James T. Chiampi

THE EXEMPLARY CHAIM RUMKOWSKI IN ’S “LA ZONA GRIGIA”

n his essay “A Defnition of the Esthetic Experience,” Eliseo Vivas offers this Idescription of the signifying effect of art on the perceiving mind: “An esthetic experience is an experience of rapt attention which involves the intransitive apprehension of an object’s immanent meanings in their full presentational immediacy.”1 Vivas continues,

[“Intransitive”] means to signify that attention is esthetic when it is so controlled by the object that it does not fy away from it to meanings not present immanently in the object; or in other words that attention is so controlled that the object specifes concretely and immediately through refexive cross- references its meanings and objective characters. And thus we may contrast esthetic with all other modes of attention by noting that other modes of atten- tion discover in objects not immanent but referential meanings, which is to say, meanings which carry us beyond the object to other objects or meanings not present upon it. (408–9)

This experience of concentrated and contained attention is a creative fascina- tion in which meanings, detached from circumambient referential meanings, are reforged. In the novel, self- renewing literary artwork, the endless possible variety of meanings in combination and recombination, in their manifold dense allusivity, all present and absent even in a single reading—these “refex- ive cross- references”—set the esthetic object in unceasing semantic fow. Thus, only homonymy would bind the esthetic and extraesthetic word. Such mean- ings, which refuse reduction to the univocal, clearly cannot be captured all together at once either in the moment of consumption, or in retrospect. Nev- ertheless, for Vivas, the experience is one. If each meaning is inscribed in the others that constitute it, what moment could be encapsulated in the defnitive paraphrase that might adequately render it to the extraesthetic world? Such

1. In Eliseo Vivas and Murray Krieger, eds., The Problems of Aesthetics: A Book of Readings (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1966) 408. My concern in this essay is obviously with the literary artwork.

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a work that could manipulate attention in this way would be suffcient unto itself, autonomous of what lies around it, and, as a consequence, relentlessly ironic. To anticipate my theme: such irony does not lend itself to the establish- ment of certain moral judgments. The meanings produced in the esthetic experience are, in an ultimate sense, incomprehensible, in part because they can never be present, but also because the “refexive cross-references” of terms that cannot be fxed are potentially illimitable. Each manifold meaning infects and modifes the others. More- over, the self-transforming verbal artifact that does not permit the attention to transgress its borders for the corroboration of its truth by dull, referential meanings, satisfes—and stifes—the will in the play of its forms, hence stifing the activity of judgment. Thus does it preclude complete responsibility, how- ever that may be understood. Esthetic discourse would be profoundly different from, say, the discourse of history, which is ideally capable of falsifcation by an appeal to extramural fact. Vivas’s artwork dwells in secrecy. I would like to employ Vivas’s defnition of the esthetic as the terminus of a destabilizing epistemological iter in Primo Levi’s essay, “La zona grigia,” the second essay in his last major work, I sommersi e i salvati, which appeared in 1986. Levi begins his essay in the fuent, familiar style of saggistica, pro- ceeds to documentary history in a pivotal moment, and climaxes his essay in the esthetic, much as Vivas defnes it, with his description of the impotence that overcomes anyone who would judge a fgure as complex as his cho- sen example, Chaim Rumkowski. Put somewhat differently: the essay begins with pretensions to the propositional only to end in the esthetic and ironic.2 One consequence of this, I believe, is the deconstruction by the Rumkowski vignette of those parts of the essay that preceded and introduced it, as well as of those that follow it. As we shall see, the fgure of Rumkowski is far too vividly singular and fascinating to be contained by any propositional “gray zone,” whose secondary and derived example it could be claimed to be. In short, the example defeats its exemplarity. More to the point: in the literary artwork named “Rumkowski,” reference is directed forward to the new mean- ings it itself creates and not to any single preexisting, extratextual meaning. Accordingly, it refers more to itself than to any propositional nugget on which one might base an identity or a moral lesson. Rumkowski / “Rumkowski” dwells in secrecy.

2. Understand “ironic” as Cleanth Brooks defned it: “[The] obvious warping of a statement by the context.” (“Irony as a Principle of Structure,” repr. in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, rev. ed. [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992] 969).

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Primo Levi begins “La zona grigia” by restating his claim that the Nazi concentrationary system, with its confusion of boundaries and limits, was incomprehensible:

Siamo stati capaci, noi reduci, di comprendere e di far compren- dere la nostra esperienza? Ciò che comunemente intendiamo per “comprendere” coincide con “semplifcare”: senza una profonda semplifcazione, il mondo intorno a noi sarebbe un groviglio inf- nito e indefnito, che sfderebbe la nostra capacità di orientarci e di decidere le nostre azioni. Siamo insomma costretti a ridurre il conoscibile a schema: a questo scopo tendono i mirabili strumenti che ci siamo costruiti nel corso dell’evoluzione e che sono specifci del genere umano, il linguaggio ed il pensiero concettuale. (12; emphasis added)3

3. (Turin: Einaudi, 1991). Hereafter, all citations to I sommersi e i salvati will be taken from this edition and noted in the text. On the notion of the “gray zone,” see Giorgio Agamben’s seminal essay in Quel che resta di Auschwitz: L’archivio e il testimone (Homo sacer III) (Turin: Bollati Borighieri, 1998); Robert S.C. Gordon, “‘Per Mia Fortuna . . .’: Irony and Ethics in Primo Levi’s Writing,” Modern Language Review 92 (1997): 337–47 as well as his excellent Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001). On exemplarity, see Andrzej Warminski, Read- ings in Interpretation: Hölderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987); Irene E. Harvey, “Doubling the Space of Existence: Exemplarity in Derrida— The Case of Rousseau,” in John Sallis, ed., Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987) 60–70, her “Exemplarity and the Origins of Legislation,” in Alexander Gelley, ed., Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995) 211–54, and her excellent Labyrinths of Exemplarity: At the Limits of Deconstruction (Albany: State U of New York P, 2002); J. Hillis Miller, “Parabolic Exemplarity: The Example of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” in Gelley, Unruly Examples, 162–74, and his “Derrida Enisled,” in W.J.T. Mitchell and Arnold I. Davidson, eds., The Late Derrida (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007) 30–58. See also Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘,’ (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992). On law and justice, see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority,’” Car- dozo Law Review 11 (1990): 920–1045; Dominick LaCapra, “Violence, Justice and the Force of Law,” Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): 701–14; Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992); and the always lucid and per- ceptive John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1997) and his Deconstruction in a Nutshell, A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham UP, 1997).

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Only simplifcation, with its inevitable despoiling of the complexity of the meanings of , could render the Holocaust graspable. Therein lies both the crux of the matter and a paradox: if one must simplify to compre- hend, then to comprehend is to fail to comprehend. Simplifcation for Levi is accordingly irresponsible, because it requires a schema and strumenti; that is, the blunt tools of calculation. On the contrary, Levi understands responsibility to the coerced / infected of the gray zone as a kind of openness to a potentially infnite otherness. Moral judgment becomes the possibility of an impossibil- ity because it requires, yet forbids, mechanical adherence to a foreordained, mechanical program. In the spirit of Vivas, one might argue an aporia: respon- sibility requires that the concentrationary experience be understood esthetically in its “full presentational immediacy,” even though such fullness is perpetually à venir, that is, perpetually underway. Although Levi acknowledges the need of the immature for simplifcation, resulting in their Manichaean division of the world into good versus bad, he warns that expediency is not adequacy. The incomprehensible is an important theme in Levi’s writings from the very outset of his career. In his frst and greatest work, Se questo è un uomo, he recalled how Clausner, his fellow Häftling, scratched “Ne pas chercher à comprendre” on the bottom of his mess tin in order to dissuade both himself and anyone else who might read it from the futile attempt at fnding a rational explanation for any aspect of the Auschwitz experience: for Nazi race law; for the numberless rules that dictated the neatness of the Häftlinge in the stinking death camp; for the inhuman nonchalance with which the SS sent children, women, and men to an atrocious death.4 Ne pas chercher à comprendre: Levi is suggesting that any ethical schema that we might elaborate and apply to the men and women of the “gray zone” in a systematic way in order to assess the moral quality of their acts is ultimately ungrounded because incommen- surable—that is, lacking purchase—on a man such as Rumkowski. For Levi, the Holocaust is the atrocious epitome of the incomprehensible, and as impor- tant, of secrecy. As proof, Levi sets before his reader the example of Chaim Rumkowski for her response. Chaim Rumkowski, as we shall see, was an irresponsible man, a man irresponsible to his “subjects,” the Jews of the Łód´z , irresponsible for exploiting their participation in his megalomaniacal and preposterous—at times deadly—shtick of benign despotism, for which he also coerced their applause. Irresponsible to their singularity. In “La zona grigia,” Levi claims that in Auschwitz, the incomprehensible was staged and that the spectacle began immediately upon one’s entry into the camp: “L’ingresso in Lager era invece un urto per la sorpresa che portava

4. Primo Levi: Se questo è un uomo; La tregua (Turin: Einaudi, 1989) 93. Hereafter, all citations to Se questo è un uomo will be taken from this edition and noted in the text.

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con sé. Il mondo in cui ci si sentiva precipitati era sí terribile, ma anche inde- cifrabile: non era conforme ad alcun modello, il nemico era intorno ma anche dentro,” leading to the loss of boundaries and limits (25). Such loss gave rise to disappointment in the new arrivals, who expected to fnd reassuring com- munity of some kind: “Il ‘noi’ perdeva i suoi confni, i contendenti non erano due, non si distingueva una frontiera ma molte e confuse, forse innumerevoli, una fra ciascuno e ciascuno” (25). Contagion compromises the purely exem- plary (“non era conforme ad alcun modello” [25]), a condition recalling that of the differential nature of the esthetic object in which every part is infected by every other. Levi’s Auschwitz was a paradoxical world of frontiered, but contagious, individuals. He makes it a world of separate, yet interpenetrat- ing, singularities: “C’erano invece mille monadi sigillate” (25). This contagion of each by each describes equally well the border-confounding drama of La tregua, Levi’s memoir of return.5 Entry into the camps meant the loss of ration- ality and unity, both personal and social.

5. See James T. Chiampi, “Rewriting Race Law: Primo Levi’s La tregua,” MLN Italian Issue 122 (2007): 80–100. Levi tells us in his article, “Jean Améry, il flosofo suicida,” from La Stampa, 7 December 1978, “ogni azione umana contiene un duro nòcciolo di incomprensibilità” (70) (repr. in Marco Belpoliti, ed., Primo Levi: Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987 [Turin: Einaudi, 1997]). Nevertheless, it would be preposterously inaccurate to claim that Levi is averse to judgment, or indeed, that Levi is a “forgiver,” a label he explicitly rejected. He does judge; in Se questo è un uomo, after his esame di chimica by Dr. Pannwitz, Levi describes an incident that takes place as he returns to his Block with the stupid Kapo Alex, “Alex strofna la mano sulla mia spalla, il palmo e il dorso, per nettarla, e sarebbe assai stupito, l’innocente bruto Alex, se qualcuno gli dicesse che alla stregua di questo suo atto io oggi lo giudico, lui e Pannwitz e gli innu- merevoli che furono come lui, grandi o piccoli, in Auschwitz e ovunque” (97). Grandi o piccoli: at this inaugural date in his literary career Levi excludes no one from judgment; not even one whom he could describe as an “innocente bruto”; or perhaps “innocente bruto” is itself Levi’s dismissive judgment. Late in his career, in the essay “La memoria dell’offesa,” the frst in I sommersi e i sal- vati, he writes: “Non vogliamo confusioni, freudismi spiccioli, morbosità, indulgenze. L’oppressore resta tale, e cosí la vittima: non sono intercambiabili, il primo è da punire e da esecrare (ma, se possibile, da capire), la seconda è da compiangere e da aiutare; ma entrambi, davanti all’indecenza del fatto che è stato irrevocabilmente commesso, hanno bisogno di rifugio e di difesa, e ne vanno istintivamente in cerca” (14–15). I believe that Agamben ignores a passage such as this when he speaks more generally of Levi’s thought in Quel che resta di Auschwitz (19). In Levi’s La Stampa interview of 26 July 1986 with Giorgio Calcagno succinctly entitled “Primo Levi: capire non è perdonare” (repr. in Belpoliti, Primo Levi), he claims that “perdonare non è un verbo mio. . . . Posso perdonare un uomo e non un altro; mi sento di dare un giudizio solo caso per caso. Se avessi avuto davanti a me Eichmann, lo avrei condannato a morte” (144).

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Levi’s Auschwitz—unlike, say, the Auschwitz of Elie Wiesel’s Night—was a Hobbesian universe in which there could be no solidarity, because the SS programmatically stifed it. It was paramount to the SS overlords that the individual, by nature an adversary, be destroyed immediately, “affnchè non diventasse un esempio, o un germe di resistenza organizzata” (26). The direc- tion of the Auschwitzian unicum permitted no example that might inspire resistance. Survival, on the other hand, was purest exemplarity because it required obtaining a privilege that would permit one to “sollevarsi al di sopra della norma” (28).6 In “La zona grigia,” Levi provides an example, the his- tory of the example and a moral judgment of it: “In secondo luogo, ed a contrasto con una certa stilizzazione agiografca e retorica, quanto piú è dura l’oppressione, tanto piú è diffusa tra gli oppressi la disponibilità di collaborare col potere” (30). He recounts the history of the formation of the Sonderkom- mando and damns their creators: “Aver concepito ed organizzato le Squadre è stato il delitto piú demoniaco del nazionalsocialismo” (39). By further implica- tion, the Nazis’ most demoniacal creation lay in the establishment of the gray zone that paralyzes the will of one who would judge: “Chi diventava Kapo?” he asks: What did it take (33)? No one expects an essayist to set out and justify an ethics deduced from a priori principles. Levi is not a philosopher of ethics. Nevertheless, he provides his own hierarchical ranking of the culpabil- ity of the perpetrators: “Se dipendesse da me, se fossi costretto a giudicare, assolverei a cuor leggero tutti coloro per cui il concorso nella colpa è stato minimo, e su cui la costrizione è stata massima” (31). He refuses to let himself be forced to damn the coerced. Only one with the eye of God could make each individual, infnite judgment. Levi qualifes his reluctance to judge: “[I]l giudizio si fa piú delicato e piú vario per coloro che occupavano posizioni di comando . . .” (31). He elaborates a paradox: in “La zona grigia,” uncoerced

6. In the preface to I sommersi e i salvati, Levi claims that despite the horrors of Hi- roshima and Nagasaki, the gulags, the Cambodian autogenicidio, and other atrocities, the Holocaust remains an unicum: “In nessun altro luogo e tempo si è assistito ad un fenomeno cosí imprevisto e cosí complesso: mai tante vite umane sono state spente in cosí breve tempo, e con una cosí lucida combinazione di ingegno tecnologico, di fanatismo e di crudeltà” (12). Incomprehensible perpetrators of an incomprehensible crime have created a place unique for its incomprehensibility. On Levi’s diffculty at understanding the Germans, see chapter eight, “Lettere di tedeschi,” which is the af- terword to Se questo è un uomo, as well as his interview with Giorgio Calcagno that appeared in La Stampa on 26 July 1986, entitled “Primo Levi: capire non è perdonare,” and Levi’s 1982 interview with Ferdinando Camon in Ritratto di Primo Levi (Padua: Nord- Est, 1987) 24–25. See also Hugh Miller, “The Same Hatred of the Other Man, the Same Anti-Semitism,” in Postmodernism and the Holocaust, eds. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Atlanta: Rodophi, 1998).

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villainy grounds presence, because only such murderers demonstrate the kind of comprehensibility and integrity that accommodate themselves to traditional notions of judgment. Levi’s most bitter denunciation is directed at “imposed complicity”—actu- ally, imposed moral contagion—rejecting the logic of “if I were in your shoes,” because “non si è mai al posto di un altro” (45). That is, otherness is fnally ungraspable. A man like Muhsfeld, who had a henchman murder a young woman survivor of the , is, however, relatively easy to judge. Much less so are the “crematory ravens”: “Il nostro bisogno e la nostra capac- ità di giudicare si inceppano davanti alla Squadra Speciale,” the Sonderkom- mando, whose personnel the Nazis chose from among the Jews themselves (43). This theme reaches its climax when Levi retells Miklos Nyiszli’s account of a macabre soccer game between a team chosen from among the SS and one chosen from the , the latter, men whom their SS oppo- nents would murder and incinerate at the precise time scheduled for their replacement. Levi enunciates his conclusion speaking in the voice of the SS: “Vi abbiamo abbracciati, corrotti, trascinati sul fondo con noi. Siete come noi, voi orgogliosi: sporchi del vostro sangue come noi” (41). It is as if the SS seri- ally etched the mark of Cain onto the Jews of the Sonderkommando by forc- ing them to repeat en masse Cain’s murder of his bother Abel with each new Sonderkommando incinerating the bodies of their brethren. The fguration of the Sonderkommando and SS recalls Dante’s damned Thieves entwined, bound, and penetrated by snakes in Inferno, cantos XXIV and XXV. Although Levi cannot comprehend the otherness of the SS, he nevertheless renders judg- ment of them via self- incrimination by speaking in their collective voice. This is the ventriloquism of moral judgment. Levi states the rule: “Rimane vero che, in Lager e fuori, esistono persone grige, ambigue, pronte al compromesso,” whom it is almost impossible to judge (35). The diffculty of judgment is due to the contagion of Häftling by the tormentor; the infected who “subivano il contagio degli oppressori e tendevano inconsciamente a identifcarsi con loro” (34).7 “Su questa mimesi,

7. Throughout Levi’s works, contagion remains a crisis concept. For example, in Il sistema periodico (Primo Levi: Opere [Turin: Einaudi, 1987]), Levi makes the avoid- ance of contagion a concern of young people, Jews, and others before and during the war: “Né in noi, né piú in generale nella nostra generazione, ‘ariani’ o ebrei che fossimo, si era ancora fatta strada l’idea che resistere al fascismo si doveva e si poteva. La nostra resistenza di allora era passiva, e si limitava al rifuto, all’isolamento, al non lasciarsi contaminare” (475). This from “Potassio.” In a preceding chapter, “Zinco,” he wrote: Potrebbe addirittura diventare una discussione essenziale e fondamentale, perché ebreo sono anch’io, e lei [Rita] no: sono io l’impurezza che fa reagire lo zinco, sono io il granello di sale e di senape. L’impurezza, certo: poiché proprio in quei

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su questa identifcazione o imitazione o scambio di ruoli fra il soverchiatore e la vittima, si è molto discusso” (34). The Sonderkommando were yoked with the Nazis, “legati allo stesso carro, vincolati dal vincolo immondo della complicità imposta,” and “la stessa ‘impotentia judicandi’ ci paralizza davanti al caso Rumkowski” (40; 45). Impurity impedes judgment. When we arrive at the example of Chaim Rumkowski, the prose style of “La zona grigia” changes. Levi admits at the outset that he never met him in person; on the con- trary, he is transcribing the story of Rumkowski from his reading. Other quali- fcations follow: Rumkowski’s is a ghetto story and not an Auschwitz story: Rumkowski was murdered on arrival there. Nevertheless, his story will serve as the best example Levi can provide of the incomprehensible. Rumkowski is, of course, a “mere” example; he might have chosen thousands of others. Nev- ertheless, he is the best example of the sort of man the Nazis would choose to make an example of, following their gratuitous practice of preceding murder with humiliation, so he is the perfect example Levi can adduce of the “gray zone.” In Auschwitz, the supremely secret and incomprehensible Nazi work of art, the SS, directors par excellence—“una regia c’era ed era vistosa”—created sardonic theatre by casting and scripting a Rumkowski (40). Levi acknowledges that he has told the Rumkowski story before in Lilìt e altri racconti, where he characterized his subject as a “personaggio cinto dalla nube della doppiezza,” that is, surrounded by irony (441). Rumkowski comes to Levi’s awareness quite by accident, his name inscribed on a coin he picked up in Auschwitz, forgot about, and rediscovered quite by chance in the pocket of his old uniform. The coin had been legal tender in the Łód´z ghetto. Levi provides us with a description of the coin (star of David stamped on one side

mesi iniziava la pubblicazione di “La Difesa della Razza”, e di purezza si faceva un gran parlare, ed io cominciavo ad essere fero di essere impuro. Per vero, fno appunto a quei mesi non mi era importato molto di essere ebreo: dentro di me, e nei contatti coi mei amici cristiani, avevo sempre considerato la mia origine come un fatto pressoché trascurabile ma curioso, una piccola anomalia allegra, come chi abbia il naso storto o le lentiggini; un ebreo è uno che a Natale non fa l’albero, che non dovrebbe mangiare il salame ma lo mangia lo stesso, che ha imparato un po’ di ebraico a tredici anni e poi lo ha dimenticato. (460) In the frst chapter of Se questo è un uomo, “Il viaggio,” Levi tells us that the man he was before being sent to Auschwitz was one given to “vivere in un mio mondo scarsa- mente reale, popolato da civili fantasmi cartesiani, da sincere amicizie maschili e da amicizie femminili esangui” (9). In “Comunicare,” using the language of anti- Semitic propaganda, he labels the Jews “nemici per antonomasia, impuri, seminatori di im- purezza, distruttori del mondo” (81). On contamination, see also James T. Chiampi, “Testifying to His Text: Primo Levi and the Concentrationary Sublime,” Romanic Review 92.4 (2003): 491–511.

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together with the date “1943”; “QUITTUNG ÜBER 10 MARK” and “DER ÄLTESTE DER JUDEN IN LITZMANNSTADT” on the other), its historical context in the form of documentary fact, carefully situating his subject with population fgures (the Łód´z ghetto held 750,000 inhabitants prewar, and 160,000 Jews in 1944), the origin of the German name of Łód´z at the time (“Litzmannstadt” for Litzmann, a World- War I general), its major industry (textiles), its signifcance (’s most industrial city), its appearance (the most modern and the ugliest Polish city). This information is presented in clear, propositional discourse capable of eliciting an experience that is conceptual, generic, and mediated—information ft for a Holocaust gazetteer. With its dichotomized inside and outside, such language makes optimistic claims about the comprehensibility of an objective world both outside and beyond the context of the essay. It establishes the comprehensible black and white world of facts whose reassurances the deep gray of the example of Rumkowski will subvert. Levi summons his reader to respond, announcing that he will put her to an impossible test, a test she surely will fail: that of judging Chaim Rum- kowski, Älteste der Juden of the gray zone. Rumkowski is introduced as the bad example, and also as the example of the bad; and also as an example that is bad for quick and certain judgment. That is, Levi inserts into the essay, by way of exemplary clarifcation, a well- wrought fable of incomprehensibility, or perhaps better: a fable that will test our responsibility to a singularity infected by the incomprehensible. Once again, the call to Levi’s responsibility comes to him through the chance discovery of a coin and his reading of Holocaust literature. Rumkowski is a text that Levi is self- consciously rereading and rewriting. Both essay and chronicle frame the Rumkowski vignette that will be their epistemological and ethical contrary. The Rumkowski vignette establishes the preceding styles as its frame and foil, for the latter “discover in objects not immanent but referential meanings” as Vivas would have it—extratextual meanings (409). What went before has now become prologue, introduction, anticipation, border, and delimitation, with its data presenting an epistemo- logical optimism that the imagistically dense, semantically immanent vignette repudiates as simplistic and reductive, even, perhaps, hubristic. If the vignette is central to the piece, it is central on account of its exemplarity, but if so, it dwells in paradox, for it would be exemplary of what the earlier essay establishes as the exemplar. On the other hand, the referential meanings of the early essay are eclipsed into forgetfulness by the immanent meanings of the vignette. The question now becomes whether the Rumkowski vignette paralyzes judgment on account of ethical complexity or esthetic intransitivity. Levi may well have scorned Vercors’s Les Armes de la nuit, because “infetto di estetismo e di libidine letteraria,” but the contaminant of estetismo – Il sistema

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periodico would call it a grain of salt or a mustard seed, is what lends force to the Rumkowski vignette and renders it desirably incomprehensible (45). That is, despised and excluded estetismo is necessary for evoking the ethical diffculty expressed as impotentia judicandi. Rumkowski will function as the perfect example of the impossibility of example. He is the “exemplary example” of the way in which an ambiguous fgure can compromise the clarity of an essay on ambiguity. Levi claims that the story of Rumkowski is “cosí eloquente sul tema fondamentale dell’ambiguità provocata fatalmente dall’oppressione che mi pare si attagli fn troppo bene al nostro discorso” (45). Si attagli[a] fn troppo bene? Stylistically, no; Rum- kowski stona. His vignette seems self- contained, as if cut from elsewhere and pasted on. Indeed, its insertion among historical facts separates the earlier from the later discourses. As Rumkowski’s vignette is autonomous of the sur- rounding essay, so is the gray zone an autonomous, self- suffcient jurisdiction within the ethical, one impervious to the ethical universals that might gov- ern and illuminate it. Nevertheless, this vivid and densely singular man will become the privileged, if incomprehensible, example of the incomprehensible. We might say, in the spirit of Levi’s Il sistema periodico, that Rumkowski is the purest of impurities. Rumkowski distracts us from the earlier chronicle much as Francesca’s story from Dante’s Inferno V distracts us from englobing Hell—the spatialization of Perfect Justice—as well as from Dante- Narrator’s precise introductory description of the punishment of the Lustful. In Rum- kowski, we have an example of one who, as Levi put it earlier, “sfderebbe la nostra capacità di orientarci e di decidere le nostre azioni” (12). Just so: the language of the Rumkowski vignette, unlike referential language, has no intention of inciting the reader to action. Put yet another way, the Rumkowski vignette is the ethically paralyzing esthetic contagium of the englobing essay. Levi portrays Rumkowski’s overweening, ludicrous hubris with an almost Dantesque economy: he describes Rumkowski traveling about in a carriage drawn by a skeletal nag, dressed in a regal mantle and surrounded by courtiers and henchmen. Levi describes at length his exaggerated, doomed and inane activity of self- aggrandizement: his orotund, fascistoid speeches, his assem- bling—with SS approval—a crew of artisans to design and print stamps and mint coins bearing his image for use in a place slated for immanent depopula- tion. This latter- day Ozymandias is a great disseminator of his exempla: the stamps he had his minions print bore “la sua effgie, con i capelli e la barba candida nella luce della Speranza e della Fede” (recalling Dante’s Cato, con- stable of ante- Purgatory [Purgatorio I, 31–39]) (47). He had his courtiers sing praises to his “mano ferma e potente” (47). Sick and starving children in the ghetto schools were forced to compose eulogies to “[il] nostro amato e provvido Presidente ” (47). Presidente! Levi makes him a posturing travesty of the Renaissance despot Maecenas. Levi- narrator is rendering SS humor

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at its sardonic and fantastical extreme: a despised and doomed Jew is the charismatic leader, protector and patron of these children whom he forces to perform a reenactment of the very fascism that deported them to Łód´z, there to starve or die of sickness; the weakest of whom he will select for gassing at Birkenau. Levi reads Rumkowski’s mind: “Da questi suoi sudditi affamati, Rumkowski ambiva riscuotere non solo obbedienza e rispetto, ma anche amore” (47). With the consent of his SS patrons, Rumkowski became a law unto himself. Dense and complex allusion further complicates our judgment of Rum- kowski: his famboyance and megalomania—substance of his messianic hamartia—suggest such doomed, mad kings from Greek tragedy as rigid Creon from Antigone, and contemptuous, ultimately clownish Pentheus from The Bacchae.8 His leadership, which might strike the naive as good fortune, suggests the similar good fortune tragic Oedipus boasts when he identifes himself in the opening scene of Oedipus the King as “I, Oedipus, whose fame all men acknowledge.” The difference, of course, is patent: Rumkowski’s peri- pateia will be brought about not by malign gods, but by the reifying will of gray Nazi bureaucrats—representatives of Arendt’s “banality of evil.” To SS theoreticians, Rumkowski was merely a number adduced in response to the question “Wieviel Stück?” to be transported in a boxcar to the gas chambers (Se questo è un uomo 14). Levi observes, “Erano gründlich, radicali: via il ghetto e via Rumkowski” (50). Rumkowski, Levi tells us, is a better example of the incomprehensible than either the merely monstrous Muhsfeld or the hundreds of crematory ravens in the Sonderkommando. There is no small irony in this: “La zona grigia” is the means by which Levi pays Rumkowski a far greater homage than he could ever have extracted from the eulogies of dying schoolchildren—literary immortality. At some cost: Levi’s portrait sub- verts and diminishes Rumkowski. Levi’s is a punitive sardonicism, effectively making an example of Rumkowski. Levi’s infected sardonicism reenacts SS laughter. “Eppure la sua fgura fu piú complessa di quanto appaia fn qui” (48). Besides Greek tragedy, Rumkowski’s fguration evokes Judeo- Christian tra- dition: Levi had baptized and derided him as “Re dei Giudei” in his earlier vignette from Lilìt e altri racconti. That is, Levi makes him the travesty of a Christ fgure: just as the Savior was slapped and spat on by Romans, so is the would- be savior Rumkowski by the SS, and then verbally by Levi. However, blessed with “mano ferma e potente,” Rumkowski is no less a Moses, with

8. Levi himself describes the story of Rumkowski as “grottesca e tragica dal sapore shakespeariano” as early as his 1982 talk at Bellagio, “Itinerario d’uno scrittore ebreo” (in Belpoliti, L’asimmetria e la vita 230).

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Łód´z as his Egypt (47). Nevertheless, since it fell to him to select the most enfeebled children for deportation to the gas chambers, he is also a Herod, massacrer of innocents. Still, to stop here would slight—“simplify”—Rum- kowski, for he also became an Oskar Schindler manqué by rescuing his own advisors from deportation to Auschwitz (receiving blows for it from the SS), and by attempting to extract from the SS a smaller quota of bocche inutili to be murdered (49).9 Rumkowski is a “chosen one”—the most deadly SS term of contempt for the Jews—a man frst selected and empowered by the SS, then humiliated, banished and murdered by them. Once again: “una regia c’era ed era vistosa” (26). Rumkowski’s antics were SS theatre, or more precisely, SS comedy, such as we fnd scattered throughout Se questo è un uomo. To write of Rumkowski is to perform a literary critical act on an SS artwork. In “Kraus,” the fourteenth chapter of Se questo è un uomo, Levi performed his infection by SS humor. Here, Levi described how he deceived naive, des- perate Kraus Pali by telling him of a cheering dream of survival that he, Levi, had never really dreamt. One rainy day, while marching back to camp from work, he recounts to Kraus a dream in which he welcomes Kraus to his home in “Naples,” introduces him to his family, feeds him dinner, and puts him up for the night. The fabricated dream flls Kraus with hope, eliciting a joyous “marea di bislacche parole magiare” (120). It was all a big lie; Kraus meant nothing to him. The gratuitous callousness Levi-Häftling demonstrates in this vignette, together with the bitterness of Levi- narrator refecting on it (con- fessing it?), makes the vignette a tour-de- force of self- indictment that works an implicit corollary indictment of the SS callousness that it copied.10 Thus does Levi inscribe Levi- Häftling and Levi- narrator in a gray zone. The Kraus episode, more than any other, inscribes Levi- Häftling and narrator among the infected, that is, those who “subivano il contagio degli oppressori e tendevano inconsciamente a identifcarsi con loro” (34). Forty years later we hear the acid narratorial tone of “Kraus” echoed in “La zona grigia.” To locate the origin of Rumkowski’s position and power—and implicitly his manifold portrayal—in sardonic SS humor is further to increase Rumkowski’s ethical ambiguity. Matricial complexity, after all, is one means of rendering the incomprehensible: vivid, contrasting fguration and allusion point in every direction except upward to a single universal that he might personify. Thus does Levi succeed in making our reading the essay a reenactment of the “gray zone.” We begin with the coolly rational and objective tone of the essay- ist, proceed to the historian’s recounting of fact, and end in the literateur’s

9. It is interesting, in this regard, to read the macabre text of Rumkowski’s most fa- mous speech, “Give Me Your Children,” last modifed March 17, 2002, http://www. datasync.com/~davidg59/rumkowsk.html. 10. See Chiampi, “Testifying to His Text” 510–11.

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caustic recounting of Rumkowski’s haecceitas in its broad variety, as revealed in Runkowki’s actions, there to suffer impotentia judicandi. Such an itiner- arium suggests a performance of Caputo’s “ordeal of undecidability.”11 Thus does the incomprehensible give rise to an impossible ideal of justice that ques- tions the justice of law. As with those of the great and the merely grandiose, the fgure of Rum- kowski is immersed in myth; thus, two versions of his death exist, “come se l’ambiguità sotto il cui segno aveva vissuto si fosse protratta ad avvolgerne la morte” (49). According to the frst, during the liquidation of the ghetto, he accepted a German’s suggestion that, in order not to be separated from his brother, he accept deportation with him. According to the second, , a shady German contractor, wishing to protect his star moneymaker, tried to prevent Rumkowski’s deportation, but failed. This version of the story has Biebow obtaining letters he claimed would protect Rumkowski and grant him special privileges in Auschwitz, letters that proved useless. Thus would Rumkowski, documents in hand, together with his family, depart Łód´z in a special car attached to the convoy taking him and the less privileged to the gas chambers of Birkenau. Ignoring the possibility that Rumkowski might willfully have elaborated his commedia of power as a Kafkaesque artist of the absurd, Levi suggests that he might truly have believed himself to be a Christ, or a Moses: “deve essersi progressivamente convinto egli stesso di essere un messia, un salvatore del suo popolo . . .” (48). This speculation is another instance of Levi’s reading the minds of the reprehensible. Indeed, as Moses, Rumkowski becomes a travesty of the lawgiver, the parodic and pathetic deconstruction of the creation of authority. It is as if, through Rumkowski’s buffoonery of monarchy, to reiter- ate that law is indeed not justice.12 The fgure of Rumkowski thus comes to exemplify the split in the notion of the exemplary: according to tradition, an ideal example would be capable of replacement by another, since any example can be subsumed into the same universal. However, irreplaceable Rumkowski (shortly to be reduced to smoke and ashes) is also an ideal example, because his singularity, with its irony and dense allusiveness, eludes subsumption into the universal. Rumkowski, in short, unlike a mere example, is uniquely exem- plary, exemplary of the incomprehensible, as Levi would have it. One might argue further that fascinating Rumkowski is the distracting encroachment of

11. Deconstruction in a Nutshell 137. 12. In “Exemplarity and the Origins of Legislation,” Harvey writes, “[The legislator] is the personifcation of the General Will prior to its establishment. He is, in short, a fction—a living fction—who writes his own script yet forges the divine signature in order to make his fction seem credible and real” (223).

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art on history. The example of Chaim Rumkowski has about it an esthetic singularity that is the correlative of his singularity as living man.13 Rumkowski is a fgure of manifold and contradictory exemplarity: “Mi pare che nella sua storia si possa riconoscere in forma esemplare la necessità quasi fsica che dalla costrizione fa nascere l’area indefnita dell’ambiguità e del compromesso” (51). In short, he is an example of the incomprehensible itself, the incomprehensible as such. But what can an example tell us of such an ideal, an ideal whose essence one cannot grasp? How can one set the boundary that would separate it from other such ideals? Rumkowski also serves as an example of the example in its ability to expand beyond its boundaries: “Una storia come questa non è chiusa in sé. È pregna, pone piú di quante ne soddi- faccia, riassume in sé l’intera tematica della zona grigia, e lascia sospesi. Grida e chiama per essere capita, perché vi si intravede un simbolo, come nei sogni e nei segni del cielo” (50). Grida e chiama per essere capita: this anguished language of obsession makes Rumkowski un personaggio in cerca d’autore. Moreover, with these words, Levi- narrator becomes Levi- critic of his text. Rumkowski has been transformed from sign to symbol, and has accordingly lost any simple referentiality. Yet he is at the same time representative of the englobing “La zona grigia” itself, which does not know what it wants to be: whether essay, cautionary tale—Levi also reduces him to an allegorical fgure, by making him an example of “la sindrome del potere protratto e incon- trastato”—or vignette, and winds up all and none (51). Rumkowski’s story is indeed pregna, but pregna as / with difference, with the whole of the essay and with every other example in the text. Pregna as well with what Vivas described as the capacity of great art to elicit in the viewer an experience of intransitive absorption. That is, [ci] lascia sospesi: the fgure of Rumkowski, symbolic (50), disorienting (12), and sirenlike entices the reader to a literary lingering, rather than urging her upward toward simplifying, reassuring universals. In the response it evokes, the vivid fgure of Rumkowski exists in excess of what it can reveal of even the incomprehensible. Thus, if the reader understands responsibility to require the providing of clear reasons for her responses, she must fail before the example of Rumkowski. That is, she is awakened to a responsibility that is inherently irresponsible. Responsibility to this avatar of the incomprehensible is less ethical calculation than the esthetic scrutiny a critic might apply to Vivas’s verbal artwork.

13. As Jacques Derrida put it in a roundtable discussion held in October 1992 at Villanova University, “A judge, if he wants to be just, cannot content himself with applying the law. He has to reinvent the law each time” (Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 17).

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Levi concludes “La zona grigia” with grandiloquence by quoting Shake- speare’s Measure for Measure in order to transform sublime and preposterous Rumkowski into Everyman / l’Uomo:

. . . ammantato d’autorità precaria, di ciò ignaro di cui si crede certo, – della sua essenza, ch’è di vetro – , quale una scimmia arrabbiata, gioca tali insulse buffonate sotto il cielo da far piangere gli angeli. (52)

The richness and subversiveness of the irony of Shakespeare’s words, cited as illuminating commentary on the vignette, serve only to corroborate Levi’s damnation of simplifcation. Here Levi attempts to use poetic singularity to gloss personal singularity. But he must radically simplify Shakespeare’s text if he would extract from it the notion of a tragic brotherhood of mankind into which to meld Rumkowski and the reader, or, perhaps better: “legar[li] allo stesso carro” (40). In light of what Levi wrote on the dangers of simplifcation, one might well ask if it is valid to simplify Shakespeare’s verses in order to fashion such a facile yet cosmic apotheosis for Rumkowski. Subtle allusions to Greek tragedy, Hebrew Scripture, and Christian Bible, citations from Man- zoni, Dostoevski, Caviani, and Vercors, reference to D’Annunzio, as well as mention of such writers on the Holocaust as Langbein, Kogan, Marsalek, and Frank, concluding with the quotation from Shakespeare, when taken together actually subvert Levi’s hasty universalizing of Chaim Rumkowski as Every- man. But that is also to say that these various contexts appeal to our respon- sibility in new and more complex ways. To anyone who has read this essay sensitively, the fate of Levi’s Chaim Rumkowski cannot be that of Everyman, as Levi would have it, except, perhaps, to the minimal degree that Everyman is incomparably exemplary. Levi’s attitude toward the incomprehensible is hardly one of stoic accep- tance; it is far too violently ambivalent for that. Thus, Levi’s unacknowledged yearning for the ultimately comprehensible leads him to search for universals that might vitiate the very singularity of Rumkowski that he has labored with such art to render. He would redeem him for the “relevant” by universalizing him: “Come Rumkowski, anche noi siamo cosí abbagliati dal potere e dal prestigio da dimenticare la nostra fragilità essenziale: col potere veniamo a patti, volentieri o no, dimenticando che nel ghetto siamo tutti, che il ghetto è cintato, che fuori del recinto stanno i signori della morte, e che poco lontano aspetta il treno” (52). Who is this noi? The reader fnds herself forced into a specious commonality with Rumkowski.

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Life is not always and everywhere a ghetto—the designated gathering place for transportation of Jews—Levi, after all, taught us that the Holocaust was an unicum; most deaths are gentler. Bear in mind that Rumkowski dies in a text—recall Vivas—that differs with each reading. Levi’s attempted universal- izing betrays the famboyant singularity of his tragic actor, this preposterous buffoon in love with pomp, who is, like some ancient Greek tyrant, drunk with self- aggrandizement. A buffoon he certainly is, but Levi’s buffoon is also and no less a man who loves his brother so much that—according to the frst version of his death—he voluntarily risks accompanying him on what he must surely have suspected could turn out to be a torturous journey to an atrocious death. Levi’s redemption of Rumkowski as Rumkowski / l’Uomo is actually a betrayal.14 Levi-narrator’s judgment is the point wherein the obituary—with its yearn- ing for simplicity and presence—collides with the ironic and literary, forcing Levi to multiply mutually contradictory glosses and contexts. John D. Caputo writes in The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Reli- gion, “Something of literature will have begun when we cannot decide with assurance what is an example of what, whether justice is an example of God, for example, or whether God is an example of justice, for example. One can always make one name, even the name of God, an example of some other name, or even of the name in general” (52). With regard to “La zona grigia,” we might say that something of literature has begun with Rumkowski’s entry onto the scene. That is, in “La zona grigia,” the universal of the incomprehen- sible is contaminated by its example. I believe that the story of Rumkowski is the afterlife of a much earlier, equally profound experience of the incompre- hensible, Levi’s anguish at not being able to recall Dante’s verses, or render for Jean the Pikolo the comprehensive meaning of the canto of Ulysses (as recounted in “Il canto di Ulisse,” chapter eleven of Se questo è un uomo). This canto from the Inferno speaks to Levi and eludes him—grida e chiama per essere capita (50). He is frantic to tell Jean its meaning and signifcance then and there; tomorrow they might both be dead. As with Dante’s Ulysses, only literature with its privileging of irony and self- multiplying complexity can do justice to a Rumkowski, if only because they induce impotentia judicandi, a profound respect for singularity. Paul de Man put it best: “But can any

14. During Levi’s year in Auschwitz, the concentrationary sublime became the quotid- ian, as he reminds us in his 1985 essay, “Perché rivedere queste immagini,” in Triangolo Rosso (repr. in Belpoliti L’assimetria e la vita ): “In tutti i nostri racconti, verbali o scritti, sono frequenti espressioni quali ‘indescrivibile’, ‘inesprimibile,’ ‘le parole non bastano a . . .’, ‘ci vorrebbe un nuovo linguaggio per . . .’ Tale era infatti, laggiú, la nostra sensazione di tutti i giorni . . .” (117). Even a rhetoric of ineffability can be inadequate to certain ends.

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example ever truly ft a general proposition? Is not its particularity, to which it owes its intelligibility, a necessary betrayal of the general truth it is supposed to support and convey?”15 Bear in mind that Levi himself writes as an unicus, calling himself a Jewish miracolato in his 1979 conversation with Giuseppe Grassano: “Noi superstiti siamo tutti delle eccezioni per defnizione, perché in Lager si moriva. Chi non è morto è perché è un miracolato in qualche modo: è un’eccezione, è un caso singolo, non generico, anzi totalmente specifco” (168–69).16 Totalmente specifco sunders the miracolato / survivor from any model, and, accordingly, from examplarity. Thus, only in the most general—and most incomprehen- sible—way would even Levi be like Rumkowski. This is why Levi’s ventrilo- quism, with its play of proximity and distance to its subject, is so fascinating and signifcant, as when, for example, he speaks through the mouth or mind of the SS (“Siete come noi, voi orgogliosi . . .” [41]). Thus does “impure” Levi, Levi- Contagium to the SS, become their allergen. As they infected him in Auschwitz, now, as survivor, author, and avenger, he infects them. Elsewhere, Levi made impurity the metaphor for his identity (“sono io l’impurezza che fa reagire lo zinco” [note 7]). The world of “La zona grigia” suggests the highest impurities: perhaps the ultimate contagion in this essay is the contagion of the status of the exemplary by the opaque singularity that denies the universal as the ground of its signifcance. To understand the impossibility of judging Rumkowski, Levi asks that we perform an imaginative act such as a dramatist performs as he writes, or an actor as he prepares:

Vorrei invitare chiunque osi tentare un giudizio a compiere su se stesso, con sincerità, un esperimento concettuale: immagini, se può, di aver trascorso mesi o anni in un ghetto, tormentato dalla fame cronica, dalla fatica, dalla promiscuità e dall’umiliazione; di aver visto morire intorno a sé, ad uno ad uno, i propri cari; di essere tagliato fuori dal mondo, senza poter ricevere né trasmettere notizie; di essere infne caricato su un treno, ottanta o cento per vagone merci; di viaggiare verso l’ignoto, alla cieca, per giorni e notti insonni; e di trovarsi infne scagliato fra le mura di un inferno indecifrabile. (44)17

15. The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) 276. 16. Primo Levi (Florence: La Nuova Italia: 1979), repr. in Belpoliti, Conversazioni e interviste, 168–69. 17. See Thomas Keenan, “Fables of Responsibility” in Gelley, Unruly Examples, 121–41.

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The act of theatre Levi describes here, like his earlier activity of ventriloquism and mind reading, is another arranged failure of comprehension by identifca- tion. Here understanding—or impossible understanding—of those in the gray zone depends upon esthetic re- creation or theatre, that is, the proscribed este- tismo and libidine letteraria. Levi asks that the reader try something not unlike what he himself does when he speaks through the mouth of Rumkowski or the SS. Levi asks, in effect, that the reader transform herself into an example, an example—save for a few details—like Levi: I, for example. But she has been taught that she cannot and should not, for that would be simplifcation (“non si è mai al posto di un altro” [45]). One suspects a certain sub rosa exculpa- tion in this: just as one cannot judge Rumkowski, so one cannot judge Levi- Narrator, whose perpetually differing words we repeat in our readings. Every gesture of this kind shows yet again how much even Levi’s artistic creation is other to himself and beyond his and our control and judgment—incompre- hensible. His precise original intent in writing has become irrelevant because irrecuperable for corroborating our reading of his text. But more important: was not his original intent itself already manifold and literary from the very moment of its conception? Following his principle requires that we suspend judgment of ourselves, just as we must of Rumkowski. It requires that we submit ourselves to the script he has furnished and perform it interiorly with nothing to guarantee the validity of our recitation. This is theatre, the theatre of the suspension of moral judgment, the theatre of the undecidable. But Levi’s question demands that we be slow in submitting Rumkowski to extraliterary criteria for moral condemnation. And we might also ask: what simplifying, extraliterary chronicle, diary, or memoir—and there are many by, among oth- ers, David Sierakowiak, Emmanuel Ringelblum, Yehuda Leib Gerst, , and Arnold Mostowicz—could refute Levi’s portrayal of Rumkowski in “La zona grigia”?18 The theatrical exercise Levi suggested expresses a compassion one wishes that Levi might have shown himself. He is, after all, among the greatest mod- ern writers on shame. Consider the penultimate chapter of Se questo è un uomo, “L’ultimo,” wherein Levi describes how he and Alberto are forced to watch the hanging of an insurgent by the Nazis (in essence, a victim who

18. Levi tells us in his essay “Auschwitz, città tranquilla” (in Marco Belpoliti, ed., L’ultimo natale di guerra [Turin: Einaudi, 2000]) that hundreds of books on the psy- chology of Hitler, Stalin, Himmler, and Goebbels, have been written, and that he has read many of them, but with little satisfaction: “[. . .] è probabile che si tratti qui di una insuffcienza essenziale della pagina documentaria; essa non possiede quasi mai il potere di restituirci il fondo di un essere umano: a questo scopo, piú dello storico o dello psicologo sono idonei il drammaturgo o il poeta” (31).

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declares himself the last example the Nazis will make of the Häftlinge). The unnamed victim cries out, “Kameraden, ich bin der Letzte!” and dies (331). Levi and Alberto watch, but do nothing. They walk beneath his body, return to their Block, and exchange a few words. L’ultimo was incomprehensible: they conclude that he must have been made of sterner stuff than they, so they eat in a silence of shame, bitterly aware of what they judge to be the cowardice behind their inaction. Levi- Narrator uses L’ultimo’s exemplarity to ground a moral judgment that condemns Levi- Häftling and Alberto as shamefully wanting. Thus does he turn his understanding of L’ultimo into the instrument of his own self-abasement.19 Levi- Narrator might have read Alberto’s and Levi- Häftling’s inaction more gently. It is tempting to read the contradictions in the fgure of Rumkowski as the richly complex paradoxes that inhere in any masterpiece of mourning. “La zona grigia” mourns the fascinating Rumkowski, a man Levi never knew, but nevertheless scorns. In his later writings, Jacques Derrida claimed that Freud’s “work of mourning” could never be completed, because it is the possibility of an impossibility, inasmuch as it forced one both to preserve and to renounce the lost object.20 For Freud, successful mourning ended when the bereaved invested his / her object cathexes in another, while for other psychologists, mourning was essentially introjection—the interiorization and assimilation of the lost individual into an inner present. Derrida made it both, because both were betrayals of the singularity of the lost object. Mourning is thus another way of speaking of absence and difference, of both fdelity to and betrayal of the person mourned. Levi mourns Rumkowski, a man about whom he has only read, hence one never completely present, yet one whom he violently despises and disowns, nonetheless a man whose complex and dense singularity

19. See, for example, “La vergogna, o del soggetto” in Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz, 81–126. This is exemplarity as moral judgment. Exemplarity as second- ary prophylaxis: the ubiquity of Levi’s concern with shame might lead one to wonder if, in the form of Chaim Rumkowski, Levi might not be writing a covert request for a compassion he could only rationally, but not viscerally, show himself. That is, one might suspect that Levi’s version of the story of Rumkowski represented an instance of what Freudians call “isolation of affect,” in which Levi might be able consciously to grasp the irrational harshness of his own shame and guilt, but not permit himself the experience of the affective catharsis that would free him of it. This would be simply another way of demonstrating that Levi’s response of shame in all its tenacity dwells in an unreachable secrecy. That is, that Rumkowski exemplifes the incomprehensibil- ity of Levi’s shame. 20. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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he commemorates twice. Rumkowski is fundamentally incomprehensible, nei- ther completely present nor absent; always disruptive, fascinating, an impu- rity and a contagium, radically singular and haunting. Impossible mourning informs “La zona grigia” as it does much of Levi’s writing on the Holocaust. But as important: mourning informs Levi’s representation of the incompre- hensible man he was himself.

University of California, Irvine