The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

No less wonderful is the behavior of the cuckoo, which by the light of our human morality seems to have been dictated by a twisted cunning. Instead of building a nest, the female cuckoo lays her egg in the nest of a smaller bird; the rightful owners of the nest often (though not always) fail to detect the intruder, sitting on the alien egg along with their own brood, until the baby cuckoo hatches. As soon as it emerges, still featherless and blind, it possesses a specific sensibility and intolerance: it cannot stand the presence of other eggs. It twists and turns and shoves until it has succeeded in pushing all the eggs of its supposed siblings out of the nest.

  The two “parents” feed the chick frantically for days and days, until it has grown larger than them. It is like reading pulp fiction, and one is unsure whether to be more amazed at the perfection of the cuckoo’s instincts or at the lack of instincts in its involuntary hosts: but even in the games of nature there must be winners and losers.

  Birds, in short, like other animals, may not know how to do all the things that we do, but they know how to do other things that we cannot do, or that we cannot do so well, or that we can do only with tools of some kind. If the experiment that Leopardi dreamed of could be carried out, we would return to our human semblances with many more arrows in our quiver.

  1. Guido Ceronetti is an Italian philosopher and poet. The pair of texts mentioned are two of Leopardi’s Operette morali.

  The Mark of the Chemist

  It’s said that the Freemasons acknowledged one another by scratching the other’s palm when they shook hands. I would like to suggest that chemists (or former chemists, like me) of my generation, when introduced to one another, should display the palm of their right hand: just in the center, where the flexor tendon of the middle finger crosses what palm readers call the head line, most of them have a small, very specific professional scar, whose origin I will explain.

  In chemical laboratories these days, it is possible to assemble very complex equipment in minutes by using conically tapered ground glass joints: it’s a quick and simple system, the joints maintain a good seal even under vacuum, the pieces are interchangeable, there’s a vast assortment available, and putting them together is as easy as playing with Lego or Erector sets. But until 1940 or so, conical glass joints were unknown or prohibitively expensive in Italy, and, in any case, beyond the reach of students.

  Corks or rubber stoppers were used for the seal; when (as was frequently the case; for instance to connect a flask to a cooler) it was necessary to insert a glass tube bent at a right angle into a drilled stopper, we would grip the tube and press down while twisting it: often, the glass tube would break and the jagged end would stab us in the hand. It would have been easy—in fact duty required it—to warn initiates of this minor and easily avoidable danger, but, as we know, an impulse survives in some dark tribal recess of our nature that drives us to want every initiation to be painful, to be memorable, and to leave its mark. This, in the palm of our working hand, was our mark: the mark of chemists who were still to some extent alchemists, still to some extent members of a secret sect.

  For that matter, and again in the field of hermetic seals, the older professors still used to speak, with odd nostalgia, of “lutes,” used by pioneering chemists before the advent of stoppers: these were mixtures (lutum, in Latin, means “mud”) of clay and linseed oil, or litharge and glycerine, or asbestos and silicate, or other things, which they used to connect their crude equipment. A distant descendant is the reddish glass mastic, based on minium or red lead, which fell out of use a few decades ago.

  Being admitted into a laboratory actually had some of the flavor of an initiation rite. There was the white lab coat, for both boys and girls: only the occasional heretic, or those who wished to appear heretical, wore a black or gray lab coat. There was the spatula in the breast pocket, a symbol of the guild. There was the ceremony of the presentation of your glassware: fragile, sacred because it was fragile, and if you break it you pay for it; for the first time in our academic career, in fact, for the first time in our lives, we were responsible for something we didn’t own, something with which we had been solemnly entrusted (in exchange for a signed receipt).

  This resulted in a peculiar market. Often, a piece of glassware improperly exposed to an open flame would emit a sinister tick and crack. If it was a small crack, we’d pretend nothing had happened, and hope that the warehouse man wouldn’t notice when the glassware was returned; if it was a large crack, the item was auctioned off—it was always good for something. It might be useful to someone who’d had a chemical preparation turn out badly, or who had produced a precipitate that needed to be weighed, or who, for whatever personal reasons, just needed to let off steam; he or she would pay a few lire for the damaged glass and then, publicly, with the greatest possible violence and noise, hurl it against the wall above the lab sink.

  The enormous laboratory sink and its surrounding area were the site of a perennial crowd. People went there to smoke a cigarette, to chat, and even to court girls: but labwork, especially the work of analysis, is serious and demanding, and even when we were in the process of courting it was hard to shake off the anxiety that went with it. There was a lively exchange of information, advice, and complaints.

  It was odd: to fail an oral examination certainly wasn’t fun, but it was taken sportingly, both by the one who had failed and by his or her classmates; it was more of an occupational accident than a failure, it was a mishap that one could describe with a certain glee, almost boastfully, much as when one gets a sprain while skiing. Getting a chemical analysis wrong was worse, perhaps because, deep down, we knew that the judgment of other people (in this case, our teachers) is arbitrary and arguable, while the judgment of things is always inexorable and just: it’s a law before which all are equal.

  No one who “missed” an element in qualitative analysis boasted about it, much less someone who’d “invented” one—who had, that is, found something that wasn’t present in the mysterious gram of fine powder that we were given to analyze. The “misser” might have been simply distracted or nearsighted; the “inventor” could only be a fool. It’s one thing not to see something that’s there, another to see something that’s not.

  In many ways, the two kinds of analysis, qualitative and quantitative, differed from everything we’d seen and done until then. It was no accident that individual values were often overturned, much as happened in gym classes in middle school. The “top of the class” students, with their proverbial memories, those who triumphed in oral exams, experts at untangling the complexities of theoretical chemistry, clever at setting forth clearly the notions acquired, or perhaps at passing off as understood things they hadn’t understood, capable of acting confident even when they weren’t, and in some cases endowed with exceptional minds, were not always competent when it came to laboratory practice. Here other virtues were required: humility, patience, method, manual skills; and even, why not? good eyesight and sense of smell, strong nerves and muscles, resilience in the face of failure.

  In particular, quantitative analysis, and specifically the ponderal variety, was a daunting endeavor. The teacher, whether a professor or an assistant, handed each student a vial containing, in solution, an unknown quantity of an element. It was our job to “precipitate” it, that is, make it insoluble, by using a certain reagent under strict conditions; collect it all (this often required hours of work) on a filter; rinse it; dry it; calcine it; let it cool and then weigh it on the precision scale. The sequence offered no space for individual initiative; it entailed nerve-racking waiting periods and a maniacal attention to detail. It wasn’t attractive work, because it was too similar to something a machine could do (and in fact nowadays machines do it, much better and much faster than human beings can).

  I can finally confess, now that many decades have passed: the top score of 30 that I received on my quantitative analysis exam in 1940 was undeserved, or perhaps I should say, was the reward for a dubious skill. I had taken it into my head to compile
the results obtained by my classmates in measuring the element that was the subject of the practical examination, and I had realized that, with a few minor variations, they all fell into “quanta”: that is, they were all whole-number multiples of a certain value. There was nothing metaphysical here, and the meaning was clear: in order to save himself time and effort, the professor, instead of weighing out for each candidate his or her own portion, more or less at random, must have used a burette, that is, a long vertical tube, calibrated and graduated, assigning to each one a whole number of cubic centimeters of solution.

  I checked this one day by entering, on some pretext, the secret room where our practical quizzes were prepared: yes, there was the burette, in plain view, still full of the pale blue solution. All I had to do was perform even a superficial analysis, and then round the result up or down so that it matched the closest step in my scale. I told only two close friends about my discovery, and they, like me, got the top grade of 30.

  I don’t know whether quantitative analyses are still administered with this system. If so, then let this confession be a warning for lazy professors and students. Unfortunately, the trick is worthless when it comes to the countless practical cases in which a chemist, now with his degree, is faced with the sad task of doing a quantitative determination of a material of plant, animal, or mineral (or even commercial) origin. As we know, nature takes no leaps, at least no macroscopic ones.

  The girls seemed to be more at ease in the laboratory than the boys. At a time when, at least in Italy, feminism still carried no weight, the female students glimpsed a reassuring continuity between housework and labwork: labwork was only a little more precise in its requirements, but the similarity was unmistakable, and the discomfort of the new proportionately less. It had become a pleasant custom among us for our female colleagues to serve us, at five, tea made in laboratory glassware; occasionally it was even accompanied by tiny experimental cookies, hastily and irreverently made, out of starch and malt enzymes, and baked in the drying oven for precipitates.

  In spite of the challenges mentioned above, I believe that every chemist has tender memories and a feeling of nostalgia about the university laboratory. Not only because it was a place of intense camaraderie and shared effort but also because when we left that lab, every night and especially at the end of the semester, it was with the sensation that we had “learned to do something”; which, as life teaches us, is different from having “learned something.”

  The Best Merchandise

  The conference on Judaism in Eastern Europe that took place in Turin in February 1984 was the most wide-ranging examination of the topic that has been held in Italy, and perhaps in all of Europe, since the Second World War. It focused on the enormous differences between this branch of Judaism, which was for many centuries the principal one, and the many other branches, including Italian Judaism, and for those who attended it provided an excellent opportunity for reassessment.

  In a little more than a generation, Eastern European Jews moved from a reclusive and archaic way of life to an active and enthusiastic involvement in labor struggles, national demands, and debates on the rights and dignity of man (and woman).

  They were among the leading figures in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and February 1917; in Warsaw alone, in the 1920s, they published no fewer than three daily newspapers and countless periodicals in every area of political debate; they were even able to generate a profoundly original body of film production, before the Nazis began their slaughter. What was the source of this impressive and spontaneous vitality? How did such a powerful voice come out of a meager social body?

  It is worthwhile to study the reasons that Jews had so much “weight” in countries where that weight was viewed with respect and straightforward curiosity, but more often with an abiding bitterness, envy, and even a savage hatred. I believe that, as is always the case in the history of human affairs, there is not a single cause but, rather, intertwining causes; among them, however, there is one that strikes me as predominant.

  There is a constant in Judaism, operative in every time and place, and it is the emphasis that has been placed for centuries on education. Beginning in the late Middle Ages, a distinctive educational system began to take root among the Jews of Eastern Europe.

  Schooling was considered the highest value in life: “the best merchandise,” as the proverb has it. Education began at age four and continued for the rest of one’s life, at least theoretically and as the hardships of that life allowed; it was imparted at the community’s expense, and almost no child went without it. The uneducated were pitied or scorned, the learned were admired, and represented in fact the sole acknowledged aristocracy.

  Of course, these were educational methods that were worlds away from those we use today: you can get an idea of them from the novels of Chaim Potok (The Chosen and the books that followed), which tell how those methods still survive, alongside more advanced pedagogical experiments, in Hasidic communities that have been transplanted to the United States.

  Their foundation was strictly religious: immediately after learning the none too easy Hebrew alphabet, the child was directly shuttled along into the reading of the Torah and the literal translation of long sections from Hebrew into Yiddish; many other passages, some of them quite long, were to be learned by heart. In the following years, the child studied a number of commentaries on the Bible and the rules governing life and prayer. Corresponding to our universities were the rabbinical schools (yeshivas, according to the local pronunciation), where the course of study was extended to the Talmud.

  Unmistakably, such a curriculum had many gaps in comparison with what is taught today: nothing about history, geography, or the language of their place of residence; nothing or almost nothing about the exact and natural sciences; a few notions of the medical art steeped in superstitious beliefs; little Western or secular philosophy; no literature, art, or music.

  The teaching was onerous and obsessive, and, especially in the yeshivas, it filled the entire day, but it was not dogmatic. The teacher referred to a certain interpretation of a Talmudic passage, or pointed out some contradiction, or posed a question. There ensued a free-ranging, ardent, sophistical discussion, sometimes shrewd, always obstinate: in some cases the central topic was forgotten, and the class ventured into fanciful digressions in which the formal elegance or the audacity of the argumentation prevailed over both pertinence and rigor.

  Wherever there was a synagogue, perhaps just an old wooden hut, there was also a library, consisting naturally of nothing but religious books, but frequented by the young, the adult, and the elderly. Every community, however small, was therefore a hotbed of culture, set in a vast territory where the non-Jewish population was almost entirely illiterate, and the Jewish population, generally quite poor, was certainly made up not of professional intellectuals but of artisans, shopkeepers, merchants, and farmers.

  Adding to this educational pressure was enforced multilingualism. Until the fury of Hitler’s whirlwind, and throughout the vast range of the tsarist Pale of Settlement, that is, from Poland and Lithuania all the way down to Moldava and Ukraine, the unifying language spoken in the archipelago of Jewish communities was Yiddish, with a few variants in terms of vocabulary and pronunciation: the mame loshen, as it was affectionately termed, the “mother tongue.” But at a very early age, as mentioned above, children were taught the “sacred languages,” Hebrew and Aramaic; moreover, the inevitable interaction with the surrounding populace forced the Jews, from childhood, to learn its language.

  For that matter, Yiddish itself, a language that is fascinating to linguists (and not only to linguists), is intrinsically multilingual: onto the foundation of a medieval Rhenish dialect, which already contained loanwords from Latin and French, many Hebrew and Aramaic terms were added, frequently adopting German declension or conjugation in a nonchalant manner (for instance, from the Hebrew ganav, “thief,” comes the past participle geganvet, “stolen”), along with a fair number of Russian
, Polish, Czech, and other words.

  It is the language of a wandering people, pushed by history from one country to another, and it bears the marks of every station along the way. Its evolution has not yet come to an end: the Yiddish of Eastern European Jews who immigrated in the nineteenth century to the United States has not died out; if anything, it is being enriched with English terms, thus moving forward to a further stage of development. Symmetrically, the most expressive and least replaceable Yiddish words enter “from below” into various professional jargons and then into everyday language.

  The “mother tongue” is an essentially spoken language (though it has been dignified by a rich if late-blooming body of literature), which makes it eminently flexible and permeable; its profoundly hybrid nature makes it an instrument of mental gymnastics for those who speak it and for those striving to understand it and reconstruct its origins.

  I believe that these cultural factors played a preeminent role in the brief but intense flourishing of Ashkenazi Judaism, and, in more general terms, in the otherwise inexplicable preservation of the Jewish people through millennia of adversities, emigrations, and metamorphoses.

  Of course, other factors worked and continue to work as cements: religion, collective memory, a shared history, tradition, persecution itself, and the isolation imposed from outside. Independent evidence is offered by the fact that, when all these factors wane or vanish, Jewish identity wanes in turn, and the communities tend to dissolve, as happened in Weimar Germany and as is happening in Italy today.

  It may be that this is the price one must pay for an authentic equality of rights and status; if that is the case, the price would be very high, and not just for the Jews. The slaughter and scattering of the Jews of Eastern Europe was an irreparable loss for all of mankind. Judaism isn’t dead, but it’s struggling to survive: gagged and unrecognized in the Soviet Union, crossbred in both Americas, submerged in Israel by different traditions and profound sociological and historical transformations.