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17 Whose Testimony? The Confusion of Fiction with Fact Lawrence L. Langer Throughout most of his life Primo Levi insisted that his first book, Se questo é un uomo (If This Is a Man, published in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz), was not the work of a writer but simply a compilation of stories he had been telling to friends and strangers since his return from Auschwitz in Oc­ to­ ber 1945. He had, he said repeatedly , no interest in producing a literary work but only a desire—­ indeed, a compelling need—­ to inform the world about his experience in Auschwitz, and in so doing to make a contribution to the history rather than to the literature of the Holocaust. He began work on the book soon after his return and finished it at the end of 1946. As is well known, he then submitted the manuscript without success to some of Italy’s major publishers until a minor independent house agreed to issue a small edition of 2,000 in Oc­ to­ ber 1947. It received little attention, sold 1,500 copies, and was quickly forgotten. But any student of literature who reads If This Is a Man will quickly note that it is no ordinary memoir, that its author was as concerned with the design as with the content of his writing, and that Levi was doing much more than merely recording the facts of his experience. How else do we explain the detail that he wrote the final chapter (called “The Last Ten Days,”) first, so that as a writer he knew where he was going to end even before he had begun his narrative journey? The sec­ ond chapter Levi wrote was its most famous one, “The Canto of Ulysses,” establishing a dramatic contrast between the moral economy of Dante’s Inferno and the moral chaos of a place called Auschwitz, which lacked all literary precedents, had no Virgil as its guide, nor any reassurance that a divine Creator presided over its desolate terrain. Both Dante and Primo Levi may have asked themselves the following question, but how different their responses: “What will my readers be capable of imagining, and how can I relate it to the reality that they already know?” Many of the philosophical and theological assumptions underlying Dante’s Commedia would have been familiar to his audience, but Levi could only feel anxiety about the response to the alien universe he portrayed, which lacked both philosophical and theological foundations. When ten years later 201 202 | Lawrence L. Langer­ another memoir called La Nuit (Night) appeared in France—­ in the same year (1958) coincidentally, that Levi’s If This Is a Man was reprinted by a major Italian publishing house—­ little had changed, and Wie­ sel could only have shared a similar unease. When the Ameri­ can translation was issued two years later, the Holocaust was still not a topic of pub­ lic discussion. In those years Raul Hilberg’s monumental study of the destruction of European Jewry was still seeking its own publisher, and the Eichmann trial and the prolonged Frankfurt trial of twenty-­ two Auschwitz personnel lay in the future. As far as I know, the first course in Holocaust literature was not taught at an Ameri­ can college or university until 1965. Although histories of the Holocaust by Leon Poliakov and Gerald Reitlinger were in print at this time, few Ameri­cans were familiar with them. Popu­lar taste on the subject had been shaped by Anne Frank’s sentimental and essentially cheerful Diary of a Young Girl (1952), which offered no details about the painful ordeal of ghettoes and camps or of mass murder, and of course made no mention of her eventual fate. Readers were thus spared the sense of anguish that surfaces in the pages of Night and If This Is a Man. But the single work destined to shape Ameri­ can consciousness—­ certainly student consciousness—­ of the Holocaust experience more than any other, one of the earliest to be written after the war, first appeared in 1946 as Ein Psycholog erlebt das KZ (A psychologist experiences the concentration camp), only to be reprinted a few months later with a new and more appealing title: . . . trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen: Drei Vorträge ( . . . in spite of everything, say yes to life: three lectures). In 1959 (in the same time period as Night and If This Is a Man), it was translated into English as From Death-­ Camp...

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