On the centenary of Primo Levi’s birth on July 31, it will be remembered that he wrote the indispensable work about the Holocaust, If This Is A Man, a masterpiece of world literature. I advise reading or rereading the key chapter of this noble and illuminating book about Auschwitz/Birkenau in which Levi is teaching Italian to his friend Jean Samuel while on soup detail, glossing quotes from Dante, who knew a thing or two about hell.
Thanks to Levi, I got to know Samuel. This modest and thoughtful man, like Levi, a chemist, regularly flew children from his native Strasbourg for a day in Auschwitz as part of their education. After Levi died, Samuel took up the baton of remembrance.
Arrested as a partisan, deported as a Jew, Levi spent almost a year in Auschwitz, and survived thanks to several factors, including knowledge of German from his chemistry textbooks, solidarity with other prisoners, strength of character — and luck. Levi returned home by the scenic route, and told the story of that amazing nine-month train journey in a sequel, The Truce.
He insisted that this episode was therapeutic, certainly better for him than returning immediately. Back in Turin, he would buttonhole strangers and tell them the story of Auschwitz. Appropriately, he compared himself to Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, a poem he loved. He went on to have a demanding day job as an industrial chemist and manager of a paint factory.
He wrote many books and made translations of several authors, including Kafka. I cannot separate the writer from the witness: the witness was the writer, and that is how we know he was a survivor; it was the same thing. Only later, with his “invented” books, could one begin to separate the survivor and the writer. In his abundant oeuvre, there are at least five masterpieces.
The most neglected is The Wrench, a great novel at once about physical work and about storytelling. Another major work is The Drowned and the Saved, the second sequel to If This Is A Man. Here, his intellect, imagination and feelings are fully engaged as he grapples with the Holocaust.
I was privileged to meet and become friends with Primo Levi. He is my hero, a great Italian writer, a great Jewish writer, a great bridge between literature and politics, between art and science. He was an educator for our troubled times, and would have been at the forefront on issues like climate change, had he lived. Strongly critical of Begin and Sharon, he spoke out as a Jew within the tent.
I have a tape recording of a 1961 Radio Three programme — an anthology of Jewish poets. There is no reference in it to the Holocaust or to Israel. A few years later, thanks to the Six-Day War in 1967, everything changed in the discourse about Jewish identity and diaspora attitudes towards Israel, because Israel was perceived as being at risk of destruction. Since then, references to the Holocaust have been endless. People talk about other genocides (Cambodia, Rwanda) and compare them with Auschwitz. Levi always insisted that we use language with care (words like “genocide” and “antisemitism”) lest we devalue the currency.
Some very serious writers reach a wide audience and they do so because, via a literary style embodying felt thought, they are significant explorers of human nature, of human suffering, of human emotion. Levi was one of those. He was such an engaging writer, such a personal writer, that people thought of him as their friend, and felt his death as a personal loss. Too often, the accounts of Levi’s suicide, unintentionally avoid the difficult issues he raised about life and society and responsibility.
Levi’s greatest gift was to listen. Not for nothing was Shema his most famous poem. He wrote to me that Shoah, the film by another great listener, Claude Lanzmann, was “amazing and cruel”. For me, what Lanzmann said of himself just before he died (a year ago this month), also applies to Primo: “time has never stopped not passing”.
Anthony Rudolf was the first publisher of Primo Levi’s poetry in English and has published many essays and articles on him, several in the JC. His most recent book is ‘Jerzyk’, an account of his late cousin whose diary is now being translated into Hebrew by Yad Vashem
