BOOK REVIEW : Auschwitz Survivor Tells Tales of Joy and Despair

The Mirror Maker: Stories & Essays by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (Schocken Books: $16.95, 176 pages)

A radio talk show on KCRW-FM recently devoted two hours to a debate on Woody Allen’s eminently debatable film, “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The participants included a film critic, a rabbi and a New York psychoanalyst who appears in the motion picture in the role of the immigrant professor who delivers a message of courage, dignity and hope in the face of a cruel and senseless world--and then, tragically and inexplicably, takes his own life by jumping out the window. All of the panelists referred to the figure of the doomed European intellectual as “the Primo Levi character.”

The real Primo Levi, of course, was an Italian-Jewish chemist who survived Auschwitz, chronicled the experience of the Holocaust in a series of brilliant memoirs and novels, and then, only three years ago, threw himself down the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin, Italy. And so we approach “The Mirror Maker,” a posthumous anthology of Levi’s poems, stories and essays, with both reverence and deep, urgent curiosity: Is there a clue in these pages to the suicide of a Holocaust survivor whose work came to be regarded as a stirring affirmation of life in the face of death and despair?

In no sense, of course, did Levi intend the “The Mirror Maker” to be a suicide note. These short pieces first appeared in “La Stampa,” a Turin newspaper to which Levi contributed from time to time over the last 25 years of his life. And so the book, by its very nature, is modest in scale and ambition; few of these pieces exceed two or three pages in length, and many of them are simply the author’s passing reflections on the headlines--an early Apollo mission, the scandal over the spiking of Austrian wines with antifreeze, the publication of a book about gossip, the negotiations over nuclear disarmament--or his musings on Horace, Kafka, Jack London, the importance of rhyme in poetry.

“I beg the reader not to go in search of messages,” Levi writes in the introduction to “The Mirror Maker,” which was published in its original Italian edition during his lifetime. “I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.”

But Levi’s memory is too powerful, too vivid, and too persistent for us to dismiss even his most ephemeral writing. Aside from the occasional piece that may be regarded as inconsequential or merely unsuccessful, the book is nothing less than a contemplation of moral order in the universe. In that sense, it is a fitting coda to such enduring and important work as “Survival in Auschwitz” and “The Awakening.”

Indeed, the memory of Auschwitz--that is, the memory of suffering, both spiritual and physical--haunts all of Levi’s writing, and flashes of the Holocaust illuminate “The Mirror Maker” like heat lightning. Thus, for example, Levi is referring to the Apollo mission and Auschwitz when he writes, both in joy and despair: “We are driven by atavistic impulses, and by reason, and at the same time by a ‘cheerful strength,’ so that, if an enterprise can be accomplished, be it good or evil, it cannot be set aside but must be carried through.”

His stories of fantasy and science fiction, I felt, were the least successful. Levi gives us a comic encounter between an Earthling and a visitor from another planet (“He wanted to know at what age clothes begin to develop”); he devotes several short pieces to imaginary interviews with animals: a gull, a mole, even a form of intestinal bacteria called E. coli (“Now bear with me for a moment, I’m in mitosis. . . .”). But even these stories offer moments when Levi’s horrific experiences in the real world add a kind of poignancy and resonance to his wildest imaginings--a young girl who sprouts wings and learns to fly; or an imprisoned alchemist who discovers how to pass through solid matter and then merges with the body of his lover “into a perpetual night of impossibility.”

Several of the essays in “The Mirror Maker” are explicitly concerned with the meaning and memory of the Holocaust. Levi eulogizes the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto: “They have demonstrated that even when everything is lost, it is granted to man to save, together with his own dignity, that of future generations.” And he condemns the revisionism of contemporary German historians who seek to minimize the crimes of the Holocaust by comparing Nazi genocide to the Soviet gulag:

“That ‘the gulag came before Auschwitz’ is true; but one cannot forget that the aims of the two infernos were not the same,” Levi retorts. “The first was a massacre among peers; it was not based on racial primacy and did not divide humanity into supermen and submen. . . . This contempt for the fundamental equality of rights among all human beings is shown by a mass of symbolic details, starting with the Auschwitz tattoo and going all the way to the use in the gas chambers of the poison originally produced to disinfest the holds of ships invaded by rats.”

As in his other recent writing, Levi invokes his own career in the field of chemistry as a context in which to consider the morality of science, the possibility of miracles, and the order--or lack thereof--of the universe. “It seems strange to me that varnishes are displacing Auschwitz as the ‘ground floor’ of my memory,” Levi writes of his special expertise as an industrial chemist. “I realize this from my dreams, from which the Lager has disappeared and in which, with increasing frequency, I am faced with a varnish maker’s problem that I cannot solve.”

Here, I believe, may be a clue to Levi’s decision to take his own life. Despite his strongest instincts and loftiest aspirations--”In my writing, for good or evil, knowingly or not, I’ve always tried to pass from the darkness into the light”--Levi, at the age of 67, despaired at finding himself in a world where the lapse of collective memory threatens to obliterate even Auschwitz. Perhaps it was that “varnish maker’s problem” that drove the survivor to suicide.