Born in Turin, one of Italy's most industrialized cities, on July 31, l9l9, the son of a successful electrical engineer, Levi grew up, during the years before World War II, in the relative comfort of the Italian middle class, in a period when being Jewish had not yet become a reason of segregation and then persecution. In l937, Levi enrolled at the University of Turin and majored in Chemistry. Because he had enrolled one year prior to the promulgation of the Fascist "racial laws," which, along with other restrictions, prohibited Jews from attending public schools, he was allowed to complete his studies. He graduated summa cum laude in l941. His diploma, however, carried the phrase "di razza ebraica" ("of the Jewish race"), the first act of discrimination he personally experienced.

In February l944, as a result of a betrayal of his partisan activities in the Aosta region, north of Turin, Levi was sent to Auschwitz. This made him a witness to one of humanity's darkest moments. Not able to foresee the tragic consequences of his own decision, upon capture, Levi admitted admit that he was a Jew, rather than to own up to his partisan involvement. This confession, he maintained, (in The Periodic Table) was made, in part, because he was tired and worn down emotionally, partly because he chose to believe this would carry a less harsh punishment, but to a greater extent because of an unexpected, sudden surge of pride in his origins. Primo Levi was one of close to 6400 Italian Jews to be deported, mainly to the camps of Auschwitz, Birkenau and Mauthausen. Of these, only a few hundred survivors returned home. Of the 650 prisoners who were taken to Auschwitz with Levi, only fifteen men and eight women survived.

In Auschwitz, by his own account, he was shocked into confronting his Jewishness by the wild course of events that allowed the Holocaust to occur. Yet he was also candid in admitting that the experience had the positive effect of awakening in him his sense of identity and an attachment to his long–neglected "cultural patrimony," of which he would be proud for the rest of his life. Paradoxical as it may seem, The other positive effect Auschwitz had on Levi was that it led him to become the admired and valued writer he is today.

As prisoner number 174517, Primo Levi's life was proscribed by the most irrational actions of others. In the Lager, what determined life or death defied any sense of logic.

Although Levi believed that for anyone to survive this horrendous experience, including his own, it was essentially the result of many diverse and unwittingly "lucky" circumstances --"lucky" is Levi’s own word in the interview with Philip Roth-- Levi quickly learned that, in the Lager, to communicate increased one's slim chances of survival, and as a man of science, whose inclination it was to observe with patience, to analyze and to understand, Levi was able to absorb, and then to communicate the Shoah as a didactic, as well as a personal experience.

Levi's ongoing, compelling need to address the effect and consequences of the death camps --an intense need which he often likened to that of Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" who could not repress the urge to tell his "ghastly tale" to whomever and wherever, was fueled in great part by an inner desire to prove the Nazis wrong in their claim that no one in the death camp would live to tell of it and that, even if someone did survive to tell, no one on the outside would believe the magnitude of the atrocities. His eloquent voice stands as proof that at least one Jew did live to tell. The more difficult task Levi saw before him was how to go about convincing the outside world of what he had witnessed.

To achieve this, he deemed it imperative to be clear and detached in his presentation of the facts. He felt that, had he appealed to emotions, he would have compromised the solemnity of the mission he was undertaking. But the need to be clear was also an integral part of his cultural background. Raised in an environment shaped by what he calls, in the opening pages of his book If this is a man (better known, in the American edition, with the less accurate Survival in Auschwitz), "civilized Cartesian phantoms," an environment, that is, where dreams and aspirations emerge from and are nurtured by reason and logic, Levi's need to understand was quintessential to his very being.

By extension, his classically concise, sober and lean style is reflective of a mind that insists on being guided by reason and civility. His dispassionate approach, the accuracy of his observations, honed by his scientific training as chemist and conditioned by the schooling in all the traditional literary sources, demanded that he refrain from emotionalism, leaving emotional responses to his readers. To be sure, he does so because he is prudent, not because he is lacking profound passion, pain, and frustration. The tone of his writing is neither swayed nor subverted by hatred, nor by revenge. Neither does he attempt to elicit these reactions from his readers.

To express himself in a rational, clear and composed manner signified for Levi a moral victory over Auschwitz and gave an additional dimension of validity to his own survival. The serenity of his voice proved that, besides surviving, he had been able to rise above the chaos and turmoil of that infernal place and had not yielded to the Nazis' plan of dehumanization. The title of the his first book itself, If This Is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz ) suggests this triumph. In the book's epigraphic poem, derived from the "Shemà" (Deuteronomy 6:4, 6:5-9, 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41), one of the most common Hebrew prayers defined by Herman Wouk as the creed of the Jew, besides asking whether anyone has the right to treat any human being the way he and others have been treated in Auschwitz, the author also asks the readers to judge for themselves whether he, Primo Levi, despite all he had to endure and in consideration of his own actions, has emerged from that horrendous experience still a man, that is with his moral integrity substantially intact and still in control of his mental faculties.

In Auschwitz, to which he will at times refer as his true university for all it had taught him about human behavior, the importance of communication was of the utmost essence. In the chapter "To Communicate" of The Drowned and the Saved, Levi observed that, on the immediate and practical level, within the confines of the Lager, the ability to speak German increased one's slim chances of survival, or at least it could help in prolonging one’s life. In this same chapter of The Drowned and the Saved Levi recalls how many prisoners, especially among his fellow Italians, were immediately sent to their death simply because, unable to understand the language, they failed to follow orders. On a more profound level, however, the ability to communicate, to relate by way of the clear and uncensored word, was the means by which the Nazis' intention of erasing the entire Jewish population was undermined. If one voice succeeded in emerging from that hellish experience to recount it, the German master plan for the so-called "final solution" would have then failed, at least in principle. Levi was impelled, by inner experience, to become that voice and to emphasize the importance of communication as a counteraction.

Levi simply would not accept the notion that it is impossible to communicate. He makes this eminently clear in his book The Drowned and the Saved when he tells:

  To say that it is impossible to communicate is false: one always can. To refuse to communicate is a failing; we are biologiocally and socially predisposed to communication, and in particular to its highly evolved and noble form which is language (DS 89).

Equally forceful is Levi in insisting on the clarity of the written word. In the essay titled "On Obscure Writing" ("Dello scrivere oscuro") of his book L'altrui mestiere (Other People's Trades) Levi makes his position very clear as he denounces writers, as with Ezra Pound, who obscure their messages for the expressed purpose of not wanting to be understood. Likewise, he has little or no use for those writers who prefer the ineffable to the explicable, as is the case of the German poets Trakl and Celan. He rejects those who favor shouting and inarticulateness to the clear, succinct, rational expression. On this point, he does not mince words. He writes:

  ... writing serves to communicate, transmit information or feelings from mind to mind, and from time to time. And he who is not understood by anyone does not transmit anything, he cries in the desert. When this happens the well-intentioned reader must be reassured: if he does not understand the text it is the author's fault, not his. It is up to the writer to make himself understood by those who wish to understand him: it is his trade, writing is a public service, and the willing reader must not be disappointed. (OPT 171)

He places the burden of responsibility on the writer to be lucid in his use of language. With his insistence on nothing short of clear, direct uncomplicated prose Levi realizes that his views may be outside of the literary mainstream of his time, but he certainly offers no apologies. Levi urges the writer to be socially committed and to not betray his or her unconditional responsibility to the reader. Levi's experience of the past had opened his eyes to a reality beyond the comprehension of most, and this made him view literature as something much more profound than an intellectual exercise with which to experiment and/or to entertain. He views literature as a vehicle through which to keep alive the reminder to humanity that it is walking a thin line and that it is essential to stay balanced because, as Auschwitz has shown, the loss of that balance can lead to catastrophic consequences. He thought it critical to strive for and preserve the balance between science and the humanities, the two fundamental cultural components necessary to any society that calls itself "civilized."

While Levi's incarceration at Auschwitz and his liberation served as the initial motivating factor that impelled him to write, his literary gift was also sparked by a sense of responsibility to be a witness for those who had perished, and no longer could speak themselves. By his recognition of that lingering "guilt of survival," he devoted the remainder of his life to fulfilling this self-appointed obligation. "To tell the story, to bear witness," he will tell Gail Soffen in an interview ("Beyond Survival" Prooftexts, 12-13), "was an end for which to save oneself. Not to live and to tell, but to live in order to tell..."

With time, however, it appears that the lingering "guilt of survival," along with other circumstances over which he had no control but that affected him deeply, begin to take a toll on Levi's thinking, on the clarity of his vision and on the effectiveness of his mission. Qualms arise to shake the waters of reason; and these qualms may have accompanied, if not led, Levi to his death. As a survivor, Levi knew he could never fathom the final reality of those who did not. Nor, as he explored at length in The Drowned and the Saved, does he ever come to terms with whatever compromises he, or any other, wittingly or unwittingly, made in order to survive. He was equally troubled with those, himself perhaps above all, who failed to take proper action while there was time to do so on the outside, to oppose the enormity of the crime. These distressing doubts led him to write, in the essay "Shame" in The Drowned and the Saved that, in the Lager, "The worst survived, the selfish, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators...the spies... that is, the fittest; all the best died" (82). This admission must have caused him immense pain because, besides casting a shadow over his own survival, it called into question his self-appointed mission of writing on behalf of those who could not. Who or what gave him the right to speak for them? This painful awareness, precipitated by other disturbing events and realizations, not the least of which his prolonged periods of depression, led Levi to question whether he could rely on reason for the explanations he sought.

Levi died on April 11, 1987, one year after the publication of The Drowned and the Saved, the work with which he returns to Auschwitz, 40 years later, by way of a dispassionate and penetrating analysis. This book was the last published major work to appear before his death, believed by most to be suicide. While there are those who claim that the publication of this particular book as the last before his death is nothing more than mere coincidence, there are other small, but significant, pieces of evidence that emerge from interviews and from some of his less known works that give cause for speculation.

Time does not permit me to go into details but I would like to focus on just one. Along with other signs, his sense of despair and disillusion is also reflected by his increasing references to the "black holes," an image he uses metaphorically to express the dark void of recent history and what some historians were now making of the Holocaust. The distress this caused him is clearly evident in the last article he wrote about Auschwitz: "Buco nero di Auschwitz" (This article appears in Primo Levi's The Mirror Maker, R. Rosenthal transl. (New York: Schocken Books, 1989) under the title "The Dispute among German Historians") in the Turin daily La Stampa (Jan 22, 1987). In this article, perhaps the very last piece he wrote less than three months before his death, he takes issue with several German historians (i.e. Nolte, Hillgruber) who have attempted to trivialize the Holocaust by raising inane questions connected with the accuracy of the number of deaths in the camps and, worse still, by questioning whether the Holocaust (or Shoah) ever occurred. With the title of this article Levi is suggesting that nothing of importance seems to have come out of Auschwitz that has shed light on what went on inside it. No lessons, it seems to him, have been learned from it and, if the debates and discussions going on at present are any indication, it is unlikely that anything of significance would come to light in the future. The "back hole," then, serves as a sad confirmation of his concern that, as he expresses in the chapter "Stereotypes" in The Drowned and the Saved, with the passing of time reason and logic will not be succeed in unveiling the mystery of the Holocaust. If anything, the mystery will only increase and the impact of the Holocaust will wane. And, as he had written in the "Preface" to The Drowned and the Saved, this is exactly what the Nazis were banking on.

This disappointing acknowledgment led Levi to question the effect of his works. He, who had always insisted on looking at this tragic event rationally because it had to be understood in order to prevent its re-occurrence, is now fearful that his words may have fallen on deaf ears. Even more troubling to him may have been the notion that, with his lack of success he also failed those victims who had touched bottom and were unable to speak for themselves. To his disappointment, Levi realized that reason cannot do much to explain the Holocaust. Reason, at this point, gives way to frustration, as indicated by the tone of hopelessness present in the last two chapters of his book The Drowned and the Saved. His desperate cry "We must be listened to" (DS 199) contains the pain and, now, anger --as Cynthia Ozick sustains--of a man who fears that his story and, more important, the story of millions who have paid with the ultimate sacrifice, will be forgotten.

Reason, the weapon with which he was hoping to ultimately slay that Auschwitz Gorgon and unveil its true evil face, does not appear to hold against the lingering, long-term effects of the Shoah. Reason, in fact, can be a double-edged sword for it can also be applied to carry out evil deeds. In the essay "Useless Violence," in The Drowned and the Saved, Levi finally, and sadly, concludes that the actions of the Nazis were not the result of madness but, rather, the result of a "logica insolente" (84) ("insolent logic"). It was a warped and brutal kind of logic the Nazis adopted to justify to themselves the necessity of their evil deeds.

In conclusion, with Primo Levi, as with many other survivors, the term " survival" needs to be interpeted in its deeper meaning; a meaning, that is, that transcends the physical. The psychological state that ensues may prove to be a continuing painful and trying experience which may carry, as it may have been the case with Primo Levi, possible tragic consequences. There being no real practical alternative, the survivor has to re-join society, that same society a good part of which was an accomplice, either by commission or omission, to what had taken place.

Levi re-joined society, and with full force. And, for this, we are fortunate for, despite what he may have thought, he has left humanity a legacy of invaluable proportions. Through his many writings, which include, in addition to the works related to the Lager experience, novels, essays and articles on many different subjects, poetry, short stories, translations and even a play, and through his other actions, Levi has given ample proof of his active participation in society.

Yet, in spite of these accomplishments and in view of how he may have put an end to his own life, we are left asking: survival, yes, but at what price?

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© Nicholas Patruno