{"id":907,"date":"2015-12-14T10:55:03","date_gmt":"2015-12-14T15:55:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunergoi.com\/?p=907"},"modified":"2015-12-14T10:55:03","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T15:55:03","slug":"primo-levis-words-of-witness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/?p=907","title":{"rendered":"Primo Levi’s Words of Witness"},"content":{"rendered":"

This passage from James Wood’s piece on author and and Holocaust survivor\u00a0Primo Levi<\/a> in The\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>:<\/p>\n

This is a classical prose, the possession of a civilized man who never expected that his humane irony would have to battle with its moral opposite. But, once the battle is joined, Levi makes that irony into a formidable weapon. Consider these words: \u201cfortune,\u201d \u201cdetached study,\u201d \u201ccharitably,\u201d \u201cenchantment,\u201d \u201cdiscreet and sedate,\u201d \u201cequanimity,\u201d \u201cadventure,\u201d \u201cuniversity.\u201d All of them, remarkably, are used by Levi to describe aspects of his experiences in the camp. \u201cIt was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944.\u201d This is how, with scandalous coolness, he begins \u201cIf This Is a Man,\u201d calmly deploying the twinned resources of \u201cfortuna\u201d in Italian, which combines the senses of good fortune and fate. In the same preface to his first book, Levi promises a \u201cdetached study\u201d of what befell him. The hellish marching music of the camp is described as an \u201cenchantment\u201d from which one must escape. In \u201cThe Drowned and the Saved,\u201d Levi describes a moment of crisis when he knows he is about to be selected to live or die. He briefly wavers, and almost begs help from a God he does not believe in. But \u201cequanimity prevailed,\u201d he writes, and he resists the temptation. Equanimity!<\/p>\n

In the same book, he includes a letter he wrote in 1960 to his German translator, in which he announces that his time in the Lager, and writing about the Lager, \u201cwas an important adventure that has profoundly modified me.\u201d The Italian is \u201cuna importante avventura, che mi ha modificato profondamente,\u201d which Raymond Rosenthal\u2019s original translation, of 1988, follows; the new \u201cComplete Works\u201d weakens the irony by turning it into \u201can ordeal that changed me deeply.\u201d For surely the power of these impeccable words, as so often in Levi, is moral. First, they register their contamination by what befell them (the \u201cadventure,\u201d we think, should not be called that; it must be described as an \u201cordeal\u201d); and then they dryly repel that contamination (no, we will insist on calling the experience, with full ironic power, an \u201cadventure\u201d).<\/p>\n

In the same spirit of calmly rebellious irony, \u201cIf This Is a Man\u201d ends almost casually, like a conventional nineteenth-century realist novel, with cheerful news of continuity and welfare beyond its pages: \u201cIn April, at Katowice, I met Schenck and Alcalai in good health. Arthur has happily rejoined his family and Charles has returned to his profession as a teacher; we have exchanged long letters and I hope to see him again one day.\u201d That emphasis on resistance makes its sequel, \u201cThe Truce,\u201d not merely funny but joyous: the camps are no more, the Germans have been vanquished, and gentler life, like a moral sun, is returning. There may be nothing more moving in all of Levi\u2019s work than a moment, early in \u201cThe Truce,\u201d when, after the months in Auschwitz, a very sick Levi is helped down from a cart by two Russian nurses. The first Russian words he hears are \u201cPo malu, po malu!\u201d\u2014\u201cSlowly, slowly!\u201d; or, even better in the Italian, \u201cAdagio, adagio!\u201d This soft charity falls like balm on the text.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The whole review<\/a> is worth the read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This passage from James Wood’s piece on author and and Holocaust survivor\u00a0Primo Levi in The\u00a0New Yorker: This is a classical prose, the possession \n [...]<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5ESBE-eD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sunergoi.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/12\/Header-Primo-Levi.jpg?fit=2725%2C1816&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=907"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/907\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sunergoi.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}