THE VOICE OF MEMORY PRIMO LEVI Interviews, 1961-1987 Edited by M A R C 0 B E L P 0 L I T I and R 0 B E R T G 0 R D 0 N "Primo Levi is one of the most important and gifted writers of our time." -ITALO CALVINO The Voice of Memory The Voice of Memory Interviews 1961-1987 Primo Levi Edited by Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon Translated by Robert Gordon The New Press New York This collection © 2001 by Polity Press First published in Italy as Primo Levi: Conversazioni e interviste 1963-87, edited by Marco Belpoliti © 1997 Guilio Einaudi, 1997, with the exception of the interviews beginning on pages 3, 13, 23, and 34 (for further details see Acknowledgments page). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher. First published in the United Kingdom by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001 Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2001 Distributed by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York ISBN 1-56584-645-1 (he.) CIP data available. The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large, commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry. The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain, and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable. The New Press, 450West 41st Street, 6th floor, NewYork, NY 10036 www.thenewpress.com Set in Plantin Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Preface: Robert Gordon vii 'I am a Centaur': Marco Belpoliti xvii Editors' Note xxvii Acknowledgements XXX Part 1: English Encounters 1 Germaine Greer Talks to Primo Levi (1985) 3 A Man Saved by his Skills (Philip Roth) (1986) 13 Primo Levi in London (Anthony Rudolf) (1986) 23 Primo Levi in Conversation (Ian Thomson) (1987) 34 Part II: Life 45 The Uttle Theatre of Memory (1982) 47 Turin (1980) 57 Mountaineering (1984) 59 Chemistry (1983) 65 The Sinister Power of Science (1987) 70 Poetry and Computers (1985) 72 . Me, Old? (1982) 76 Part III: Books 77 The Truce (1963) 79 Science Fiction I Storie naturali (1966-1971) 84 Science Fiction II Vizio diforma (1971) 87 vi Contents The Periodic Ta ble (1975) 91 The Wrench (1979) 94 La ricerca delle radici ('The Search for Roots') (1981) 98 If Not Now, When? (1982) 103 The Drowned and the Saved (1986) 109 Part IV: Literature and Writing 115 A Mysterious Necessity (1972) 117 A Conversation with Primo Levi (1979) 121 Interview for a Dissertation (1981) 136 Encounter with Primo Levi (1981) 148 An Assault Called Franz Kafka (1983) 155 Primo Levi (1984) 161 The Essential and the Superfluous (1987) 167 Part V: Auschwitz and Survival 177 Round Table: The Jewish Question (1961) 179 A Self-Interview. Afterword to If This is a Man (1976) 184 Return to Auschwitz (1982) 208 The Duty of Memory (1983) 218 Words, Memory, Hope (1984) 250 Part VI: Judaism and Israel 259 Jewish, Up to a Point (1976) 261 Interview with Primo Levi (1979) 266 God and I (1983) 272 Primo Levi: Begin should Go (1982) 279 If This is a State (1984) 287 Bibliography of Primo Levi's Wo rks in Italian and English 295 Index 297 Preface Robert Gordon Primo Levi is now firmly established as one of the essential writers of 1 our century. His two principal works on the Holocaust - Se questa e un uomo (If This is aMan, 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 unbear­ able 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 var­ iously 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 atten­ tion to his ceuvre 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 understand­ ing of him. This volume of interviews shows us another of those viii Prefa ce 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 metier as a writer, itself a complement to his primary career as an industrial chemist, constantly ran parallel to and intersected a third metier, 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 fe lt so deeply misunderstood, that they were not believed, that they lost the desire to say anything more. LEVI: For myself! didn't fe el 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 fo und 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, officesand 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. Prefa ce ix At this first stage of his work, when familiar lines of shared reflec­ tion 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, I 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 con­ tains 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.