Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life by Berel Lang (review)

Primo Levi is best known as the author of two important books on the Holocaust, Survival in Auschwitz (Se questo è un uomo) and The Drowned and the Saved (I sommersi e i salvati). Berel Lang’s brief but important book expands our understanding of Levi as not just a Holocaust writer but a talented recorder and investigator of the human condition more broadly. The book is part of the Yale University Press “Jewish Lives” series, and Lang takes up, in his fourth chapter, what it means (for us, and what it meant for Levi during his lifetime) to consider him a Jewish writer. But much more important, Lang explores the implications of what would happen if we saw Primo Levi as more than just a Holocaust writer.

The book is organized into six chapters, beginning—oddly, at first appearance—with the circumstances surrounding Levi’s death by suicide in 1987 at the age of sixty-seven; it then considers in turn his experience during the Second World War (including his activity as a partisan in 1943, capture and internment in Auschwitz, and circuitous return to Turin in 1945); his work as a writer; his identity as a Jew; his positions as a thinker (if not a practical or moral philosopher); and finally, a brief meditation on the difficulties of writing a life as difficult to parse as his. Beginning with Levi’s death may seem odd because it might cast a pall over everything else: what was it that caused Levi—who after all considered himself an optimist—to take his own life after persevering for so long after the brutality of Auschwitz? But that is precisely Lang’s point: regardless of whether or not Levi’s death was a delayed reaction to the indignities of Auschwitz (or the result of infirmity or depression, as many have speculated), the life itself—measured against the scientific intensity and moral rigor of the writing—remains far richer than any univocal explanation would allow.

Lang characterizes Levi’s life as a series of dichotomies, and the purpose of the book is, in many ways, to trace the effects of the corresponding tensions. A subtitle in the third chapter calls Levi’s life a “Divided Road,” a road that diverged in the years between 1943 and 1945. The most significant is the tension between his life as a scientist (as a chemist, he had a long career with the Societa Industriale Vernici e Affini, or SIVA, in Turin after the war), and his life as a writer, which began in earnest upon his return from the camps. Much of the chapter devoted to Levi’s writing is an attempt to determine whether his devotion to science—the observation from a distance for which the writing is known, adherence to objective description, the sparseness of authorial comment—kept him from the dangers of aestheticism and “the literary,” dangers that Lang has discussed extensively in Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide. Lang explains that Levi’s The Periodic Table “is clearly a literary work, not one primarily of either science or history: literary not only in the sense that the narrative voice has a significant presence in the exposition (as it often does even in . . . standard scientific writing) but that the voice is also a subject of the writing” (pp. 84–85). The work is literary in part because of its specific scientificity: not only does Levi write about the world, but he also quite purposively writes about writing about the world.

This is at once a literary and a scientific tendency because at the heart of both is a deep conviction that it is the matter of investigation that merits the writer’s attention. This is what makes Levi more than just “a Holocaust writer.” Devoting attention to the minutiae of the camps was something he felt compelled to do, but whether describing the Nazi project of extermination or the character...