Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist

by Myriam Anissimov, Steve Cox (Translator)

The landmark biography of the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor who helped shape our understanding of humanity.

Myriam Anissimov's major biography of Primo Levi delves deeply into the life and mind of this controversial writer, philosopher, and Holocaust witness, exploring the complex nature of a man who was both a strong-spirited survivor and a sufferer of severe bouts of depression, a man who felt misunderstood. His experiences at Auschwitz resulted in some of this century's most remarkable literature, which includes The Periodic Table and Survival at Auschwitz . He was haunted not only by his own experiences, but by the fear that future generations would inevitably forget and even deny the Holocaust. On April 11, 1987, Levi committed suicide, throwing himself down the staircase of the building where he was born.

By bringing Levi's life into focus with material gathered from exhaustive research, interviews with his friends and relatives, and numerous unpublished texts and testimonies, Anissimov's biography is an invaluable contribution to Holocaust scholarship and a crucial companion to the writings of this tortured genius.

"Myriam Anissimov's biography of Primo Levi is masterfully evocative and will serve as a companion volume to his own books. It helps explain their depth and greatness."-- Elie Wiesel

"An important event. . . . a serious, lively, and at times fervently told story that is always sympathetic to Levi's shy personality and restrained tone."-- front page, The New York Times Book Review

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Jewish, Holocaust, History

604 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

'On 11 April 1987 Primo Levi plunged down the stairwell of the house where he was born and had always lived; the house where he was born now became the scene of his death'

This is a horribly clear, concise and unarguable sentence. Levi would I feel, having read this memoir through, have approved of its unadorned poignancy. He was a man of Turin, a man of the Enlightenment, a chemist, a writer, a Jew, a survivor of the camps. It was this last phrase that served to thrust him into the role of witness, of being a thorn in the side of those who would prefer to forget or turn away or ignore or, worst of all, re-invent.

It is the account of Levi's journey from being a member of a well-to-do assimilated non believing jewish family via the racial laws of the 1930's and the horror of the camps to well-to-do non believing Jew who recognized his being a part of the great whole that is the Jewish Diaspora. His accounts of the appalling nature of the camps, his over-riding need to bear witness and remember is all the more heartbreaking when you read how swiftly this need became both imperative as doubters and deniers rose up and depressingly draining as his witness fell on deaf ears or at least, for many years, half-hearted acknowledgement.

Reading his life is an amazing experience for the very fact that he worked as a chemist for over thirty years, lived all his life, except for the obvious abscence of the concentration camp, in the same flat, lived to a greater extent, unrecognized and unfeted by the literary world and yet now is recognized as this incredible powerhouse of decency and unembittered clear sightedness. His death, coming as it did over 40 years after the end of his captivity serves to remind me that those wounds and unseen damage perpetrated by viciousness and bigotry and cruelty are things which must be acknowledged, they cannot be assumed to be healed simply because there is no plaster-cast or no blood or no visible bruising.

He carried the burden of survival. It was that being one of those who 'got through' which appears to have weighed him down always, as if, the fact that he could speak of it meant he had not suffered as much.

'At a distance of years one can today definitely affirm that the history of the Lagers has beeen written almost exclusively by those who, like myself, never fathomed them to the bottom. Those who did so did not return, or their capacity for observation was paralysed by suffering and incomprehension.
On the other hand the 'privileged' witness could avail themselves certainly of a better observatory, if only because it was located higher up and hence took in a more extensive horizon; but it was to a greater or lesser degree also falsified by the privilege itself'

The poignancy in this statment breaks your heart. It seems like one of those horribly circular arguments that no-one but Levi could have resolved. As a british catholic who has never suffered anything beyond stupid name calling or crass bigotry, I find it verging on the impossible to grasp what anyone, having gone through what he did, seeing what he saw, could move on into a normal life with job and love making and home building and holidays and yet he did but it was this very moving into a 'normal' life that appears to hamstring his movement. The horror of his memories, of all those who did not get that opportunity, rise up like some horribly Greek Chorus to stare and chide and judge. In 1984 he wrote a poem called 'The Survivor'...in the light of his death just 3 years later it rings like a prophecy. Its last lines read

'Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people,
Go away, I haven't dispossessed anyone,
haven't usurped anyone's bread.
No one died in my place. No one.
Go back into your mist.
Its not my fault if I live and breathe,
Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.'

The real tragedy is, quite clearly he was never able to believe this himself. He did not believe in God and who could possibly argue with his logic from his own experience that if the camps exist then God does not and yet he respected and marvelled at those men and women who came through the camps with their sense of a loving God strenghtened. 'I find no answer to the riddle' was his comment to those who asked him of his own relationship with the God he could not believe in. He had never been a practising Jew in faith terms and indeed his own Jewishness, prior to 1938, was carried very lightly and, in his own words, rather embarrassedly but his encounter with Yiddish culture in the camps as it was wiped from eastern Europe with a brutality almost unimaginable served to spark an interest in this unknown and previously unexperienced part of his heritage. My own hope will be he is enjoying the peace and release from guilt that he so richly deserved. This is a powerful account of one man's noble living out of his perceived vocation to bear witness to the destroyed culture of European Jewry, to the destruction of the humanity of the victims and the perpetrators and to keep the rumour of hope alive in amidst the bleak reality of denial and excuse.

There is an extraordinary example of his goodness when he enters into regular correspondence with one of the Germans with whom he was forced to work as a chemist in the camp laboratory. The German doctor hides and disguises and reinvents the truth of the situation, imagining conversations and encounters which Levi knew never happened. This doctor craves a good conscience but can only achieve that by hiding the reality from himself. Levi gently seeks to illuminate the situation by asking questions or setting forth his thoughts, opening the correspondence to the possibilty of a genuine conversation involving honesty and truth but does so leaving opportunities for the man's self-image to remain unchanged. He does not force the man to a confrontation he could not face....needless to say, the man does not take the opportunities but remains ill at ease in his fairy story. Some might critiicze Levi for this but I found in it an incredible goodness. He speaks clearly and concisely to the general situation and offers truth to the individual but does not force, the violence he suffered is not repaid with violence but rather, as a man of enlightenment, he speaks from an amazing position of gentlessness.

His realtionship with the literary world was interesting insofar as he was never much recognized as 'a man of letters' because he also worked as a chemist and yet his wider experience surely gave him a greater right to the title than those whose narrow cultural life does not truly extend beyond the confines of publishers' offices or the world of academe. I loved his theory on writing which, though seeming to make perfect sense to me in the context of what he was writing, came in for riotous criticism:

'It is up to a writer to make himself understood by those who wish to understand him; it is his trade, writing is a public service and the willing reader must not be disappointed'.

this reminded me of one of my favourite comments by Flannery O'Connor where she says 'Good novelists deserve Good readers'. Both Levi and O'Connor recognize that partnership which must exist between the writer and the reader but whereas o'Connor seems to emphasize the readers effort Levi seems to put much more emphasis on the writer's need to avoid foggy thinking.

He went further than this in certain comments in which he condemns confusion and obfuscation and
seems almost to reject imagery which stretches the reader by his call to avoid 'embellishments and convolutions'. I suppose this comes from the subject matter he is addressing as well as his own experience as a concise and clear chemist for whom clarity would be all. Presumably he wished to avoid anything that could serve to camouflage or disguise the horror he felt honour bound to declaim. I love imagery and symbolism and metaphor but perhaps for Levi there was that sense in which this horror of prejudice and mass slaughter should only be described starkly and coldly and brutally and deserves nothing of beauty and myth and softening shadows.

At one point in the camp-life he recounts a small incident where one of the guards finds his hands are covered with filth from having picked up some object or other from the ground. This guard turns and wipes his hands on Levi's clothes as he walks past. This act of total indiffernence and disinterest on the part of the guard seems almost to have wounded deeper than so many more things that i would have found unbearable in his experience. That is what I found so distressing about Levi's death, if it came about because of his struggle with having survived whilst others perished.I would want to cry out to him across that immense agony of spirit he endured that his honesty and courage and decency, his ability to articulate and communicate that agony to a middleclass brit who has never suffered means I become a witness not because of my own suffering but because he had the decency and humility of spirit to share his.

I would not dare to say anything so crass as that this would justify or give purpose to his surviving above and beyond the millions who didn't and nor do i mean that i in any way can understand or feel the suffering but I do find it wickedly tragic that after all he went through, after all he endured, after all the people he touched as he touched me, yet still
his life ended not in acclaim and gratitude and peace but smashed at the bottom of a stairwell.




ps I am staring at my copy of 'Primo Levi, Tragedy of an optimist' by Myriam Anissimov ISBN 1854105035 in which, quite clearly written wide across the page, is the declaration Steve Cox translated this book, therefore not Michael Perkins..... Everytime I try to correct this simple and annoying error a big red sentence slashes itself across my screen telling me I am wrong. Well sorry GR I most certainly am not. Translators need recognition and Cox is not getting his here.

Anyway, having fought for the honour of Steve Cox, whosoever he may be, I will sign off

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author of the book made a very good effort at contextualising Levi and presenting his life and work, as well as delving at times into his mental state. The book has a predominant focus on his life regarding his deportation and the suffering in Monowitz, both the event and his own writing about it in the two autobiographical books and in his final work of analysis. I personally believe at times, though that this has been done at the expense of his other works. His extremely impressive short stories, three volumes of them in Italy, (which in many ways represent him and demonstrated not only his gifts as a brilliant writer, but his ability to tackle various styles and themes, a very rare quality indeed) are practically dismissed with a page or two. Some of his public speeches are printed in their entirety, instead. This is quite unfortunate, because if someone had not read anything by Levi except for his Holocaust books, they would not be inspired to do so based on this book. Again, those volumes contain some of the greatest of Levi's writing, and some of the greatest writing by any modern author. The humour, the humanism and the inventiveness of Levi really shine in them, and I would have enjoyed a deeper analysis of them aside from the fact that they were not equal to his other work or didn't sell very well.

As well, the author has built upon the theme (which more and more evidence is showing is wrong) of Levi's suicide, and dismisses with a sentence that there was doubt about it being suicide, (from two persons who knew him, Mendel and Rita Levi Montalcini). Indeed, there is not even the questioning of Rabbi Toaff's claim of having spoken with Levi on the phone on Saturday 11 April, when he would not have spoken on the phone with anyone, as was widely known. The entire book is so well-researched, it is a shame that there was no attempt to actually delve deeper into his death, but that would have changed the mood and theme of the book a great deal, and the author perhaps had very much invested in this thesis.

The background on the resistance and the analysis of the Italian political and social situation were very well presented and at times even quite illuminating. It was very interesting to learn of the workings of Einaudi and the other publishers and translators. I quite appreciated that research, particularly because he was so faithful to a company that at several turns was not there for him and not supportive in the way one would expect them to be.

It was very informative to "meet" many of the real persons who had appeared in Levi's books and the author did some excellent research work to allow them to give their own impressions. The author in general created a very readable biography of Levi, full of many facts and definitely driven by a deep love and appreciation of this great writer. Though, in spite of the above, and its length, I still would not consider it as definitive. I think it serves as a very good companion to the books by Tullio Regge, Camon's Conversations, Jesurum's book about Levi as well as his book about Italian Jews. And, obviously, the entire written work of Levi, which says so much both in his lines and between them.

[Chisimdi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Truly like the name, it is a tragedy of an optimist.

Primo levi fought life heads on
There were troubles with the Nazis
There came the Jews and their beliefs
Fascism and all transfers and travels.
The Auschwitz? Reading about it seemed impossible to believe.

Poor eating habits and poor management of diseases.

Levi had two advanced women he literally sacrificed his life for after going through hell.

This book had my heart sink at some points.
Especially when he returned and everyone expected him dead. Also, how he died was tragic.

[Barak · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 100 pages or so of this book are truly tiring, the biographer deciding to tell us not only all the names of all minor figures that Primo Levi met in his life, but also a very pedantic historical narration of Italy in its fascist days.

Later on the story becomes more interesting, outlining Levi's experiences in the concentration camp and afterwards.

Levi is portrayed as a very kind, smart and unassuming humanist, and one can only feel regret at the end for his untimely death in the form of suicide, as well as for not being able to meet this person and talk to him.

One thing, however, detracting still from this biography are the many typos in the English translation from Italian, as well as several sentences that appear in another language throughout the book without being translated at all for some reason.

Lastly, I felt that the book, probably intentionally, was lacking in details about the wife and two children of Primo Levi. I don’t know if this was in order to preserve their privacy or because the biographer did not think them important enough to assume the mantles of major characters.

[Raskol'Nikov]

Il libro è superficiale e fastidiosamente lento. Ci sono molte ripetizioni e qualche contraddizione. Ma la cosa più fastidiosa è che l'autrice dà per certe notizie non provate, come l'accusa ad alcuni professori di ostacolare Primo Levi nella compilazione della tesi, o come una sua presunta religiosità (cosa negata varie volte dallo stesso Levi, che invece aveva una profonda spiritualità). Insomma si trova un ritratto più fedele dello scrittore torinese nei paragrafetti presenti in alcune antologie scolastiche, e dispiace perche Levi è uno scrittore in debito con la critica di un più diffuso approfondimento, iniziato veramente solo dopo la sua morte (sebbene esistano alcuni saggi davvero interessanti e raccolte molto belle).