by Primo Levi
JUNE: Levi is sent to work with a team of bricklayers who are building a wall. He meets a Piedmontese mason, Lorenzo Perrone, who works for an Italian company that has moved to Auschwitz, and who has a certain freedom of movement. Perrone takes Levi under his protection, and every day brings him an extra ration of soup, collected from the leftovers in his camp.
NOVEMBER: Because of his chemistry training, Levi is transferred to a laboratory.
1945
JANUARY: For almost his entire time in the Lager, Levi had managed not to get sick, but now he contracts scarlet fever. With the Russians approaching, the Germans evacuate the camp, abandoning the prisoners in the infirmary, including Levi, to their fate. The rest of the inmates begin a forced march toward Buchenwald and Mauthausen, during which most of them die.
I remember having lived my Auschwitz year in a condition of exceptional spiritedness: I don’t know if this depended on my professional background, or an unsuspected stamina, or on a sound instinct. I never stopped recording the world and people around me, so much that I still have an unbelievably detailed image of them. I had an intense wish to understand, I was constantly pervaded by a curiosity that somebody afterward did, in fact, deem nothing less than cynical, the curiosity of the naturalist who finds himself transplanted into an environment that is monstrous, but new, monstrously new.16
Levi lives for several months in a Soviet transit camp in the Polish city of Katowice, where he works as a nurse. At Katowice, at the request of the Soviet authorities, Levi and Leonardo De Benedetti, his friend and a doctor, write a Report on the Hygienic-Sanitary Organization of the Concentration Camp for Jews in Monowitz (Auschwitz—Upper Silesia). The text appears in the scientific journal Minerva Medica in November 1946.
JUNE: The journey of repatriation begins. Levi and his companions follow an absurdly labyrinthine route, which takes them first to White Russia and then through Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Austria. Levi arrives in Turin on October 19. (The experience is recounted in The Truce.)
Family, home, factory are good things in themselves, but they deprived me of something that I still miss: adventure. Destiny decided that I should find adventure in the awful mess of a Europe swept by war.17
1946
Reintegration into Italy in the aftermath of a devastating war is difficult. Levi finds work at the DUCO-Montecatini paint factory, in Avigliana, near Turin. He is obsessed by the ordeals he has suffered and feverishly writes the accounts that will become If This Is a Man. Yet he manages to find relief in the experience of writing.
Before I was arrested I had already written a story; I still have a copy, but I’ve been careful not to publish it. It was a mediocre flourish, with a little of everything in it. . . . There’s a lot of the natural world, rocks and plants. Maybe that’s what I would have written about, yes, that world fascinated me. But the experience of the concentration camp was fundamental. Obviously I wouldn’t go back; yet alongside the horror of the experience, which I still feel, I can’t deny that it also had positive results. There, it seems to me, I learned to understand the facts about men.18
For the survivor, to tell is an important and complex undertaking. It is perceived, at the same time, as a moral and civic obligation, as a primary, liberating need, and as social capital: someone who has experienced the Lager feels that he is the repository of a fundamental experience, inserted into the history of the world, a witness by right and by duty, frustrated if his testimony is not asked for and acknowledged, rewarded if it is.19
[In If This Is a Man] I tried to write the biggest, heaviest, most important things. . . . It seemed to me that the theme of indignation should prevail: it was testimony in an almost legal form, intended as an indictment—not for the purpose of provoking reprisal, revenge, punishment but purely as testimony. And so certain subjects seemed to me somewhat marginal . . . let’s say, an octave lower, and these I wrote about much later.20
The question that is often asked by high school readers (“If you hadn’t been in the Lager and hadn’t studied chemistry, would you still have been a writer? And, if so, in the same way?”) could be answered logically only by taking another Primo Levi who didn’t study chemistry and who began writing. The counter-proof doesn’t exist. Sometimes, forcing the paradox a little, I’ve said that my model for writing was the short, end-of-the-week factory report, and to a certain extent it’s true. I was struck by a statement attributed to Fermi, who also was bored when he had to write a paper in high school. The only subject he would gladly have taken up was: Describe a two-lire coin. The same thing often happens to me: if I have to describe a two-lire coin I’m successful. If I have to describe something indefinite, for example a human character, then I’m less successful.21
He becomes engaged to Lucia Morpurgo.
1947
Levi leaves DUCO. For a short, frustrating period he works with a friend.
SEPTEMBER: He marries Lucia Morpurgo.
OCTOBER: If This Is a Man is published by De Silva, with a drawing from Goya’s Disasters of War on the cover.
I had written some stories on my return from prison. I had written them without realizing that they could be a book. My friends from the Resistance, after reading them, told me to “fill them out,” to make a book out of them. It was 1947, I brought it to Einaudi. It had various readers, and it fell to my friend Natalia Ginzburg to tell me that Einaudi wasn’t interested. So I went to Franco Antonicelli, at De Silva.22
1948
Levi’s daughter, Lisa Lorenza, is born.
APRIL: Levi accepts a job as a laboratory chemist at SIVA, a small paint factory in Turin. (In 1953, the plant moves to Settimo Torinese, on the outskirts of Turin.) Within a few years he becomes the technical manager and then the general manager.
I entered the paint industry by chance, but I never had very much to do with the general run of paints, varnishes, and lacquers. Our company, immediately after it began, specialized in the production of wire enamels, insulating coatings for copper electrical conductors. At the peak of my career, I numbered among the thirty or forty specialists in the world in this branch. . . . I don’t believe I have wasted my time in managing a factory. My factory militanza—my compulsory and honorable service there—kept me in touch with the world of real things.23
1952
At the invitation of Paolo Boringhieri, Levi contributes to Einaudi’s Scientific Editions, with translations, revisions, proofreading, and editorial opinions. The arrangement continues until 1957, when Boringhieri leaves Einaudi to start his own publishing company.
1955
JULY 11: Levi signs a contract with Einaudi for a new edition of If This Is a Man, for the amount of 200,000 lire. Publication is planned for 1956.
1957
Levi’s son, Renzo, is born.
Levi starts writing the story of his return from Auschwitz, which will become The Truce. He writes one chapter a month, starting with a note on the journey written when he got back to Italy. He composes methodically, writing at night, on days off, during vacations. He makes regular journeys for work to Germany and England.
1958
The new edition of If This Is a Man is published by Einaudi. The initial printing is 2000 copies, which is followed by a second of the same size.
1959
If This Is a Man is translated into English and comes out in the United Kingdom and the United States, with very modest success.
1960
JUNE: Levi sends to Jerusalem the text of a deposition that will be added to the records of the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
“Forgive” is not my word. It is inflicted on me, because all the letters I receive, especially from young, Catholic readers, have this theme. They ask if I have forgiven. I believe that I am in my way a just man. I can forgive one man and not another; I’m able to pass judgment only case by case. If I had had Eichmann before me, I would have condemned him to death. Indiscriminate forgiveness, as some have asked me for, is not acceptable to me.24
1961
The French and German translations of If This Is a Man appear. (Levi laments the poor quality of the former.)
In parallel with The Truce, Levi is writing the stories that will later be collected as Natural Histories. He tests the reactions of readers by publishing them in various periodicals and dailies, including Il Giorno, an innovative daily in Milan. He submits some to Italo Calvino, at Einaudi, who is favorably impressed.
When this function of mine (as a witness of important historical events) was worn out, I realized that I couldn’t persist in an autobiographical mode, and yet I was too “marked” to be able to slip into orthodox science fiction. Then it seemed to me that a certain type of science fiction could satisfy the desire to express myself that I still felt, and might lend itself to a form of modern allegory. For that matter, most of Natural Histories was written before the publication of The Truce.25
1962
Radio Canada completes a radio version of If This Is a Man, with which Levi is very pleased.
The authors of the script, far away in time and space, and strangers to my experience, had drawn from the book everything I had put into it, and even something more: a spoken “meditation,” on a high technical and dramatic level, and, at the same time, meticulously faithful to reality.26
Levi proposes to RAI, the Italian state radio-television company, an adaptation of If This Is a Man that would be different from the Canadian version, expanding the most suitable episodes but preserving the technique of a multilingual dialogue.
At that time I worked in the factory until five-thirty in the evening, and then I went with the RAI people to Bròzolo—a little village in the hills—because they were trying, for the first time, to shoot outside the scenes that had presumably taken place outside. And they chose Bròzolo for this reason: that it’s one of the few towns in Piedmont where the farmers still wear wooden clogs, and they needed the sound of people walking in wooden clogs. . . . For me it was a very odd way of reliving in my skin the environment of that time, because the idea of this radio transposition was to revive the multilingual world of the Lager. And so there were French, Hungarian, Yiddish-speaking, Polish, and Russian actors—rather, non-actors, amateur actors. Now, to live in that reconstructed Babylon was truly to be plunged again—with quite penetrating effects—into the environment of that time. On the spot, that is, in the course of the broadcast, the radio recordings, the rather bold idea arose of making a theater version. And it was done using the same criteria.27
1963
APRIL: Einaudi publishes The Truce. The back cover copy is written by Italo Calvino, and on the front is a drawing by Marc Chagall, in which a man seems to be hovering in flight over a house. The critical reception is very positive, and includes praise of Levi’s narrative skill.
The Truce was written fourteen years after If This Is a Man: it is a more “self-conscious” book, more methodical, more literary, the language much more profoundly elaborated. It tells the truth, but a filtered truth. Beforehand, I had recounted each adventure many times, to people at widely different cultural levels (to friends mainly and to high school boys and girls), and I had retouched it en route so as to arouse their most favorable reactions. When If This Is a Man began to achieve some success, and I began to see a future for my writing, I set out to put these adventures on paper. I aimed at having fun in writing and at amusing my prospective readers. Consequently, I gave emphasis to strange, exotic, cheerful episodes—mainly to the Russians seen close up—and I relegated to the first and last pages the mood, as you put it, “of mourning and inconsolable despair.”28
JULY: The Truce comes in third for the Strega, the most important literary prize in Italy. Meanwhile, in Venice the jury for the Campiello Prize (newly established by a group of industrialists; among the jurists are many prominent Italian writers) chooses the book as one of the top five, to be submitted to a second jury, made up of three hundred ordinary readers.
SEPTEMBER 3: By a large margin, The Truce wins the first Campiello Prize. Levi says to an interviewer:
Look, maybe today it’s more fun for me to write than to work as a chemist, and yet I have a secret ambition to find a point of connection between the two. That is, to explain to the public the meaning of scientific research, to document imaginatively, but not too much so, what happens in the world of the laboratory, so as to reproduce in a modern guise man’s oldest, most mysterious emotions, the moment of uncertainty, to kill the buffalo or not kill it, to find what you’re looking for or not find it. There is a whole narrative tradition that re-creates the life of miners, or of doctors, or of prostitutes, and almost nothing about the spiritual adventures of chemists.29
1964
Expanding on ideas suggested by his work in the laboratory and in the factory, Levi continues to write stories with a technological starting point, which are published in Il Giorno and elsewhere.
1965
Levi returns to Auschwitz for a Polish commemorative ceremony.
The return was less dramatic than one might have imagined. Too much noise, scarcely any reflection, everything tidied up and in order, façades cleaned, a lot of official speeches.30
1966
Levi collects his stories in a volume entitled Natural Histories. The book is published, by Einaudi, under a pseudonym, Damiano Malabaila, in order to signal the difference between these fantastic tales and his first two works.
NOVEMBER 19: With the actor Pieralberto Marché, Levi produces a theatrical version of If This Is a Man, based on the version made for Italian radio. It is performed by the Teatro Stabile of Turin.
1968
DECEMBER 27: Levi starts writing for the Turin daily La Stampa, with an article on the Apollo 8 space mission. From 1975 on, he is a frequent contributor.
1971
Levi collects a second series of stories, Flaw of Form, and this time publishes it under his own name, also with Einaudi. Presenting a new edition at the beginning of 1987, he writes:
It saddens me because these are stories related to a time that was much sadder than the present, for Italy, for the world, and also for me. They are linked to an apocalyptic, pessimistic, and defeatist vision, the same one that inspired Roberto Vacca’s The Coming Dark Age. But the new Dark Age has not come: things haven’t fallen apart, and instead there are tentative signs of a world order based, if not on mutual respect, at least on mutual fear.
MAY 3: In Turin, Levi testifies before a German prosecutor against the former SS colonel Friedrich Bosshammer, who is accused of deporting 3500 Italian Jews.
1972–73
Levi travels to the Soviet Union several times for work (see the chapters “Anchovies I” and “Anchovies II” in The Wrench).
I was in Tolyatti, and I noticed the respect with which the Soviets treated our skilled workers. This fact made me curious: those men sitting in the cafeteria with me, elbow to elbow—they embodied an enormous technical and human patrimony but were destined to remain anonymous, because no one had ever written about them. . . . The Wrench perhaps originated in Tolyatti: in fact, the story is set there, even though the city is never explicitly named.31
1975
Levi decides to retire and leaves his management job at SIVA; he remains as a consultant for two more years.
I worked in a factory for almost thirty years, and I must admit that there is no incompatibility between being a chemist and being a writer: in fact, there is a mutual reinforcement. But factory life, and particularly factory managing, involves many other matters, far from chemistry: hiring and firing workers; quarreling with the boss, customers, and suppliers; coping with accidents; being called to the telephone, even at night or when at a party; dealing with bureaucracy; and many more soul-destroying tasks. This whole trade is brutally incompatible with writing. Consequently I felt hugely relieved when I reached retirement age and could resign, and so renounce my soul number one.32
My chemistry, which after all was a “low,” almost a kitchen chemistry, provided me first with a
vast assortment of metaphors. I feel richer than my writer colleagues because for me terms like “light,” “dark,” “heavy,” “light,” “blue” have a more extensive and more concrete range of meanings. For me blue isn’t only the blue of the sky, I have five or six blues available. . . . I mean that I had in my hands materials not in everyday use, with unusual properties, and they served to amplify my language precisely in a technical sense. So I have available an inventory of raw materials, of “tiles” for writing, somewhat larger than someone who doesn’t have technical training. Also, I’ve developed the habit of writing compactly, of avoiding the superfluous. Precision and concision, which are, I am told, characteristics of my writing, came from my work as a chemist.33
APRIL: The Periodic Table, an autobiography in twenty-one chapters, each of which originates in an element of Mendeleev’s table, is published by Einaudi. Later that year, Levi publishes a small collection of his poems, The Beer Hall in Bremen, with Scheiwiller, in Milan.
1978
Levi publishes The Wrench, about a Piedmontese rigger, Faussone, who travels around the world building trestles, bridges, oil rigs, and who tells stories of his encounters and adventures, and the daily difficulties of his trade.
The book aims at a reassessment of “creative” work, or just work: work, besides, can be creative at the level of the thousand Faussones who exist, and in other jobs and at other social levels. . . . Faussone doesn’t exist in flesh and blood, as I let the reader believe, but he does exist: he’s a kind of conglomerate of real people, whom I’ve met. . . .
Alongside an official, cynical rhetoric, which exalts work so as to exploit it, because a medal costs less than a raise, a second rhetoric appears, not cynical but profoundly stupid, which depicts work as a purely servile expression of humanity. That rhetoric, among other things, clashes with a workers’ culture, that of the Faussones, who make professional competence an indisputable value.34