Preface

Robert Gordon

Primo Levi is now firmly established as one of the essential writers of our century. His two principal works on the Holocaust¹ – Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man, 1947), a spare but searing account of his eleven months ‘in the depths’ of Auschwitz, and I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1986), a collection of essays revisiting the moral and historical dilemmas of that event and the memory of it forty years on – stand like twin pillars of humane meditation on the century’s darkest moment. Indeed, it is hard to think of another figure of comparable stature who wrote and spoke of these unbearable events with such accessible economy, wit and persistence over such a long period of time.

Levi’s extraordinary impact on the reading public within Italy, but perhaps even more so in the English-speaking world, has been variously and at times controversially explained. Whilst for many it is the pellucid clarity and unburdened directness of his prose that attracts, for others it is his rather ambivalent status as a ‘non-Jewish Jew’ (his own phrase) that allows him to bridge the gap between the ‘Jewish’ Holocaust and the wider world looking on. However, as recent attention to his œuvre in Italy, led by the work of Marco Belpoliti, has shown,² both these explanations are inadequate to account for the power and resonance of his writing. There is another Levi, more complex and disquieting, more hybrid and contradictory and hence more rich and rewarding, a Levi who belies the calm sage many have taken him to be. At the very least, the multiplicity of identities and voices within Levi must be taken as fundamental to our understanding of him. This volume of interviews shows us another of those identities, another of Levi’s roles which filtered through into his writing and went towards making up the figure we so much admire and listen to.

Above I referred to Levi as someone who both wrote and spoke of the camps. The purpose of the present volume is encapsulated in that simple pairing of writing and speech. As Marco Belpoliti points out in his essay ‘I am a Centaur’ below, Levi’s career or métier as a writer, itself a complement to his primary career as an industrial chemist, constantly ran parallel to and intersected a third métier, as a talker. Levi the interviewee is one part, the recorded part, of Levi’s career as a talker.

As Levi notes in The Drowned and the Saved, survivors can be split into two schematic types, those who talk and those who stay silent.³ Neither role is voluntary, he says; both are psychopathological impulses. At the moment of return from the camps, the impulse to talk even superseded the fear – felt by him and all his fellow inmates in the camps – that no one would listen to what they had to say. When two oral historians indicated to Levi in a 1982 interview that they had spoken to several survivors who had only now begun to talk about their camp experience, he was at one level incredulous:

LEVI: … But as to why Elena Recanati or Natalia Tedeschi haven’t spoken until now, surely it’s because they’ve only now been tracked down. Did they refuse to say anything before?

No, they say that after their return, they felt so deeply misunderstood, that they were not believed, that they lost the desire to say anything more.

LEVI: For myself I didn’t feel that incomprehension. As you know, If This is a Man had a difficult career. It only became well known ten years after it was written. But nevertheless, I found understanding, solidarity, I never had any difficulty in telling the stories I had to tell. (see below p. 241)

Indeed, far from having difficulty in the months following his return to Turin in October 1945, Levi poured forth the stories he had to tell to whoever would listen – friends, family and strangers in trains, trams, offices and homes. This was all the more striking given his later discretion and restraint in choosing whom to tell (see, for example, his comments on not talking to his children at all about his deportation, p. 232 below). In due course, the stories would be written down and coalesce into If This is a Man. Writing and talking went hand in hand from the outset with Levi.

At this first stage of his work, when familiar lines of shared reflection on the genocide had not yet been laid down, the moral impulse behind his stories was muted, even though it is as a subtle moralist that Levi is increasingly coming to be valued. Levi was one of many returnees to speak and write, in public and in private, in the months following their repatriation, but he, like others, was primarily laying his own ghosts to rest and also setting the record rather than issuing a call to moral enquiry. Hence the powerful but lapidary imperative in the poem ‘Shema’ that prefaces If This is a Man: ‘Meditate that this has been’. The poem echoes in a number of ways the Hebrew prayer after which it is named, not least in its ritual orality, its exhortation to repeat its words (as Levi paraphrases it) ‘in your homes and as you go on your way, / as you go to sleep and as you rise…’. Levi’s own talking of the camps in these months shares something of this orality, with its awe but also its solemn stasis, as each ‘recitation’ renews the trauma as well as heals it.

The voice of ‘Shema’ and If This is a Man nevertheless also contains clues to the moral or ethical turn that Levi’s writing and talking was increasingly to take. The preface of the book, for example, famously describes his task as ‘a calm study of certain aspects of the human mind’. This becomes more evident still when Levis finds a public stage in the mid-1950s. In one of the interviews in this volume, he suggests that his return to writing – that is, his reworking of If This is a Man for a second edition in 1958 and the subsequent writing of The Truce (1963) – was actually triggered by a new-found vocation for public speaking and public dialogue:

In 1955 – to mark the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camps – they organized a photographic exhibition on the deportations, in Turin and elsewhere. Until then I had felt a fearful panic about speaking in public. During the war and the Racial Laws, I was part of a very small group of Jewish youths in Turin who had set themselves the task of showing how the Bible and Fascism were incompatible. […] Since any form of associationism was forbidden, unless licensed by the police, there was a local policeman at all the meetings: poor thing, he sat in a comer, not understanding a word, smoking his pipe, reading the newspaper or sleeping.

When I had to get up and speak I was terrified. I ineptly read my piece on antisemitism… I was 19 and I swore to myself that I would never speak in public again, that I was not up to it. And I stuck to my promise until 1955 when I went to that exhibition to explain the meaning of those photographs. And I found an audience of young people who were so enthusiastic, warm and nice that I was over-whelmed: I saw that my book, even though it had sold so poorly, had spread around, had left a mark, had touched people. This too drove me towards writing The Truce. (pp. 164–5 below)

Once again, talking and writing intersect. At this point, Levi’s talking becomes moral rather than psychopathological, public and ‘civic’ rather than private; it is dialogue rather than monologue, response rather than ritual reiteration. And in his description of the enthusiastic ‘young people’ he spoke to, we can see what was to be the dominant constituency for this new phase of his career, especially after the early 1960s when his books became set texts in Italian schools: students. Levi spoke at schools, conferences and public meetings on literally hundreds of occasions, repeating his own stories but also answering questions and engaging with his audience. These encounters ostensibly had little to do with record, with history or with the written word, and indeed only very few of them have survived in recorded or transcribed form. But over the course of the years Levi became a professional, even a consummate talker, crystallizing – in part through a form of variant repetition quite different from the liturgical repetition evoked by ‘Shema’ – that balance between restrained formality and orality that Marco Belpoliti pinpoints below in his analysis of Levi’s language. Levi speaks as if writing and writes as if speaking, with an emotional and syntactic lucidity that draws his reader or listener into engaged, reflective contact.

The first two phases in Levi’s career as a talker – first, talk as trauma, then talk as pedagogy and exchange – in a sense represent the prehistory of the Levi anthologized in this book. Sporadically in the 1960s and 1970s, but with a dramatic crescendo in the 1980s, Levi’s talking increasingly took the form of the media interview, in journals and newspapers, on radio and television. This new form of encounter is assessed by Levi with his usual ironic acuity in moments of his own writing. Perhaps the most important of these reflections is in his ‘self- interview’, which first appeared in La Stampa in 1976 and was then included in a longer version in new editions of If This is a Man as an ‘Afterword’ (see below pp. 184–207), where he sifts through twenty years of questioning about the camps – mostly by schoolchildren – to ask himself eight key questions, on the Final Solution, Germany and Germans, racism and anti-Semitism. But it is worth also noting three other less well-known corners of his work where he pokes fun at the interview form through characteristically playful transposition and parody of it. First, there is his radio short ‘Intervista aziendale’ (‘Company Interview’) of 1968, elaborated by the experimental director Carlo Quartucci from an idea by Levi, in which a documentary-style interview with workers in a factory uncovers a Lamarckian industrial dystopia where workers inherit their factory skills genetically from their parents. Then there is the series of mock newspaper interviews with animals, of which he completed five in the last months of his life for the journal L’Airone. And finally, there is a story called ‘L’intervista’ (‘The Interview’) in Racconti e saggi (The Mirror Maker), in which an extraterrestrial chronicler compiling information about the Earth interviews the protagonist Elio on his way out of the factory night-shift.⁴ All three of these examples show Levi using the interview form as a stylized way of interrogating the world, of stripping away its surfaces; but in each case also, the interview tends to reduce and simplify and the interviewee feels disoriented and uneasy at having to represent and explain his factory, his species, his world in such terms. The temptation to see here an analogue of Levi as he was constantly called upon to represent and encapsulate in simple terms the darkly rebarbative and complex world of the camps and also the ‘species’ of the survivor is strong indeed. Beneath the gentle satire and the formal games, as so often in Levi’s work, we find a reflection on his own experience and an interrogation of the limits and possibilities of the form in question, here the interview which played such a prominent role in the final decades of his life.

The selection in this volume is intended to illustrate the range and variety of his interviews and also the patterns of reiteration and reworking of the familiar in Levi’s responses. A many-sided Levi – with interests in, among other things, politics, literature, chemistry, science, religion, music, even mountaineering – emerges alongside the overwhelming gravity of his central experience and subject-matter, the Lager. It is as though his interviews describe a spiral movement, out from the centre of gravity – Levis himself described Auschwitz in a 1987 article as a ‘black hole’ – but then inexorably back again. Ultimately it is perhaps this movement through testimony and beyond and then back again that explains the sheer rounded humanity we feel when reading Levi; and also when spending some time in his company as he talks to others.

Life

A brief outline of Levi’s life and work will serve as a useful guide to reading his interviews.

Born in 1919 into the small and largely assimilated Jewish community in Turin, Levi attended the Liceo Massimo d’Azeglio, a school once famous as a seedbed of liberal anti-Fascist views. His father Cesare was an electrical engineer, close to the dominant positivist circles of the city’s intelligentsia, and Primo followed him in his voracious, eclectic reading and in his rejection of the humanist education on offer in the liceo. He opted to read chemistry at Turin university. Despite the obstacles set in his path by the 1938 Race Laws, he managed to graduate in 1941. Following a period in Milan and after the fall of Fascism and Italy’s Armistice with the Allies in 1943, Levi joined the Resistance against the rump Fascists and the Nazi occupiers of northern Italy, but he was betrayed and captured almost immediately. Preferring to declare himself a Jew rather than risk execution as a partisan, he was imprisoned at the prison camp at Fossoli from where, in February 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz-Monowitz. He remained there until liberation by the Red Army in January 1945. He reached Turin again in October 1945 after a long, halting journey home described in La tregua (The Truce, 1963).

On his return, he wrote stories about his time in Auschwitz and, with doctor and fellow deportee Leonardo De Benedetti, a medical report on camp conditions for a general medical journal (Minerva medica). The stories were published in book form as Se questo è un uomo in 1947, by De Silva, having been rejected by Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese at Einaudi. The book was praised by a small number of reviewers (including the young Italo Calvino), but had little impact. Levi started a career as an industrial chemist and manager which would last for thirty years. He stopped writing with regularity, although it is now clear, despite his own declarations to the contrary, that he continued to think up and sketch out stories and poems throughout his apparent years of silence between the late 1940s and late 1950s.

In 1958, with interest in the Holocaust growing, Einaudi republished Se questo è un uomo in a slightly revised edition, to much greater acclaim. This success persuaded Levi to write more, and in 1963 he published La tregua, which won a prize and began to launch Levi into the role of writer per se for the first time. In 1966 and 1971 respectively, he published two collections of science-fantasy stories, Storie naturali (initially under a pseudonym, Damiano Malabaila) and Vizio di forma. Both contained stories written as divertissements over a period of years, some dating back to those same months in 1946 when he was talking and writing his first deportation stories. Their witty but often dark inventions have grown in stature over the years as both subterranean links with the Holocaust work and as their own literary qualities have become more evident. In particular, though, they are a focal point for Levi’s important role as a bridge between ‘the two cultures’ of science and literature in Italy. As he tells Giuseppe Grassano (see below p. 126), a long-standing, if neglected tradition in Italian culture, from Galileo onwards, has seen no gulf between the two, and he positions himself, as a writer and a public figure, firmly within that tradition.

In confirmation of this happy synthesis, in 1975 he published Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1984), an autobiography loosely structured according to chemical elements. Each chapter centres on a real, fictional or metaphorical encounter with an element at a certain time of Levi’s life. The book was hailed in America especially – Saul Bellow called it ‘a necessary book’ – and Levi’s immense international reputation stems from this reception. His next work, La chiave a stella (1978; The Wrench, 1987), was, by contrast, very local in its style and theme: it consists of the work stories of a industrial rigger, Libertino Faussone, who, in his odd mixture of Piedmontese dialect and technical jargon, tells of his epic and intimate struggles with bridges, dams and the like. And yet, as several interviews show, Levi saw The Wrench as closely related to The Periodic Table in their shared celebration of the possibilities of a certain intelligent, problem-solving form of work, and generally put a great deal of his most heartfelt values into the figure of Faussone and his stories.

The Wrench, set in a Togliattigrad Levi had visited for work, stands among other things as a farewell meditation on his career as a chemist, and indeed, as he was writing it he was also going into retirement to become a full-time writer. His only fully fledged work of fiction, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?), the story of a Jewish partisan band in the Second World War, followed in 1982, winning two prestigious prizes, but also some criticism for its ‘over-researched’ reconstruction of the Ashkenazi Jewish culture of Eastern Europe. The 1980s saw a rapid crescendo in interviews and international acclaim, and Levi also began publishing several volumes of collected and new essays, stories, poems and articles. The year 1981 saw Lilit e altri racconti, containing essays, camps stories and science-fiction stories and La ricerca delle radici (‘The Search for Roots’), a fascinating commented anthology of his favourite or formative books. In 1983 came his translation of Kafka’s The Trial, an occasion for an extraordinary and traumatic clash of temperaments. His collected poems appeared in 1984 under the Coleridgean title Ad ora incerta (‘At an Uncertain Hour’) and the following year came his most characteristically eclectic, ‘encyclopaedic’ (as Calvino called it) and curious volume of essays, L’altrui mestiere (Other People’s Trades). More of his articles for La Stampa were collected for the 1986 volume Racconti e saggi (The Mirror Makers).

A year before his death, Levi drew together his reflections on Auschwitz in his most striking book, I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1986). The essays – on memory, communication, the shame of the survivor, the Nazis’ ‘useless’ violence, and the ‘grey zone’ of moral ambiguity between victim and oppressor – revisit many of the moral and historical questions thrown up by the Holocaust and are models in humane, ethical meditation. At the same time, they also contain moments of genuine anguish, anger and ambivalence. Indeed, this acceleration in publishing and public profile in the 1980s was by no means without its pressures and anxieties for Levi. He was vexed by periods of writer’s block, frustrated by the distortions in his reception abroad (especially in America after 1984, where he felt he was being lionized but also absorbed into a model of the European Jewish writer which he knew he did not fit, only then to be criticized precisely for not fitting it) and deeply concerned by pernicious negationist and ‘revisionist’ accounts of the Holocaust appearing in France and Germany. He was also increasingly disillusioned with speaking to the young: he felt they no longer understood him nor had any notion of why what he had to say was important, let alone of the detailed complexity of what he was trying to describe. Nevertheless, he remained active, talking, writing and planning future writing throughout his final years. He died in April 1987, believed by most to have killed himself, although several voices continue to argue that there is no substantial evidence that he committed suicide.⁵

Notes

‘I am a Centaur’

Marco Belpoliti

For all that he was a shy and reserved person, in the course of his career Primo Levi agreed to take part in large number of interviews, conversations and dialogues, many of which appeared in print, with a wide variety of different interlocutors, from journalists and critics to students and fellow writers. So intense was this activity that he came to think of his role as a talker and witness as a third profession, to set alongside his more official and recognized careers as chemist and as writer. Indeed, almost twenty years after the republication of If This is a Man in 1958, he felt compelled to add a new chapter to the book, an Afterword aimed particularly at his young readers, in which he replied to the questions most frequently put to him.¹ The Afterword is a genuine example of what we might call the self-interview. What is more, orality had from the outset played an important role in his vocation as a writer, if we are to believe his account – often repeated in his interviews – of the first drafts of the stories that went to make up If This is a Man, first drafts based on stories told orally to relatives and friends, to strangers and chance travel companions, on trains, trams, public places, wherever he found himself.

The orality of Primo Levi the narrator is confirmed by the famous preface to If This is a Man, where he describes the need to tell the story to ‘others’ as an elementary necessity, a physical need; or in the 1946 poem about the dreams of his year in Auschwitz, which later became the epigraph to The Truce: ‘tomare; mangiare; raccontare’ (going home, eating, telling our story).² In this, Levi comes close to those characters in the short stories of Nikolai Leskov, whom Walter Benjamin described as ‘having counsel’, as offering their listeners practical advice, norms for living, proverbs; whose ‘counsel, woven into the fabric of real life, is wisdom’.³ Furthermore, in Levi’s work, but also in his active life, the art of the storyteller is closely related to the art of listening: as he writes in The Wrench, ‘just as there is an art of storytelling, strictly codified through a thousand trials and errors, so there is also an art of listening, equally ancient and noble, but as far as I know, it has never been given any norm’.⁴ In an interview Levi gave to Italian television in the early 1970s, entitled ‘The Profession of Storytelling’ and dedicated to If This is a Man, there is a curious episode which epitomizes his attitude as a talker-cum-listener: at a certain point, the interviewer, instead of seeking answers from Levi, begins to answer his own questions himself. Levi calmly listens to him, in silence, his expression a mixture of curiosity and perplexity. The questioner is talking about the behaviour of Germans during Hitler’s rule, a question to which Levi himself has no sure answer and one to which he returns in many of the interviews concerning his experience as a deportee to the German concentration camps.

The speaker’s profession is, for Levi, necessary, dictated by a dual obligation: on the one hand, there are the demands from many of his listeners for explanations of aspects of the Lager he does not write of in his books (or that he touches on only briefly). These are demands, for further excavation – as if beneath Levi’s stories there could be a base truth, an explanation of explanations, a foundation on which his interlocutors could plant their feet solidly and all would be clear. On the other hand, Levi feels the need to clarify for himself, to explain to himself more precisely, to draw out what is implicit in his writing.

Listening to Levi reply to his interviewers’ questions on the tapes or videos that have survived, one cannot help but be struck by how smooth and polished his speech is, how it is ready-made for the: printed page. His spoken language is closer to written language, dictated by his quick reflexes, the reflexes of the chemist. He seems quite free from what Roland Barthes called the ‘hysteria’ of the spoken word, the continual attempt to hook the listener with a flow’ of ‘buts’ and ‘sos’, to bind him into his status as partner for the duration of the dialogue. On the contrary, Levi’s language is always precise; the typical interjections of a one-to-one encounter – ‘do you follow? are you listening? do you understand?’ – are quite absent. In other words, in Levi’s spoken language there is no drama, not even muted drama. Transcribing his words from tape, one realizes that they always come quickly to him: the task of adding punctuation is easy since, unless he is interrupted by his questioner, pauses in his speech are clear, natural. Even parentheses, digressions – all the diversions that point in spoken language to the secondary importance of this or that idea – are rare and always perfectly clear.

For Levi, the interview is an extension of the art of storytelling, a way of adding something further, something that he has saved from oblivion, a fragment that his so-called ‘mechanical memory’ can suddenly restore.⁵ Often in conversation he sounds like the archaeologist of his own past: for example, in the first interview in Part II of this book, ‘The Little Theatre of Memory’ (another self-interview, this time made using extracts of music and songs), he sounds the depths of his own memory and tries to draw together the fragments into an organic design. The writer is always narrating, even when he entrusts his memories to the microphone, to an apparently ephemeral moment such as the interview. Indeed, the best way of getting to know the man and the writer, the chemist and the ex-deportee, is to read the words he offers to others. Levi takes advantage of his occasional listeners to recall neglected episodes from the camps, neglected by others but also by his younger self (when Levi tells stories he is never alone, he is always in the company of that other younger self who lived through the experience of Auschwitz and whose heir, descendant and beneficiary the older Levi is, as he says on several occasions). And the opposite is also true: Levi can tell the same story yet again, after so many other times of telling it, with the same words used with such precision in his writing. The art of storytelling, for him, is also the art of repeating oneself, of renewing the same old story for new listeners, with a modicum of necessary variation. In his stories, and thus also in these interviews, repetition is not an unthinking gesture: it is a carefully deliberated choice. It is the choice of the swiftest possible means so that the passage from mouth to ear always results in clear and effective communication.

‘A book’, Levi said more than once, ‘has to be a telephone that works’, and the metaphor of the phone points to a crucial aspect of communication in Levi – distance. There is a distance between narrator and listener; the narrator, of course, counsels his interlocutor, but there is always a certain distance between them (it is the Lager that produces the disparity, as well as the need for explanation prompted by the interlocutors, a need he himself feels acutely). In the early 1980s, as Levi began to reflect once more on his salvation, he tells one interviewer that the impulse to write a book about his time in Auschwitz came not only from the need to bear witness and to cure himself from the curse of Auschwitz – the word as salvation, the story as therapy – but also from the desire to feel different from those around him: ‘think of Ulysses spending the night recounting his odyssey to Alcinous. Probably there is another motivation at work here, perhaps that almost banal need to testify to the facts, to make another understand that I am different from you, that I have seen things you have never seen, thus I am at a level above you.’⁶

In many interviews, Levi repeats that his first profession, chemistry, saved him from death and gave him his second profession, writing. It was his strange destiny to have received from one of the greatest tragedies of our century the gift of the word: so that we can almost see him – although he disliked prophets – in the image of Isaiah whose lips were touched by the Archangel with the burning firebrand, to confer on him the purity of speech. Levi the Jew – ‘ebreo di ritorno’ (returning Jew), as he describes himself whenever he is asked about his Judaism – acquired the ability to narrate directly from the hell of Auschwitz, and, once he had returned to life, the ability to purify his mouth of that contagion using the gift of the story, an inheritance which, like all divine or magic gifts, soon proved to be a double-edged sword. In The Wrench he uses Greek myth to tell the story of that gift, seeing himself in the clothes of Tiresias who meets the snake on the road and is turned into a woman: ‘ever since then, being a chemist for all the outside world but feeling the blood of a writer in my veins, I felt as though I had two souls within my body, and two is one too many’.

The dialogues in this book show with great clarity the complex identity of this ‘man of counsel’, this ‘enchanted traveller’: chemist and writer, witness and writer, Jew and Italian. In one of the earliest interviews, with Edoardo Fadini in 1966, dedicated to the science-fiction stories published later that year as Storie naturali (‘Natural Histories’) under the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila (his literary alter ego), Levi declares: ‘I am amphibian, a centaur […] I am split in two. One half of me is of the factory, the technician and the chemist. The other half is quite separate from the first […] and inhabits the world of writing, giving interviews, working on my past and present experiences. They are two halves of my brain. I live with this paranoiac split.’⁷

The Centaur, to whom Levi dedicated one of his most beautiful short stories, ‘Quaestio de Centauris’,⁸ does not only represent the presence of opposites, but also the union of man and beast, of impulse and ratiocination, an unstable union destined to break down. The man-horse is an emblem of the radical internal opposition that every survivor lived through and which echoes like a biblical warning in the very title of Levi’s first book. In many interviews, Levi constantly found ways to come back to the deep split that ran through him, rather than wishing to hide it or to forget it. He offers it to his listeners in part as a sort of self-revelation, but always also with a modest reluctance to give in wholly to the excessive curiosity of others. As he puts it, with a note of pride, in one radio interview, ‘I guard my own privacy jealously’.⁹ In these conversations, Levi tells us a lot about himself, about his family, his tastes, his life in general, so that it might even seem that his trumpeted discretion is only apparent. In reality, he allows us glimpses into his life because it was from the capital event of his life that his adventure as a storyteller and talker began, because the unhealing wound, in life and in memory, is what produces the need for the word, for clear communication.

In many encounters, Levi is asked if he would have been a writer had it not been for Auschwitz. Levi replies that without knowing ‘what to say’, without ‘the content’, there is no story. On another occasion, he goes so far as to say that without the Lager he would have been a failed writer. His second profession, which he more than once labels a non-profession (a lecture he gave in Turin after the publication of The Periodic Table (1975) was entitled ‘The Writer Who is Not a Writer’ (‘Scrittore non scrittore’)), not only gives great happiness, as is evident when he discusses writing, but is also the means for him to renew that old pain, the wrench. There is an almost standard reply that he uses after a certain date – around 1978 – when he is asked ‘What are you writing now?’ ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘I think I’ve exhausted all avenues’; or ‘I’ve run out of supplies, I don’t have much more to say’. In one of his last conversations, with Roberto Di Caro, in which he talks about the economy of narrative, there is a sense of weariness, of exhaustion in his words;¹⁰ but this is nothing new. Acting just like a chemist or technician who carefully weighs up his own means and assesses what is available to him before starting in on an operation, Levi weighed up his own narrative resources on several occasions. When The Truce was published in 1963, he was asked about future projects and he mentions an idea for a book of factory stories, the adventures of a chemist, but he says he has not yet found the key motif, the way to make the subject interesting for the reader, although he himself is so enthused by it (Levi clearly had in mind at the time a story built around an epic motif, around memory, which, as Benjamin noted again, ‘is the epic faculty par excellence’, ‘The Storyteller’, p. 96). These hints are the embryonic form of a narrative project that resulted in not one but two books: The Periodic Table and The Wrench. ‘And what about the Lager experience?’, a journalist asks him after he receives the Campiello Book Prize for The Truce in 1963. ‘Absolutely, not another word. Nothing. I’ve said everything I had to say. It’s all over.’¹¹ But nothing finishes in Levi, everything returns continuously, through some intrinsic force. And so his affirmation that his subject-matter has run its course, besides being a superstitious gesture driven by the fear of losing his own prodigious storytelling abilities, is also an unequivocal sign of its continual recapitulation, of the impossibility of cutting himself off even for a moment from the inheritance of Auschwitz (there is not a single interview that does not refer, even if only in the introduction, to that place).

The other question Levi comes back to again and again – at times rejecting and at times accepting it – is the question of his being a writer. Levi is certainly a fully fledged writer, above all else an exceptional writer, since none of his books fits neatly into a specific genre, and this causes his questioners difficulties: what is If This is a Man? A testimony or a story? A memorial or a novel? And The Periodic Table? A Bildungsroman built up out of several short stories? And again, what sort of a book is The Drowned and the Saved from a literary point of view? He explains to Giuseppe Grassano that his identity as a writer is manifold, coming back once again, in 1979 now, to the theme of the Centaur: ‘I am a “liceo” student with a humanistic education, but also a chemist and finally an ex-deportee. So I have at least three different sources for my writing.’

The foremost difficulty for the interviewer, then, at least until the early 1980s, is that of fixing the boundary between witness and writer, chemist and storyteller, between the narrator of the odyssey of Auschwitz and the writer of science-fiction stories. Then, suddenly, with the publication of If Not Now, When? in 1982, the problem seems to disappear, as if that work of fiction, that story of love and war, has smoothed over all the distinctions. But for Levi the problem is still there; indeed, in a sense it is sharper than ever. On the one hand, as the witness, Levi feels called upon to be truthful, and this problem – the truthfulness of his own affirmations – will return obsessively in these years, providing the impulse to write that masterpiece of self-reflection, The Drowned and the Saved, born not only as a reaction to the ‘negationism’ of figures such as Faurisson and Darquier de Pellepoix,¹² but also from inner motives, from an enquiry into his own work as a writer. On the other hand, his books are all, whether testimonial or essayistic (see, for example. Other People’s Trades (1985), one of the last great examples of the tradition of the elzeviro (short essay) or prosa d’arte (art prose), in which Italian writers of the twentieth century have excelled), strongly literary works. Indeed, this literary quality is what sets Levi apart from the hundreds of stories and testimonies published in Italy and in Europe after the defeat of Nazism.

So, Levi’s books are to differing degrees shot through with that ‘fiction’ proper to literature (he reflects on this in almost all of the interviews, explaining what real events lie behind this or that story, including stories he has been told by others). To be a writer, he reflects, is in a sense to betray the task of the witness, since it is natural for the written page to render the true story more convincing and more compelling. In this Levi shows, even compared to other narrators of the genocide of the Jews, an acute awareness of the problematic rapport between narration and reality, of the fact that every act of testimony is valid essentially in and of itself. In a filmed interview of 1974, the interviewer tries to compare Levi’s account with that of one of his camp companions, the famous Pikolo of the chapter ‘The Canto of Ulysses’ in If This is a Man. All to no avail, because Pikolo does not remember a single thing of that crucial episode, he only recalls that he and Levi did speak at length, nothing of what they spoke about. Levi himself, in other conversations, emphasizes that there is always some discrepancy between what he narrates and what happened in reality, however much he continues to insist on the essential veracity of his work. He notes that few of the people who appear in his books have accepted the portrait he gives of them there. When he moves on to the field of pure invention, with the characters of If Not Now, When?, he confesses to journalists that he ran up against another unforeseen problem. The characters began to act like people, refusing to die, taking him by the hand and controlling him (one of them will even come and visit his creator, in a couple of stories from the 1960s, ‘Creative Work’ and ‘In the Park’¹³ ).

In a conversation on the sources of The Wrench in 1978, Levi speaks of himself, with his usual self-irony, as a ‘counterfeiter’. In all probability, he is aware – although no one puts it to him in these terms – that the literature of our age is a strange place where nothing, not even that which is most horrifying and scandalous, appears before the reader as it is, a place where the true story loses its spark of truth and changes into something else, a leisure activity or a form of information. Walter Benjamin, once more, tells us that this is because literature in the modern age has substantially cut itself off from experience, it is no longer ‘experience passed on from mouth to mouth’ (‘The Storyteller’, p. 84), it no longer originates in an act of memory, it has lost perhaps once and for all its epic charge.

The presence of many professions in Levi (chemist, writer, witness, speaker) is not a chance happening: any profession is a natural generator of stories, since stories are born in the workplace, in various workplaces (those ‘other people’s trades’ pursued with such tenacity in the prose collection of that name). The profession of the writer is itself a form of artisanal craft, he declares shortly after the publication of If Not Now, When?, his first novel as he calls it. Like Faussone, the mechanical rigger of The Wrench, he talks of himself as a rigger of stories. Indeed, all his stories are ones we can ask to be continued (Benjamin again). In one interview Levi even says he has an idea for a sequel to If Not Now, When?; in others he explains how it had originally been born out of another story, together with a fragment recovered from the story of his own return to life.

Although Levi was from the outset a great talker, always ready to respond to his listeners, no published interviews have been found before 1961, when he is asked to respond to a questionnaire on the ‘Jewish question’ put together by an historical journal. Even between 1963 and 1978, the number of interviews is relatively low. Then, suddenly, from 1979 onwards, Levi – already a very well-known writer, the author of a set text studied in almost every school in Italy and also a frequent visitor to schools – becomes a public figure. Newspapers begin to ask his views on his life, his work as a chemist, his past, on the camps and his work as a writer. Most of Levi’s 250 or so interviews are concentrated in a period of seven or eight years between 1979 and 1986, when he is no longer practising his first profession and has dedicated himself more intensely to his second, that of the writer. In this phase of his life, Levi only very rarely goes to schools to meet students, since the latter, he notes with regret more than once, now see the Second World War as an event lost in the distant past. For the first time, there are notes of pessimism about his third profession and this seems only to intensify with his various encounters with the press. He takes part in television programmes and he accepts into his home interviewers from all four comers of the world. For the international public, Levi has by the early 1980s become one of the best-known Jewish writers in the world, and this despite the fact that the translations of his books into English had passed almost unnoticed in previous decades (including in America and Israel). Levi himself is surprised and bewildered by this, as he explains in a 1986 interview with Risa Sodi, where he gives an account of his trip to America and the welcome he received, and notes ‘by dint of being called a Jewish writer, I became one! I’ve already mentioned that I began to wonder if there any “goyim” lived in America. I didn’t come across a single one of them! It almost becomes comical. My editor is Jewish and all his collaborators are Jewish. He introduced me exclusively to illustrious American Jews. I spoke to Jewish audiences.’¹⁴

As emerges clearly from the interviews and dialogues collected in this volume – but also from the many not included – even the Jewish side of his identity presents problems. Never letting go of his hybrid nature, he tells one interviewer he feels four-fifths Italian and one-fifth Jewish. But he immediately adds that he has grown very affectionate towards that one fifth and that he considers it fundamental to his identity. On several occasions, such as in the interview with the writer Edith Bruck, herself a Jewish concentration-camp survivor, he declares that he became Jewish after Auschwitz, that beforehand he had been simply a middle-class Italian boy.¹⁵ Or again, to Giuseppe Grieco, ‘I am Jewish by accident of birth. I am neither ashamed nor boastful about it. Being Jewish, for me, is a matter of “identity”: an “identity”, I must also say, that I have no intention of discarding.’¹⁶

In 1982, the invasion of southern Lebanon by Israeli troops provoked a strong reaction in public opinion both in Israel and amongst the Jewish Diaspora outside Israel to which Levi belonged. It was a critical moment for Levi, who had just returned from his second trip to Auschwitz since the end of the war. He was one of the promoters of an appeal for the withdrawal of the troops and for a peace process to guarantee a homeland to those who did not have one. The Italian press interviews Levi and here too, he revealed the subtlety of his thinking which, much like his thinking on the Lager and the theme of the ‘grey zone’, cannot be reduced to simple categories founded on predetermined mental or ideological schemas. This is an aspect of Levi’s Judaism that is less well-known but just as important as others, another tile in the unusual mosaic that goes to make up his identity.

Reading this volume makes the special qualities of Primo Levi clearer than ever for us. If the collected interviews of many twentieth-century writers constitute a rich mine of information on their working habits, opinions, interpretations, likes and dislikes, Levi yet again represents an exception. His story, whether written or oral, is always a story of experience, in which words count as gestures, as ceremonial acts to guide us through the calamitous state of the twentieth century. It is up to the reader to pick up in his words and their transcription the sanction of truth that resonates, often in the dual guise of an unexpected optimism combined with a lucid pessimism. ‘I am a centaur’, he tells us. For Primo Levi, talker and writer, let Benjamin’s closing words on the storyteller stand: ‘His gift is the ability to relate his life; his distinction to be able to tell his entire life. The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story’ (‘The Storyteller’, p. 107).

The Voice of Memory

Interviews 1961–87

Preface

Life

Notes

‘I am a Centaur’

Notes