The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Most significant, however, is the expanding audience for Levi’s works in the non-European world. In Latin America, translations continue to appear in Brazil and Mexico, and in 2005–06 two long interviews were published in Argentina.

  In Asia, Japan’s early interest in Levi’s work—The Truce came out in 1969—was followed by years of silence; the “battle for memory,” or, rather, the effort for collective reflection on the crimes perpetrated by the country during the Second World War, began only with the death of Emperor Hirohito, in 1989. Interest in Levi revived in the nineties, thanks mainly to the translations of Hirohide Takeyama. The first translation into Chinese was The Periodic Table, in 1998; three years later The Drowned and the Saved appeared in Mandarin (and in 2013 in simplified Chinese). In South Korea, an account of the wretched fate of political detainees under the military regime was possible only after 1988, with the establishment of democracy, but it was still some twenty years before Levi was published there: translations of If This Is a Man, The Periodic Table, If Not Now, When?, and The Wrench came out between 2007 and 2013. If This Is a Man was published in Vietnamese in 2010, and The Truce appeared in India in 2008, in Malayalam.

  New editions and printings continue to appear in Hebrew (in 2002 The Truce and If Not Now, When? and in 2007 a collection of interviews with Levi). In 2009 the Aladdin Project, an association of writers, diplomats, intellectuals, and translators, whose purpose is to inform an Islamic audience about the Holocaust, made Arabic and Farsi translations of If This Is a Man available on its website.

  Levi followed the international publication of his works closely, aware that every new translation offered a chance to broaden his readership. In many cases his involvement was important, not only in encouraging publication but because he had a contractual right to check the quality of the translations into languages that he knew.

  The expansion of Levi’s popularity, although posthumous, into geographic areas completely outside the experience of the Holocaust testifies to the fact that the message of his work has acquired a universal value, that it is capable of defending human dignity in very diverse contexts; it’s not surprising that his name often comes up in reports of contemporary crimes against humanity, such as the genocides in the nineties (in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda) or the barbarization of political and social life in vast areas of the world (even in the West, where we have seen, for example, aggressive displays of anti-Semitism and xenophobia).

  In international culture, the image of Levi as a witness has come to dominate not only his status as a great writer but other essential aspects of his personality and his work. This is no doubt a consequence of the fact that in most languages Levi’s fundamental texts of memory have become available before his more narrative works. And in the languages into which a single work has been translated, that work has almost always been, even in more recent years, If This Is a Man. The publication of the Complete Works in English represents a crucial step in encouraging a change in that perception.

  MONICA QUIRICO

  The list of sources for the citations and part of the information in this

  essay—writings and interviews by Primo Levi, critical literature on him

  and on his work—can be consulted at the websites of Liveright/W. W. Norton (http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294988470) and the International Center for Primo Levi Studies in Turin (http://www.primolevi.it/Web/English).

  Notes on the Texts

  IF THIS IS A MAN

  “If This Is a Man is a book that was written immediately.” This statement, which Primo Levi made in Cuneo, in Piedmont, in November 1975, during a talk with readers, needs to be interpreted. Levi’s first book appeared in the fall of 1947—almost three years after the liberation of Auschwitz—by which point dozens of memoirs about the deportation had already appeared in Italy. Among these, however, only seven had to do with the deportation of the Jews. From the chapter “Die Drei Leute vom Labor” we know that Levi had already scribbled some brief notes in the Lager, just as we know that he had to destroy them, because if they had been found on him he would have been sent before a firing squad. He fixed them on paper just the same, to ensure for himself two things that were very rare in that place: solitude and thought—not only rare but a source of the most acute suffering, “the pain of remembering, the old fierce anguish of feeling myself a man again, which attacks me like a dog the moment my consciousness comes out of the darkness.”

  So even in Auschwitz Levi had tried to write; but, as far as we know, he didn’t write in the months just after the liberation. The “truce” that gives his second book its title was an adventurous middle time of wandering through Europe. His traveling companions were fighters or survivors or victims like him; they were part of the same history, of the same geography as the Lager. They were people with whom he exchanged stories along the way, and doing so was consoling; but they were not an audience. The testimony—that is, “the evil tidings of what man’s audacity made of man in Auschwitz,” as the finale of the chapter “Ka-Be” solemnly chimes—had to be brought to the others: to those who were distant, those who would have preferred not to know, the indifferent, the unwilling, the incredulous, the torturers themselves and those who had supported them. This was the audience that Levi sought.

  There was a notable exception to this abstention from writing before his return to Italy. In Katowice, in the spring of 1945, a commission from the Soviet government approached some three thousand former deportees of various nationalities and asked them to document their experience in the Lager of Oświęcim—the Polish name of Auschwitz. That early investigation depicted, concisely but reliably, the key role that Auschwitz played in the Final Solution, in the structure and functioning of the industry of death, in the number of victims. Among those who compiled testimony were two Jews from Turin: a forty-seven-year-old doctor, Leonardo De Benedetti, and a twenty-five-year-old chemist, Primo Levi. Report on the Hygienic-Sanitary Organization of the Concentration Camp for Jews in Monowitz (Auschwitz—Upper Silesia) probably had an early version (shorter, and perhaps drafted in French), which may someday be found in some archive in the former USSR. The Italian text is, instead, a version conceived for an audience that knew almost nothing about the Lagers. Levi and De Benedetti published it on November 24, 1946, in the prestigious journal Minerva Medica. The text was rediscovered in the 1990s, after decades of oblivion, thanks to Alberto Cavaglion, and has been translated into English (Auschwitz Report, edited by Robert Gordon; London: Verso, 2006).

  The capacity apparent in Auschwitz Report to gather, remember, and organize information of minute complexity is astonishing—anthropological no less than clinical, political no less than scientific. The authors, De Benedetti and Levi, were prisoners at the bottom, at ground level; their ability to overcome the ignorance of space and time that was inflicted before every other humiliation is equally astonishing. The Report should be read and studied on its own, and not as an outline for If This Is a Man. It was the first evidence of a technical nature produced by survivors of the Lager: effective because it was concrete, addressed to the few who at the time were interested in knowing the reality of the extermination. And it was an engagé text, commissioned and written with the war still going on, or just concluded.

  Auschwitz Report, then, really was “written immediately,” but the statement is also truthful with regard to If This Is a Man. During a TV broadcast in 1974, Levi answered a question on the origin of his first book “as a structure”: “It had no origin, it emerged from a series of stories. It originated upside down, and perhaps that’s visible. I wrote the last chapter first, because it was the most urgent, the freshest in memory, but I had no intention of writing a book. The structure emerged little by little, when I realized that these episodes were a tale, that they could be arranged chronologically, that they were, in other words, a chronology.”

  In the second, definitive edition of 1958, the book concludes with the places and dates of its composition:
“Avigliana–Turin, December 1945–January 1947.” The DUCO-Montecatini plant, where Levi went to work as a chemist on January 21, 1946, was in Avigliana. It was his first full-time job after returning to Italy, and from then on, work and writing were superimposed on each other, as he recounts in the chapter “Chromium” in The Periodic Table: “I had kindly been granted a rickety desk in the laboratory, a noisy, drafty workplace full of people coming and going with rags and cans, and had been assigned no definite task; unoccupied as a chemist and in a state of complete alienation (though it was not called that at the time), I wrote, in no order, page after page of the memories that were poisoning me, and my colleagues looked at me stealthily, as if I were a harmless lunatic. The book grew in my hands almost spontaneously, without plan or system, intricate and crowded as a termite nest.” Thus for weeks he made notes randomly, but impelled by the urgency of remembering, until a structure began to emerge. The date “December 1945” alludes to the first phase of this feverish pursuit of the facts.

  The typescripts of the first drafts of the final chapter, “The Story of Ten Days,” are dated February 1946. Thus the earliest chapter that Levi was able to shape is the one with the simplest structure: a diary. The design of the work and the chronology of the facts related in it began to develop from that nucleus. If This Is a Man (in both versions, 1947 and 1958) perfectly melds the chronology of the facts recounted with the thematic progression in the witness-narrator’s discovery of the Lager. Every new subject confronted in the individual chapters—the journey, the entrance into Auschwitz, the infirmary, the forced labor, the selections for the gas chamber—corresponds to a deliberate step forward in the calendar, along the arc of the months and the seasons. Diary and story come together smoothly; the same is true for the descriptions of the events and the reflections on them.

  We know the dates of the drafts (or at least the first drafts) of some of the book’s chapters, thanks to a typescript that Levi sent to his cousin Anna Yona, who lived in Massachusetts, in the hope of finding through her a publisher in the United States—that is, even before the work appeared in the original language. Thus, “The Canto of Ulysses,” February 14, 1946; “Kraus,” February 25; “Chemistry Examination,” March; “October 1944,” April 5–8; “Ka-Be,” June 15–20.

  When Levi wrote “The Canto of Ulysses” he wasn’t aware that Jean Samuel, known as Pikolo, had survived the evacuation march from Auschwitz; like all the healthy prisoners, Jean had been forced to march through the night of January 17–18, 1945. He was tracked down by Charles Conreau, the French schoolteacher with whom Levi had spent his last days in the Lager. Charles, having returned from Auschwitz before Levi, had sent him a letter from France, which Levi found waiting for him upon his return. He answered right away, asking Charles, among other things, to look for Jean Samuel in Strasbourg. Charles found him in early March 1946 and gave him Levi’s address in Turin. Jean wrote to Levi on March 13; Levi answered on the 23rd with a long letter, telling him: “I’m writing: some poems, some essays, even some stories related to life in the Lager.” In “Chromium” Levi also tells us that in those first months after his return he wrote “short, bloody poems.” The fact that in that letter—contemporaneous

  with the writing of his first book—he distinguishes “essays” from “stories” (and indicates that he considers the gesture of writing stories about Auschwitz particularly bold) means that, individually, he gave to the texts that were gradually emerging a character that was predominantly either narrative or nonfiction. Among the more essay-like—whether they were completed or still being written—were surely “This Side of Good and Evil” and “The Drowned and the Saved.”

  In that first letter of March 23, Levi told Jean that he was writing about him in one of the stories: “You will find it odd.” Later, on May 24, Levi sent him a rough draft, in Italian, of “The Canto of Ulysses.” In a letter dated April 6, he gave a strange and extraordinary definition of the texts that he was producing: “machins,” that is, in French, as the historian Sergio Luzzatto puts it, “contraptions, thingies. . . . Certainly Levi said it out of modesty. But maybe he said it for another reason as well. Maybe the writer intuited, clearly, that his different ways of analyzing the experience of the Lager, contemporary and contextual, were outside the categories of traditional literary genres: altogether, they had the amphibious and ineffable quality of works that are sui generis.” Machins, therefore, against the Auschwitz machine, defined thus in the chapter “Initiation”: “precisely because the Lager was a great machine [Italian macchina] to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts.”

  At the start of 1947 If This Is a Man was ready. Levi said, without providing many details, that he presented it to two or maybe three publishers, who rejected it. The only one about which we have definite information is Einaudi, in Turin. Cesare Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg, editors who were also writers, both read the manuscript. Ginzburg, née Levi, was Jewish. Her husband, Leone Ginzburg, had founded the publishing house with Giulio Einaudi, and was a celebrated Slavicist and anti-Fascist—he was, in fact, a leader of Justice and Liberty, the movement in which Levi was active during his brief time as a partisan. Leone Ginzburg had died in prison in Rome, on February 5, 1944, after being tortured by Nazi jailers.

  The rejection of If This Is a Man on the part of a Turinese, anti-Fascist publisher that should, theoretically, have been sympathetic toward Levi, and should have readily grasped the value of the work, caused outrage not only in Italy. After Levi’s death, Ginzburg admitted that she had, forty years earlier, done something foolish. But in 1947 the war had been over for two years, and memoirs that recalled its horrors seemed to have saturated the market, even if few were about the deportation of the Jews. Einaudi wished to publish books that constructed the future: at first glance Levi’s did not seem such a book, and also its stylistic approach was far from the literary climate of the time; the neorealist writers modeled their style on American examples, especially Hemingway.

  In the spring of 1947 Levi gave some episodes from his book to L’Amico del Popolo (Friend of the People), a Communist weekly published in Vercelli, outside Turin. The editor of the paper was Silvio Ortona, the unnamed author of the two lines “until one day / it will no longer make sense to say: tomorrow” that “run through” Levi’s memory in the chapter “Kraus.” The episodes that were published were, in shortened versions, “The Journey” (March 29, 1947); “On the Bottom” (April 5); another excerpt from “On the Bottom,” entitled “Häftlinge” (May 17); “Our Nights” (May 24); and “An Accident” (May 31, from “Ka-Be”). Included in this last excerpt was the future epigraph poem of If This Is a Man, here titled “Psalm.” On March 29, the paper, presenting the first excerpt, explained that the pieces were taken from “a forthcoming book, On the Bottom, about the extermination camp of Auschwitz.” The work was therefore complete but had not found its definitive title, and the uncertainty persisted until the last moment.

  In the meantime Levi’s life continued on its course. At the end of June 1947 he quit DUCO and ventured into business in a private chemistry lab with his friend Alberto Salmoni; it was a commercial failure, which he tells us about in two stories in The Periodic Table, “Arsenic” and “Tin.” In September Levi got married, and at the end of that summer the Florence journal Il Ponte published, in its August–September issue, another important episode, “October 1944.”

  At that point, the book had been accepted by the publisher De Silva, also based in Turin, and run by Franco Antonicelli (1902–1974), another figure with long experience in both publishing and the anti-Fascist struggle. He was at the time the president of the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale del Piemonte (National Liberation Committee of Piedmont), and Levi’s book reached him, as the literary critic Marco Belpoliti notes, “through Alessandro Galane Garrone, who had read the manuscript at the end of 1946 at the urging of Levi’s sister, Anna Maria, who was also a member of the CLN.” It was Antonicelli who came up with the title. At an early poin
t, as we have seen, Levi had thought of calling the book On the Bottom, then he inclined toward The Drowned and the Saved. Antonicelli, deleting the imperative “Consider” from one of the lines of the epigraph poem, coined If This Is a Man. He had a brochure printed in which he presented it as “the work of a new writer,” and in which he insisted on not only the moral but the literary value of the work: “No book in the world on the subject of these tragic experiences has the artistic value of this one.” On the fourth and last page of the brochure the epigraph poem was reproduced, in Levi’s handwriting, with the line “Consider if this is a man” printed in red.

  Levi undertook to publicize the book himself. In the October 1947 issue of L’Italia che Scrive, he wrote the magazine’s monthly “I Present My Book” column, under the title “If This Is a World”:

  If not in fact, in intention and in conception, the origins of my book go back to the days of the concentration camp. The need to tell “others,” to make “others” share it, took on for us, before the liberation and after, the character of an immediate and violent impulse, to the point of competing with other elementary needs: the book was written to satisfy this need; in the first place, therefore, as an interior liberation.

  This explains its fragmentary nature: the chapters were written not in logical succession but in order of urgency. The work of linking and unifying was carried out more deliberately, and is more recent.

  I have avoided crude details and polemical and rhetorical temptations. Those who read it may have the impression that other, more atrocious accounts of prison have gone too far: it’s not true, everything that has been read is true, but this was not the face of the truth that interested me. Nor did it interest me to tell about the exceptions, heroes and traitors, but, rather, by inclination and by choice, I tried to focus attention on the many, on the norm, on the ordinary man, not vile and not a saint, whose suffering is all he has but he is incapable of understanding it and containing it. It seems to me unnecessary to add that none of the facts are invented.