Criticism of Primo Levi takes new directions

A report on the February 2008 conference at Yale University

by Franco Baldasso

Primo Levi’s complex, multi-faceted, unresolved Jewish identity and the context in which the Italian writer published his books were the most thought-provoking issues raised by the scholars at the international conference: “Primo Levi in the Present Tense: New Reflections on His Life and Work before and after Auschwitz ”. The conference was held at Yale University’s Whitney Humanistic Center at New Haven in the past 28-9 February, co-sponsored by the Departments of Italian Language and Literature and of Judaic Studies.

Conference organizers Profs. Risa Sodi and Millicent Marcus noted that Levi’s “name is increasingly invoked wherever the need to bear witness arises.” The conference indeed was comprised of five panels of different contributors from the US to Australia, from England to Italy, proving that today, 20 years after his death, Levi ’s work and thought still attract international attention.

A striking feature of the conference was the intervention not only of scholars but of the editorial world, represented by Ann Goldstein, recent translator of Levi ’s collection of short stories A Tranquil Star and of Robert Weil, Vice-President of Norton & Company Publishing. Norton will publish Levi’s complete work translated into English in 2009. “Regarding Levi’s books,” said Robert Weil, “what is more striking for an editorial market like the American, always in the search for novelty and where translated books do not sell much, is the ongoing attention of the public towards his work. ”

This attention is apparent as scholars endeavor to draw new seminal questions, more than to establish definitive stances on Levi ’s work. After the keynote address by Giuseppe Mazzotta, Chair of the Department of Italian at Yale, the ensuing panel was the most remarkable and problematic of the whole conference. Its title, “Politics, Nationalism and Collective Memory,” refers to one of the most relevant achievement of historical research after World War II, the building of a national memory that influenced collective as well as personal identities. With reference from Levi ’s seminal Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table), Prof. Nancy Harrowitz from Boston University analyzed the controversial account of Levi ’s life after fascist Racial Laws of 1938. In the fabric of Levi’s text Harrowitz identified contradictory passages that seem to refer more to the tentative normalization of Jewish experience under Fascism and before World War II than to its real account. Jewish and Italian identities seem to be intertwined in Levi ’s text with a clear preference for the second and a reductive stance on the first. Moreover, following Harrowitz ’s conclusions, the next step could be to recognize a sort of opacity in Levi’s writing, despite the traditional and common praise for his almost “classical” clearness.

After Stanislao Pugliese’s (Hofstra University) paper on the Jewish Antifascism in Northern Italy and the political background pertaining to Levi ’s Turin, Robert Gordon of Cambridge University made a major contribution. Prof. Gordon accurately pointed out that the period between the Einaudi edition of Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) in 1958 and the publication of La tregua (The Reawakening) in 1963, corresponded in Italy with an eager and increasing interest in the Holocaust, as evidenced by the publication of testimonies, fictions, films, historical research on the subject, from Edith Bruck to Giorgio Bassani, from Renzo De Felice ’s Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo to Gillo Pontecorvo’s films.

Moreover, Gordon suggested a division of the time into different periods, during which the Jewish genocide slowly became understood as separate from the antifascist memory in Italy, until a first sort of popularization in the beginning of the Sixties. The first day of the conference ended with the screening of Davide Ferrario (and Marco Belpoliti) ’s disputed documentary La strada di Levi (Primo Levi’s Journey).

Levi’s Jewish identity was at issue even in two of the most significant papers of the second day, Marina Beer ’s confrontation between Levi and Italo Calvino (Università “La Sapienza”, Rome) and Elizabeth Sheiber’s (Rider University) disquisition on Lilit. This collection of stories of different genres is a crucial book for the comprehension of Levi ’s writing, unfortunately unpublished in its entirety in the US. But the most relevant contribution of this last day was the conclusive keynote address by Lawrence Langer, Professor Emeritus at Simmons College. Langer, a cornerstone in the literary criticism as well as in the understanding of Holocaust testimonies, outlined the peculiarity of Levi ’s literary vision of Auschwitz in the broader context of Holocaust literature.

During the final discussion, Prof. Langer shared not only his learning, but also his wit as well. Still, the remarkable news was that Jean Samuel, the prisoner of Auschwitz Levi depicted as Jean Pikolo in Se questo è un uomo, just published his own memoir, which is quite unlike Levi’s literary representation.

Franco Baldasso is a doctoral candidate in Italian Literature at NYU. He recently published his first book, entitled Il cerchio di gesso. Primo Levi narratore e testimone (Bologna: Pendragon).