The Complete Works of Primo Levi

by Primo Levi

  Even though “Tantalum” (Il Mondo, December 27, 1973), the third story in Lilith chronologically, has the name of a chemical element as its title, it wasn’t put into The Periodic Table, because it was really a science fiction tale that strayed humorously toward the supernatural, and would have been out of place in a work anchored in reality, autobiography, and factory work.

  Seven stories did not appear in La Stampa; besides “Tantalum,” they are “Gladiators,” which appeared in L’Automobile (June 15, 1976); “Decoding,” in Prospettive Settanta (July–September 1976); “The Sorcerers,” “Children of the Wind,” and “Weekend,” in Notiziario della Banca Popolare di Sondrio (April and December 1977; August 1978); and “The Return of Lorenzo” (see below). But it would be worthwhile to look more closely at the last two stories of “Present Perfect,” a section whose twelve pieces are all moral portraits of characters—a type of writing at which Levi excelled.

  “The Return of Lorenzo” is the only story that was published directly in Lilith, as if Levi felt ashamed to reveal in a newspaper the end of the man who had saved his life in Auschwitz. Lorenzo Perrone, upon returning to Italy, became voluntarily one of the “drowned,” letting himself die. This and the story that follows are in fact the only ones about the “drowned” in the whole collection. And they are symmetrical, because, unlike Lorenzo, Chaim Rumkowski, the “king of the Jews,” did everything possible to save himself, even if it was harmful to his people.

  “The King of the Jews,” which appeared in La Stampa on November 20, 1977, is certainly the most important story in Lilith and is a first draft of what became the final episode of the chapter “The Gray Zone” in The Drowned and the Saved. Levi had for some years wanted to tell the story of Rumkowski. He spoke of it in a letter of March 9, 1975, to his cousin Anna Yona, who lived in the United States. The scholar Martina Mengoni has traced the sources of Levi’s interest. Levi read an article by Solomon F. Bloom, “Dictator of the Lodz Ghetto: The Strange History of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski” (it appeared in English in the December 1948 issue of Commentary); it was the first detailed account of the elder of L’viv (as Lodz is called in the text), and he drew on various passages from it in his own text. But he also knew The Rats, a collection of stories by the Polish Jewish writer Adolf Rudnicki, translated into Italian in 1967; one of the stories, “The Merchant of Lodz,” painted a historical-psychological portrait of Rumkowski. Finally, in the seventies, thanks perhaps to Anna Yona, Levi got in touch with the writer Leslie Epstein, who in 1979 published King of the Jews, a novel whose protagonist is Rumkowski.

  “The King of the Jews” suggests that the twelve portraits of “Present Perfect” in Lilith are in reality pointing toward the future: toward the complexity of Auschwitz, toward the subtlety of the moral attention necessary to describe it with precision, toward the new concept of the “gray zone,” which Levi was elaborating in those years and which was to mark a turning point in the international debate on the Shoah.

  This is the first full version of Lilith in English, conforming to the original structure of the Italian volume. However, the twelve stories in the section “Present Perfect” were published in 1986 (with the addition of three stories of the same type written after 1981, and the poem “The Survivor”) under the title Moments of Reprieve, by Summit Books; Levi wrote a preface for it, which appears here in Uncollected Stories and Essays: 1981–1987. Four stories in “Future Anterior” (“A Tranquil Star,” “Gladiators,” “The Fugitive,” and “Tantalum”) and two in “Present Indicative” (“The Sorcerers” and “The Girl in the Book”) appeared in 2007 in A Tranquil Star, published by Norton. The eighteen other pieces are here collected in English for the first time.

  IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

  Right after leaving Munich, near the end of the journey described in The Truce, Primo Levi was surprised to observe that the train he was traveling on now had sixty-one cars rather than sixty. At the end was “a new car, crowded with young Jews, boys and girls from all the countries of Eastern Europe. None of them looked more than twenty, but they were extremely determined and confident: they were young Zionists, they were going to Israel, taking any route they could and by any means they could.” Levi admired them: “They felt immensely free and strong, masters of the world and of their destiny.”

  This was the initial inspiration for If Not Now, When?, which was published by Einaudi in April 1982. Levi imagined the adventures that brought the youths to that point, and wrote his first and only book of pure invention: a “Western” about the Jewish partisan war, as he himself called it. He revealed a second inspiration in the Author’s Note that ends the novel: sometime in the midsixties, a friend, Emilio Vita Finzi, had told him about groups of young Jewish partisans whom he had helped in Milan, just after the war, on their aliyah to the Promised Land. In the Author’s Note Levi also explains the origin of the title, and specifies which characters and episodes are real and which are made up. This attitude of caution and responsibility is striking, and is motivated by the role of writer-witness he assumed whenever he spoke about historical events or on subjects related to Judaism. For the same reason, he concludes the Author’s Note by sheltering his inventions in a library of readings, thanks to which he was able to document the anti-Nazi struggle in Eastern Europe, Jewish traditions, the Yiddish world: peoples, historical events, rituals, languages—all of which were remote from the sensibility of Italian Jews and even further from the culture of non-Jewish Italian readers. Thus, before he started writing, he took some time to study the history books and even to learn Yiddish as well as he could: “eight months of preparation and total immersion.” At the end of the book Levi notes the period of the writing precisely, “Turin, January 11–December 20, 1981,” saying, in an interview, “It seemed to me appropriate to indicate what was for me a happy year.”

  Levi knew that he was taking a risk with this first novel. He had written an introductory page, but at the last minute he eliminated it. Here is a passage: “The actors are ready, or almost. Their outlines are still veiled, they have not yet emerged from the blur, from the universe of things that don’t yet exist but wish to exist. They move about weakly, gray on a gray background; they speak softly, or maybe they don’t even speak but gurgle and wail, like newborn puppies: they wait, hope, and fear to make their entrance.” Levi must have felt that this preface was ingenuous, and in the end he launched into the narrative without preamble. He also discovered that the characters of a novel, endowed with a nature and a life of their own, at a certain moment decide independently what to do and where to go: “I had an outline, which I then ignored completely. I wanted to make [the characters] into Racinian heroes, whereas they preferred common, average roles, made up more of hard work than of memorable deeds.”

  Once again, Levi delivered to Italian readers—transformed into language—a world they didn’t know: he had begun in 1947, with If This Is a Man, and continued with the strange science fiction of Natural Histories, the Jewish-Piedmontese dialect of “Argon,” in The Periodic Table, and, finally, the technological and dialect language of Faussone, in The Wrench. Now, thanks to him, Yiddish culture entered Italian literature, translated into Italy’s native language. In this novel Levi reflected on history, on its sufferings, and on the moral stature of ordinary men. His desire for epic and for a richness of representation probably owes something to the great example of Elsa Morante’s History (1974); also, Morante, in a 1965 essay, “For or Against the Atomic Bomb,” discussed the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909–1944), who, like Levi’s Martin Fontasch, composed his last lines a few moments before he was killed by the Nazis.

  Levi drew on the painting of Marc Chagall for If Not Now, When? but he also claimed a great number of literary sources. He confessed that he had taken some landscapes from Turgenev and from Tolstoy, while the violent impulse of his partisans can be traced to the stories of Isaac Babel anthologized in The Search for Roots. The opening episode—in which the hours are marked by gunshots because the
belltower has been destroyed—is taken from Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, but it’s also (very likely) an homage to the painter-writer who shared his name, Carlo Levi, and his political novel The Clock, of 1950. Most important, Levi declared, “among the great works that I kept before me while I was writing this book was the Bible. It was useful to me as secular reading.”

  Levi wanted to be the first Italian writer of Yiddish inspiration. The experiment was well received in his homeland: If Not Now, When? sold 110,000 copies the first year and won two big literary prizes, the Viareggio and (for the second time, after The Truce) the Campiello. The novel was less successful in the United States, where authentically Yiddish literature was well-known and where his linguistic ideas seemed less original.

  Although Levi could not have wanted or predicted it, If Not Now, When? came out at a bitter historical moment, shortly before the Israeli Army invaded Lebanon. He and other intellectuals of Jewish origin distanced themselves from those acts of war. Levi went so far as to call for the government of Menachem Begin to resign. On July 11, 1982, advertisements for the novel came out with the headline “Tyre Sidon Beirut, June–July 1982,” referring to the cities where the bloodiest clashes between Israelis and Palestinians had taken place. A Biblical quotation was addressed to each of the two peoples. To Palestine: “Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity. . . . But the meek shall inherit the earth; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.” To Israel: “Awake, awake, stand up, O Jerusalem, which hast drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury. . . . How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace!” The title of the novel thus became a troubled question addressed to both sides in the conflict.

  If Not Now, When? was published in English for the first time in 1985 by Summit Books.

  COLLECTED POEMS

  Primo Levi’s first literary publication was a poem, “Buna Lager,” which appeared on June 22, 1946, in L’Amico del Popolo, a Communist weekly published in Vercelli, outside Turin, and edited by his friend Silvio Ortona. Nine months later, the paper published the first of five episodes of If This Is a Man. Levi dates “Buna Lager” (later titled simply “Buna”) December 28, 1945; in the same month, he wrote “The Story of Ten Days,” the final chapter of If This Is a Man, which is presented in the form of a diary. As we know, in that chapter he describes a Lager abandoned by the Germans: Auschwitz in ruins. “Buna Lager,” on the contrary, describes an extermination factory that is working at full capacity, and it does so in hammering lines, full of assonances and alliterations, with pressured, mangled syllables.

  Only recently did the publication of “Buna Lager” emerge, indicating that he initially shaped in verse the Lager that he had just begun to depict in prose. Between the last days of 1945 and the first weeks of 1946, Levi wrote a dozen poems, which he called (in the chapter “Chromium,” of The Periodic Table) “short” and “bloody.” Those poems, written before most of If This Is a Man, have a voice very different from that of his great first work. They are the book’s introductory chords, high-pitched and strident compared with the prose that follows.

  On May 31, 1947, the fifth and last episode of If This Is a Man to appear in L’Amico del Popolo was accompanied by a poem, then titled “Psalm”: the book’s future epigraph. Levi retitled the poem “Shemà” when, in August 1964, he published it again, in the second issue of Sigma, a university journal in Turin; and it’s the title by which it is known today. Both “Psalm” and “Shemà” are religious titles, both from the Old Testament. “Shemà” has a clearer Jewish connotation, as the first word of the fundamental prayer of Judaism: “Shemà Israel,” Listen, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one alone. The first lines Levi wrote in 1945–46 are presented as verses of a sacred text, and, as Alberto Cavaglion, in his commentary on If This Is a Man, writes, in “Shemà” Levi lets us hear the “voice of God” evoked at the end of the chapter “The Canto of Ulysses.” And yet Levi himself called the poem his “blasphemous interpretation of a Yiddish prayer.” That epigraph poem, a solemn, angry voice of command, is an atheist prayer, a counter-prayer that affirms the uniqueness of the extermination rather than the uniqueness of God, and scourges the indifference of the reader-spectator.

  “Buna” was not Levi’s first poem; as a boy he wrote singsongs, satiric verses about his friends, humorous rhymes with scientific subjects. But there is also the poem, dated February 1943 and titled “Crescenzago,” that Levi always considered his first successful poem; in fact it opened all three collections of poetry that he published. If the texts of 1945–46 (and many poems written in the following years as well) contain the kernel of stories and even essays that Levi later wrote in prose, “Crescenzago” secretly preserves other chromosomes of the future writer. The poem, composed of six stanzas of six lines each, is based on a simple yet intelligent mathematical game: 6 × 6 = 36, a perfect square, in which 2 and 3 (an even and an odd) are prime factors, 22 × 32. Deliberately Pythagorean, the numerological structure projects into poetry the structural formulas of organic chemistry: the double bonds that, constructed in the form of regular hexagons, branch out from the hydroxyl groups and the carbon atoms.

  Already during the war years and the period of semi-clandestine life under the racial laws, the young chemist had confided to his friends that he would like to write the story of a carbon atom. Not until 1970 did he actually write “Carbon,” but it contains a passage about hexagonal structures, the molecular chains into which the carbon atoms are inserted as a result of the synthesis of chlorophyll. And in February 1943, long before writing “Carbon,” Levi implicitly expressed his desire to do so by arithmetical means in the thirty-six lines of “Crescenzago.” He was already planning his periodic table.

  Yet the chemical, structural, and mathematical game wasn’t the only one Levi played in “Crescenzago.” He was manipulating words and sounds and was aware of it. The twenty-three-year-old author was an agile, rhythmical poet, cheerful, but with a tinge of melancholy: “A Crescenzago ci sta una finestra, / E dietro una ragazza si scolora. / Ha sempre l’ago e il filo nella destra. / Cuce e rammenda e guarda sempre l’ora, / E quando suona l’ora dell’uscita, / Sospira e piange, e questa è la sua vita.” (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.)

  In the filigree of these lines an Italian reader can recognize Leopardi (the Silvia of the Canti), Guido Gozzano (the Piedmontese seamstresses of “The Colloquies”), and the sorrows of Giovanni Pascoli. But the stanza begins with a parodic line, which Levi has skillfully stolen from a popular and prestigious art form, the classic Neapolitan song. It’s a musical passage known all over the world: “A Marechiare ce sta na fenesta” (1891), words by Salvatore Di Giacomo, music by Francesco Paolo Tosti.

  Shortly after If This Is a Man came out, Levi tried twice—without success—to publish some of his poems: in 1948 in the monthly Il Ponte, in Florence, and in 1949 in the influential international journal Botteghe Oscure, as documented by a correspondence with Giorgio Bassani, its editor in chief. Before the fifties, Levi had written no more than fifteen poems altogether, among them “Get Up,” which became the epigraph for The Truce. One remarkable poem is “Epitaph,” dated 1952, which evokes an episode of violence among comrades in the partisan struggle. Levi was, with Beppe Fenoglio and Cesare Pavese, among the first writers who had the courage to confront, early on, that ungrateful subject; he devoted a powerful passage to it in the chapter “Gold,” in The Periodic Table. “Epitaph” and “Shemà” open the group of five poems that Levi published in Sigma in 1964; the other three are “Singing,” “Avigliana,” and “Crescenzago.”

  Six years passed before Levi decided to collect his works in verse. In December 1970, he published a small volu
me, in a printing of just three hundred copies, without a title or the name of the author. The cover was cardboard, the twenty-three poems were typed on a typewriter. (Seventeen of them were previously unpublished; the last was “Lilith.”) In this completely anonymous object, Levi’s imprint is recognizable in that each poem is accompanied by a date—a habit not widespread among lyric poets. Since the poems are in chronological order, the book was like an intimate diary in which the “uncertain hour” of each poem was fixed with precision: Levi was a writer who had faith in uncertainty but sought exactness.

  Five years later, Levi’s poems were brought out by a small, prestigious publisher, Vanni Scheiwiller, in Milan, who, starting in the thirties, with his All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro editions, had published such writers as Montale, Quasimodo, Ungaretti, Auden, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Cummings, Seferis, Guillén, Michaux, and Benn. The elegant plaquette, in fifteen hundred numbered copies and this time with Levi’s name on the cover, included twenty-seven poems (the twenty-three of the earlier collection plus four that were previously unpublished); the date of the printing was April 25, 1975, the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war in Italy. The last two poems were “The Dark Stars” and “Farewell,” and the title, L’osteria di Brema (The Beer Hall in Bremen), came from the poem “Arrival,” a translation-imitation of a lyric from the Buch der Lieder of Heinrich Heine.

  “In the Beginning,” dated August 13, 1970, is one of the four new poems in The Beer Hall in Bremen. It ends, just like the story “Carbon,” with a “hand that writes”: the hand of Primo Levi. It’s a link between different kinds of writing but it’s also an announcement, because, starting in the second half of the seventies, Levi wrote poetry much more consistently. In 1976 and 1977, he published in Tuttolibri translations from Heine and from an anonymous Scotsman of the seventeenth century, and in the summer of 1978 his poems began appearing in the paper itself: the first, on July 28, was “Huayna Capac.” Of the thirty-six poems that Levi published between 1978 and 1984, thirty-four appeared in La Stampa; the exceptions were “Annunciation” (in L’Almanacco dell’Arciere, 1980) and “2000”(in a volume titled Vent’anni al Duemila; Twenty Years Until 2000).