FWD: Primo Levi, Surviving Auschwitz, part I

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November 8, 2003BOOKS OF THE TIMES 

Surviving Auschwitz, Surrendering to Despair

By ANTHONY GRAFTON

>he first edition of Primo Levi's book on his time in Auschwitz, "If This Is a 
Man," appeared in October 1947. Few trumpets sounded. Ian Thompson, whose 
583-page biography, "Primo Levi: A Life," traces the writing and publication of 
each of Levi's major books, comments dryly: "In those days, books were expected 
to make their own way. There were no author interviews, no magazine profiles, 
no launch parties."



Natalia Ginzburg, herself a major writer, had rejected the book at Einaudi, 
the publishing house that set the literary and intellectual tone in postwar 
Italy. Levi's publisher Franco Antonicelli did his best, but "If This Is a Man" 
received only a modest number of reviews and sold a mere 1,500 copies. Slowly, 
painfully, memory came back, in the countries that had killed, or betrayed, or 
simply ignored the Jews of Europe in the 1940's. Italians created a new 
literature and a new film, and Levi carved out a distinctive place for himself, 
producing a luminous account of his return from the camp, "The Truce"; a daring, 
evocative book structured on the table of the elements, "The Periodic Table"; 
and a set of scarifying meditations on the moral world of the camps, "The 
Drowned and the Saved." Translations of "If This Is a Man" appeared in English and 
German, bringing Levi a vast range of responses from outside Italy. 



By the early 1980's the literary establishments of the West realized that 
this industrial chemist from Turin was also one of the great European writers of 
the 20th century. The creator of a genre of his own — a cross between the 
story and the essay, neither pure memoir nor pure fiction — Levi brought a clear 
eye; a pure, lean prose; and an amazingly judicious habit of mind to bear on 
the anus mundi, Auschwitz, where he had learned that he and everyone else 
inhabited a gray zone in which the violence of captors and fellow prisoners alike 
leached away character and morality. He eventually became a celebrity, a 
canonical author in American universities, widely read in introductory surveys of 
world literature as well as in courses on the Holocaust. 



Through all these triumphs, Levi suffered again and again from clinical 
depression. He lived a cramped, difficult life with his mother and wife, who did 
not get on, in the apartment where he was born. Retirement from the work as a 
chemist, which he had always enjoyed, brought little relief. In April 1987, in 
despair at the rise of Holocaust revisionism and his sense that his own 
faculties were fading, he apparently killed himself, jumping from the landing outside 
his apartment door.





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