A Tranquil Star (Unpublished Stories) (review)

Twenty years ago, the Italian chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi fell to his death from the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin. Within hours, a debate exploded as to whether his death was an accident or a suicide and, if the latter, how this might force us to reinterpret his legacy as a writer and Holocaust “survivor.” Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth, and Susan Sontag all weighed in, but the debate over his death has overshadowed the larger significance of his place as a thinker “after Auschwitz.”

This new collection of Levi’s writings, the first publication in English of Levi’s fiction since 1990, gives readers a sampling of his extraordinary intellect and wide range. It is a mere appetizer for Norton’s ambitious project to publish Levi’s entire oeuvre in two volumes sometime before the decade is out. Two stories, “Bear Meat” and “A Tranquil Star,” appeared earlier this year in the New Yorker while “Knall” first appeared in Harper’s. The stories are deftly translated by Ann Goldstein (a writer at the New Yorker) and Alessandra Bastagli (writer and editor at Palgrave Macmillan). Jenny McPhee, writer, novelist, and scholar in residence at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University, translated “Censorship in Bitinia.” Since Levi is not as well known in the United States as Elie Wiesel, readers might have been helped by some biographical details in the introduction.

Levi’s memoir of life in the extermination camp, Survival in Auschwitz, has claimed its rightful place among the masterpieces of Holocaust literature. When the camp was liberated by the Red Army in January 1945, Levi began a picaresque odyssey, as recounted in The Truce. His last work, The Drowned and the Saved, is arguably the most profound meditation on the Shoah. Although best known for these works on the concentration camp universe, Levi did not want to be known as a “Holocaust writer”; he aspired to the simple title of “writer” without any adjective (“Holocaust,” “Italian,” or “Jewish”). Besides his Holocaust masterpieces, Levi also wrote poetry, essays, science fiction, and a novel concerning Jewish partisans in World War II.

As both a chemist and a writer, Levi felt the divorce of science from humanism as the tragic flaw of the twentieth century. These stories try to reconcile the “two cultures.” He reveled in this stance straddling two worlds. “I am a centaur,” he once wrote enigmatically, as all men and women are centaurs: “a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust.” He insisted that his role as a scientist, chemist, and technician were complementary and not contradictory to his status as a writer and humanist. As he remarked in an interview with the American writer Philip Roth: “In my own way, I have remained an impurity, an anomaly, but now for reasons other than before: not especially as a Jew but as an Auschwitz survivor and an outsider-writer, coming not from the literary or university establishment but from the industrial world.”

He was an essayist and a prolific writer for various Italian newspapers; we today might recognize him as a “public intellectual.” It was in this “other” work, which Levi did not perceive as divorced from his Auschwitz experience, that he offered a possibility of looking and living in a post-Holocaust world. He suffered from depression most of his life, and this could not all be blamed on Auschwitz. Sometimes, he could find respite in writing, but the completion of a work or a specific task, such as the translation of Kafka, could thrust him into the darkest despair. Toward the end of his life, with the appearance of Holocaust deniers and historical “revisionists,” he was again haunted by Auschwitz.

Chronologically, the stories date from the summer of 1949 to December 1986, five months before the writer’s death. Some are autobiographical, such as “Bear Meat,” recounting a harrowing night spent in the open after...