What do you think?
Rate this book
3008 pages, Hardcover
First published September 3, 2015
When I presented If Not Now, When?, I stood up to say that I had a book about the Holocaust, and sales estimates shrank. When I said it was written in Italian, they shrank even further, and even more so when I said that it was literary. I had to tell people that there are just some books that are in no category, Jewish or otherwise, that they are just great books, and this is how I represented it in America.”When Saul Bellow read The Periodic Table for the first time, he remarked, “It is wonderfully pure.” It was only by April 1984 that Levi “finally achieved the commercial success that had previously eluded” him. Sadly, he only experienced it for three years. He died on April 11, 1987, the coroner ruling it death by suicide, but whether this is true is still unclear today. I have listed the volumes backwards below, because the final volume make everything that came before as profound as anything I have read in my life.
Serving in the SS included an intensive and skillful “reeducation” that flattered the recruits’ ambition. These, mostly ignorant, frustrated outcasts felt valued and exalted. The uniform was elegant, the pay was good, the power almost limitless impunity guaranteed…Höss and his deputy have the bright idea of trying Zyklon B, the poison used to kill rats and roaches, and that works well. After a test carried out on nine hundred Russian prisoners, Höss feels “greatly encouraged”: the mass execution is successful, in terms of both quantity and quality – no blood, no traumas. There is a fundamental difference between machine-gunning naked people at the edge of a ditch they have dug themselves and throwing a little box of poison in an air duct…And a final one that should make us all think about our public priorities:
Obviously, the year of the child [1979] originated in a widespread feeling of guilt, in the awareness that to this day, even in the most advanced countries there is no feeling of reverence toward children, as prescribed by the Gospels, and that adults are preparing, for today’s children, a future full of shadows. And yet love for children is inscribed in us; the proximity of child, even an unknown child, makes us responsible, brings us joy, strength and peace of mind.Other People’s Trades
A night spent in a state of insomnia is longer than a night spent sleeping, though up to now, as far as I know, no quantitative research has been carried out. As everyone knows, subjective time lengthens enormously if clocks or chronometers are consulted frequently.The PARACHRONO is “A method of accelerating, slowing down, or arresting the subjective time of a subject.” Prisoners would perceive a long sentence as a blink of any eye, one could watch mushrooms “literally grow before my eyes,” and extend the length of an experience orgasm as long as desired.
He belongs to the most dangerous human species of this century. If you consider it, without men like him, without the Hösses, the Eichmans, the Kesselrings, and the thousand other loyal, blind men who carried out orders, the savage beasts, Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, would have been impotent and disarmed. Their names would not figure in history; they would have passed like shadowy meteors through Europe’s dark sky. Instead, the opposite occurred: as history has shown us, the seed sown by these dark apostles took deep root in Germany, in all classes, with alarming speed, and led to a proliferation of hatred that continues to poison Europe and the world today.If only Levi were alive today to tell such truths about the Idiot, the American symbol of global fascism. As horrible as he is, it’s his minions that scare me. They live around me, they smile with thumbs up over the graves of relatives buried in the most sacred cemetery in the nation, they thrive under the incompetence of a lazy, profit-driven press. The proliferation of poison is reemerging globally and we have no Primo Levi to point out its toxic absurdity.
It can happen anywhere. I do not mean nor can I say that it will happen. As I’ve noted, it’s unlikely that all the factors that triggered the Nazi madness could occur again, and simultaneously. But some precursory signs are appearing. Violence, “useful” or “useless,” is before our eyes. It is spreading, through sporadic private incidents and government lawlessness, in the two areas customarily known as the first and the second worlds, that is to say, in parliamentary democracies and Communist-bloc countries. In the Third World it is endemic or epidemic. All that is needed is a new two-bit actor (there is no shortage of candidates) to mobilize the violence, legalize it, declare it necessary and just, and infect the world with it. Few countries can be guaranteed immunity from a future wave of violence generated by intolerance, lust for power, economic claims, religious or political fanaticism, or racial friction. We thus need to sharpen our senses and distrust the prophets, the charismatics, the persons who speak and write “fancy words” without the backing of sound reasons.Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981-1987
This Bortolasso was a middle-aged laborer, strong as a mule and dirty as a boar. He couldn’t have been a pure idiot: it’s more likely that he belonged to that human type of which it’s said in Piedmont that they play the fool in order not to pay taxes. Sheltered by the immunity granted to the weak of mind, Bortolasso performed his job as a gardener with extreme negligence. It was a negligence that bordered on a primitive astuteness: all right, the world had declared him irresponsible, no it must put up with him as such, in fact provide for and take care of him.Most endearing is a story about a prehistoric wanderer with a gift of finding and manipulating lead, sharing it during his travels. The most autobiographical story is about being in Italy after Mussolini fell and before Levi was sent to Auschwitz, describing the effects of fascism, a timely lesson for today:
To write melancholy, crepuscular poems, and not even very good ones, while the world was in flames, seemed to us neither strange nor shameful: we proclaimed ourselves enemies of fascism, but in fact fascism had worked in us, as in almost all Italians, alienating us and making us superficial, passive, and cynical.And his thoughts about what the administrative, bureaucratic trivialities of working do to us, often without our cognition, become literary:…at that time I hadn’t yet become acquainted with the frightening anesthetic power of company papers, their capacity to hamper, muffle, blunt every flash of intuition and every spark of intelligence.As one who never really “got” science, Levi goes on to write with a passion about chemistry, had I been exposed to it as a young person, still wouldn’t have led me to study science, but it would have sparked a respect for the beauty and poetry behind it.
Work is fiction’s greatest blind spot. Work occupies more of our hours than sleep, love, and family, yet it’s rare to find a novel that takes as its main subject the daily routines, obligations and petty indignities that consume most of our lives…The earliest novels, written by people wealthy enough not to have to work, tended to be about the lives of people wealthy enough not to have to work. The subject of work has been largely avoided ever since…This is a fun collection, mostly consisting of extended monologues of his colleague, a construction specialist who gets to travel the world. I get the sense that Levi used this as a writing exercise, to force himself within certain literary constraints. Not classic literature, but very interesting.
”Come to think of it, you look Jewish, too. We’ve seen some strange things, but this beats them all: a band of Jews wandering around Poland with weapons stolen from the Poles, passing themselves off as partisans, the sons of bitches!”How is it possible that this, Levi’s only novel, has never come to my attention before? That it hasn’t been made into a movie? Perhaps because it was published in the early 1980s. Had it been in the 1960s, it would have fit in nicely with WWII-themed movies of the decade; Richard Burton or Clint Eastwood and a bunch of other stock actors come to mind. And it’s a story that few know about. Small gangs of partisans fighting invading Nazis and collaborating locals. In this case it’s in the closing year of the war and the first months of peace and an amalgamation of Jews as they make their way from Russia to Italy in hopes of one day making it to Palestine.
To reenter Bude, we have to cross a space cluttered with piles of girders and metal frames. The steel cable of a winch cuts across our path, and Alex [the Kapo in charge of Levi's Kommando or squad of prisoners] grabs hold of it to climb over: Donnerwetter, he looks at his hand, black with thick grease. In the meantime I have joined him. Without hatred and without contempt, Alex wipes his hand on my shoulder, both the palm and the back of the hand, to clean it; he would be amazed, the innocent brute Alex, if someone told him that today I judge him on the basis of this action, him and Pannwitz and the innumerable others like him, great and small, in Auschwitz and everywhere.