Status Updates From The Complete Works of Primo...

Continuing slowly through Natural Histories. What strikes me most about these stories is how funny Levi is—a quality that one might not expect if one had only been exposed to his memoirs and Holocaust writing.

Reading the new translation of Natural Histories, because I really love Levi's speculative fiction

Obviously, the year of the child [1979] originated in a widespread feeling of guilt, in the awareness that to this day, even in the most advanced countries there is no feeling of reverence toward children, as prescribed by the Gospels, and that adults are preparing, for today’s children, a future full of shadows.

If today’s Germany cares about the place that it is entitled to among European nations, it cannot and should not whitewash its past. [January 22, 1987]

An Nuremberg [Albert Speer] was the only defendant to admit his guilt, even for things he did not know; indeed, precisely for not wanting to know about them.

Reason, art, and poetry do not help to decipher the place from which they have been banished.

The imminence of death meant there was no time to focus on the idea of death.

I myself was, and in fact continue to be, even as I write on my screen, ignorant. I have only the vaguest idea of what’s going on behind it. At first, this ignorance of mine was deeply humiliating. A young man came to my aid, paternally offering me his guidance, and said, You belong to the austere generation of humanists who still expect to understand the world around them.

It is the puzzle that tormented both Job and Ivan Karamazov, and the darkest stain on Hitler’s Germany: why the innocent? why the children? why does Providence stop when confronted with the wickedness of human beings and the pain of the world?

From the first few classes I realized how cruelly different it is to learn at age twenty, age forty, and age sixty.

For Adolf Eichmann (poem excerpt):

O son of death, we do not wish you death.
May you live longer than anyone ever lived:
May you live sleepless for five million nights,
And every night may you be visited by the suffering of everyone who saw
The door that closed off the way back click shut,
The dark around him grow, the air thicken with death.

They noticed that some of the corpses were extremely thin. Why?

‘Then the rumor we’ve heard was true,’ said Marian.

‘What rumor?’ asked Mendel.

Mendel marched in silence, and felt less than happy about being Mendel.

There’s no doubt, but of course, ganz bestimmt! I speak German like a German, if I want; better than Hitler, who’s Austrian. I can speak it with a Hamburg accent, or a Stuttgart accent, or a Berlin accent, as the client prefers. Or without an accent, as on the radio. I also speak Russian with a German accent, or German with a Russian accent.

But what can you say to a decent person who has made a mistake, who doesn’t know how he did it, and who carries his guilt like a load of lead? The only thing to do is to offer him a cognac and invite him to talk.