by Primo Levi
Turin, January 11–December 20, 1981
Author’s Note
This book had its origin in something a friend told me many years ago: that in Milan, in the summer of 1945, he had volunteered in the Aid Office described in the last chapter. During that period, amid a stream of refugees and people returning home, groups similar to the one I decided to describe actually arrived in Italy: men and women whom years of suffering had hardened but not humiliated, survivors of a civilization (little known in Italy) that Nazism had destroyed to its roots, people who were exhausted but conscious of their dignity.
I did not intend to write a true story but sought, rather, to reconstruct a plausible yet imaginary itinerary for one of these groups. In large part, the events that I’ve described really happened, although not always in the places and times I assigned them. It’s true that Jewish partisans fought the Germans, almost always in desperate circumstances, sometimes incorporated into more or less regular Soviet or Polish bands, sometimes in formations made up only of Jews. There were roving bands, like Venyamin’s, which variously accepted or rejected (or sometimes disarmed or killed) Jewish fighters. It’s true that groups of Jews, totaling ten or fifteen thousand people, survived for long periods, some until the end of the war, in fortified encampments like the one I arbitrarily situated in Novoselky, or even (incredible as it seems) in catacombs like the one where I placed Schmulek. “Diversionary” actions, like the railroad sabotage and the hijacking of the parachute drops, are widely documented in the literature on the partisan war in Eastern Europe.
The characters, on the other hand, with the sole exception of Polina, the girl pilot, are all invented. In particular, the figure of the songwriter Martin Fontasch is imaginary, but in fact many Jewish cantors and poets, both celebrated and humble, were killed, like Martin, and not only in the years 1939–45, and not only by the Nazis. Thus the song of the “Gedalists” is also invented, but its refrain, along with the title of the book, was suggested to me by some words that I found in the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), a collection of sayings of famous rabbis that was edited in the second century AD and is part of the Talmud. We read there (ch. 1, para. 13): “He [Rabbi Hillel] said also: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? and when I think of myself, what am I? and if not now, when?’ ” Naturally, the interpretation that I attribute to my characters is not the orthodox one.
Since I had to reconstruct a time, a background, and a language that I knew only superficially, I had ample recourse to documents, and there are many books that I found extremely valuable. I cite the principal ones:
Ainsztein, Reuben. Jewish Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Europe. London: Elek, 1974.
Armstrong, John Alexander, ed. Soviet Partisans in World War II. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.
Artuso, A. Solo in un deserto di giaccio (Alone in a Desert of Ice). Turin: Tipografia Bogliani, 1980.
Ayalti, Hanan J., ed. Yiddish Proverbs. New York: Schocken Books, 1963.
Eliav, A. Tra il martello e la falce (Between the Hammer and the Sickle). Rome: Barulli, 1970.
Elkins, Michael. Forged in Fury. New York: Ballantine Books, 1971.
Kaganovich, M. Di milchamà fun di Jiddische Partisaner in Mizrach-Europe (The War of the Jewish Partisans in Eastern Europe). Buenos Aires: Union Central Israelita Polaca, 1956.
Kamenetsky, Ihor. Hitler’s Occupation of Ukraine. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1956.
Karol, K. S. La Polonia da Piłsudski a Gomulka (Poland from Piłsudski to Gomulka). Bari: Laterza, 1959.
Kovpak, S. A. Les Partisans Soviétiques (Soviet Partisans). Paris: La Jeune Parque, 1945.
Landmann, S. Jüdische Witze (Jewish Humor). Munich: DTV, 1963.
Litvinoff, Barnet. Road to Jerusalem. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966.
Minerbi, S. Raffaele Cantoni. Rome: Carucci, 1978.
Pinkus, Oscar. A Choice of Masks. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Sereni, A. I clandestini del mare (Illegal Immigration by Sea). Milan: Mursia, 1973.
Sorrentino, L. Isba e Steppa (Isba and Steppe). Milan: Mondadori, 1947.
Vaccarino, G. Storia della Resistenza in Europa, 1938–1945 (The Story of the Resistance in Europe, 1939–1945). Vol. 1. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981.
I thank the authors, along with all those who encouraged me with their opinions, and whose criticisms served as a rudder. I owe particular thanks to Emilio Vita Finzi, who recounted the kernel of this story and without whom the book wouldn’t have been written, and to Giorgio Vaccarino, who affectionately followed me and made available to me his prodigious archive.
Translator’s Afterword
If Not Now, When? is widely considered to be Primo Levi’s only real novel. One other book, The Wrench, can be called novelistic, but Levi himself commented that he wrote a novel only “after thirty-five years of apprenticeship, and patent or camouflaged autobiographical writing.” If we date the beginning of this thirty-five years to 1947, when If This Is a Man was first published in Italy, Levi was clearly referring to If Not Now, When?, which appeared in Italy in 1982.
And in fact If Not Now, When? has a rich and varied cast of characters, while The Wrench is told largely in the voice of a single narrator. “Writing a novel is quite another matter,” Levi went on. “It is a form of super-writing: you no longer touch earth, you’re in flight, with all the thrills, terrors, and excitements of an early aviator in a biplane made of canvas, twine, and plywood; or perhaps, more accurately, in a tethered balloon whose moorings have been cut. The initial sensation, destined to wane soon enough, is of boundless, almost licentious freedom.”
It is worth noting, however, that this self-proclaimed sense of freedom is very short-lived. In fact, the entire narrative arc of If Not Now, When? seems to be one of conditional freedom at best. In theory, the plot might seem to be a succession of ripping yarns: the protagonists sabotage one train, hijack another, fight pitched battles, tap phone wires, steal a truck, steal log rafts, and, in short, are out in the world fighting for their lives, instead of slaving in camps. But there are pitfalls everywhere; one of the most demoralizing, tellingly, is a cocktail party in an expensive apartment in Milan. Indeed, the sense of freedom seems to narrow as the characters return to civilization and to the author’s home territory.
Though Levi notes that, at least in theory, creating characters is an act of unbridled freedom, he qualifies this by adding, “But only theoretically, because you’re tied more closely to them than might appear. Each of these phantoms is born of your flesh, has your blood in its veins, for better or worse. You propagated it through budding. Even worse, it’s a gauge, it gives indications about a part of you, the tensions inside you, like those glass telltales that are cemented into a wall to determine whether a crack is likely to spread. They’re your way of saying ‘me’: when you move them or have them speak, you think twice about what you’re doing, for they might say too much. They might even outlive you, perpetuating your bad habits and errors.”
Only one of the characters, and certainly not the most likable, manages to break free of these invisible chains that seem to weigh them all down, even in the vast openness of the Russian steppes. In an encampment on the banks of the Gorin River, the actor Pavel “picked up a piece of charcoal, and drew a mustache on his upper lip, pulled a shock of wet hair over his forehead, saluted the crowd with his arm held out straight before him at eye level, and began to hold forth.” Speaking first in German, he works up to a frenzy, inciting Germany’s soldiers to fight to the death, “labeling them, variously, heroes of Greater Germany, sons of bitches, dogs of heaven, defenders of our blood and soil, and assholes.” Then, in an intense, Führer-like fury, he breaks into “a doglike snarl” and, “as if an abscess had burst, he stopped talking in German and went on in Yiddish, and everyone bent double with laughter: it was extraordinary to hear Hitler, in the throes of his ranting, using the language of the outcasts to incite someone to slaughter someone else; i
t wasn’t clear whether he was calling on the Germans to slaughter the Jews or the other way around.” The character’s abrupt lapse into an almost primeval Yiddish suggests something both profound and provocative.
Interestingly, having moved from German rabble-rouser to Yiddish split personality, Pavel in the end reverts to the language of his puppet master, Levi himself: “Pavel, with great dignity, instead of reprising his routine (which, he explained, he’d first tried out in 1937 in a Warsaw cabaret), sang ‘’O sole mio,’ in a language that no one understood and which he claimed was Italian.”
It becomes apparent not only to the reader but, especially, to the translator, that the farther the band of refugees ventures into the more exotic regions of Western Europe, the closer the book seems to come home—that is, to Levi’s “home,” though not his own Turin but the larger metropolis of Milan. The group’s ultimate destination of Palestine remains beyond, in the future, in a realm that perhaps belongs chiefly to the newborn child.
CONTENTS
At an Uncertain Hour
Crescenzago
Buna
Singing
February 25, 1944
Song of the Crow I
Shemà
Get Up
Monday
Another Monday
After R. M. Rilke
Ostjuden
Sunset at Fòssoli
February 11, 1946
The Glacier
The Witch
Avigliana
Wait
Epitaph
Song of the Crow II
They Were a Hundred
For Adolf Eichmann
The Last Epiphany
Arrival
Lilith
In the Beginning
Via Cigna
The Dark Stars
Farewell
Pliny
The Girl of Pompeii
Huayna Capac
The Gulls of Settimo
Annunciation
To the Valley
Heart of Wood
First Atlas
July 12, 1980
Brown Swarm
Autobiography
Voices
Unfinished Business
Partigia
Arachne
2000
Passover
In Mothballs
Old Mole
A Bridge
The Work
A Mouse
Nachtwache
Agave
Meleagrina
The Snail
A Profession
Flight
The Survivor
The Elephant
Sidereus Nuncius
Give Us
Chess I
Pious
Chess II
Other Poems
To the Muse
Casa Galvani
The Decathlete
Dust
Date Book
Still to Do
Song of Those Who Died in Vain
Samson
Delilah
Airport
On Trial
Thieves
Mandate
August
The Fly
The Dromedary
Almanac
These translations are for Deborah Harris
— J.G.
Footnotes printed in roman type are Levi’s own. Those in italics were supplied by the translator, and draw on information from two biographies: Primo Levi: The Double Bond by Carole Angier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) and Primo Levi: A Life by Ian Thomson (Henry Holt, 2003).
To Lucia
In all civilizations, even those still without writing, many individuals, both celebrated and unknown, feel, and yield to, the need to express themselves poetically: so they secrete poetic matter, robust or bloodless, eternal or ephemeral, for themselves, or those closest to them, or for the universe. Poetry was certainly born before prose. Who among us has never written poems?
I am a man. And I, too, at irregular intervals, “at an uncertain hour,” have given in to this urge: it seems to be written into our genetic heritage. At certain moments, poetry has seemed to me more appropriate than prose for conveying an idea or an image. I can’t say why, and I’ve never given it any thought: I don’t know much about theories of poetics, I don’t read much poetry by others, I don’t believe in the sacredness of art, nor do I believe these lines of mine are excellent. I can only assure the eventual reader that on rare occasions (normally no more than once a year) individual stimuli have naturally assumed a certain form which my rational half continues to consider unnatural.
Crescenzago1
Maybe you never thought of it,
But the sun also rises at Crescenzago.
It rises, and looks out for a field,
Or forest, hill, or lake;
And doesn’t find them. With its ugly face
It sucks fog from the dry Naviglio.
The wind rushes out of the mountains,
Running free across the endless plain.
But when it notices the smokestack here
It suddenly turns tail and flees
Because the smoke’s so black and poisonous
The wind’s afraid that it will stop its breath.
The old women sit and spend the hours
And count the falling rain.
The faces of the children are the color
Of the dead dust in the streets,
And here the women never sing,
But the tram whistles, harsh, relentless.
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.
When the siren sounds at dawn
They slip out of their rumpled beds.
They come into the street with their mouths full,
With dull eyes and ringing ears;
They pump the tires of their bicycles
And light up half a cigarette.
From morning till night they make
The menacing black steamroller heave,
Or spend the whole day eyeing
The hand that quivers on the dial.
Saturday nights they make love in the ditch
Beside the crossing keeper’s house.
Crescenzago, February 1943
1. A suburb in the “industrial sumplands north of Milan” (Thomson, 119) where Levi went to work every day at A. Wander, Ltd., a Swiss drug company. See also the chapter “Phosphorus” of The Periodic Table, where “Giulia Vineis” darns stockings while she waits to get off work.
Buna1
Wounded feet and cursed earth,
The line long in the gray mornings.
Buna’s thousand chimneys smoke,
A day like every other day awaits us.
The sirens are terrific in the dawn:
“You, multitude with wasted faces,
Another day of suffering begins
On the monotonous horror of the mud.”
I see you in my heart, exhausted comrade;
Suffering comrade, I can read your eyes.
In your breast you have cold hunger nothing
The last courage has been broken in you.
Gray companion, you were a strong man,
A woman traveled next to you.
Empty comrade who has no more name,
A desert who has no more tears,
So poor that you have no more pain,
So exhausted you have no more fear,
Spent man who was a strong man once:
If we were to meet again
Up in the sweet world under the sun,
With what face would we confront each other?
December 28, 1945
1. The name of the factory where I worked while I was a prisoner. �
�Buna was a vast plant at Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, established by the German chemical giant I.G. Farben and ‘as big as a city,’ Primo said, covering an area of about twelve square miles, and employing about 40,000 workers in all” (Angier, 303). Its main product was meant to be the synthetic rubber called Buna, but in fact, owing to sabotage and Allied bombing, none was ever produced.
Singing1
. . . But then when we began to sing
Those good old silly songs of ours,
It was as if everything
Was still the way it used to be.
A day was nothing but a day:
And seven of them make a week.
Killing was something wrong to us;
Dying, something far away.
And the months pass rather fast,
But there are still so many left!
We were merely young again:
Not martyrs, infamous, or saints.
This and much else came to mind
While we kept on singing;
But they were things like clouds,
And not easy to explain.
January 3, 1946
1. Cf. Siegfried Sassoon, “Everyone sang.”
February 25, 19441
I’d like to believe something beyond,
Beyond death destroyed you.
I’d like to be able to say the fierceness
With which we wanted then,
We who were already drowned,
To be able someday to walk again together
Free under the sun.