The man who bore witness
Primo Levi, an obsessive chronicler of his life as a Holocaust survivor, gets a biography from someone else.
PRIMO LEVI: Tragedy of an Optimist, by Myriam Anissimov, Overlook Press, 452 pages
Two hundred years from now, readers who wish to know our century will turn to the prose of Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz.
Levi was born into a cultured middle-class Jewish family in Turin in 1919. Myriam Anissimov, in this first full-scale biography of the Italian author and chemist, records that Levi’s father, Cesare, was an electrical engineer and an avid reader of literature. From him Levi learned that the humanities and the sciences need not be separate worlds.
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Levi was fortunate to have entered university before the Fascists instituted their racial laws banning Jews from higher education. Still, no professor of chemistry was willing to supervise his thesis. The young physics lecturer Nicola Dallaporta helped Levi get his degree. He told Levi after the war that Providence had chosen him to become the chronicler of the slave-labour camp, a concept Levi refused to accept since his Auschwitz experiences had convinced him that there was no Providence, and no God.
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Upon his return to Turin, Levi felt the need to bear witness: “I had a torrent of urgent things to tell the civilized world. I felt the tattooed number on my arm burning like a sore.” But the civilized world was not very interested in what he had to say. No large publisher would accept his powerful account, Survival in Auschwitz. Anissimov reports that the book received a few positive reviews but was “distributed rather than sold.”
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On the morning of April 11, 1987, Levi plunged down the stairwell of his house, an apparent suicide. His death shocked his readers. How could this sober and diligent man, who had cast a rationalist’s penetrating light on our century’s most enormous crime, fall into the abyss? Anissimov does not provide a definitive answer, but presents a constellation of facts. She reports that after his return from Auschwitz, Levi experienced severe bouts of depression that he found increasingly difficult to overcome. She describes the complications he was having recovering from a prostate operation, his anxiety over his senile, 91-year-old mother, as well as his despondency over the media coverage being given to professional Holocaust deniers.
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Source: KENNETH SHERMAN, Globe and Mail, [email protected]
Kenneth Sherman’s essay Primo Levi and the Unlistened-to Story can be found in his book Void and Voice.
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