding decades: they are products of a spacious, versatile workshop, overflowing with talent and, at a superficial glance, disorganized. On April 11, 1987, this workshop suddenly lowered its shutter, leaving on its shelves dozens of texts—stories, essays, poems, testimonies, portraits of friends and of other writers, strong opinions on political and historical events—that, if Levi hadn’t died, would certainly have found their place in future books, assembled with care.
We can be sure, for example, that sooner or later Levi would have published a new collection of poems. For that reason those which appeared after the publication of An Uncertain Hour are placed as a separate section, “Other Poems,” in the 1997 Einaudi edition of the Opere (here, they are in Collected Poems). As for the fiction, some of the stories were already arranged in a series that, in two years at most, would be ready to be published, including the stories on animals that in his last months, and even his last days, Levi wrote for the zoology and ecology monthly Airone.
In Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987 we find an extension of Other People’s Trades and Stories and Essays (in which, just a few months before his death, Levi had arranged a number of the pieces published in La Stampa). Levi the culturally omnivorous yet refined essayist can be found in pieces like “Our First Ancestors Weren’t Animals” and “The Brute Power” but also in the strange recollection “When They Drank Methanol in the Lager” and in the pieces on Jack London and on Calvino as the translator of Raymond Queneau. These essays document for us Levi the translator into Italian of Kafka’s The Trial (for a series thought up by Giulio Einaudi and entitled Writers Translated by Writers) and the memorialist of two loved and admired figures, Emanuele Artom and Leonardo De Benedetti.
In the rich panorama of these writings, four points of reference in particular might be noted. The first, which goes back to 1982, is the tortured but fully convinced polemic against the Israeli government’s military conduct in Lebanon (“Who Has Courage in Jerusalem?”), also documented in many interviews and public statements that year. The second, which confirms Levi’s belonging to a people (or, rather, to an ethical ideal of being in the world) is “The Path of a Jewish Writer” (1984). The two should be read together in order for us to grasp entirely Levi’s moral energy and his awareness of his asymmetrical identity.
The other two are in the areas of science and history. The essay “Asymmetry and Life” is a complex reflection (published in Prometeo, a scientific monthly with a popular approach) on the chemical-physical structures of living matter and its behavior at the molecular level. The subject is directly connected to that of Levi’s doctoral thesis in experimental physics at the University of Turin. The final reference point here is “The Black Hole of Auschwitz,” in which, forty years after the events—as in The Drowned and the Saved, which preceded it by a few months—Levi reflected on the Shoah, in an argument against the historical revisionism that was beginning to invade Europe. This could be called Levi’s true moral testament; it appeared on January 22, 1987, as an editorial on the first page of La Stampa. It’s one of the last essays that Levi signed, and though its tone may seem wearier than usual, the logic is as inflexible as ever.
The pages of this section are translated and collected for the first time as a unit based on the Italian edition of Levi’s complete works, Opere, published in 1997 by Einaudi and edited by Marco Belpoliti.
DOMENICO SCARPA
The list of sources for the citations and part of the information in this
essay—writings and interviews by Primo Levi, critical literature on him
and on his work—can be consulted at the websites of Liveright/W. W. Norton (http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294988470) and the International Center for Primo Levi Studies in Turin (http://www.primolevi.it/Web/English).