Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge (review)

114 SHOFAR Spring 1997 Vol. IS, No.3 recreate it, and celebrate it. Equivocal Dreams continues important debates in Hebrew criticism and opens out new areas ofcritical discussion. The author's keen eye for detail is as visible as his interest in political subtexts. Dreams barely expressed and barely known to their dreamers are an 1.Ulderlying theme in several essays ofthis collection. More often than not these dreams are shattered by the incompatibility ofsocial realities and personal yearnings, the very stuff of all great literature. Esther Fuchs Judaic Studies University of Arizona Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge, by Mirna Cicioni. Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg Publishers, 1995. 222pp. $16.95(p). The work of Primo Levi was not widely known in the United States 1.Ultil the mid 1980s, when The Periodic Table apptared in Raymond Rosenthals' translation. The following years saw the publication of almost all ofLevi's writings in English, and the two early texts dealing with Levi's experience in Auschwitz were rediscovered. His sudden death in 1987, and the subsequent publication of The Drowned and the Saved, cast him and his extraordinary testimony in the forefront of a group of Holocaust writers whose witnessing seemed ever more urgent as the numbers of survivors declined. Despite the success of Levi's work, it received little scholarly attention in the U.S. 1.Ultil 8fter the author's death. Since then, a number ofconferences have been held and their proceedings published; several critical works have appeared in Italian, and so far three in English, including the one 1.Ulder review.l And two biographies are currently 1.Ulder way in England. Mirna Cicioni, who teaches at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, has written an introduction to Levi's work for English-speaking readers. She proposes to go beyond the parameters ofthe ''Holocaust writer" designation, and to situate Primo Levi within the changing contexts ofItalian society and culture. In developing an analysis ofthe diverse facets ofLevi's thought, she stresses his urgent desire to "build bridges between different cultures: Jewish and Gentile, scientific and literary, technical and intellectual, Piedmontese and international" (p. xii). ''Bridges,'' declaresLevi's alter ego in The Monkey's Wrench, "are like the opposite ofborders, and borders are where wars start" (p. xi). Cicioni's book is divided into five chapters in which she deals with Levi's texts in lRisa Sodi, A Dante ofOur Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); Nicholas Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995). BookReviews 115 order oftheir publication. This order makes sense when one is considering their historical context, but is less satisfactory when the publication consists ofessays that appeared over a span ofsome twenty years. However, the structure serves Cicioni well for the major texts. The first chapter provides an invaluable introduction to the historical background of the Jewish community in Turin, one of the largest in Italy. The Jews ofFiedmont were well integrated, well represented in the professions, and tended to be secular; Levi thus emerges as a somewhat typical representative ofhis group. As prisoner no. 174517 in Auschwitz, he was determined to bear witness to his experience, in order to both understand the event and speak for those who were silenced. Cicioni points out that Levi's first book, Survival in Auschwitz, was particularly powerful because it was not simply a historical memoir but a philosophical and sociological examination ofthe death camps. Levi relies not only on his own scientific training to try to make sense ofthis hell, but also on a broad knowledge of literary texts, particularly Dante and the Bible. These sources are used as common points ofreference for (Italian) readers, yet at the same time they are problematized, undermined as eternally valid commentaries on humankind and its relation to the divine. This is a common trait in-Holocaust literature (Cicioni cites Alvin Rosenfeld on this point), but Levi's texts provide us with a specifically Italian point ofview. It was sixteen years before Levi published his second book on Auschwitz and its aftermath, The Reawakening. Cicioni speculates that the timing depended in part on a changed political atmosphere in 1963, when the Italian Communist...