The Inferno of Auschwitz: Review Essay

116 . SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No. 2 THE INFERNO OF AUSCHWITZ Review Essay by Beno Weiss Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese Pennsylvania State University Understanding Primo Levi, by Nicholas Patruno. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. 170 pp. The intent of the popular and quite useful Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature Series, published by the University of South Carolina Press, is to function as a guide for undergraduate and graduate students and non-academic readers; also it is meant to provide introductions to the lives and writings of prominent modern authors and explicate their most important works. The Series emphasizes the sociological and historical background of authors and attempts to explain the complexities of their writings. Dr. Nicholas Patruno, Professor and Director of Italian at Bryn Mawr, has far exceeded the guidelines of the Series in providing us valuable new and judicious insights into the life and writings of the Italian author and chemist, Primo Levi, who, like Elie Wiesel, experienced the Holocaust and survived to tell about it in a most dramatic, poetic, and eloquent manner. Yet, 42 years after his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945 by the Russian army, and just when the prize-winning author was becoming ever more known among Italian and international readers, he apparently succumbed on April 11, 1987 to the ghosts of his horrible past, throwing himselfdown a flight of stairs in the building where he lived and was born. And so, notwithstanding the title of Levi's last novel, 1be Drowned and tbe Saved, the author who had regarded himself as one of the few survivors morally charged to give testimony to the Shoa, "drowned" too. Ominously, in this novel where suicide is a major concern, Levi discusses the terrible dilemma ofliving with Holocaust memories. Levi thus became like the camp inmate in his "Story of a Coin" who, at first, is granted certain luxuries in return for helping the Germans keep his fellow The Inferno ofAuschwitz 117 Jews in order, and then like the other inmates he too is sent off to the gas chambers but gets to ride in a "special" coach. "We too," writes Levi, "forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence wait the lords of death and not far away the train is waiting." With his own tragic end, perhaps, Levi was trying to cry out and call attention to "the pain of a man who fears that his story, and more important, the story of millions who have paid the ultimate sacrifice, will be forgotten." Introducing the American reader to Levi's career as a writer, scientist, and int~llectual,as well as drawing attention to his literary merits, presents several problems. In particular, one has to be familiar with the historical background of Italian Jews: their experiences during the Fascist era, in particular during Mussolini's final years (1943-45)-when the war was fought on Italian soil, and their participation in the Resistance. Patruno presents most clearly, cogently, and in a graceful style Levi's formation against the background of the above-mentioned considerations. Jews have lived in Italy going back to the second century B.C.E., long before the destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem, and for over two thousand years have been an intellectual, cultural, and spiritual force on the peninsula, where they have sustained a culture that is both recognizably Jewish and distinctly Italian. On the whole, in spite of the high degree of assimilation, they have been able to preserve their identity first among a pagan and then a Christian culture, up to modern times. By the ninth and tenth centuries, Italian Jews had established the first yeshivas, institutions which gained great renown during the Middle Ages. During the Risorgimento-partly supported by Jewish money-many Jews participated in the struggle for independence. Indeed, rabbis recruited from their pulpit members for Mazzini's Young Italy. In 1848, early in the Risorgimento, Jews were granted full civil rights. After unification in 1861, many Jews were elected and appointed to high government positions because of their devotion. Giorgio Sydney Sonnino (1847-1922), for example...