The Complete Works of Primo Levi, Page 2

  Levi reflects on writing and language in a surprising number of essays. In his emphasis on the need for clarity, he didn’t mean that writing, or language, had to be simple; but it should be comprehensible, and it was up to the writer to be sure that the reader, “maybe with some effort,” could understand him. Looking back at his life as a writer, he described his feelings after the belated success of If This Is a Man: “I realized that I had a new instrument in my hands, intended to weigh, to divide, to verify—like the ones in my laboratory, but flexible, quick, gratifying.”

  These new volumes, by presenting Levi in all his facets, will enable English-speaking readers to encounter for the first time the entire range of his versatile, inventive, curious, crystalline intelligence. In doing so, they will discover a writer they may not have fully known, one whom Italo Calvino called among “the most important and gifted writers of our time.”

  ANN GOLDSTEIN

  EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  These volumes owe their existence to Robert Weil, the editor in chief of Liveright, who conceived of the project, and whose extraordinary vision and dedication made it possible. Nor would it have been possible without the talent and the hard work of the translators: Stuart Woolf, Jenny McPhee, Nathaniel Rich, Jonathan Galassi, Antony Shugaar, Anne Milano Appel, Michael F. Moore, and Alessandra Bastagli and Francesco Bastagli.

  The Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin and its staff—Cristina Zuccaro, Daniela Muraca, and Roberta Mori—have been invaluable collaborators, unfailingly generous with their time and their archive and other resources. I am especially grateful to Fabio Levi and Domenico Scarpa for their continuing support and encouragement; Domenico has in addition been a tireless colleague and a profoundly knowledgeable consultant, providing illuminating notes on the texts and the bibliography. I would like to thank Ernesto Ferrero, for his vivid chronology; Monica Quirico, for her informative essay on the international reception of Primo Levi’s works; and Irene Soave, for her detailed work on the maps of Turin and Piedmont. I am grateful for the support of Natalia Indrimi and Alessandro Cassin of the Primo Levi Center in New York, and I would also like to thank Risa Sodi, James Marcus, Alexia Ferracuti, Gregory Conti, and Renata Sperandio.

  These volumes are indebted to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, to the Guggenheim Foundation, and to the Italian Foreign Ministry. My work would not have been possible without the support and indulgence of David Remnick and my colleagues at The New Yorker, in particular Henry Finder, who brought me to this project.

  Ernesto Franco, Roberto Gilodi, Andrea Canobbio, Laura Piccarolo, Valeria Zito, Kylee Doust, Carmen Prestia, and Francesca Manzoni, all of Giulio Einaudi Editore, the publisher of the Italian Opere, were essential working with us at different stages and over several decades. To make this English-language version, the efforts of a variety of rights specialists and editors at American and British publishers were vital: Marcella Berger, who proved essential in launching the project, and her colleagues Marie Florio, Sandy Hill, and Marie Marino-McCullough at Simon & Schuster; Sean Yule at Knopf; Hal Fessenden at Penguin Random House; Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus & Giroux; and Adam Freudenheim and Cecilia Stein at Penguin UK.

  I am especially indebted to Toni Morrison, and to Ruth R. Boatman, Fran Lebowitz, and Harold Augenbraum, who made Professor Morrison’s introduction possible.

  Particular thanks are due to Trent Duffy, who copy-edited eight of the fourteen books herein and helped me shepherd the entire series through the production process, and to the other copy editors, Anne Adelman, David Stanford Burr, and India Cooper. Finally, this project has had a long history, and I am grateful to the many people at Liveright/W. W. Norton who have been involved with it and supported it in immeasurable ways: Robert Weil’s assistants over the years, Tom Bissell, Brendan Curry, Tom Mayer, Lucas Wittmann, Phil Marino, and Will Menaker; the production, manuscript editing, design, and art teams of Anna Oler, Nancy Palmquist, Don Rifkin, Ellen Cipriano, Albert Tang, Steve Attardo, Debra Morton Hoyt, and Chin-Yee Lai; as well as Drake McFeely, Jeannie Luciano, Star Lawrence, Stephen King, Elisabeth Kerr, Bill Rusin, Deirdre Dolan, Felice Mello, Julia Sherrier, Jessie Hughes, Claire Reinertsen, Elizabeth Clementson, Peter Miller, and Cordelia Calvert.

  ANN GOLDSTEIN

  CHRONOLOGY

  1919

  JULY 31: Primo Levi is born in Turin, in the house where he will live for his entire life. His forebears are Piedmontese Jews, originally from Spain and Provence. Levi describes their habits, their style of life, and their language in “Argon,” the first chapter of The Periodic Table, but he doesn’t remember any of them apart from his grandparents. His paternal grandfather, Michele Levi, was a civil engineer who lived in Bene Vagienna, a village in the Piedmontese province of Cuneo, where he had a house and a small farm; he died, a suicide, in 1888. Levi’s maternal grandfather, Cesare Luzzati, was a cloth merchant who died in 1941. His father, Cesare, born in 1878, graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1901. After various periods of working abroad, in 1918 he married Ester Luzzati (1895–1991). Levi recalls his father as an extrovert, modern for his time, a man who loved good living and good reading but was not much interested in family matters.

  He went to temple on Yom Kippur because he was a bit superstitious, but he also was friendly with [Cesare] Lombroso, the positivist physiologist, in Turin; he attended séances, not because he believed in spirits but in order to understand what was behind them.1

  We were very different. He was a fine person, but he didn’t have much inclination for the career of father. . . . He left me a library, a love of books, a certain spiritual tension.2

  1921

  Levi’s sister, Anna Maria, is born. Levi remained very close to her all his life.

  1925–1930

  Levi attends elementary school; his health is delicate, and for a year at the end of elementary school he has private lessons. He also attends Hebrew School, in preparation for his bar mitzvah.

  Like all the children of the Jewish community in Turin, I was taught the basics of our religion. At the age of thirteen I had my “initiation,” following which I was accepted as a full member of the community. This ceremony is called bar mitzvah, which means literally “son of the law.” . . . I went through the ceremony passively. I have no pride in being Jewish. I never felt that I was a member of the chosen people who have made an iron pact with God. I’m Jewish because I happened to be born Jewish. I’m not ashamed nor do I boast of it. Being Jewish, for me, is a question of “identity”: an “identity” of which, I have to say this, too, I do not intend to strip myself.3

  1934

  Levi enrolls in high school, at the Ginnasio-Liceo D’Azeglio, an institution known for its anti-Fascist teachers. With Mussolini’s dictatorship firmly established, however, the high school has been “purged” and is now politically agnostic. Levi is a shy, diligent, but undistinguished student, far more interested in chemistry and biology than in history and Italian.

  My vocation for chemistry began at fourteen. My father cautiously pressured me to concentrate on science in high school. He loved books, he bought books randomly and had the passions of an autodidact. He had studied many things on his own and continued to study until the end of his life. He filled the house with strange books, some of which I still have.4

  He forms friendships that will last his whole life. He goes on long vacations in the Italian Alps; this marks the start of his love for the mountains. He reads Concerning the Nature of Things, by Sir William Bragg.

  I was enthralled by the clear and simple things it said, and I decided that I would be a chemist. Between the lines I read a great hope: models on a human scale, concepts of structure and measurement reaching far, toward both the minuscule world of atoms and the boundless world of the stars—perhaps infinitely far? If so, we live in a conceivable universe, comprehensible to our imagination, and the anguish of the darkness gives way before the ardor of research.5

  1937

/>   OCTOBER: Having been held back in Italian at the end of high school, Levi retakes the final exam in order to graduate and get his diploma. He then enrolls as a chemistry student in the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Turin.

  Every year had its laboratory: we were there for five hours a day—it was quite a commitment. An extraordinary experience. In the first place because you were working with your hands: literally, it was the first time I’d done this, even though maybe you burned your hands or cut them. It was a return to origins.6

  1938

  AUTUMN: After a yearlong publicity campaign, the Fascist government promulgates the racial laws; Jews are forbidden to go to public schools, but those who are already enrolled in the university are permitted to continue their studies and get their degrees. Levi is friendly with students in anti-Fascist circles, both Jewish and not. He reads Mann, Huxley, Sterne, Werfel, Darwin, and Tolstoy.

  I read a lot because I came from a family in which reading was an innocent and traditional vice, a gratifying habit, a mental gymnastics, an obligatory and compulsive way of filling empty time, and a sort of mirage in the direction of knowledge. My father always had three books that he was reading at the same time; he read “when he sat in his house, when he walked by the way, and when he lay down and when he rose.” He had a tailor make him jackets with large, deep pockets, each of which could hold a book. He had two brothers who read just as avidly and indiscriminately.7

  The racial laws were providential for me, but also for others: they constituted the reductio ad absurdum of the stupidity of fascism. The criminal face of fascism had been forgotten. . . . The idiotic one remained to be seen. . . . In my family Fascism was accepted, with some annoyance. My father joined the Party reluctantly, but still he wore the black shirt. And I was a Balilla and then an Avanguardista [the Balilla and the Avanguardisti were the Fascist youth organizations; enrollment was obligatory for all Italian youths]. I would say that for me, and for others, the racial laws gave us back our free will.8

  1941

  JULY: Levi graduates cum laude. His diploma notes that he is “of the Jewish race.” Of his chemistry textbook and its author (Ludwig Gattermann’s Die Praxis des organischen Chemikers), he writes:

  One feels in it something more noble than pure technical information: the authority of one who teaches things because he knows them, and he knows them because he has lived them; a grave but firm call to responsibility, the first I had had, at twenty-two, after sixteen years of studying and infinite books read. The words of the Father, then, which awaken you out of childhood and declare you to be an adult, conditionally.9

  His father is dying of cancer. Levi searches frantically for a job to support the family. He finds one (semi-legal, because businesses are not allowed to hire Jews) in an asbestos mine in Balanagero, near Lanzo. Officially he doesn’t figure in the company’s books, but he works in a chemical laboratory (see the chapter “Nickel” in The Periodic Table).

  1942

  Levi finds a better-paid situation in Milan, at Wander, a Swiss drug company, where he is assigned to research new diabetes drugs (see “Phosphorus” in The Periodic Table).

  He has a group of friends from Turin, “boys and girls, who had for various reasons landed in the big city that the war made inhospitable” (see “Gold” in The Periodic Table). They included the architect Eugenio Gentili Tedeschi, Carla Consonni, Silvio Ortona, Ada Della Torre (Levi’s cousin), Vanda Maestro (who later dies in Auschwitz), and Emilio Diena. Gentili Tedeschi recalls that the young Levi impressed them with the quality of his imagination, and the friends predicted for him a sure future as a scientist:

  Primo Levi explains our immaturity well. We lived in uncertainty and expectation. Each of us had been surprised by the racial laws at a vulnerable moment: at the end of the studies that were very important to us and that we wanted to finish. So we had missed the year, 1939, when one could still leave the country. We remained stuck here and we tried to survive, supporting what remained of our families.10

  NOVEMBER: The Allies land in North Africa. Levi and his friends make contact with members of anti-Fascist organizations, and their political education is rapidly completed. Levi joins the clandestine Action Party.

  1943

  SUMMER: The Fascist government falls on July 25 and Mussolini is arrested. On September 8, the new government, headed by Marshal Pietro Badoglio, announces an armistice with the Allies. The German armed forces, considering themselves betrayed, occupy northern and central Italy. Levi joins a partisan group operating in Valle d’Aosta, in the Alps.

  DECEMBER 13: At dawn Levi is arrested near Brusson with other comrades, including his Jewish friends Luciana Nissim and Vanda Maestro. Many years later, in 1980, he writes to Paolo Momigliano, president of the Historical Institute of the Resistance in Valle d’Aosta: “My time as a partisan in Valle d’Aosta was undoubtedly the most opaque of my career, and I would not recount it willingly: it’s a story of well-intentioned but foolish youths, and it’s best left among the things that are forgotten. The allusions contained in The Periodic Table are more than enough.” (See the chapter “Gold.”) After his capture, Levi is sent to the transit camp of Fòssoli, near Modena.

  The Fascists didn’t treat us badly, they let us write, they let us receive packages from home, they swore to us on their “Fascist faith” that they would keep us there until the end of the war.11

  1944

  FEBRUARY: Fòssoli is taken over by the Germans, who send Levi and some six hundred and fifty other prisoners off on a train whose destination is Auschwitz. When the train stops at Bolzano, the last Italian city before the border with Austria, Levi and his friends Vanda Maestro and Luciana Nissim drop a postcard, already stamped and addressed to their friend Bianca Guidetti Serra, from the car they are locked in. The card bears the motto of the Fascist regime in wartime: “Vinceremo” (We will win). Next to it, written in pencil, are the words “SEND, please.” The card arrives at its destination: “Dear Bianca, all traveling in the classic manner—say hello to everyone—the torch to you. Ciao Bianca, we love you. Primo, Vanda, Luciana.” The torch was the symbol of the Action Party, in which all four are active.

  The journey lasts four days and four nights. At the end, ninety-five men and twenty-nine women are selected to enter the Lager. All the others—men, women, old people, children—are sent to the gas chamber.

  There wasn’t one camp at Auschwitz, there were thirty-nine. There was the town of Auschwitz and in it was a Lager, and it was Auschwitz properly so-called, that is, the capital of the system; two kilometers to the south there was Birkenau, or Auschwitz II; that’s where the gas chambers were. It was an enormous Lager, divided into four to six adjoining Lagers. Farther up was the factory, and near the factory was Monowitz, or Auschwitz III: that was where I was. The camp had been financed by the factory, and belonged to it. Around it were thirty to thirty-five smaller camps (mines, weapons factories, farms, etc.). In my camp there were about ten thousand of us.12

  Levi attributes his survival to a series of fortunate circumstances. He had a good enough knowledge of German so that he could understand the orders of his jailers. In addition, by the end of 1943, the shortage of manpower in Germany was such that it became indispensable to employ even Jews, a reservoir of free labor, rather than kill them outright.

  We Italian Jews didn’t speak Yiddish; we were foreigners to the Germans and foreigners also to the Eastern European Jews, who had no idea that a Judaism like ours existed. . . . We felt particularly defenseless. We and the Greeks were the lowest of the low; I would say that we were worse off than the Greeks, because the Greeks were in large part habituated to discrimination; anti-Semitism existed in Salonika, and many of the Salonikan Jews were used to anti-Semitism on the part of non-Jewish Greeks. But the Italians, the Italian Jews, so accustomed to being considered equal to everyone else, were truly without armor, as naked as an egg without a shell.13

  The most difficult thing to convey was the “boredom,” the
total boredom, the monotony, the lack of events, the days that were all the same. This is the experience of the prisoner, and it produces a curious effect, which is that the days are extremely long while they’re being lived, but as soon as they’re over they seem extremely short, because there’s nothing in them.14

  At Auschwitz I became a Jew. The consciousness of feeling different was forced upon me. Someone, for no reason in the world, decided that I was different and inferior: my natural reaction was, in those years, to feel different and superior. . . . In that sense, Auschwitz gave me something that has stayed with me. By making me feel Jewish, it inspired me to retrieve, afterward, a cultural patrimony that I hadn’t had before.15