Italian Writer Survived One Tragedy, Succumbed to Another

PRIMO LEVI, Tragedy of an Optimist; by Myriam Anissimov; translated from the French

by Steve Cox, Overlook Press $37.95, 452 pages

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For many years the Italian writer Primo Levi was condescended to by Italian literary critics. His prose, they said, was too scientific, too classical. Now that he has been dead nearly a dozen years, Levi’s stature as one of the most acute observers of the 20th century’s signature event, the Holocaust, has been confirmed in and outside of Italy.

Levi did not, until 1986, have a biographer. Now Overlook Press has issued a look at Levi’s life by Myriam Anissimov, a writer born in a refugee camp in Switzerland during World War II. Anissimov’s biography is a respectfully written companion to Levi’s own works, which are autobiographical.

In fact, Anissimov does not add much to what we already know. Of Levi’s shielded, bourgeois youth in Turin, in the Piedmont region, Levi presented an account in “If This Is a Man,” which in its grave formality can scarcely be improved upon. The same is true of his telling and retelling of the incandescent experience of his life, his months from 1944 to 1945 in a factory trying (unsuccessfully) to make ersatz rubber in the Germans’ extermination camp at Auschwitz.

Levi’s exact prose, so patronized by his early Italian critics, presents the horrors of the camp in words that are chilling for being so plain. The appellation “noble” should not lightly be bestowed on any writer, but Levi, like his Polish elder, Czeslaw Milosz, deserves it for maintaining his humanistic vision in the face of the gravest evil.

Growing up in fascist Italy, Levi was so assimilated that he scarcely knew he was a Jew--except that the Christian boys teased him by likening his circumcision to castration. As fascism tightened its grip and Mussolini began to imitate Hitler’s racial laws, Levi retreated into the study of chemistry. Science, he said, was, with its exactitude, an antidote to the unruly passions of fascism.

When Italy was occupied by the Germans, Levi and his fellow idealists fell captive to them. Levi, sent to Auschwitz, soon understood that, being Jewish in German eyes, he was to become Jewish in his own. In Levi’s greatest books, “Survival in Auschwitz” (originally and more accurately rendered in English as “If This Is a Man”) and “The Periodic Table,” a meditation on human nature as a study of the elements, he turns Auschwitz to this side and that in order to look into the nature of the Holocaust.

Levi returned to Italy after his release by the victorious Red Army. He went back to chemistry, working as an industrial chemist and writing on the side. His mission, he said, was to bear witness to what he had seen. Levi married and lived his remaining years in the apartment building in which he was born. It was from his third-floor landing that he jumped to his death at the age of 67 in 1987.

Levi’s suicide shocked the literary world. But not those who knew him. It is the merit of Anissimov’s biography that she makes Levi’s suicide, so seemingly puzzling to those who thought of him as a resolute rationalist, seem natural, even inevitable. Levi had become the virtual prisoner of his mother, who lived in the same building and demanded constant attention, and of his mother-in-law, who was even older and also lived there.

Levi had always suffered from periods of doubt about his worth and his work; they came now more frequently. He was taking antidepressant pills, but one doctor wondered if they were right for him. Then he had prostate surgery with some complications. Anissimov does not say what the exact diagnosis was, but she makes it clear that Levi feared it was cancer.

“I don’t know how to go on,” he told Elio Toaff, Rome’s chief rabbi, just before his death. “My mother has cancer, and each time I look at her face I remember the faces of the men lying dead . . . in Auschwitz.” Such final conversations had all the hallmarks of a person in the grip of a profound depression. That the grip was fatal will come as no surprise to the reader of Anissimov’s modest, useful biography.