Primo Levi - Tragedy of an Optimist by Myriam Anissimov Aurum £25 in UK
The burden of survival haunted the Italian writer Primo Levi throughout his life, ultimately making it unbearable. Author of If This Is a Man (1958), The Truce (1963), The Periodic Table (1975) and The Wrench (1978), he killed himself in April 1997. His strange suicide shocked readers, and while some observers believed the calm, reticent Levi had come to terms with the horrors he had witnessed in Auschwitz, many more sensed that the suppressed anger contained in his writings confirmed his lasting unease.
It took the success of the English-language edition of The Periodic Table, first published in New York in English in 1984 and endorsed by Saul Bellow, to establish Levi as an important European writer some twenty years after the first English publication of If This Is a Man. For Levi, however, that success came too late. With it, more disturbingly, came criticism from the international Jewish community who accused him of not being Jewish enough. Levi always considered himself an Italian. Religion was incidental to him and was in fact gradually imposed on him by the race laws introduced by the fascist Italian regime. This was further intensified by his time in the Nazi death camps: "My Jewish identity took on a great importance following my deportation to Auschwitz; it is very likely that without Auschwitz I would never have written, and would have given only a little weight to my Jewish identity."
Levi wanted the world to know what happened. "I returned from the camp," he wrote, "with an absolute, pathological narrative charge." A chemist by profession, he was always marginalised as a writer by the literary establishment, which saw him as witness rather than artist. His work is compelling, and informed by abiding themes: the horrors of the events he lived through as well as the ever-pressing guilt of survival. The story he has to tell is invariably his own - "my only thought was to survive and tell" - and this most private man spent his writing life telling and retelling his experiences.
Levi is a mystery: precise, selfcontained, remote yet clearly tormented. Was he a saint or merely a survivor? Is his vision inspired, selfless or self-absorbed? Levi was shy yet also resentful of the reluctant admiration he received. So who was the real Primo Levi? Myriam Anissimov embarks on this most difficult quest in Primo Levi - Tragedy of an Optimist. It is an odd subtitle. Optimism is not a quality easily associated with Primo Levi. Anissimov is as much in awe of Levi as are his readers. Her approach is respectful, admiring, even protective, stressing his fragility, shyness and weighty sense of duty. His presence was kindly and gentle and other-worldly. Primo Levi left one feeling humble.
On meeting him almost exactly a year before he died, I was aware of the futility of attempting an ordinary conversation with such a person; his Holocaust experiences rendered everything trivial. Thin and pale, he held his hand up to shield his eyes from the light and his skin seemed transparent and paper-like, the camp number still visible on his wrist. For all his scientist's exactitude and economic language, it was as if he already belonged to another world.
In Anissimov's book Levi remains an elusive personality. After Auschwitz, his life was dominated by the great and terrifying adventure of an epic trek across Europe from Belorussia back to Turin via the Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany. After that he returned home to live quietly in the Turin apartment he had grown up in - in fact, he made his study in the room where he had been born. His wife was a willing listener to his stories about life in Auschwitz; neither of his children ever asked him about his experiences.
The Periodic Table is an original work, blending science, autobiography and the imagination, while his other writings are valuable testaments. The strength of Anissimov's meticulous, over-long study lies in the effort she has put into recreating the Italy, and especially the Turin, which Levi knew. She is at her most confident when dealing with the social and political history of the first half of the century, specifically the rise of fascism and state anti-Semitism. Throughout the book, which was written in French and published two years ago in Paris, the briskly formal pace of the narrative slows whenever she is directly faced with her subject. There is little new on offer here except for some insights into the tensions of Levi's domestic arrangements, which centred on his caring for his senile mother and blind grandmother. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Turin in 1919, Levi even as a boy was frail, and shy with women. He did well academically, although, interestingly, he was not drawn to literature and concentrated on science. "Chemistry and astronomy became and remained his favourite subjects," writes Anissimov, "because he found in his reading some of the answers to the questions he asked himself about the apparent chaos of the world." He was also a determined hill walker and enjoyed nature - an interest he did not inherit from his city-loving father, whose early death in 1942 from cancer deeply affected him.
Being Jewish initially meant little to Levi, who was an atheist. Italian Jewry was both ancient and highly assimilated. It was not until the persecution of the European Jews began depriving Levi of work as a chemist that he became aware of his culture as anything more than "a small, amusing anomaly". It is a point which Anissimov repeatedly returns to. Although he was well supported by his editor, Italo Calvino, Levi's career as a writer remained overshadowed by his relevance as a witness and the witness role was one he took seriously. In The Drowned and the Saved, written a year before his death, he referred to his death-camp number as a part of his body, and described his reluctance to have it erased. "Why should I? There are not many of us in the world to bear this witness."
As a son he was bound to his aged mother, who outlived him; as a death camp survivor he was haunted by his failure to die. Levi the writer, in telling his story, testified to the sufferings of his race. His books will last because they record a vast human tragedy. Anissimov's book is the first major biography and is responsible and dignified, if dull and stylistically mannered. Points are laboured and her admiration for her subject often intrudes. Yet as Levi is important, so too is this dutiful, honourable account.