[from the Letters archive] Primo Levi: 20th Century Dante By Robert Andersen Who could find words, even in free-running prose, For the blood and wounds I saw, in all their horror--- Telling it over as often as you choose. It's certain no human tongue could take the measure Of those enormities. Our speech and mind, Straining to comprehend them, flail, and falter.                                    --Dante, Inferno, XXVIII The things I had seen and suffered were burning inside of me; I felt closer to the dead than the living, and felt guilty at being a man, because men had built Auschwitz, and Auschwitz had gulped down millions of human beings, and many of my friends, and a woman who was dear to my heart. It seemed to me that I would be purified if I told the story...by writing I found peace for a while and felt myself become a man again, a person like everyone else, neither a martyr nor debased nor a saint...                                --Primo Levi, Chromium   Part I: A Fall From A Great Height Great heights ring Torino (Turin), the capital of the Italian Piedmont and the site of this year's Winter Olympics. Laid-out in a symmetrical grid by the French in the 16th Century, the city of a million plus sits on the proscenium Plain, north and east the Swiss-Italian Alps, west that vast glacial montane dominated by Mont Blanc. On clear days the mountains telescope dramatically, all but enveloping the urban agglomeration, so that the broad straight edged avenues of this regal city appear to culminate in the soaring peaks of the Herbetet and the Gran Paradiso, among so many others. The Piedmont is the least Italianate part of Italy, more England than nearby France, its climate cool, damp, gray -- il frigerifo d'Italia -- its people noted for their reserve, what strikes their countrymen to the South as their pesci morti insularity. Torinese are stolid, taciturn, industrious, puritanical even, not given to "Italian" displays of affection or warmth. Indeed a veritable Swiss haughtiness predominates. Which is to say the haute bourgeois sensibility and echt protestant ethic gives the city the feeling of a memento mori, the 19th Century lives on, a city ringed by a studied blanc image caught by De Chirico in his haunting 'emptiness' canvases, a city in Italy but not of it. Little wonder Nietzsche went mad there. This month, as the world tours its vast colonnades and mammoth piazzas, its austere facades and celebrated basilicas, Turin will remove the shroud of its 'courtyard' history to reveal itself as an alluring city both striking and anachronistic. A place of decorous cafes and enticing restaurants and a low-rise historic architecture that retains the tenor of a city privileged to ignore the cataclysm of the 20th Century. But that would be an erroneous perception. In fact next to Milan Turin was the Italian city most often found in the cross-hairs of Allied bombers during WWII. Thanks to close proximity to the sprawling Fiat plant Turin was heavily bombed, and much of the historic center itself was burned out. So much so that nearly a third of the population had fled the city for the countryside by the end of 1943. Indeed, the raids came day and night, American and British bombers by the hundreds, reducing the city to a shell rife with mutini criminal gangs. The Insurrection in April 1945, which drove the Germans out and settled scores with their Fascisti comrades-in-arms, very nearly turned the city into a second Warsaw. By the end of the war Turin looked as though it had been laid waste by Barbarians enroute to the Fall of Rome. When Primo Levi returned in October 1945 after 22 months in Auschwitz and the Russian steppe, he expected to find his apartment building destroyed and his family vanished into the death camps. But the four story building at 75 Corso Re Umberto, in the fashionable La Crocetto, was still largely intact, and mother and sister unscathed and resuming housekeeping after three years of evading fascist goons and the furor teutonicus.  In fact his sister, Anna Maria, had become a heroine of the Resistance, more than brazen in her fury over her older brother's arrest and disappearance into "the Greater German Reich." She took many heart stopping risks as an agent de liaison with the Action Party. Crossing the threshold scarcely recognizable -- "swollen, bearded and in rags" -- he was greeted by his mother with characteristic Torinese elation, telling him to put on a sweater. The third-floor flat, with its generous floor plan and sturdy old-school furnishings, is central to understanding Primo Michele Levi. He was born there, in what later became his study, in 1919, and he died there, a suicide down the stairwell, in April 1987. Save for the 22 months in hell and back, and a year's working sojourn (under an "Aryan" name) in Milan prior to capture in the Val d'Aosta, he lived his entire life there, the dutiful son and husband and father, raising two children, caring for his senescent mother right up to the day he flung himself over the banister. This extreme rootedness, what some thought turned pathological when he couldn't leave his demanding mother for even an hour, is extremely rare in writers, as Philip Roth notes. Writes Roth: I don't personally know of another contemporary writer who has voluntarily remained, over so many decades, intimately entangled and in such direct, unbroken contact with his immediate family, his birthplace, his region, the world of his forebears, and particularly, with the local working environment which, in Turin, the home of Fiat, is largely industrial. But Levi was no ordinary writer, but identified himself as a chemist, an industrial chemist who had commuted daily to the suburbs, for 30 years, breveted to an administrative position for which he showed diligence and tact but not affinity or enthusiasm. This "centaur" then, halved in so many ways -- writer-chemist, survivor-witness, son-spouse -- also found himself "at home" in the extremes of high altitude. Primo Levi found escape in the mountains. Indeed as an adolescent and young man Levi had a pronounced affinity for the great heights, and together with his fearless friends Sandro Demastro and Alberto Salmoni tackled some of the most difficult alpinismo climbs in the region. Indeed, climbing against the fascist grain, the trio of montanaros ventured where the Club Alpino Italiano guidebook explicitly said not to, a heady defiance that sometimes led to the taste of la carne dell'orso, bear meat, exposure in the death zone. Writing about these (mis)adventures much later in The Periodic Table, his superb quasi-memoir, Levi rues his lack of appetite but that taste stood him well when he did finally encounter a death zone of surpassing horror: And now that many years have passed, I regret that I have eaten so little of it. For of all the good things life has given me, nothing has had, even distantly, the taste of that meat, which is the taste of being strong and free: free to err as well, and be master of one's own destiny. Sandro, who would later be killed in these mountains a partisan, and Alberto, he of the indefatigable cheerful mien, were naturals, autochthonous beings, possessed of an innate confidence and athletic charisma that Primo greatly envied and zealously sought to emulate. In fact his books are dominated by Sandros and Albertos, larger than life figures who effortlessly manifest what Primo conspicuously lacked, sheer physicality together with a visceral sense of well-being. The muscular, naked torso cult of Il Duce's Italy -- arditismo -- was anathema, but a surging bravado sent this remarkable trio -- "Levi was the brain, Salmoni the poetry, and Delmastro the power" as a friend recounts -- into places they had no business, in Levi's case a powerful will to overcome his short, slight stature, to prove that a cerebral Jewish urbanite could hold his own on the rockface and icefield. Levi claimed first position on the rope, and so led the hairy ascents, makeshift skis often strapped to their backs for the hell-bent descent. In fact as the camera pans across the slopes of the Olympic venues it will be viewing runs that Levi himself helped pioneered. This in the 1930s, a mere three decades of winter sports in Italy, when gear was rudimentary to say the least, no lifts for them, and the mountains beckoned all the more because of the gathering war clouds of Europe. As he later wrote, "to see Sandro in the mountains reconciled you to the world and made you forget the nightmare weighing on Europe." Levi not only survived his initiation into alpinismo he thrived in the great heights, precisely what one wouldn't have expected of the frail often sickly child. Indeed, Primo Levi would confound expectations on more than one occasion, not least with his suicide, which shocked his many admirers. Born into a prosperous bourgeois family, his father Cesare a genial electrical engineer with a penchant for flirting, a self-described conquistadore di dame that caused the mortifyingly shy adolescent no lack of embarassment (Levi's one great enduring fear was rejection by the opposite sex), Primo soon enough emerged as an inquisitive, studious, brilliant pupil, notwithstanding debilitating illnesses that kept him out of school for almost two years. Under the doting tutelage of a succession of matronly teachers he was accelerated into the highest academic levels, the youngest (and often smallest) pupil in the room, attending the best liceo in Turin, where he excelled, and matriculated in Turin Univerity's Chemical Institute, where he scored a First summa cum laude, the 1941 diploma (Anno XIX of the Fascist Era) specifying his "Jewish Race." The beneficiary of a grueling classical education, which meant Greek, Latin, and Dante, memorization memorization memorization,  Levi rebelled to the extent of choosing chemistry as his concentration, the sciences not held in high regard in fascist pedagogy. Levi's facility in the Chemistry Lab, and his overall genius for the subject (not one but three theses for his diploma), put him on the fast track for a distinguished academic career. Not as a chemistry professor but as a physics professor, for his researches had brought him to the edge of the quantum frontier, where molecular structure undergoes that singular transformation into fugitive states of energy, and for that arcane adventure physics leads on where chemistry leaves off. In an ideal world Primo Levi would have become a physicist, and not merely a good one but a great one, for this "little quicksilver woodland creature empowered by the forest's most astute intelligence," as Roth colorfully describes him, was driven to the summits, the great heights, Mt. Primo indeed. But Levi, 95% Italian and 5% Jewish, as he once put it, did not live in an ideal world, nor even an imperfect one. He lived in dark times, malevolent times, the worst of times, and once the Race Laws of 1938 went into effect, Fascist Italy's (and the Holy See's) cynical crime against humanity, Nuremburg without the furor, Primo Levi, along with some 4,000 of his fellow Torinese became 100% Jewish, pariahs of the first order. All but shunned by their Christian counterparts (the crime of "pietism"), expelled from the professions, removed from the organs of the State including the Army and Navy, "Italian citizens of the Jewish Race" were herded into a psychological ghetto absent the Star of David (but standing out all the same since "Aryan" mufti required fascist insignia). Without losing their citizenship (what the Germans derided as Kosher Fascism) the Jews of Italy were subject to the same stringent Aryan taxonomy, whose grandparent, which surname, whose proof of baptism, the full roster of humiliation and degradation, a standing invitation to suicide. Living in a state of disbelief (many were sure it would blow over, after all Mussolini's mistress was Jewish herself) Jews scurried for cover, for escape to Switzerland or Brazil, for false identities, for Byzantine ways of keeping life and limb together while awaiting the Allied Victory. But with rare exceptions they couldn't imagine the worst, and that, argues Levi, is what allowed life to go on at all. Surely The Vatican would intervene, put its foot down. True believers in the religion of Humanity, Italy's Jews were simply incapable of giving up the faith. Even up the eve of departure for Auschwitz, stuck for weeks in the "transit" camp at Fossoli, nominally run by Italians in a "humane" fashion, the Jews of Italy (and Europe for that matter, since many had fled into Northern Italy, what became the Republic of Salo once the Germans rescued Mussolini and occupied the country ahead of the Allies in the fall of 1943) refused to acknowledge the worst, not for lack of evidence or testimony, since Italian soldiers fighting on the Russian front had come back with hair-raising stories of the wanton, systematic slaughter of Jews, but because of an ingrained belief in the Enlightenment and Risorgimento, in the high civilization of Dante and Michelangelo and Verdi and Cavour and Croce. Italy was Humanity's Shrine, its Temple as it were, and none were more devout in their assimilation to its lofty ideals than Italy's Jews. After all, they had gone from rural ghettoes enforced by the Church to the pinnacle of urban, bourgeois life in a mere two generations. Levi's ancestors had been in the Piedmont since 1500, after expulsion from Spain, and the Jewish community in Rome dates to the 2nd century BC. Napoleon had abolished the Piedmont ghetto in 1797, and the House of Savoy had given its Jewish subjects carte blanche, to reside in Turin and enter the professions. By the time Primo Levi was a young boy the small Jewish community loomed large in the affairs of the city. Its prosperity was to be found in country villas like "Paradiso," which his grandfather had built (and later lost in bankruptcy), and its significant representation in the professions made it the epitome of the Italy of the Risorgimento, of liberalism, unity, secularism. In his preface to the "Jews of Turin," commemorating the centenary of the synagogue, Levi writes that when our fathers...came to live in the town they towards the end of the last century, they brought with them the great strength---undoubtedly, unique, and a specific gift---that history has bequeathed to the Jews: literacy, religious and secular culture understood as a duty, a right, a necessity, one of life's delights; and this in the era when the population of Italy was almost entirely illiterate. Certainly Levi's own father, Cesare, who loved books almost as much as women, and who suffered a horrible death from stomach cancer in 1942, thanks to the proscription of pain-killers for Jews, epitomized that heady ascent into the great heights of civilization and culture. One has only to read the "Argon" chapter in The Periodic Table to get a sense of the mileau of his 19th Century forebears. Levi's genealogy poignantly traces the country-to-city transition of an extended family that wove a spell of intimacies, feuds, mesalliances, all the endearing and eccentric characters that figured in Primo's family lore. And like that noble gas, a trace element in the atmosphere (Italy's Jews constituted .06% of the population), that miniscule fraction were "inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous discussion." Hence the social death consummated by the slow train to Auchwitz (five horrific days crammed in straw covered cattle cars, without water, the equal of the sufferings depicted in Dore's illustrations of Dante's Inferno) was enough to reach back and extirpate that rarefied Italy as well, defile that Shrine a thousand fold. Levi, who had been allowed to complete his studies (his sister had to wait until the end of the war to enter University), could not find but one professor to sponsor his thesis, and that one, a remarkable physicist of Greek origin, brought home to Levi how prescient De Chirico had been in his eerie paintings of a Turin devoid of any semblance of human warmth. Turin's Jews were obliged to live in an empty city, which made their shadows standout all the more, the broken columns signifying this social death, not as extreme as Germany's but just as lethal. More than eight hundred were shipped to the death camps, of which only a miniscule ever returned. Primo Levi was as unlikely a Resistant as they come. Which is why he was betrayed shortly after returning to the mountains to fight the invading Germans. Levi, who found the prospect of taking another's life beyond comprehension, and who thoroughly despised the paramilitary drill required of students (his bandolier featured a salami), had no instinct whatsoever for the life of a combatant, Here his vaunted alpine experience deserted him, and new to a different set of dangers made all the wrong moves, roused out of his sleep by fascist militia and shipped to Auchwitz via Fossoli, along with 649 others, men, women, children -- "stuck" (pieces) in SS parlance -- of whom only 24 ever returned. By a monstrous yet gravid irony this precipitazione dall' alto -- this "fall from a great height" -- gave us one of the great works of literature, and in fact turned Levi, with his "marble Italian," into the Dante of the 20th Century. In Auschwitz, in the anus mundi, the ne plus ultra of human existence, in the abyss Primo Levi found his voice, his purpose, his genius, and returned from the dead to bear witness, to talk and write about the things he had seen there, over and over again. His death certificate cites as "cause" that precipitazione but his books record his alto, his solo climb to Mt. Primo, to that summit reached only by dint of a fall from a great height.   Part II: There Is No Why Here I am alive and was dead...write therefore of the things thou hast seen.                                                Revelation I, 18-19 The canto of Ulysses. Who knows how or why it comes into my mind...Who is Dante? What is the Comedy?...Here, listen Pikolo, open your ears and your mind, you have to understand, for my sake: "Think of your breed; for brutish ignorance Your mettle was not made; you were made men, To follow after knowledge and excellence." As if I also were hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am.                                                  --Primo Levi, If This Is A Man There is a remarkable painting by De Chirico, which captures Levi's post-Auschwitz odyssey with vatic precision. Entitled Ulysses' Return, it depicts the solitary Greek hero at sea, rowing -- rowing that is right in the middle of a bourgeois apartment, its walls adorned with two of the artist's signature Turin scenes.  After his 11 months in the Lager, and another 11 in circuitous transit, languishing deep in Mother Russia, Primo Levi endured a kind of house arrest, in the company of strong-willed women -- mother, sister, wife, daughter, later lovers -- vying for his attention, the ensorcelling domain of Penelope and Circe, all the while his restive imagination found him outside the pale, pulling on oars against a sea of troubles, reliving his singular ordeal in solitary confinement, an industrial chemist not an academic, a "classical" writer not a contemporary one, a witness not a survivor, an asexual intimate not a sexual conquistadore. The adventurer had come home to tell his tale over and over again, breaking the Turin taboo, buttonholing strangers on the commuter train, relating his tenebrous story to a woman who consented to love him. Levi's miraculous return is a fraught one, ultimately a harrowing one, and those four walls, restored from considerable bomb damage, became the place where the adventure would play itself out, in his life, in his writing, in his belated acclaim -- succoring him, exalting him, damaging him and ultimately killing him. Primo Levi likened himself to the Ancient Mariner, logorrhetic teller of dreadful tales ("an importunate, isolated revenant from an irrelevant, macabre Elsewhere," in the acute phrasing of Inga Clendinnen), but this death-camp survivor steeped in Greek and Latin, and above all Dante, who could recite almost the entire Divine Comedy from memory (thanks to punishing Dante contests in the liceo), readily identified with Ulysses, restless soul who transgressed the boundaries of received wisdom and returned a voluble survivor, boldly reciting his tale of "no man's" land, of demons and suffering beyond human ken. Primo Levi could survive Auschwitz, indeed even in a real sense 'triumph' there thanks to his powers of observation and memory, his chemistry profession and his astonishing "good fortune," but the "black hole" that finally consumed him was not the anus mundi but those four walls of middle-class comfort. The double-bind of bourgeois existence and nether-world experience would have him climbing the walls, making his escape only in his picaresque tales, of which the story of the devious road home to Turin, told in The Truce, his first real "literary" effort (written twelve years after his first book), is one of the great narratives of epic return. Levi was the Ulysses of the living room floor, relating Dantesque horrors in self-effacing, clinical Torinese detachment. But this born storyteller who could not bear to part from his senescent mother with her incessant demands on his time (she would outlive him by four years), came to dread the "post," since it represented expectations and demands that he couldn't hope to meet in his spiral-down into an ever deepening depression. Indeed, the delivery of the mail one fine Saturday morning in April 1987 sent him literally over the edge. Those four walls became another Lager -- his mother a cadaverous inmate, a musselman no less -- and as De Chirico intimates, intrepid Ulysses doesn't stand a chance against their power to confine, to close in on -- even to crush -- the questing spirit. Dante of course assigns Ulysses a place deep in the bowels of Hell, the dread Malebolge, eighth circle, where he is punished for being a "false counselor," a deceiver. But Levi, who entered Auschwitz a non-believer and returned even more emphatic in his denial of Divine Providence, learned to emulate the wily deceiver, as a "haftling," a veritable no-man, vouchsafed by the tattoo (174517) on his lower left arm, a number he proudly displayed thanks to the short sleeve shirts he invariably wore. "I stole," he writes, "at every favorable opportunity but with sly cunning, and without exposing myself." Like Ulysses, whom Dante profoundly identifies with and yet still roundly condemns, Levi pushes on, to fathom the unknowable, the realm where -- as an SS guard tells him, snatching an icicle from the desperately parched newcomer -- "there is no why." Dante changed Ulysses' tale, sending this hero on further adventures beyond the pale, no hope of redemption for him, while in his hearth and home, writing If This Is A Man, Levi rescues Ulysses from his Dantesque fate and adopts his spirit as the guide that will take him places no human should have to endure. That "ill-defined patrimony of mental habits" that saved him from the silent fate of so many others surely included visceral immersion in Dante, in the Florentine's vision of Hell. Indeed it must have seemed as though Gustav Dore's gruesome illustrations of human suffering in The Inferno had been zealously copied by the SS and put into "Teutonic" practice in Auschwitz. In that sense Levi had been preparing for this horrific place all his young life. The wonderful Canto of Ulysses was written in a half-hour, on a lunch break, composed "in a trance." In its pellucid passages, deep in the bowels of Hell, Levi asserts his humanity by invoking the great Dante, at the same time as he rebels against The Master's implacable theodicy. There is nothing Divine about this Satanic Parody. Levi will return from the dead a witness, an iconoclast, an epigone of Ulysses. There will be no "as pleased Another," no Wrath of God visited upon Sinners. Levi enters Auschwitz a humanist and he leaves, chastened within an ounce of his life, a humanist. Indeed, Levi will be as exacting, as painstaking in his depiction of hell as Dante, will populate it with the monstrous and the martyred and the all too-human, but he will never lose sight of the fact that this hell is man-made, that the "gray zone" beneath good and evil is its great achievement, one that admits of no judgment save understanding the full extent of its Malebolge, its diabolic reach deep into the soul of humankind. Ulysses summons us to be human, an adventurer, a breaker of Turin taboos, outspoken and indefatigable, while Dante assigns him a fate worse than death, due punishment for violating the boundaries of good and evil. But Levi's real-life Hell is circles upon circles of human torment, Hans Memling's  The Universal Judgment no longer a medieval altarpiece but a 20th Century reality, taboos run riot, satanic license deified, where "crematory-ripe" signifies the mocking "why" of the place, to turn human beings into musselmanner, a loathsome subspecies deserving to be turned into ash. The Dante of the 20th Century endures the minatory ordeal of the "selection" in order to bear witness to the "drowned," those who have seen the Gorgon, and who disappear up the chimney. "To sink is the easiest of matters; it is enough to carry out all the orders one receives, to eat only the ration, to observe the discipline of the work and the camp. Exper ience showed that only exceptionally could one survive more than three months in this way. All the musselmans who finished in the gas chamber have the same story, or more exactly, have no story; they followed the slope down to the bottom, like streams that run into the sea. On their entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by mis- fortune, or through some banal incident, theyare overcome before they can adapt themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already in decay, and nothing can save them from select- ions or from death by exhaustion. Their life is short, but their number is endless; they, the Musselmanner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non- men who march and labor in silence, the divine spark dead within them, already too empty to really suffer. One hesitates to call them living: one hesitates to call their death death, in the face of which they have no fear, as they are too tired to understand." Not life, not death, but a gargoyle voiding both, a new kind of human is born at Auschwitz, precisely to extinguish all hope for those who enter there. Levi will lead Dante on a tour of hell as even The Master could never have imagined. As Carole Angier, a Levi biographer, searchingly puts it: "And now his ambition was far from ordinary. It was--as he told Pikolo then, many times--to record and report Auschwitz to the world. Auschwitz is further beyond the limits of human knowledge of good and evil than even Ulysses had gone. But Primo Levi determined to be the new Dante of this new earthly Inferno, as in fact he would become. Perhaps that was what he glimpsed: the gigantic risk of his own folle volo, his own mad flight." If This Is A Man was written in a white heat. Levi wrote from memory, in flawless prose without a tincture of rage or condemnation. In fact he had begun this book in Auschwitz itself, when he found himself "selected" to be one of three admitted to the life-giving warmth of the chemical lab at the mammoth Buna works, where IG Farben was futilely attempting to turn out synthetic rubber for the doomed war effort. For almost nine months the cadaverous Levi had defied the odds of survival, laboring under horrific conditions, subject to the sadistic whims of the SS and the Kapos, of the myriad Lager "prominents" given carte-blanche to maim and murder at will. As the lowest of the low, a Juden, subject to gas chamber "selection" once his usefulness to the Reich ceased, calibrated at no more than three months, Levi had managed to supplement the starvation ration enough, with the vital help of two remarkable compatriots, Alberto Dalla Volta and Lorenzo Perrone, to endure the blows and elements, the daily afflictions designed to extinguish all vestige of humanity, to confirm the SS in their savage contempt for these submensch. But as Levi writes, it was indeed his "good fortune" to arrive in Auschwitz when death was not automatic for the able-bodied Jew. Auschwitz was a hell with many circles, a vast slave labor enterprise as well as a death camp, and indeed the SS and IG Farben were at odds over the immediate fate of their charges. The infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" was not an SS derision but an IG Farben commonplace, and Levi, who later wrote a book in praise of homo faber, of honest work well done, looked to sabotage his contribution to the lab at every opportunity. Still, he owed his life not to the correct, collegial Herr Dr. Meyer but to the contemptuous Dr. Pannwitz, blond blue-eyed avatar of Aryan superiority, who "examined" the Chemistry Dottore "as if across the glass window of an aquarium between two beings who live in different worlds." Levi began his book in the lab, between bombing raids, ignoring the ugly disdain of the several German women who assisted there, furtively jotting down notes, which he had to destroy as soon as he committed them to memory. Once behind those four walls in Turin he brought the Inferno of a Dante and the Odyssey of a Ulysses into the 20th Century, in a feat of remembrance almost Homeric in its achievement. If This Is A Man went nowhere, published in obscurity by  a quasi-vanity press after the leading Italian publishers turned him down. After the War, after the horrors of the Bombing and the German Occupation and the Russian Front and the Labor Conscription who wanted to read about a horror that occured im nacht und nebel -- in night and fog, almost too fantastic to be credited. Too, his exemplary prose reeked of the liceo, of the kind of classical education that postwar literary circles firmly disavowed. The down and out of Rome yes, the damned and defiled of Auschwitz no. The book was simply not ready to be read, which was exactly the verdict at Einaudi. And so Primo Levi, who knew he had written a masterpiece, became an ordinary man again, an industrial chemist specializing in the arcana of paints and resins for electrical insulation. The firm he helped found, SIVA, went on to become one of Italy's industrial success stories. After a decade, with the book piled up in a warehouse in Florence (the first edition destroyed in the famous flood of 1966), the judgment on Levi and his book changed as readers discovered it almost by accident, and it was reissued  by Einaudi and eventually translated into English. I first read Survival In Auschwitz (its American title) in 1969, at Berkeley, where Fascist was the zeitgeist pejorative of record and the "Good German" debate raged alongside the Plateglass Revolution. Holocaust was a term just beginning to come into vogue, and it was then still possible to read the entire literature on the subject, starting with Raul Hilberg's magisterial The Destruction Of The European Jews. It is nearly impossible, now that Auschwitz glides off the tongue as a "hypermemory," a commonplace and an industry, to convey the impact that modest, thin volume had for those few of us privileged to read it (it soon went out of print). More than an expose, or a chronicle of hell, or even an anatomy of evil, Survival was a revelation, not a trace of rhetoric in it, its matter-of-fact tone and crystalline sentence structure reading -- at a time of the defilement of a great University by one and all, from the Governor to the Street People -- as an event of great moral force. Next to Levi's "University" (which he readily acknowledged as such in several interviews, a genre he mastered as well) what was occuring in On Strike Shut It Down Berkeley, with its curriculum of defiance and despair, was a dungfest, a saturnalia of excremental  unction. Auschwitz was the defiled place of study, hence the fierce moral obligation to master the primal course-load, to render its horrors in lapidary prose. Levi, though shamed by his shunning of the "drowned," saved himself from the defilement of the gray zone by meeting that obligation, a witness of extraordinary clarity and courage. And as Inga Clendinnen writes,"the very simplicity of Levi's prose can blind us both to its beauty and its intellectual penetration, as the shining surface of clear water dazzles our sight and hides the depths beneath." Levi, once in Germany for business, was complimented on his knowledge of the language, "unusual for an Italian." When he replied he learned his German at Auschwitz the silence proved deafening. Actually what he learned in the Lager, to supplement his rudimentary "scientific" German, was a slaughter bench debasement of the language, an argot pathological in its criminality and bestiality. Of the 7,000 Italian Jews who went to Auschwitz only a relative handful survived long enough to master this language of violence and death. The "interpreter" was a bludgeon, wielded without mercy, its blows a kind of lingua franca in the Babel of every language spoken in Europe. Levi, consummate scion of the great heights, a worthy apprentice of The Master, avoided the interpreter by being tutored in the stench, adapting to its verbal blows, its stentorian life-or-death refrains. Jawohl! Hence his "voice" stands out all the more for its clarion restraint, its refusal to disavow The Master. Not the least of the great achievements of If This Is A Man is its use of exemplary prose to delve into the depths of a stench beyond human comprehension. Even today that "voice" comes through as a revelation. In the vast literature of The Holocaust Primo Levi looms as the great height, the "Voice of God" as it were. But if he owes Dante his voice he owes Chemistry his metier, his powers of close observation and dispassionate analysis. Levi conceived of his project as a kind of laboratory report, and Auschwitz itself as an experiment. Chekhov once compared writing to being a chemist, since "to chemists there is nothing unclean in the world. A man of letters should be as objective as a chemist; he has to renounce ordinary subjectivity and realize that manure piles play a very respectable role in a landscape and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones." Levi was a chemist extraordinaire, and he modeled his book on his probing chemical analyses. The "experiment" conducted on the human condition at Auschwitz, the production of musselmanner and the creation of a "gray zone" beneath good and evil -- a manure pile of biblical enormity -- enlisted his faculties, all of them since he himself was a participant as well as observer. To read his book is to enter the Lager in the company of a man who knows what small detail and what large observation convey the magnitude of the crime. The icicle incident and the drowning of ciphers attest to the skill of the chemist, who bore witness to the experiment even as he challenged its raw data in his very being. Matriculation # 174517 graduated from this University summa cum laude, his thesis on the practice of Hell earning him a First in Organic Chemistry even though he was unable to find a sponsor beyond a small obscure publisher. Ironically, and perhaps fittingly, the Holy See itself is absent from his later writing on the responsibility for Auschwitz. Understandably he concentrates on the Germans, in particular the notion of "collective responsibility," which he first dismisses and later in life entertains, if only as a working hypothesis. (One wonders what he would have made of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's relentless j'accuse, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, a book I reviewed, favorably, in The Chicago Tribune (April 21, 1996)). Dante has no reservation about damning Popes to hell but Levi remains reticent on the subject. The Jews of Italy were the most assimilated of any on the face of the planet but for the Church in the 19th and early 20th Centuries they remained anathema, a scourge to be ghettoized, their young kidnapped and baptized, accusations of blood libel to be credited and blood sacrifice to be promulgated. It is a loathsome, indeed horrendous saga, ironically one which has been ecliped by the klieg-light focus on the damning silence of "The Deputy," Pius XII. With a single exception (Benedict XV), The Silent One's predecessors were possessed with desire to visit upon their Jewish compatriots a social death akin to that found in the Race Laws of 1938. No wonder The Vatican didn't protest. As the leading historian of the Vatican's antisemitism puts it, "Mussolini's new laws embodied measures and views long championed by the Church itself."  "Needless to say...(the) Fascist leaders who cited the Church to justify the new anti-Semitic laws were doing so for their own political reasons, and there is abundant reason to question their sincerity. But they could only exploit the Church in this fashion because the Church had indeed helped lay the ground- work for the Fascist racial laws. Decade after decade, forces close to the Vatican had denounced the Jews as evil conspir- ators against the public good. Decade after decade saw the Vatican-linked press lament the baleful effects of the emanc- ipation of the Jews. For decades, the Italian Catholic press had denounced the Jews' disproportionate influence in Italy. After all this, it should hardly be surprising that Mussolini's anti-Jewish campaign met with little resistance from Italian Catholics." Levi's silence on this subject is puzzling, as if this were a taboo too close to home. Or, perhaps more profoundly, his silence is damning, that the Pope who today is a candidate for canonization should be treated with all due disrespect without even so much as a citation by the great Levi. And indeed, in Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's fierce prosecution, Pius XII has received precisely the Dantesque condemnation he so richly deserves. Primo Levi had two recurring nightmares that finally blended into a gray zone all their own. First, that he wouldn't be believed, not even by his sister, and Second, that he would be believed but delivered back into the Lager just the same. The first surfaces in Auschwitz itself, and is related in Survival. The second animates his last book, his "suicide note" as Cynthia Ozick calls it. The Drowned And The Saved is a summa, the reflection of a chastened sage. The gray zone of mnemonic deception, a collaboration of perpetrator and survivor alike, had since been taken up by the historians, notably in Germany, but elsewhere as well, in answer to the question of "why." Levi could only be aghast at its audacity. This most feted and beloved of authors, short-listed for the Nobel Prize, hailed and celebrated in literary circles in Europe and America, Primo Levi could only push the boulder up anew, a Haftling still, the SS, along with their newfound "prominents," the Deniers and Revisionists and Relativists, still in charge of Auschwitz, still presiding over its ashheap, this one of history itself: "We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers." Primo Levi's formidable memory (the equivalent of a great pianist's mastery) could not bear up under the blows of the "interpreter," that bludgeon that turns memory into history, witness into cyclopean vision, the genocide of genocides into the annals of barbarism. Those four walls of his Turin Apartment were as impossible to escape as the electrified perimeter surrounding Auschwitz. Levi feared for his memory, receding into "physiological oblivion," and for the story he had told over and over, long since become ancient history -- "When I go into a classroom, I feel a flash of amazement when they see the author of the book they've been reading, that I'm still alive and that I speak Italian, not Latin or Greek." "For us to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult. We see it as a duty, and at the same time as a risk: the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to. We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experiences, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental, unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It took place in the teeth of all forecasts; it happened in Europe; incred- iby, it happened that an entire civilized people, just issued from the fervid cultural flowering of Weimar, followed a buffoon whose figure today inspires laughter, and yet Adolf Hitler was obeyed and his praises were sung right up to the catastrophe. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say." The core was being superannuated, turned into a peripheral matter. Auschwitz was being interpreted to death, relativized, contextualized, monumentalized, even demonized, in sum historicized, turned back into nacht und nebel, this time in broad daylight. Levi's Diogenes lantern was powered by a despair that it had all been in vain, that the SS would triumph after all, their satanic laughter drowning out the cries of their victims. Levi is as always painstaking and pellucid and he addresses the salient topics -- the uses of "useless violence," the responsibility of the Germans, above all the "gray zone" -- with his customary brilliance and lapidary wisdom, in a tour de force of argument. Who wants to find hope enter here. But the undercurrent, that the "memory of the offense" will be written off as another time, another place, relegated to the inexorable crematorium of history is its desparing theme. Who reads Dante anymore? with a shudder? Violence, and genocide are the lingua franca of the world, and the denizens of this post Holocaust world have nothing to do but submit and collaborate in its perpetuation. For Levi the humanist his "conclusion" is as close to a cri de couer as you will hope to find in his work: "Satan is not necessary: there is no need for wars or violence, under any circumstance." His astonishing good fortune could not escape the lash of celebrity, which drained and even demeaned him, the Superstar of Auschwitz. No wonder the postman only delivered bad news. He had penned another masterpiece, a work of a superb moral essayist. All that remained was that "mad flight" into the void. What this last book, which bears the original title of his first book, a borrowing from Canto XX ("The new pains of Hell that I saw next demand new lines...Which is of those submerged in the underground") conveys is the formidable intelligence of a human being confronted with another gray zone, this one almost as malevolent as the one ordaining that Jews lead Jews to the slaughter, for it too leads to an ashheap. Fame and fortune could never arrest the dread of that signature Auschwitz guttural: "Wstawac," GET UP! The nightmare never ends, there is no why here. Levi wanted as an epitaph the Homeric epithet for Ulysses, 'polla plankte.' Which means "driven to wander far and wide," indeed "much erring." Instead his number went on his simple gravestone. This month, as the world visits Turin, it will find, on an especially clear day, indeed a crystalline one, Mount Primo just this side of the Gran Paradiso. The exile returned home, and today looms over his native city as its great height. As Dante is to Florence so too is Levi to Torino. Indeed, the 20th Century Dante would appreciate the irony. Copyright 2006 Robert Andersen.  All rights reserved.