In December 1943, Primo Levi was a 23 year old chemist who, after an attempt to connect with a resistance movement, was arrested and later transported to Auschwitz where he remained until the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945. Two years after his return home, he published his first book, If This Is a Man, a remarkably sober account of his experiences in the camp. The book had a huge impact on Uri S. Cohen, a Professor of Hebrew and Italian Literature at Tel Aviv University and one of the foremost scholars of Primo Levi. Tomorrow, October 23, he’ll be giving a talk on Affection and Survival: Primo Levi and Friendship in the Camp at the NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò. I spoke with Professor Cohen about his interest in Primo Levi, the concept of the “Gray Zone” as described in If This Is a Man, and whether true companionship was possible in a Nazi camp…
How did your interest in Primo Levi begin?
Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man marked my life in a very real way. I read the Hewbrew version when it came out in 1987 [forty years after it was originally published, in Italian]. It took a lot of time for Israel to be able to accept that “version” of the Holocaust, which did not conform to the established way of thinking about it. There was a clash of frameworks. And so when it was translated into Hebrew, I read it and I had a feeling that something was off in the translation. I needed to read it again but in the original Italian language and so I was compelled to learn Italian just for this purpose. Primo Levi, because of his genius, was able to see, capture and express the camp and what it was and what it meant in the world in a way which is endlessly deep. He sees and forms these perfect figures that allow us to think about something we cannot begin to imagine.
Primo Levi referred to the camps as a “Gray Zone.” What did he mean by that?
Primo Levi un-did the way in which morality in the camps was talked about by creating this concept of the “Gray Zone.” The traditional line between good and bad didn’t feel like the right way to think about the camps. The Gray Zone is a lifelong debate on the kind of moral universe that the camp represents. Primo Levi painfully moves from being the victim to a position where the survivor is an anomaly because of luck but also because he took part as a survivor in the mechanism of the camp producing death.
The last chapter in If This Is a Man brings this idea home: Levi is organized, he’s managed to adapt. The Gray Zone argues against the idea that there’s a distinction between modes of survival. We can’t judge the actions – we’re all accomplices, Levi says. We’re all in the Gray Zone, which describes the dynamics of the camp where there is no survival without compromise.
What do you make of the references to Dante and the Canto of Ulysses in If This Is a Man?
I wrote a paper on the figure of Ulysses in Primo Levi. The Canto of Ulysses chapter is a beautiful moment in the book. Levi can still appreciate the poetry of Dante. It just shows how Levi is able to perceive and write with enormous grace even within the brutal conditions of the camp. Dante’s Inferno is deeply connected with Primo Levi’s books. In If This Is a Man, the way Levi constructs the remembrance of the Canto 26 really brings home this idea that Levi is not going to have a conqueror’s homecoming. He’s more like the Ulysses within Dante’s Inferno, eternally burning, and speaking, but never really escaping.
Originally, the word ‘companion’ was used to describe someone with whom you shared a meal, as the word ‘panis’ refers to the Latin word for bread. It is even said that on his first night home from the camps, Primo Levi slept with a piece of bread under his pillow. In the context of a concentration camp, where prisoners underwent cruel starvation, is companionship in the camps truly possible?
For Primo Levi, absolutely not – everyone is one’s enemy. There’s no such thing as companionship. There is, however, an immediate solidarity between the privileged. But there is an utter breakdown of solidarity between the prisoners. Companionship is not expected and unavailable. When he was released from the KaBe [the Auschwitz infirmary], Levi was released to a block where his friend Alberto was. With him, he shared a friendship, food, and they organized everything together, but Levi doesn’t use the word comrade. So Levi and Alberto had this incredible bond and were a survival unit but, in the end, Levi realizes that it is empty. It doesn’t offer redemption from that thing that one feels guilty of. Everything is complicit and corrupt in the camp. Alberto resisted, but at the same time he doesn’t offer redemption. Friendship is an extension of the logic of the camp – it doesn’t present an example that can defy having succumbed to the logic of survival in the camp.
You’re working on a “counter-biography” of Primo Levi. Why a “counter-biography”? Can you tell us more about the book and the motivation behind writing it?
It’s a project more than a book. It’s a counter-biography because, in the end, there’s a question about Primo Levi and the relationship between the writing and biography sometimes known as the debate on the witness and the writer. So I am trying to write and talk and think about Levi in a way which is not bound by the constraints of a traditional biography.
What is so special about Levi is that his work is a constant striving towards “the open.” His works are a portal between something that gives us a warning but also a way to think about an “opening” from what in many senses was the “most closed,” a sealed fate.
My intention is towards the open. I begin with the question about whether or not he committed suicide [Primo Levi’s body was found at the bottom of his apartment’s stairs in 1987. No note was left.] The real truth of it is that we’ll never know. If I understood anything from Levi from reading him it’s that he was not an intentionless man. If he wanted his death to be a closure of his life, he would’ve made that abundantly clear. I think the way he left this world, the only way we can understand it, is that he left it uncertain. He had left it open.
Suicide is a rejection of the world. With his death, Levi gave us this final gift of an opening. No letter, no relic will tell us more than what he already told us in his art.
Meet Professor Uri S. Cohen tomorrow night, October 23, for his talk on Affection and Survival: Primo Levi and Friendship in the Camp at the NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò. More details here.