The prophecy of Primo Levi

In January 1985, a laudatory New York Review of Books review of Primo Levi’s “The Periodic Table” sent me straight to my local bookstore for a copy, which I devoured in one or two sittings. I’d never read anything like it — truly one of those rare books where, after finishing it, you’re a different person, seeing the world through new eyes.

The book tells the story of Levi’s personal experiences as a member of the Italian Resistance and survivor of Auschwitz metaphorically, refracted through the scientific properties of various elements he studied and worked with as an industrial chemist. It was such an instant commercial and critical success that its publisher, Schocken Books, persuaded the reclusive author to undertake a two-week speaking tour of the United States that spring. A few weeks later, by happy coincidence, a longtime friend, Rabbi Haim Beliak of the Claremont Colleges Hillel, called to tell me that Levi would soon be speaking there. Would I like to interview him for my radio station? I was working at the time for KBIG-FM, where I was the editorial director and produced documentaries and various short news features built around interviews with prominent authors. 

Levi spoke in Claremont on Sunday, April 21, 1985, three days after Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. A dapper and distinguished figure with a neatly trimmed beard and nimbus of white hair, Levi spoke with careful, elegant precision, as you might expect of a formally educated Italian scientist trained to meticulously and dispassionately record his observations.

Despite his slight build and self-effacing manner, Levi was an intimidating presence. After what he’d been through, after his eloquent and unsparing chronicles of that suffering over nearly four decades (his first Holocaust memoir, alternately titled “If This Is A Man” and “Survival in Auschwitz,” was first published in Italian in 1947, when he was only 27), after all his international acclaim, I suddenly felt inadequate for the task of interviewing him.

When it was over, I worried I’d blown the kind of journalistic opportunity that comes along rarely, if ever. Levi was nervous, guarded; the harder I tried to elicit more expansive replies to my questions, the further he withdrew. To top it off, ambient noise in the room rendered the audio useless for broadcast, which had been the point of the exercise. I filed the cassette and materials away with a nagging sense of failure.

Recently, amid the publication of Levi’s “Complete Works” and the accompanying resurgence of interest in his writing, I came across the cassette from that 1985 interview. I was pleasantly surprised at how differently I experienced our conversation today.

Levi sounds cordial and responsive, carefully framing his replies on such a familiar, yet inescapably painful, topic in what was, after all, not his native tongue (his conversational English was certainly adequate, but he had no translator). As I listened, he reappeared before me and I vividly remembered his bright eyes, frequent smile and self-deprecating struggles to find the right words — but there was also a hint of melancholy that hovered over him like a shadow.

Here is some of what Levi told me during our interview:

I know this is a difficult question: How did the Holocaust experience change your orientation to the rest of the world?

It is very curious. It is a question which I have received many, many times, and to [which] I am almost unable to reply. How could I forecast a future of my life, which did not come into existence? … If I had not had the experience of the concentration camp, perhaps I would have kept chemistry without turning into a writer.

Let me ask you about chemistry and writing. What preserved your interest in the profession of chemistry, given your obvious ability to write and your success as a writer?

Oh, it’s a very clear matter, because out of chemistry, you can make a living. Out of writing, it is very difficult, unless you consent to write commercially, I think — which I have always refused. I found it much more apt, for free writing, to keep to a material trade, a concrete trade … and to keep writing for Sundays, not to earn a living out of them. Of course, if you earn something out of writing, so much the good. But it came very late.

I wanted to ask you something to follow up on some remarks you made in your talk about these so-called “revisionists” who deny or minimize the Holocaust. How do you respond to questions from people who don’t have the kind of firsthand experience you do, or the background?

Oh, I get angry. I refused a discussion with [Robert] Faurisson, the French revisionist. I think the revisionist either an idiot or in bad faith. It can’t be together an intelligent man, and a sensible man, and in good faith. It is impossible. … I had a discussion, in fact, with a young man in Italy, a revisionist. And look, what convinced him was that — their argument, their point, as you know, is “nobody of you survivors has seen a gas chamber” — and I told him, in fact, that I didn’t see a gas chamber. But hydrogen cyanide was used every time lice [were] found in the barracks. And I had not seen the gas chamber, but I had seen the gas. And he told me arrogantly, “And how could you recognize hydrogen cyanide? How could you tell hydrogen cyanide from another stuff to kill pests?” I told him as a chemist, I recognized very easily hydrogen cyanide from another poison. And he felt a little crestfallen … embarrassed. 

How do you think the Jewish community, as a whole, should respond [to Holocaust denialists]?

With good sense. … It is not acceptable to state that every picture is a fake and that every witness is a lie. It’s too easy. This way, you could demonstrate that Napoleon never existed. It is enough to say that all historians that stated anything were liars. Liars! That the ruins of Ligne Maginot in France have been built by scenograph [a professional constructed set] and so on.

Let me just ask you a final question. Briefly, what is the relevance today of Holocaust observances and remembrances for the world of non-Jews? How would you convey the importance to them of this?

(Pause of several seconds, heavy sighing) Can I recoil? I am not able to reply. Too difficult. I apologize to you. I’m pretty exhausted.

What I could not have known I later learned from the detailed account of Levi’s American tour in Ian Thomson’s biography, “Primo Levi: A Life.” That Levi had undertaken the tour only under duress; that it had also been a tremendous physical and emotional strain for his wife, Lucia, who had accompanied him; that he had been suffering from and been treated for depression for several years; that he was preoccupied with the health of his invalid mother, whom he lived with and cared for in the Turin apartment where he was born; that by the time I spoke with him, he had already delivered several speeches, been overwhelmed and intimidated by the hothouse literary salons of New York and submitted to other media interviews (which he found sheer torment); and that after flying across the country, he had just traveled up from San Diego earlier in the day following a taxing series of family and social obligations.

In the space of three weeks, he had crisscrossed the country, delivered six speeches and sat for 25 media interviews. In retrospect, it’s a wonder that Levi was able and willing to talk to me at all, yet he handled it with as much grace, candor and courtesy as he could muster.

After 38 years, America had finally discovered, and embraced, Primo Levi. But despite his publisher’s hopes that he would return for another visit to the U.S, that first trip was to be his last. Two years later almost to the day, depressed and in poor health, Levi would greet his landlady as she brought him the daily mail, and then a few minutes later, without warning, step out of his apartment and pitch himself over the stair railing and plunge four floors to his death. He died instantly on the marble floor of the stairwell in the building where, apart from his internment and imprisonment, he had spent virtually his entire life. He was 67.

“It is not very probable that all the factors that unleashed the Nazi madness will again occur simultaneously but precursory signs loom before us,” Levi concluded in “The Drowned and the Saved” (1986), the last book he would publish during his lifetime. Sporadic acts of individual violence as well as government lawlessness were on display everywhere, he asserted. “It only awaits its new buffoon (there is no dearth of candidates), to organize it, legalize it, declare it necessary and mandatory, and so contaminate the world. Few countries can be considered immune to a future tide of violence generated by intolerance, a lust for power, economic difficulties, religious or political fanaticism, and racialist attritions. It is therefore necessary to sharpen our senses, distrust the prophets, the enchanters, those who speak and write ‘beautiful words’ unsupported by intelligent reasons.”

For Primo Levi, the memory of the offense lasted a lifetime. Were he still with us today, his heart would be breaking at how thoroughly we seem to have forgotten it all. 

Joel Bellman is a writer and columnist who served as communications deputy under three Los Angeles County supervisors, following a decade as an award-winning L.A.-based broadcast and print journalist.