Book Review : Triumphant Scenes Amid Holocaust

Moments of Reprieve by Primo Levi (Summit: $14.95)

Primo Levi became one of Europe’s most humane and least dispensable writers after history blew him off his industrial chemist’s bench and into Auschwitz.

He wrote of the Holocaust not through its monstrousness but through the playful anarchy of the human spirit that flickered in its depths, and prevailed even when it did not survive. It takes sun to make shadow, and the more brilliant the sunshine, the sharper and darker the shadows.

A Different Vision

“Moments of Reprieve” goes over the same ground that Levi mined in “Survival in Auschwitz” and “The Reawakening,” and transformed in his masterpiece, “The Periodic Table.” At first glance, its vignettes may seem like tailings from a worked lode. Yet it is quite of a piece with his wayward vision. Where other Holocaust accounts--”Shoah,” for instance--find every scrap of atrocity essential for a monument whose inscription is “Never Again,” Levi scavenges every scrap of triumph for a monument whose inscription, roughly, is “What a Piece of Work Is Man.”

“Moments” collects the saints, fools, schemers, clowns and crooks that Levi encountered or imagined in the concentration camp. Are “encountered” and “imagined” interchangeable, then? At its extremity, human experience is curved like Einsteinian space. The message of hope or defiance that one individual may flash to another can be a suggestion, a glance or a posture, quite as well as an entire concerted action or speech. Levi finds the principle of life at work in a death-camp trustee who does little more than draw upon his juggler’s trade for a moment of artistic bravura while shifting construction materials.

He finds it in Rappoport, a genial scoundrel and racketeer who manages to apply the principle of vigorish to cornering the camp’s soup supply. He takes a shine to Levi and another Italian prisoner in memory of a scurrilous visit he once paid to Pisa. Besides soup, he bestows on them his philosophy.

Death camp or not, he figured, he had had more good times than bad. “So in the sad event that one of you should survive me, you will be able to say that Leon Rappoport got what was due him,” he tells them. “If I meet Hitler in the other world, I’ll spit in his face and I’ll have every right to. . . . Because he didn’t get the better of me.”

He finds it in a Berlin pharmacist who surmounts the camp’s realities by rendering Mozart and other classics in a sonorous hum through his outsized nose. He finds it in Tischler, who shares a sewer pipe during an air raid and tells him a Hassidic-like tale about Lilith, Adam’s first wife. She tempted even God to concupiscence, and out of this came the spirit of war.

Make Lilith Die

“But one day,” Tischler continues, inventing a fable that conquers despair by sheer audacity, “a powerful being will come--the one we are all waiting for. He will make Lilith die and put an end to God’s lechery, and to our exile.”

Very faintly, he finds it in a young German assistant in the lab where, as a slave laborer, he is forced to work. Quite simply, and with no exercise of authority, she asks him to fix her bicycle and gives him an egg and some sugar in exchange. This banal transaction takes on glory amid the maniacal despotism that prevails in the camp.

There are the inmates’ extraordinary migrations and transformations. A Polish Jew becomes a mascot to an Italian contingent attached to the German occupiers. When they go back to Italy, he goes with them. When the Gestapo arrests the Italians as they cross the frontier, the boy escapes into Italy and stays with a family of one of his benefactors. From there, he joins the Partisans; after the war, he joins the Jewish resistance and ends up in Israel.

In our more or less peaceful lives, we come to think that we are our circumstances. When our kitchen drains freeze--as in John Cheever--our lives fall into disrepair. For Levi, humanity remains itself even if kidnaped by a raiding party from Sirius--so long as it stays human.

There is the grotesque and haunting account of Rumkowski, king of the Lodz ghetto. The Germans choose him to represent the Jews; they gave him privileges and authority that he began to think of as his own. Was he, finally, the Jews’ representative or the Nazis’ puppet?

More Irony Than Anger

Levi inclines to the latter view; but he does so with more irony than anger. Irony is a cousin of compassion. And in the savagely comic account of Rumkowski’s end--the Germans attach a private railroad car for him on the train that takes him and his packed-in subjects to the gas chamber--he sees something deeper.

Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence wait the lords of death and not far away the train is waiting.

Some of the vignettes in “Moments of Reprieve” are very slight indeed; shorthand notes of an aberration, an oddity, a weed or two slipping through the totalitarian concrete. They are told sketchily and dispassionately; as if Levi were making the point that, even at its most ordinary, unregimented humanity is extraordinary. Perhaps I have been mesmerized into feeling that even ordinary Levi is extraordinary. Perhaps these two are the same thing.