by Primo Levi
I am not able to judge my book: it may be mediocre, bad, or good. I hope that it is read, in any case: not only out of ambition but also in the small hope of making the reader understand that these things have to do with him.
The work with which Levi made his debut demonstrates in several ways his universal intention: he speaks here of the world, man in general, the many on whom he focuses his attention, the many he hopes will read his book, the warning that the facts narrated have to do with the reader, every reader. If This Is a Man came out in October 1947 as part of De Silva’s nonfiction series Biblioteca Leone Ginzburg (Ginzburg had been a close friend of Antonicelli); the cover featured a figure taken from Goya’s Disasters of War. In addition to the brochure, the publisher printed an advertising flyer, inserted in the book, for which the author concisely summarized the meaning of the work: “This book was not written to accuse, or even to provoke horror and hatred. The lesson that emerges from it is for peace: those who hate are violating not just a moral principle but, first of all, a law of logic.” That last sentence has the knife edge of Pascal’s pensées: if the law of the strongest that originates in hatred of those who are different is taken to its extreme consequences, the inevitable result will be the annihilation of the human race, of the species “man,” for whom the work is titled. In these words, just as in the book, Levi’s ethical fiber equaled his exactness as a witness and his power as a writer.
In the 1974 TV appearance mentioned above, Levi said that If This Is a Man was “a record of events reflected on afterward.” The title confirms this: the book offers evidence of the facts (this) and an interrogation of that same evidence (if): testimony entrusted to memory and subjected to a continuous critical test. Before entering into the heart of the story, the reader has to cross two more thresholds that lie beyond the title. First, a Preface, similar to the text published in L’Italia che Scrive, in which Levi fixes the tone that he intends to give to his own voice and the objective that he sets himself: “to furnish documentation for a
detached study of certain aspects of the human mind.” Detachment does not, however, imply coldness, and the reader will be surprised by the second “threshold,” immediately afterward: the epigraph poem, which in the book has no title. Its opening lines seem to be chanted in a rapt voice: a hum that develops in a spiral fashion, a spring compressed, and then, at the start of the second stanza, rushes out in a burst of anger, of crude battering sounds. The entire poem is a dense weave of phonic molecules, distributed symmetrically. The voice that addresses the reader reveals itself, line by line, as a voice that judges and commands. Its source is the voice of God, Alberto Cavaglion observes, a voice whose tone is found at the close of “October 1944,” in the invective against Kuhn after the selections for the gas chamber. But here, before the story begins, Levi intends to force his reader into a situation—created by the tools of rhetoric—similar to that which a prisoner was hurled into when he entered Auschwitz. Levi creates an acoustic shock that is converted to a moral shock: “consider,” “ponder,” “carve,” “repeat.”
The story that follows is also surprising. It’s not a simple autobiography, nor is it the lamentation of a helpless victim. Two nouns are sufficient to understand how complex and subtle the conceptual outline of the book is. The first is found in the Preface: “It was my good fortune.” The decisive role of chance in the events of the Lager, as Robert Gordon notes, and the intervention of a relative “good fortune” for the individual Levi inform us that the story told is always true but never simple. The second noun belongs to the same family as fortune: “relief.” Levi uses it twice at the start of the work. In the chapter “The Journey” we read a sentence that gives us chills: “We had learned of our destination with relief. Auschwitz: a name without significance for us at that time, but at least it implied some place on this earth.” If that is the announcement of the journey, the definitive arrival at Auschwitz is marked by the transfer of those chosen for forced labor to their barracks: in the truck, and under the guard of a German soldier who, instead of shouting at the prisoners, “Guai a voi, anime prave” (“Woe unto you, wicked souls”: Inferno III:84; it’s the first explicit citation of Dante in the book), asks them for their money and their watches. A thief, in other words, and not even very clever: “The matter stirs us to anger and laughter and a strange relief.” Autobiography and history, horror and the grotesque, humiliation and humor, all in a structure of paradoxical events and words. In hindsight, Levi can say that being deported in 1944 was his “good fortune,” for he now (1947) knows the history of the Third Reich and the Nazi Lagers, while both times he says “relief” it follows an immediate recognition of observable facts: only someone who knew nothing of Ausch-
witz could feel relief. In the same way, Levi the deportee realizes for the first time that he has fallen into an absurd place when he is induced to quote Dante. And he resorts to Dante not because he has to describe a horror that challenges every possibility of expression but because he is surprised at having found moral mediocrity where he expected incorruptible sadism.
Thus the story is introduced. But there are two distinct episodes in If This Is a Man that allow us to witness both the book’s material and its spiritual birth. The first is the episode cited above where Levi, left alone in the chemical laboratory at Buna, writes a few lines in pencil that he immediately afterward destroys. The second is “The Canto of Ulysses”: the urgency to communicate, using as amplifier, support, and filter of his own voice a famous text whose language is adequate to the need: the Divine Comedy. The structure of If This Is a Man is therefore visible—and in a certain sense directly commented on—within the work itself. For it is not a book of remembrances but, rather, a book in which the author revisits an absolute present, which concerns Everyman. When, in “Chemistry Examination,” Levi writes the sentence “Today, this very day, as I sit at a table and write, I myself am not convinced that these things really happened,” he is joining the two cognitive poles of his story, the during of Auschwitz and the now of the writing, delivering them to the always of reading and of literature, and uniting in a single figure the Häftling Levi and the writer Levi.
If This Is a Man is therefore rooted, first of all, in a need to speak not of oneself—not of one’s own humiliation, one’s own hunger, one’s personal misfortunes—but of an extreme condition, new in the world, which concerns every man because it represents a direct threat against any human being, and which can teach each of us something unprecedented. The need to communicate this universal news implies that If This Is a Man will not be the testimony of a category: not of Jews, not of political prisoners. The book is not entitled If This Is a Jew, although Levi quickly points out that Jews represent more than 90 percent of the victims of the Lagers.
Another consequence of this primary need is that Levi attributes equal importance to individuals and to the structure of Auschwitz. The story of men whose names have been taken away, If This Is a Man is also a prolonged, persistent exercise in restoring to each of them a name (and a personal history). Levi’s determination to construct a termite nest in which every insect is newly endowed with name and surname is the most profound feature that—beyond the many quotations and allusions, explicit or implicit—he shares with Dante Alighieri and his Comedy, which is crammed with individual stories, stories that without him would be condemned to eternal oblivion. Levi is close to Dante also in his moral imagination, in his capacity to elaborate—starting with what is seen in the netherworld—anthropological-interpretative categories. In terms of language, then, Levi had the intelligence, in If This Is a Man, to make use of two registers that proceed side by side but are completely distinct: the “new, harsh language” born of the Lager and reproduced with implacable acoustic memory, and the high tone that is the privilege of the narrator, and that describes the most despicable actions in a clear, educated courtroom-style diction. In Dante, Levi found the simultaneous presence of the two languages, and a representative realism with incompar
able power.
Dante’s ability to carve reality by verbal means accounts for three further, particularly complex aspects of If This Is a Man. The first, as noted in the case of the word “relief,” is the active presence of the comic beside the tragic, animating grotesque human portraits. Second, the deeper one sinks into the inferno, the more the roles of victims and torturers tend to get mixed up, and here we are in the territory of collaborationism, on the path that leads to the “gray zone” of The Drowned and the Saved. Third, and last, is the empathic energy with which Levi tries to reason with the logic of someone else, even his torturers: an effort that, according to the Bulgarian philosopher Tzvetan Todorov, cost him inner peace, and which is an exercise in mimesis that owes much to the example of Dante. Finally, though, a Dantean element must be mentioned that is absent in Levi: forgiveness. Levi had no intention of forgiving his torturers.
If This Is a Man was favorably received. There were more than twenty reviews, a brilliant result for an author who was just starting out and for a work published, in an edition of 2500 copies, by a small publishing house. Most of the reviews were in left-leaning newspapers and journals in northern Italy. But the book was also reviewed in La Stampa, the main daily in Turin, and in the Corriere d’Informazione, the sibling of the most important national daily, Corriere della Sera, in Milan. One of the advertisements circulated by De Silva some months later carried the information that the “wife of the famous scientist Enrico Fermi” would translate the work for readers in the United States. Laura Capon Fermi was of Jewish origin, but her version was not completed. It’s probable that she worked on an intermediate version of the text, which precedes the edition of 1947; what remains of the translation is preserved in the University of Chicago Library.
The most farsighted review of If This Is a Man came out in the Piedmontese edition of the Communist Unità, on May 6, 1948. It was entitled “A Book About the Death Camps,” and was signed Italo Calvino. In a 1975 interview, Levi said, “I feel like Calvino’s brother and he like mine. If This Is a Man and The Path to the Spiders’ Nest came out almost at the same time. From then on, although we didn’t see each other much, the paths we traveled were close and parallel.” In La Stampa the debuts of Levi and Calvino were reviewed together, but what the two books shared was not completely evident in 1947. In effect both replaced the abstract myths of heroic prison and heroic resistance (forged immediately after the war in Italy for political reasons) with the raw truth of a story: truth was reached through style. Both books challenged those monumental representations of History, sowing doubts and raising questions, and punctuating with ironic and grotesque details the dramas described in their pages. In his review of Levi’s book, Calvino said openly what needed to be said: “With facts like the extermination camps it seems that any book has to be inferior to the reality in order to be able to sustain it. Yet Primo Levi has given us on this subject a magnificent book that is not only an extremely effective piece of testimony but has pages of genuine narrative power, which will remain in our memory as among the finest of the literature on the Second World War.”
Calvino used the adjective “fine,” praising the work for its form and not only for its content: he was the first to say that Primo Levi was a writer. A year later he confirmed his judgment, writing in an essay about diaries of the Lager: “I will confine myself to citing the one that, and I believe I am not mistaken, is the finest of all: If This Is a Man, by Primo Levi: a book that for sobriety of language, power of images, and psychological acuity is truly unsurpassed.”
In the summer of 1948 If This Is a Man was a candidate for the Viareggio Prize, one of the most prestigious in Italy. Levi was eliminated in the first phases of the contest, and yet, along with Calvino’s judgment, and with the literary attempts he was making in those same months (poems, stories) in directions different from that of the witness, his nomination for the prize is an indication of the wish to build for himself a possible path as a full-time writer. The attempt failed; but that same year Levi received a great moral and literary acknowledgment, although it was limited to a private exchange of letters. The poet Umberto Saba (1883–1957; his mother was Jewish, and his birth name was Umberto Poli) wrote to him on November 3:
Dear Signor Primo Levi,
I don’t know if it will please you to hear from me that your book If This Is a Man is more than a fine book, it’s a fated book. Someone had to write it: destiny willed that that someone should be you.
It is fated as, in the last century, Silvio Pellico’s My Prisons was. Was it successful? Was it not? I don’t know anything about it. Horror and, even more, disgust for what is happening isolate me increasingly from everything that is written and said today. And even your book I got by chance; unlikely that I would have bought it. But as soon as I began to read, I couldn’t stop. Now it is as if I had personally had the experience of Auschwitz. If it were possible, I would order that it be used as a school text. But those responsible (if men can be responsible for something) for the extermination camps will be careful not to. Unfortunately, the immense crisis of evil and stupidity that began in 1914 will need some centuries to wear itself out. I have the impression that your book will live even beyond the crisis. Because many others have described those horrors, but they have all done it from the outside; no one—at least as far as I know—has suffered them, and rendered them, from the inside.
Yours, with gratitude and affection
SABA
In 1949 De Silva, in financial difficulties, handed over its activities and its warehouse to a publisher in Florence, La Nuova Italia. Hundreds of copies of If This Is a Man remained unsold. The verb with which Levi notes the natural disaster that destroyed them, on November 4, 1966, is remarkable, tying them to the Lager and to Dante’s Ulysses: “They drowned in Florence during the flood because Nuova Italia, which had taken the rights, kept the volumes in a cellar.”
The Levi who made his debut was therefore appreciated as a writer, and at the end of the forties he received various invitations to contribute to journals. Despite his attempts at different kinds of writing, he did not neglect his book, which, because of the change in publisher, was now out of print. In 1952 he offered it a second time to Einaudi, for which he had started working as a translator of scientific books. In this attempt he had the support of Paolo Boringhieri, who a few years later set out on his own, founding the publishing house that bears his name. Now, again, Einaudi said no to “Primo Levi’s fine book,” which, according to Einaudi’s records, “having already been through the hands of two publishers, wouldn’t have much chance of success.”
However, the publisher had agreed that If This Is a Man was a “fine” book, and two years later it established a new series of works devoted to the deportation and the extermination of the Jews, bringing out Robert Antelme’s Espèce humaine (The Human Race), the diary of Anne Frank, and the Bréviaire de la haine: Le IIIe Reich et les Juifs (The Breviary of Hatred: The Third Reich and the Jews), by Léon Poliakov. The time was ripe, and, finally, ten years after the liberation, a third proposal was successful. The contract for a new Einaudi edition was signed on July 11, 1955. Almost three years passed before the book was printed: in 1956 Einaudi suffered a severe financial crisis and had to cut back its new publications. In compensation, Levi had time to reconsider the structure of his book. He didn’t rearrange it and didn’t rewrite, but he made many small corrections and some notable additions; the earliest and most orderly study of the variations was done by the critic and philologist Giovanni Tesio in 1977. Yet, even in the absence of a real remaking, If This Is a Man–1947 can be considered a work on its own.
Tesio explains that “the largest number of additions is in the first part of the book, up to and including the chapter ‘Our Nights.’ Afterward, only the chapter ‘The Last One’ has a substantial addition. Elsewhere it’s a matter of alterations in the order of a few lines or even a few words.” In particular, all the events leading up to Levi’s arrival at Fòssoli, in the chapt
er “The Journey,” are new: the 1947 version began with the sentence “In mid-February 1944 there were six hundred Italian Jews in the camp at Fòssoli.” Also new are the portrait of the child Emilia, the encounter with Schlome, and the background of the character of Alberto, who only in 1958 becomes a fully rounded figure; the biggest addition has to do with the three stratagems for survival related in the chapter “The Last One,” in whose 1958 version picaresque pages and dramatic pages end up coexisting. The end of “On the Bottom” is new, with the quotation from Dante and the soldier thief. Right after “On the Bottom,” Levi inserts a completely new chapter, “Initiation,” which, if we recall his letters to Jean Samuel, is perfectly balanced between the essay and the short story. Tesio notes that the “work of revision . . . appears to follow the sole criterion of adhering more closely to the testimonial and psychological truth of the material.” In the 1958 edition this truth is expressed by a structural symmetry as well: now that there are seventeen chapters in the book, “The Drowned and the Saved” occupies the ninth position, at the exact center of the work. The chapter of those who survive, either by force or by cunning, therefore appears as the fulcrum of the book, fittingly for a text that, after years of new reflections, will resonate with the pages on the gray zone in a work that bears the identical title.
The new edition of If This Is a Man, like the first, was part of a nonfiction series, “Saggi.” Starting in 1960, the pace of reprintings increased, and as early as mid-1959 the work of the German translator Heinz Riedt began, leading to the publication, in November 1961, of Ist das ein Mensch? In 1962 Radio Canada submitted to Levi an abridgment of the text that the author liked so much that, two years later and along the same lines, he put together a script for Italian radio. The director was Giorgio Bandini, one of the first directors to stage Beckett in Italy.