Three volumes, 3,000 pages: The Complete Works of Primo Levi, in its very girth and exhaustiveness, asserts a claim about the man whose oeuvre it collects. Best known for his Holocaust memoir, If This Is a Man, as well as for The Periodic Table—a book about his life in, with, and through chemistry—Levi should be seen, as the collection’s publicity material puts it, as “one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers.” Novels, stories, poems, essays, science writing, science fiction, newspaper columns, articles, open letters, book reviews: His every word is worth preserving, translating, purchasing, pondering. To read them all together, the collection insists, is to see the man anew.
I say this with reluctance—The Complete Works, which was 15 years in the making, is clearly a labor of love, meticulously edited by Ann Goldstein and seamlessly carried over from Italian, in fresh renditions, by a team of 10 translators—but the claim, on the volumes’ own evidence, is manifestly false. Levi is a great writer. He is a vivid writer, an unflinching writer, an indispensable writer. But he is also a limited writer, both in talents and in range. It does no favors, to the reader or to him, to try to rank him with the likes of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Beckett. His achievement, in his work about the Holocaust and its aftermath—If This Is a Man, The Truce, and The Drowned and the Saved, as well as parts of Lilith and The Periodic Table—is significant enough. Surrounding that achievement with masses of ephemera only obscures it. A selected works, at half the length for half the price (The Complete Works lists for $100), would have served him better.
Still, if the collection brings new readers and renewed attention, 28 years after his death, to this remarkable artist and man, it will have done important work. Levi is the rare writer about whom it can be said that his literary virtues originate in, and are largely inseparable from, his moral ones. His ability to guide us through the hell of the camps depends upon his powers of precise observation as well as on an eidetic memory of the 11 months of his enslavement. But it also rests upon a superhuman strength of mind, a refusal to distort the record with a spasm of self-pity or sentimentality, of pain or rage or lust for revenge.
Consider the fact that the very first words of If This Is a Man are “It was my good fortune.” This is a book that was written immediately after the author’s return from Auschwitz, his face so bloated by malnutrition that his family didn’t recognize him. It was Levi’s good fortune, he goes on to explain, to be deported only in 1944, by which time the Germans were in desperate need of labor and therefore interested in keeping able-bodied Jewish men alive—or at least in killing them less quickly. Levi had grown up in Turin, the intellectually gifted son of an assimilated Jewish family. He studied chemistry in college, then joined the partisans in 1943 after the collapse of the Fascist regime and the occupation of the country’s north by German troops. Arrested that winter, he acknowledged his Jewish identity, was interned at a transit camp, and sent to Auschwitz. Of the 650 men, women, and children in his convoy, some 20 would return.
Many factors contributed to Levi’s survival, most of them matters of sheer luck, but chief among them, by his own account, was the will to bear witness: to transmit the experience, to a no doubt disbelieving world, with scrupulous exactitude. The effort clears his eyes and purifies his language. There are few general ideas in If This Is a Man—life under Fascism, he would later say, had taught him to prefer small, verifiable statements to big, rhetorical ones—but rather a succession of indelible particulars. The way you say never, in the slang of the camp, is “tomorrow morning.” Packed together with a mass of other naked men awaiting a “selection,” one of the periodic medical inspections that determine who gets to keep on suffering and who will be sent to the gas, he experiences “the sensation of warm flesh pressing all around” as “unusual and not unpleasant.” “In German,” he tells us, “I know how to say eat, work, steal, die.”
With perhaps a sense of mercy for the reader, or perhaps reflecting the shape of his own experience—the shock of entry into a universe of hunger, cold, and pain—Levi brings us quickly to the worst. The fifth chapter, “Our Nights,” is all but unreadable. The men bunk two to a miserable bed, head to toe. Sleep is a light veil. “One wakes at every moment, frozen with terror … under the impression of an order shouted out by a voice full of anger in a language not understood.” Men “smack their lips and waggle their jaws” in their sleep. Their food comes mainly in the form of a watery soup, forcing the inmates to urinate frequently during the night. They evacuate into a bucket, which must be emptied constantly, by whoever brings it to the brim. The latrine is outside, across the snowy prison yard:
It is our task to trudge to the latrine with the bucket, which knocks against our bare calves, disgustingly warm; it’s full beyond any reasonable limit, and inevitably with the shaking some of the contents spills over onto our feet, so that, however repugnant this duty may be, it is always preferable that we, and not our bunk companion, be ordered to do it.
The night ends long before dawn, when the guard “pronounces the daily condemnation”: Wstawać—get up.
Far worse than the physical suffering, whose urgency fades from memory, are the affronts to human dignity. Those wounds, it seems, do not heal. As a chemist, Levi is drafted into a squad of skilled workers for the rubber factory. He must pass an oral examination administered by a Doktor Pannwitz, “tall, thin, blond.” Pannwitz looks at him. It is a look, Levi tells us, that “did not pass between two men.” Earlier, after a comparable incident, he had felt “as if I had never in all my life suffered a more atrocious insult”—that of being treated as a beast. Now, he says,
if I knew how to explain fully the nature of that look, exchanged as if through the glass wall of an aquarium between two beings who inhabit different worlds, I would also be able to explain the essence of the great insanity of the Third Reich.
Beyond the obligation to bear witness, If This Is a Man is driven by a need to redress that affront—to assert to the world that its author is, indeed, a man. And not even to the world, per se. In 1961, 14 years after the book’s initial publication, a translation was made into German. In the preface, Levi writes that his one conscious purpose in life has been “to make my voice heard by the German people, to ‘talk back’ to the SS … to Dr. Pannwitz … and to their heirs.” Beasts do not talk back. In the camp, he has told us, you learn very quickly not to ask questions, because you’re not entitled to an answer. Communication goes in one direction, by means of shouts and blows. But now he has something to say to the Germans: “I am alive, and I would like to understand you so that I can judge you.” We are witnessing a very private interaction.
Understand and judge: Levi’s greatness as a writer of the Holocaust is analytical as much as narrative. His effort to make sense of a phenomenon that is devoid of sense by civilized standards was a lifelong project that began, in effect, the moment he entered the camp. The prisoner’s first, most exigent need was to decipher the rules of the place. That is why intellectuals, Levi remarks in The Drowned and the Saved, were at a disadvantage: because “logic and morality impeded acceptance of an illogical and immoral reality.” Those who spoke no German, he adds, and who therefore couldn’t understand the orders of the brutes in black, were generally dead in half a month.
In If This Is a Man, the author’s educative process is embodied in the volume’s very language. Before his deportation, in the transit camp, it is elegiac, noble. A large extended family prepares for the journey from which they know they will never return:
When all was ready, the food cooked, the bundles tied up, they loosened their hair, took off their shoes, placed the funeral candles on the ground, and, lighting them according to the customs of their fathers, sat on the bare soil in a circle for the lamentations, praying and weeping through the night.
But the instant Levi passes underneath the infamous sign, arbeit macht frei, that wise and cultivated voice departs. The man who possessed it is no longer with us. The language switches to the present tense: Every moment is the last; there is no place from which to stand and say “it was.” For many pages afterward, the facts come at us one by one, just as he encountered them and from the same perspective—that of total, vulnerable naïveté. The tone at times reminds you of a children’s book, if there were children’s books about the inferno. “Häftling: I have learned that I am a Häftling. My name is 174517.”
At last he starts to get his bearings. After five months, he has become an “old prisoner.” Time begins again. Chapters acquire titles like “The Events of the Summer” and “October 1944.” By now he is able to step back and describe the workings of the camp: the black market that operates in the northeast corner, where a stolen turnip, say, can be exchanged for a bit of third-rate tobacco; the “Prominents,” inmates who have managed to achieve position (cook, Kapo, superintendent of the latrine); the strategies and tactics of survival. The book’s middle chapter is an interlude. Levi asks himself whether there is anything to be learned from all this—about human nature, about the world outside the camps. Here we feel the scientist come to the fore. Yes, he says, “the Lager [camp] was also, and preeminently, a gigantic biological and social experiment … to determine what is inherent and what acquired in the behavior of the human animal faced with the struggle for life.”
Interpreting the results of that experiment would occupy him, at intervals, for the rest of his life: in essays and speeches; in countless appearances at schools; in correspondence with German and other readers; in a voluminous reading of Holocaust memoirs and studies, many of which are reviewed in the pages of The Complete Works. Above all, at the end of his life, in The Drowned and the Saved (1986), a pendant, some 39 years later, to If This Is a Man and an intellectual and moral triumph.