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c h a p t e r 9 Primo Levi in the Public Interest: Turin, Auschwitz, Israel Risa Sodi This essay focuses on three extraliterary facets of Primo Levi: his public associations with Auschwitz and Holocaust commemoration, his leadership role in the Jewish community of Turin, and his contribution to the intellectual debates over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many of Levi’s nonliterary pronouncements appeared in low-circulation publications, on Italian radio and television, in unexpected venues or were about subjects—like the crisis in the Middle East—with which Levi is not usually associated. A review of these facets sheds light on the man that was Primo Levi and also on the literary projects that occupied him at the same time. In the late 1950s and 1960s, while he was working full-time as a chemist , Levi’s political energy was largely directed toward undertakings related to Auschwitz. For one, in November 1957, Levi and Lello Perugia, otherwise known as ‘‘Cesare’’ from The Reawakening, joined a class-action suit brought by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims with over ten thousand claimants against IG Farbenindustrie.1 The ‘‘Claims Conference,’’ as it was known, collectively sued for indemnification of the slave labor provided to IG Farben during World War II by prisoners at Buna Monowitz. The suit was settled in 1960: IG Farben set aside three million Deutschemarks (or $720,000 in 1960 dollars) for political prisoners and twentyseven million Deutschemarks, or $6.5 million, for ‘‘those persecuted 127 128 Risa Sodi because of their race.’’ In October 1960, Levi received his personal settlement from this latter fund, 2,500 Deutschemarks (or $600).2 At roughly the same time, the Polish government announced plans to build a monument at Auschwitz. Levi commented on the announcement in a 1959 La Stampa article, ‘‘It doesn’t matter if it’s beautiful, it doesn’t matter if it approaches the rhetorical, if it falls to pieces. It mustn’t be used for partisan aims: it must be a monument-admonition that humanity dedicates to itself to bear witness, that repeats a message hardly new to history but too often forgotten: that man is, and must be, sacred to himself , everywhere and forever.’’3 Nearly two decades passed, however, before the plans were actually implemented. At that time, in 1978, Levi was commissioned to help in the design of the museum at Auschwitz. He proposed that the walls of the Italian building be decorated with nonrepresentational artworks, the better to express the ineffability and indescribability of the Holocaust experience. Each abstract work, in his plan, would be accompanied by a plaque bearing a text he himself would write. Levi’s full text survives: eight numbered paragraphs focusing on the history and interpretation of the Italian Holocaust, its victims and its perpetrators. The language, as ever, is direct, unflinching, and poetic—reminiscent of the imperatives and familiar tu of ‘‘Shemà,’’ the epigraph to Survival in Auschwitz. The Polish government chose to erect only the last plaque, point 8, which states in part: ‘‘Visitor: observe the vestiges of this camp and meditate: Make sure your visit is not useless, so that our death will not be useless . . . make sure that the terrible fruit of hate, whose traces you have seen here, does not bear new seeds, not tomorrow, not ever.’’4 Several years later, in 1982, Levi returned to Auschwitz with a team from Sorgente di vita (Springs of Life), a RAI TV program about Jewish life. Though he had been to Auschwitz before, in 1965, this second visit to Poland left him profoundly shaken. Perhaps it was the martial law crackdown imposed by General Jaruzelski in the wake of Solidarity agitation, or his renewed acquaintance with the sights and sounds of the Polish winter , but Levi is heard commenting on camera about a railyard, ‘‘Even now, the sight of those freight trains has a violent effect on me.’’5 A watershed event in the world perception of the Holocaust was the Adolf Eichmann trial and execution in 1961–62. Televised internationally from Jerusalem, the Eichmann trial galvanized world attention and, for the first time—for complex reasons explored by Sharon Roubach and Dina Wardi—put Holocaust survivors front and center in Israeli discourse.6 Levi was among the hundreds called to testify, yet he refused to go. The reasons for his refusal are not clear, but may center on personal concerns [3.16.81.94] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 17:04...

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