by Primo Levi
Foreword to Il futuro spezzato: I bambini nei lager nazisti (Broken
Future: Children in the Nazi Camps), by Lucia Beccaria Rolfi and Bruno
Maida (Florence: La Giuntina, 1997); written in 1980
Primo Levi in America
The story of Primo Levi’s relationship with American publishing begins, curiously, nearly forty years before the publication of The Periodic Table, in 1984, made him a recognizable literary figure in the United States. The American segment of Levi’s life, which has been impressively researched by Levi’s distinguished biographers, reveals as much about American and Jewish-American literary culture as it does about Levi. As early as 1946, Levi had sent a version of what became If This Is a Man to several American cousins, including a first cousin of his wife, Lucia, and his own first cousin, the gifted translator Anna Yona. She in turn brought several translated chapters to the venerable firm of Little, Brown, which had them read by Joshua Loth Liebman, a best-selling author himself, who said, in the recollection of Levi’s cousin Andrew Viterbi, that “no one wants to hear about this thing.”
In many ways, Rabbi Liebman represented popular, if not prevailing, Jewish-American sentiment at the time. Responding to the parlor anti-Semitism that was so pervasive in the wider culture in these early postwar years, even Jews were merely continuing a tradition of obfuscation and bowdlerization that had been prevalent in the 1930s and earlier. On a much wider scale, Hollywood’s egregious denial of Jewish persecution was typified by the classic 1942 film Casablanca, in which the word “Jew” is never mentioned—but how can the desperate refugees, willing to sacrifice anything to gain a visa to the “free world,” be anything but fleeing Jews, one step ahead of their German and, yes, French persecutors? Indeed, publishers like Little, Brown were simply unable to countenance something as horrific or unfathomable as this inferno, memorialized not in the fourteenth-century imagination of Dante but in a contemporary account by an Auschwitz survivor struggling to rehabilitate his life as a chemist in Turin.
Levi’s work was first published in Italy the next year, 1947, but it took twelve more years for the English-language rights to be sold. The year after the second Italian publication of If This Is a Man—in 1958, this time by Giulio Einaudi Editore—a now defunct boutique press called Orion, which specialized in refined literary editions and had an adjunct office in Florence, purchased these rights. Roslyn Targ, then of Horch Associates, a prominent foreign rights agency, made the deal with Orion for $1000. Translated by Stuart Woolf, who worked directly with Levi, the book came out in America to polite, if not exciting reviews, in the fall of 1959. However, this English-language version, produced with a raft of typos, which greatly upset Levi, failed to get any attention beyond a small group of serious literary Jewish readers. Even less successful was the translation of La Tregua (The Truce), retitled The Reawakening in America, and published in 1965 by Atlantic Monthly Press, which reverted the rights to the book only eight years later. This was hardly surprising, and surely had less to do with the quality of Levi’s book than with American responses to the Holocaust.
As Cynthia Ozick has noted, “The word ‘Holocaust’ wasn’t really ubiquitous in America until the late 1960s.” And even then, America seemed to be able to handle only “one Holocaust icon,” Ozick commented, referring to her friend Elie Wiesel, who had blazed a trail in an atmosphere of denial, neglect, and deafening silence. It seemed unfair to compare Levi, that “quicksilver little woodland creature enlivened by the forest’s most astute intelligence,” as his friend Philip Roth put it, with Wiesel, who lived in America and spoke English fluently. Levi disliked crowds and public speaking, and possessed an Italian sensibility that was too weirdly scientific, too foreign, or, perhaps some readers felt, too intellectual for American readers. It should be stressed again that even in the 1960s, American Jews were still responding to a legacy of “restriction” clauses and other forms of anti-Semitism, so that assimilation, if not etiolation, remained a goal. Arthur Samuelson, who became Levi’s editor at Summit Books in the 1980s, recounts that he had to invent one of the first college courses on the Holocaust at Hampshire College and had to read most of Levi’s works in Italian, as they were not available in English in the 1970s when he was an undergraduate.
The literary agent Bobbe Siegel faced similar obstacles as she attempted to expand Levi’s literary presence in the United States. After starting out with Roslyn Targ, Siegel struck out on her own, and was engaged by Erich Linder, of Agenzia Letteraria Internazionale, to handle Levi’s American rights. Siegel adored Levi personally and recalled, “He was an exceptionally sweet and courteous man.” She visited him in Italy several times throughout the 1970s, but was unable to find an American publisher at all receptive to Levi’s work.
Alvin Rosenfeld, an eminent literary critic and scholar at the University of Indiana, began a correspondence with Levi but was equally frustrated, unable to find a version of The Periodic Table available in English. “I told Levi that I had read the German translation,” Rosenfeld said, “and I thought it was extraordinary. He gave me permission to place it in America, but I had no luck—some told me it was not a good chemistry book, while others told me that there was too much chemistry for the book to be a personal memoir.” Rosenfeld, who was on good terms with the renowned critic Irving Howe, appealed to him for support, hoping that Howe might achieve for Levi what he had done, nearly twenty years earlier, for Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, first persuading a publisher to take on Roth’s much neglected and virtually forgotten 1934 masterpiece, and then reviewing it brilliantly on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. Rosenfeld’s personal appeal to Howe worked. Howe, along with a distinguished translator of Italian literature, Raymond Rosenthal, became key in getting Emile Capouya, not only himself a translator but also an editor at Schocken Books, to sign up The Periodic Table after it had been rejected by more than twenty American publishers. Arthur Samuelson, only a few years out of college, was then still a young editor at Schocken. He was also very enthusiastic about The Periodic Table, but he rose to prominence at Schocken not for his love of Levi but for publishing the enormous New York Times best seller When Bad Things Happen to Good People, by Rabbi Harold Kushner. Pursued by other publishing houses for, as he recalls, “hitting this home run,” Samuelson took a job at Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster. There he proceeded to buy up seven of Levi’s unpublished titles for approximately $1500 each, leaving The Periodic Table behind at Schocken, where it was still being translated by Rosenthal. As Bobbe Siegel, who brought these seven books to Samuelson in a shopping bag, later reflected, “I had no trouble selling Levi to those who had heard of him then, but I had trouble getting money.”
Siegel was not the only one who faced hurdles. Simon & Schuster was a hugely successful, commercial firm, and Arthur Samuelson, who had been hired for his ability to create pop best sellers, was faced with the daunting task of presenting Levi’s book to the Simon & Schuster sales force. “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.”
Samuelson’s excitement about Levi’s works came to be shared by others. Saul Bellow, who had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976, had already commented on the dust jacket of the Schocken Books edition of The Periodic Table: “After a few pages I immersed myself in The Periodic Table gladly and gratefully. There is nothing superfluous here, everything this book contains is essential. It is wonderfully pure.” The reviews that accompanied the publication of Levi’s memoir in the fall of 1984 were, at long last, so laudatory—eclipsing any raves that Levi had received in Europe—that the way was finally paved for him to achieve literary recognition in America. Already a highly praised
and respected master in his native land, but not necessarily known as a “Jewish writer,” Levi was hardly prepared for the celebrity, best-seller status that depicted him foremost as a Holocaust survivor and memoirist and suddenly catapulted him out of literary anonymity on American shores. While The Periodic Table garnered phenomenal reviews, If Not Now, When?, published several months later, in April 1985, through Simon & Schuster, finally achieved the commercial success that had previously eluded Levi.
At this juncture, Levi, accompanied by his wife, was preparing for what turned out to be his only visit to America. He had been invited by, among others, Alvin Rosenfeld, Irving Howe, and Summit Books. His publisher planned a publicity tour of nearly three weeks, beginning on April 12, 1985, which would take the Levis to New York, Los Angeles, San Diego, St. Louis, Bloomington, Indiana, and, finally, Boston. “We worked out an arrangement to bring Levi over, mostly as a book promotion,” Rosenfeld recalls, “but he got cold feet over it. He was not really a public personality. He was reserved, though wonderful—he did not have what we call platform presence, in the terms of Mailer or Wiesel, for those are people who know how to stand before a large audience and bring it alive. That was not Levi, who was like a string quartet, not a full orchestra.”
Wendy Nicholson, the director of publicity at Summit, who was Levi’s publicist, recalled that “he was a sweet little man, very tiny, and he felt like a rabbit in the sights of the hunters.” He possessed a “most extraordinary moral gravitas,” she added, but “he had no patience for fools or superficiality, and he was disgusted by the banality of the questions” he was asked. While the thronging New York crowds and autograph seekers became so intense that Irving Howe was forced at one point to act as Levi’s bodyguard, it was apparent to Nicholson that a cadre of highly influential reviewers was able to position Levi beyond the “Holocaust” label and convey the gossamer subtlety of Levi’s works to a greater public. “It was not as bad then as it is now,” Nicholson says of this period, the mid-1980s. “Levi was a serious person and he was honored for that. It was the last stage of a certain quality of reviewing, which doesn’t exist in commercial newspapers and magazines today, and there was also a level of discourse that no longer exists.”
Besieged by well-wishers, hounded by literary paparazzi, and picked up for events in black limousines—one thinks of a tour for a blockbuster author like, say, Judith Krantz or Sidney Sheldon—Levi must clearly have had second thoughts about his visit. As Ian Thomson writes in Primo Levi, “Levi began to survey his American cultural mission with a mixture of dismay and wonder. He asked Lucia if any non-Jews at all lived in New York; so far they had met mostly Jews.” This astonishment was clearly evident to Levi’s editor, Samuelson: “Jews in Italy are far more comfortable as Italians rather than as Jews, whereas in this country Jews have turned it into a brand, and Levi didn’t see himself as a Jewish brand. The situation he was describing [in his books] was not restricted to Jews, and he was arrested for being in the anti-Fascist movement.” For Levi, Samuelson added, “to say that you are a Jewish writer is a diminishment; it says that you have value only to Jews, and that was not the audience he was writing for. Americans are much more comfortable benefiting from or participating in the brand, whereas in Italy you would have been dismissed as having parochial concerns.”
Leaving New York and traveling to San Diego, Primo and Lucia Levi were met at the airport by Lucia’s cousin Andrew Viterbi, who had first met Levi at his bar mitzvah in Turin in 1948, and whose father had read to him his cousin’s Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man). Viterbi threw a festive brunch for the Levis in La Jolla, and amplified what Levi’s editor first noticed in New York. “He [Primo] mentioned somehow that he considered himself to be an Italian, an internationalist, and then a Jew, who happened to have been brought into the tragedy of war. But in coming to America they labeled him that way and pinned a Star of David on his chest.” Viterbi’s son, Alan, added, “In the United States, there is less appreciation for great intellectuals. There he was perceived just as one of Italy’s great writers, while here he was pigeonholed,” and added that Primo was a shy individual whose “way of communicating was with the pen.”
At Claremont College, where Levi had been invited by the rabbi of the college, he gave a fine lecture in English but was upset when the translator at the question-and-answer session afterward bungled his Italian answers, prompting Levi to respond himself in English. Arriving in Bloomington after a stop in St. Louis, Levi was united with his friend and correspondent Alvin Rosenfeld at the University of Indiana, where the response was far less raucous than in New York. Rosenfeld recalled, “America is a fast-paced, rather dizzying country, and Levi was from Piedmont, which is known for a slower pace of life and a greater reserve. Primo embodied that in a very civilized way. His manner was not an ebullient manner. He was very affable, and in a small room it was a joy to be with him, but he was not given to platform antics, and crowds were not his thing.”
At Levi’s final publicity destination, Boston, the novelist Leslie Epstein—the son and nephew of the twin brothers who wrote Casablanca, and whose own novel The King of the Jews Levi had read in English and admired—remembered that Levi “looked aquiline, held his head back, and seemed physically like a rod of steel, which must have helped him survive.” Picking him up in his little red Fiat called “Frisky” (“He probably loved it after all those limousines,” Epstein quipped), the novelist recalled that Levi seemed to feel quite at home, especially since he was reunited with Anna Yona, his first cousin, at a particularly memorable lunch. According to Epstein, Yona was “lively, humorous, and a really wonderful person.” He observed that she “possessed many of the qualities” of Levi himself: “the dignity, the calm, a certain irony, and a sense of the moments that lie before and behind the one that one happens to find oneself in.” In Boston, Levi gave a talk called “Beyond Survival,” and he was feted, Epstein emphasized, as an Italian writer, not as a Holocaust icon. Epstein admired Levi so much that he offered him a position at Boston University, but Levi responded, “I cannot do.”
“Why not,” Epstein countered.
“My mother,” Levi replied, “is in a very sad way.”
“She was beloved, but he also felt trapped by her,” Epstein said of Levi’s mother, Ester, who lived with her son and daughter-in-law in Turin. “He had to stay with her.”
In the fall of 1985, months after Levi’s American sojourn, an incendiary essay—“a celebrated spitball” in the words of James Marcus, who had corresponded with Levi—appeared in Commentary. Written by Fernanda Eberstadt and ostensibly a review of If Not Now, When?, the piece was clearly an attack on Levi himself, who in 1982 had challenged Israel’s right to invade Lebanon and had called for Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon to resign. The article criticized Levi’s ability as a novelist and further questioned his appropriateness as a Holocaust spokesman, suggesting that he was not “Jewish enough,” as Levi’s biographer Carole Angier has noted, and that his background as a civilized Western European Jew rendered him clearly unable to comprehend the totality of the genocide of a diverse mass of six million people. According to both Arthur Samuelson and Marcus, this piece angered and wounded Levi, a man who suffered from episodic and lasting depressions, and who was at the time already deeply saddened by the unexpected death of his friend and editor Italo Calvino, that September.
The last full year of Levi’s life, 1986, was marked by visits from two Americans, encounters that were poignant in their own distinct ways. Philip Roth, who had first met Levi in London that April, traveled to Turin in September to visit the writer he so admired. Assigned to write an essay for The New York Times Book Review, Roth was given a tour of Levi’s old factory, among other touchstones from Levi’s past. Roth’s profile, which appeared only months before Levi’s death, described the writer as a “chemist-artist” who when “listening . . . is as focused and as still as a chipmunk spying something unknown from atop a stone wall.” Roth further noted, “Of all t
he intellectually gifted artists of this century—and Levi’s uniqueness is that he is even more the artist-chemist than chemist-writer—he may well be the most thoroughly adapted to the totality of the life around him.”
The other American visitor was Risa Sodi, then a twenty-eight-year-old master’s candidate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Sodi, now a Yale administrator and an Italian literature scholar, met Levi three months before Roth’s visit, on June 19, 1986. She wrote, “That afternoon, Levi answered the doorbell in shirtsleeves and led me into his living room. After some preliminary chitchat, my nervousness made me blurt out, ‘Ora possiamo cominciare!’ (We can begin now!), and so began an intense but agreeable three-hour conversation, punctuated only by two phone calls, which he didn’t answer, and one trip he made to the kitchen to prepare us an espresso.” The biographer Myriam Anissimov said later, in Primo Levi: The Tragedy of an Optimist, that Sodi was “the only one who succeeded in having a private conversation with Primo Levi, the only one who succeeded in breaking through his shell.” The meeting produced a profound and indelible effect on Sodi, who calls Levi “a polestar for my professional and scholarly life.”
Two days before Levi’s death on April 11, 1987, Alvin Rosenfeld received a letter from his friend, in which Levi reported, “I am suffering from a severe depression, and I am struggling at no avail to escape it. . . . Please forgive me for being so short; the mere fact of writing a letter is a trial for me, but the will to recover is strong [italics added]. . . . Let us see what the next months will bring to all of us, but my present situation is the worst I ever experienced, Auschwitz included.”
Unquestionably, Levi’s American story—from the all too casual dismissal of his Auschwitz memoir by a Boston rabbi in 1946 to his dismay at being interviewed in 1985 by a New York Times critic who had not read his book and the caustic attack on him in Commentary—reveals as much about permutations of American culture, literature, and politics, Jewish or otherwise, as it does about Levi himself. The outpouring of praise that rained down upon Levi in 1984, along with the encomiums that greeted the posthumous publication of The Drowned and the Saved a few years later, has, if anything, continued to grow and has augmented his stature in these last three decades. All of this is underscored by the publication of several outstanding Levi biographies; the appearance of the 1997 film version of The Truce, starring John Turturro, and of Primo, a theatrical work and film, adapted and performed by Antony Sher; the serialization of two Levi short stories in The New Yorker in 2007; the proliferation of academic Levi symposiums; and, finally, this American and English copublication of The Complete Works of Primo Levi, with thirteen new translations and a corrected one by Stuart Woolf, Levi’s first English translator.