In this conversation Judge Guido Calabresi, a long time friend of Centro Primo Levi, shares stories of his family’s flight from Fascist Italy —from Milan to Yale— and the ways his childhood experiences have shaped his personal and professional life in the USA.

This spring, Calabresi has appeared as a panelist in our presentation of Giana Pontecorboli’s  Americordo.The Italian Jewish Exiles  in America, and of Patrizia Guarnieri’s Italian Psychology and Jewish Emigration under Fascism.

Guido Calabresi is a legal scholar and senior Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A former Dean of Yale Laws School where he has been teaching since 1959, he is now Sterling Professor Emeritus and Professorial Lecturer in Law. He has been awarded some fifty honorary degrees from universities in the United States and abroad, and has published widely on the Law and related subjects.

AC Unlike most Italian Jews who came to the US, fleeing the Italian racial laws, your father was an anti-Fascist and realized long before the discriminatory measures where Italy was going.  You family’s decision was not so much a consequence of the laws but rather a political decision.

GC We are unusual because we were antifascist. Most of the people who came as refugees were not particularly active antifascists, perhaps they thought fascism was wrong, but it was not a reason for taking political action. And then there were some who had been actively fascist, because some Italian Jews as every other group had embraced fascism. What was unusual about us was that both my father and my grandfather were fiercely antifascist from the beginning. My father was beaten and jailed in 1924, when he was a student, from then on he and his sisters became very active in Giustizia e Libertà the movement led by the Rosselli brothers. The second time he was beaten and jailed was when he and others put a wreath by a statue of Garibaldi on the first anniversary of Mateotti’s murder.

My father had wanted to leave Italy in the late twenties early thirties, when it became clear that Mussolini was not going to fall. My grandfather who was a patriot of the old school, said: “No, one does not leave one’s country”. Despite patriotism, his fierce anti-Fascism, made some call him a traitor. One of Ferrara’s most prominent fascists, his name escapes me now, would correct them:” You can call Ettore Calabresi anything: he is wrong, his is terrible, but don’t call him a traitor, because in the First World War he behaved heroically even after Caporetto”. Because of his antifascism and his prestige in the city, my grandfather was barred from returning to Ferrara. Once he returned to his city to attend a funeral they put him in jail.  In such a small city they could not tolerate a powerful industrialist married to a woman from a great land owning family, who was outspokenly against the Regime.

AC Was there a catalyst for your parent’s decision to leave?

GC After my grandfather died in the fall of 1937, and at the same time his friends Carlo and Nello Rosselli were murdered, my father decided it was time to leave. He tried to get out then, but as it happened, the Fascists did not want people to come to the US and speak out against them, so they denied us the necessary exit visas. My father was repeatedly denied permission to leave until the racial laws were passed. So we came to the US because we were anti-Fascists, but we left at a time when most Jews were in fact fleeing the racial laws.

AC For centuries Italian Jews had lived in tightly knit communities. Increasingly in the times of Fascist persecution, mobility between cities was dangerous. During the difficult times that it took your parents to arrange for the family’s departure for the US, you moved all over Italy: from Bologna, Milan, Genoa and Cortina D’Ampezzo, making it literally an escape out of Italy, rather than one out of Milan. What do you recall of the actual departure?

GC What had happened is that with the help of Giuseppe Levi, a professor of Physiology in Turin —the father of Natalia Ginzburg— a fellowship had been arranged at Yale, through the Damian

Foundation, and that is what allowed us to come. But my mother’s parents thought one should not leave, so the compromise was that my father was going to come see what it was like and we would join a bit later. When our father was scheduled to leave, my brother and I were in Cortina with our maternal grandparents. My father was supposed to leave on the Conte Di Savoia, in late August 1939, and my mother was there seeing him off. But the ship did not sail: they said it had engine trouble and that it might leave the next day. Some body we knew in Rome told us that the delay was because war was about to break-out.

I had gone to bed thinking my father had sailed, when we were phoned in the night: it was my mother saying that the ship had not sailed, it might sail tomorrow. If it is war we don’t want to be separated, bring the children to Genoa, and we will leave the next day. She went back to Milan and told the maids to put everything that was in the wardrobe rooms, into trunks.

AC one of the difficulties is that you were not allowed to bring money abroad…

GC Exactly. My father had had enough shirts made so that he did not need shirts for fifteen years!  What the maids took from the wardrobes and put into the trunks was not necessarily what we needed in the US. For instance upon opening them we found diapers from when we were small. Those were eventually sewn together and made into sheets for my father’s examining room here…

AC How did you get to Genoa?

GC My brother and I, our maternal grandparents, and our nanny — a wonderful woman from Friuli, very religious, very Catholic and fiercely anti-Fascist— she had been with us since the time my brother was born, took a train. I remember that ride very well because we could not get a sleeper, it was too late, and so we all were in a first class carriage, which was unusual.  In families of our sort parents would typically go first class, the children and the nanny would go in second class, not to disturb the people in first. I thought those red plush cushions in first class were lovely, and was very excited that we were going to America. My brother and I were shouting “We are going to America!” without knowing at all what that meant, while our grandparents, looked like death, because their daughter was leaving, their other daughter having already left for Brazil. We arrived in Genoa, and the ship did not sail.

So we thought, war is really coming. Obviously, we did not want to go back to Cortina, near the German border, and we also did not want to go back to Milan because it might be bombed.

AC You had to separate again?

GC Yes. My father went back to Milan to see if there was some other way to leave the country, while we went to our maternal grandparents’ villa, L’Uccelletto, on the Via Emilia, just outside Bologna. —L’Uccelletto, has become over the years a collective dream for our family, everyone has been trying to rebuild l’Uccelletto—

While we were there, my father was frantically searching for other ways to have us leave. The President Monroe, of the American President Lines, was despatched to bring American nationals back home because of the war crisis. The ship was so full that they needed an extra ship doctor and offered the spot to my father. His reply was that he would only go if his family could travel with him. So again we thought we would be leaving… Our trunks were somewhere between Genoa and Bologna.

But eventually they found another doctor who wanted to leave and did not have a family with him, so our departure was postponed again

The evening that the trunks arrived at L’Uccelletto —I had a little earphone radio—I heard that the Rex — the flagship of the Italian lines (which appears in Fellini’s Amarcord)—  was leaving on the 8^th of September. What had happened was that war had broken out, but Italy had not joined. So the ship was sailing. I turned to tell my mother that I heard this, I was six but I knew what was going on. The phone rang: it was my father from Milan saying he had tickets for us on the Rex. We immediately went back to Genoa with the still unopened trunks. We got on board on the 8^th of September, and arrived in New York on the 16^th.

AC How was the beginning of your American life?

GC Not easy. The problem was that, because of the uncertainties of our departure my father’s fellowship at Yale had been arranged for the second term. So when we arrived my father did not have a job, and things were not easy. We went to a dismal hotel on the West Side that a distant cousin of ours, the only person we knew in the US, had indicated. This cousin, Paolo Contini, because he was tall and handsome, had been sent by the Fascists to study law in Berkley, California.

My parents had sent Paolo a telegram from the ship asking him to find us a really cheap hotel in New York where we could stay a few months. The hotel was cheap indeed: it cost $10 a month for four people with food — if you can call what they gave us, food—

I know this because my father kept the receipts for the first two months, obviously one for my brother and one for me, so we would always know how it all started in the US.

AC Your memories are so vivid and precise. Did you commemorate your beginning in the family over the years?

GC Yes, we always celebrated the anniversary of our arrival. The night before the 16^th, we often would go to an excellent Italian restaurant, as a reminder of our life in Italy and on the ship; and then the day after, we would go and eat hamburgers…

We had been very, very wealthy, but arrived with nothing and had to rebuild from scratch.

AC Since your father was going to start his fellowship in New Heaven in just a few months, why did you remain in New York City?

GC We stayed in New York because my father thought that the New York License Exams had more reciprocity. If we were going to starve, he thought, we might as well starve here, as there. He took his exams in New York and luckily he passed them. We did not know that we would end up staying in New Haven. His fellowship was only for a year…

A Dean at Yale recently found the letter from back then giving the fellowship, and sent it to me. It is the most offensive letter you can imagine. My parents never said a word about it to us, but it said: “Yes we will let you come, somebody has given the money, try to get them to give more, but you cannot do this and you cannot do that … and don’t think it will last…” They really did not want us: I’m not sure if in their eyes it was worst that we were Italian, or Jewish, but they made it clear they did not want us. The Medical School like the Law School was more open, than the rest of the University, which was certainly not open to Jewish or to Italian faculty members at that time, but it wasn’t very open!

AC What was it like for two young children such as you and your brother, to find yourselves in New York under these new circumstances, as refugees?

GC We landed on a Saturday and on Monday we were in school. I was six, almost seven and my brother was nine years old. That’s what you did with kids. My brother was lucky because in this little public school somewhere in the West Side, they had a class for people his age and older, who were non English speakers. We spoke German and French, we had had a German governess and a French one, but we did not speak English. My brother immediately fit in with his classmates who were German, French and Spanish refugees, and learned English perfectly in a short time and with no accent at all.

I instead, was too young to go in that class, and was put back in kindergarten, while I should have been beginning second grade. I could already do math at a 5^th grade level and instead was in a class were all we did was make necklaces and tie knots … I did not understand what was going on, and naturally did not like it.

Further I was teased pretty badly and did not have enough English to respond.

AC As children did you sense or absorbe the anxieties your parents must have felt about employment, the war, and the future?

GC Our parents were very good at keeping from us their underlying anxieties. I did not think about the future much, but the present was sometimes puzzling. There were things I didn’t like: I did not like the food! Until we found an automat where they had chicken potpie, I really had trouble eating. I loved the automat, it was very flashy and something children could play with: you put in money and things spun around…

Remarkably our parents kept us from feeling really anxious about things, so that our anxieties were more our own, the smaller anxieties of all children trying to adjust to a new environment.

I have long been full of admiration for the strength of my parents.

AC Did you realize that the family was suddenly out of money?

GC Our parents did not talk about it in front of us but there were plenty of indications. For example my father was a well known cardiologist but without a license he could not practice. Someone at the Italian Consulate, a Count of some sort, heard about him and asked to be treated.  My father took care of him but explained he could not accept money. So instead the Count kept sending elaborate flower arrangements for us at the cheap hotel. My mother would only comment that he could have send fruit…In truth I am sure the Count had no idea how poor we really were.

AC In that period, the fall of 1939, there were a number of other Jewish families, who had escaped from Italy and were living in New York. Did your parents socialize with some of them?

GC There was a significant Italian Jewish community in New York, and there were also some non-Jewish anti-Fascists: the two groups pretty much became one. My father, of course, fitted in both camps because of his early anti-Fascism. We did see a fair amount of them. There was the whole family of Paolo Calabi. One of the daughters, Serena Calabi Modigliani, who later married the famous economist Franco Modigliani, was a distant relative on my mother’s side.

My parents almost never went out in the evenings, because it cost money to do anything. One evening they did go out, I think to a movie, and our baby sitter for that evening was Tullia Calabi, who later married Bruno Zevi. She must have been 17 or so and I remember liking her very much. After that, we did not see her again for years and years.

AC When you moved to New Haven, that kinship with other Italian Jews must have ended abruptly.

GC Certainly in a certain sense by moving to New Haven we distanced ourselves from the Italian Jewish community in New York. We did socialize with the very few Italian Jews who had come to New Haven. There were the Orefice, an insurance family, Giorgio Cavalieri’s sister had married one of them and they were in New Haven. For a time, Cesare and Piera Tedeschi (John Tedeschi’s father and mother) were there and we would see them. But in New Haven we had to be part of a broader community.

The Italian Jews who remained in New York in fact remained very much part of that community of exiles, and while my parents stayed in contact with them, we progressively became separate from them.

AC In a sense you were becoming “Americans”?

GC Well, what did we become? We were outsiders in every possible way; we were Jews but not like most American Jews. We were Italian, but not like most American-Italians. We did things for them and with them. My mother after the war was made Cavaliere for all she had done for the Italian Americans in New Haven.  And my father was met immediately by those —very few— Italian Americans who were or had been anti-Fascist, and had been ostracized, because the Italian American community, mislead  by propaganda, had become quite pro Fascist. Several of them made my father (a doctor, not a lawyer) the executor of their wills, because they trusted and shared his political views.

AC Were did you live in New Haven?

GC That is interesting! When we first arrived, a real estate agent took us to the Wooster Square area, which is where all the Italians lived —New Haven was very segregated— and to Westville, were most of the Jews tended to live. But the people from the Medical School, my father’s colleagues to be, immediately swept in and said: “No, no, no that is not were you are going to live. You must live in a certain area between Whitney Avenue and Orange Street, between the Park and Edwards Street, (which is where all the Yale fellows, assistant professors, graduate students still live.) What they meant to say was: you are “ethnically Yale”.

AC Yale in turn was less than welcoming to Jews…

GC Yes, we were at Yale, and we were part of Yale, but we were completely different from most of the Yale people. With the exception of a few people in the Law School, and fewer people in the Medical School, there were no Jews on Yale faculty and no Italians either. So we were part of something of which we were not part, and not part of those things one would have thought we would be part of. My brother and I recognized this immediately, and not as a negative thing; that rather than being part of any group, we were ourselves. And that we did. We spoke Italian at home, and we spoke English outside. Italian remained our language: to my brother’s dying day, when I spoke to him I would speak in Italian. This has much to do with what all of us became.

AC Can you talk about your family’s relationship with Italy. In three generations of Calabresi men, we find Ettore, your grandfather, who having fought for a unified Italy, could not imagine leaving. Your father, Massimo, whose anti-Fascism made him want to leave in the early 1930s, and yourself who despite having grown up largely in the States continue to see Italy as a point of reference.

GC I think, that in an interesting way, all of us have always thought of ourselves as being Italian. Though they decided ultimately to stay in America, in part for my brother and me, my parents never thought of themselves as being really American. They became American citizens but they were Italians in a very deep sense. To their dying day, they were Italians who were living here.

My brother and I were, in some fundamental sense, both. We went back to Italy after the war, and both of us had the same experience. This was right after the war when Italy was very poor and just beginning to reconstruct. Both of us had the sensation that while it would be extremely difficult to live in Italy if one were poor, it would be intolerable for people like us who had grown up in America with egalitarian principles, to be rich there, as we would have been. So we said to our parents that we wanted to remain in the US.

There is a time related irony: our trip and our impressions were of Italy in the late 1940’s, before the Italian economic boom of the 50’s and 60’s, when Italy became immensely egalitarian, while in America African Americans were virtually not seen; desegregation had not yet happened. In a sense we made a decision, based on egalitarianism, which was a good thing, but we may have decided wrong because now America is less equal in many ways than Italy.

My wife, who is as American as they come, and has fallen in love with Italy (her work is there), says that I am never fully at home until I am in Italy.

AC How does one deal with in effect being, both Italian and American?

GC One summer I had a group of students from all over the world. A youngster who was born in Pakistan, and grew up in Denmark, said: “Look, I think I know what it means to be two things, but what are you really, are you Italian or are you American?” And I said, “ I am both, I really am both”. “OK” he said, “but whom do you root for in the World Cup?” “Of course, in the World Cup I root for Italy” I answered “but if there were a World Cup in baseball I would root for the USA”.

In other words, in those things that I associate with Italy, I am very Italian and in the things I associate with the US I am very American.

Now that is a difference from my parents, who though they were here felt so deeply Italian, and with my grandfather, born in 1870, who no matter how bad things got, could not conceive of leaving Italy.

AC Much of the Calabresi’s American experience is intertwined with Yale. It was Yale that offered your father an initial fellowship, and Yale is the place were first you studied, and later became Dean of the Law School and eventually Professor Emeritus.

GC We grew up in New Haven, where we first were at the fringes of Yale —my father was hanging on by his fingernails to a tenuous affiliation while my mother flat out could not teach at Yale, as women were not on the faculty back then— Nonetheless both my brother and I attended Yale and did very well there. Yale recognized this very early, so that when I got a prize as one of the top students in my freshman year, in the motivation they wrote “Guido Calabresi first generation American, second generation Yale.” Both my parents had gotten Yale degrees and that, in an odd way, became part of our identity. In a strange way I think that Yale changed more than we did and it became more like us, than we became like it.

AC How much do you think that your family history, you emigration story has informed your professional life as a United States Court of Appeals Judge?

GC The way we came to this country certainly influenced me as a lawyer and as a judge.

I became a lawyer because I loved the study of law so much… that I practically fell in to it. At the time I did not realize how much this was the ancient tradition of my family.  Especially on my maternal side, the Del Vecchio’s, who originally were Rabbis, had later had a long tradition in the Law. In my immediate family (grandfather, father and brother) they were all doctors and I thinking I was doing something different, fell into an even longer family tradition. I was reverting…

What became of me as a lawyer and a Judge is this: the most important part of my legal education, of my formation as a lawyer, and as a Judge is that I am a refugee. That I am an outsider.

People don’t believe that I am an outsider, because now I seem to be so much of an insider. But I am not.

My wife Anne recognizes that and loves that in me. It is that sense of not being part of the system, that has made me, I think, the kind of scholar, the kind of Judge, that I am. In the same way that my student, colleague, and now boss Sonia Sotomayor, has always seen things as an outsider, so do I.

I could not be the judge that I am if I had come up entirely in an American system. In a strange way I have Mussolini to thank for that; the difficulties he presented us with made us the people that we have become.

The Italian Section of the Voice of America during WWII

1. On the evening of January 20, 1944, in Lima, Peru, my father Antonello sat down to write a long letter to his two brothers living in New York – Giuliano, a journalist with the Voice of America, and Claudio, a doctor – giving them a detailed account of the last hours of their father Edmo. Edmo, himself a refugee to Peru, had died of a cerebral aneurism the day before. Antonello had sent his brothers a cable but wasn’t sure if the news had reached them or not.  During the evening he turned on the radio to try and listen to Giuliano’s daily broadcast under the pseudonym Mario Verdi.  But he heard an anonymous speaker say,  “Instead of Mario Verdi’s usual commentary…,” and go on to announce another program. That was how my father knew for sure that Giuliano and Claudio had received his telegram and, as a sign of mourning, had suspended his own broadcast.

Why am I relating this episode? On one hand to explain my own interest in the history of wartime radio broadcasts and, on the other, to underline the effectiveness of the radio medium from the point of view of its listening. Tonight I shall try to illustrate these two complementary aspects by touching on the experiences of two men. Both refugees to America as a result of the 1938 fascist anti-Jewish laws, both held highly responsible positions at the Voice of America during the war: one during the so-called heroic period of 1942-43 and the other after the normalization (which I’ll explain later) of the Office of War Information, of which the Voice of America was a part.

The first of the two is Roberto Lopez (1910-1986), son of the famous playwright Sabatino, who was then a promising scholar and after the war an illustrious professor of Medieval History at Yale.  The second is my uncle Giuliano Gerbi (1905-1976). Renowned as a sportswriter and broadcaster in the Thirties, his career was irreparably damaged by fascism, in spite of his later successes at the Voice of America.

2. Before getting into the story itself, I’d like to recall some of the main points in the history of U.S. radio propaganda after the United States entered the war, on December 8, 1941. President Roosevelt had previously created several different organizations, often in contrast among themselves. It was not until June 13, 1942 that the President decreed the birth of the Office of War Information (OWI), merging four pre-existing government agencies into one sole organism.

Elmer Davis, esteemed CBS commentator, was named head of the new organization, based in Washington. The Overseas Branch, with headquarters in New York, was entrusted instead to the famous playwright Robert E. Sherwood, friend of the President and one of his speechwriters. Subordinate to the Overseas Branch was the Voice of America. Its radio broadcasts (in German, French and Italian) began on February 25, 1942, exactly eighty days after Pearl Harbor.

It must be said right away that OWI was destined to have a troubled existence. This was primarily due to the deep contradictions between the ideals of a ‘just’ war and the crude military necessities, aimed at total victory. It was accused of partisanship as well. The 1942 elections had given control of both Houses of Congress to a coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats, both of whom “viewed OWI as a propaganda agency not for the United States but for Roosevelt and the New Deal.”  This led to continual attacks in the local press.

Roosevelt was, of course, aware of all these problems but it was not in his character to assume precise positions. So he refrained – as long as he was able – from getting involved in the disputes which broke out almost every day over OWI, especially territorial rivalries with other sectors of the administration.

Making OWI work in such conditions had become, therefore, a herculean task studded with ‘accidents’.  So much so that at war’s end, Elmer Davis, in his Report to the President, wrote that the director of any future propaganda agency would need to possess “the varied abilities of a lobbyist, a traffic policeman, and the impresario of an opera company.”

3. Roberto Lopez applied for a job at the Coordinator of Information, one of OWI’s predecessors, around the end of May, 1942. He was hired by the Italian Section of the newly created Voice of America on August 16^th of the same year.

He had earned his degree in History in Milan and qualified for university teaching in 1936, immediately obtaining a position in  History of Economics at the University of Genoa. Barred from teaching after the approval of the racial laws, he emigrated to America in September of 1939 and, thanks to his friend Professor Robert L. Reynolds, found a job as teaching assistant in the History Department of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

His first boss at the radio, up till the end of 1942, was Carlo Emanuele a Prato, who had had similar duties in one of the agencies incorporated into OWI. At that time there were ten employees in the Italian Section: a Prato himself, Alfredo Segre, J. D. Ravotto, Giorgio Padovano, Sergio Funaro, Aurelio Natoli, Leo Wollemborg, Luigi Giovanola, Primo Raddi and Vincenzo Vacirca. Counting Lopez, about 50 per cent were Jewish.

A Prato was a socialist with a lengthy journalistic career behind him, spent mostly in exile (Switzerland and Paris). He had long been inspired by antifascists Gaetano Salvemini and Carlo Sforza, the latter having been Foreign Minister prior to the advent of fascism. At the beginning of 1942, however, a Prato had begun to cross swords with his former spiritual fathers, in particular with Salvemini who criticized him for serving the Americans and their foreign policies. The same criticism could have been levelled at Lopez, who, however, saw nothing inconsistent with his antifascist principles in working for OWI:  at least as long as he was allowed to attack, not only Mussolini and his gang, but Vittorio Emanuele III as well.

4. Here I shall skip over – as I’ve already written about them elsewhere – all the attacks levelled at the Italian Desk by antifascist Italians in America. There is no evidence that Lopez was touched by them in the slightest. He had to have known about them and yet he never mentioned them during our conversations. He talked to me instead about his particular job. Lopez didn’t talk on the radio himself, he wasn’t a speaker. He wrote news and feature stories which others read in front of the microphone. The amount of work was overwhelming. Newly hired, he drew the night shift for 54 days in a row. The Overseas Branch office of the OWI had recently been transferred, in the middle of summer 1942, to the corner of 57^th Street and Broadway.

By January of 1943, the New York offices of OWI employed around three thousand people, over a fifth of whom were foreigners. Most of the latter worked in the foreign sections of the Voice of America. At the time the VOA turned out approximately a thousand programs a day in twenty-seven different languages. It was a Babel, the dominion of John Houseman (1902-1988), the famous theater director and producer, who left us one of the most vivid descriptions of the ‘heroic’ period of the VOA.

The Italian Desk (or Service) – recalled Houseman in his memoirs – was the third largest, after the French section (although the French “did not distort the news, as the Italians did”) and the German one. At the time of the Allied landing in Sicily (July 10, 1943), it employed about seventy people who were

a constant source of entertainment and exasperation.  From the start they resisted all attempts to bring any semblance of American journalistic efficacy into their broadcasts, The idea of broadcasting items as they received them from the News and Control Desk was utterly repugnant to them.

Houseman continued:

In addition to the deep, chronic disagreements, personal and political, between recent expatriots and Italians long resident in the United States, there was constant friction between those who reluctantly accepted U.S. Government policy and those who followed the divergent lines of various local Italian groups.  In fact, there was more attempted interference with Italian broadcasts than with those of any other nation – except the Poles.

In other words, an animated hotbed of nerves.

5. And so we arrive at a date crucial to Italy’s history: July 25, 1943, with the fall of Mussolini and Field-Marshal Pietro Badoglio named prime minister in his stead.

That Sunday Roosevelt was at his cottage “Shangrila,” about sixty miles north of Washington, with two of his closest advisors, Sam Rosenman and the above-mentioned Bob Sherwood, director of OWI’s Overseas Branch.  They were working together on a speech for the president. The late-afternoon quiet of the sylvan retreat was suddenly shattered by a telephone call from Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, announcing the dramatic Italian news heard, however, on the not-always-reliable “Radio Roma.”

Only that evening was the news definitely confirmed. After returning to Washington, Roosevelt made a call to Churchill (it was the middle of the night in London) who was able to explain exactly what had happened.

Some hours earlier, unaware of the events taking place in Italy, Roberto Lopez, who had by then been promoted to “script editor,” was strolling along 42^nd Street.  On that hot July Sunday he was off-duty. As usual when he arrived at Times Square, he glanced up at the neon billboard to check out the latest headlines. There he saw the electrifying Italian news and ran headlong all the fifteen blocks to his office.

The Voice of America offices were complete bedlam. How to react?  The fact that it happened on a Sunday made communication with the State Department difficult and directives about Italy were unclear.  The latest, approved on February 21, 1943, stated: “‘Fascism’ includes not only Mussolini and his political and military accomplices, but the House of Savoy, which betrayed Italy to Fascism, and the industrialists who support Fascism.” Likewise, the joint message issued by Roosevelt and Churchill on July 17 could be interpreted the same way.

As Sherwood was absent, his second-in-command James Warburg, of the banking family, took on the full responsibility of deciding. In his instructions he gave orders to treat the event “coldly and without any jubilation,” since in any case it made no difference “whether Mussolini or Badoglio or the King hold the leadership.” The intrinsic ambiguity of American foreign policy allowed the liberal approach to prevail, thus forcing OWI into a rather delicate position.

So it was that, on that fateful evening of July 25^th, Lopez considered himself fully authorized to harshly attack Vittorio Emanuele III:  “Badoglio’s proclamation exhorts Italians to gather in support of the emperor-king. The king was made an emperor by Mussolini and by Badoglio. The Italian people were not consulted. The Italian people are not involved”.

6. Yet the Voice of America went even further, with an episode that is rather well-known today. On that same evening, Warburg decided to broadcast several passages from a radio commentary pronounced shortly before by the famous New York Post columnist, Samuel Grafton:

Fascism is still in power in Italy.  Italy has put on a new face, that’s all. Italian Fascism has rouged its cheeks and its lips and is trying to see whether a smile will not do more for it, than the famous frown by which it lived so long.

The moronic little king who has stood behind Mussolini’s shoulder for 21 years has moved forward one pace. This is a political minuet and not the revolution we have been waiting for.

Bitter words indeed, which Warburg meant to be broadcast only once, and only in English. Instead, the text was mistakenly transmitted six times, which probably allowed a news leakage. Consequently, on July 27, Arthur Krock, the New York Times Washington correspondent and fierce critic of Roosevelt, levelled a front-page attack on OWI, accusing it of having established its own autonomous course of action with regard to Italy and sabotaging any future negotiations with the king and Badoglio.

OWI was in trouble. On the afternoon of that same July 27, Roosevelt called a press conference and declared that neither he nor Sherwood had authorized the offending broadcast. On top of that, Churchill had just informed the American President that he himself “would deal with any non-fascist Italian Government which can deliver the goods.” In other words, sign an act of surrender.

After some hesitation on Roosevelt’s part, this debatable approach was promoted in another press conference on July 30, in which he manifested his willingness to negotiate with any non-fascist, “be he a King, or a present Prime Minister, or a Mayor of a town, or a village.”

With this, the Voice of America was being called to order: forsaking its ‘strategy of truth’, and submitting the liberal ideology, prevalent among leaders of the time, to the demands of  wartime military and the more moderate spheres.

One can imagine Lopez’ distress in such a situation. During the month of August he still managed to get a few anti-monarchical and anti-Badoglio thrusts past the censors but by now even this tentative approach had become virtually impossible. A drastic choice loomed which came to fruition on September 8, 1943. At news of the the armistice, Maurice English, head ever since spring of 1943 of the Italian Section (after poet Morris Bishop’s brief tenure), chose Lopez to write the  main article. As he gave him the raw material which had arrived from Washington, English ordered: “See that we translate literally: ‘today Italy surrendered.’” To which the adamant Lopez replied: “Fascism has surrendered, not Italy!”

English’s repeated insistences that the orders from Washington  be carried out met with no success. Lopez’ resignation became a foregone conclusion.

Not long afterward, Yale University welcomed the future historian and author of the famous The Birth of Europe with open arms:  he remained there for the rest of his life.

7. By coincidence, Giuliano Gerbi arrived on the scene just as Lopez left it and the turbulence at OWI subsided. His curriculum was quite different from Lopez’. Five years older – he was born in 1905 –Gerbi had graduated from  Bocconi University in Milan with a degree in Economics. He had a lengthy career as a sportswriter behind him:  not only was he a sportswriter and correspondent for the Milanese newspaper L’Ambrosiano, specializing in cycling, tennis and skiing, but since 1931 he had been a sportscaster for EIAR, forerunner of  RAI, as well.  In 1938 he gave the EIAR live commentary of the ‘Tour de France’, won by Gino Bartali. His voice was well known in  Thirties Italy. A brilliant future in radio broadcasting would have been his, had it not been cut short by the passage, in autumn of 1938, of the anti-Jewish laws.

From that moment on, Gerbi’s peregrinations began. Paris, New York, ever-more uncertain jobs, a year at a bank in Colombia. Finally in 1941 he came back to the United States, first in Boston and then in New York, to be near to his brother Claudio, a doctor, himself an emigrant to the US. In the Big Apple, Giuliano had taken up broadcasting once again, first at  WHOM and later, in 1942, at WOV as “Chief of the newsroom and Italian announcer.”  During the same period he also collaborated with NBC.

WOV was a private radio station which broadcast mainly in Italian.  After the USA entered the war it was closed down because of its not-undeserved reputation as a den of fascists and only reopened after a vigorous purge of its most compromised elements. The first change in his circumstances came in the summer of 1942 when OWI gave him his first contract as “Italian staff announcer”, and, in November of the same year, another one as “announcer.”  At the same time he was still working for both WOV and NBC. After September 8, 1943 came the definitive move. In a plan to increase its hours of Italian-language programming, the Voice of America offered him a daily commentary which went on the air for the first time on September 27, 1943. Thus began the broadcasts of “Mario Verdi,” the radio pseudonym assigned (with a striking lack of imagination) to him by OWI. His was the only ‘autographed’ program in the entire Italian Section of the VOA. It went on the air twice a day, every day (except, in its first months, on Thursday).

8. In an autobiographical note from the Sixties, Gerbi himself described his typical working day:

My daily commentary went on the air at 15:45 New York time, corresponding to 21:45 Italian time, but I remember that in spite of that my “piece”  […]  had to be ready, barring any last-minute additions or changes, by 10 o’clock in the morning. If 15:45 was “air time,” there was a rehearsal or run-through at 15:00, during which I had to read the “piece” in front of a “director,” who more often than not understood very little Italian, and, before that the piece had to go to the “ditto room” to be duplicated, and then […]  it had to undergo a “military control” and a “political control;” and before the control it had to be translated into English.

At that time I was living in New York, at 53 East 54^th Street, three blocks from WOV. Thinking back to those days I can’t imagine how I managed to carry on for weeks and months sleeping 55 minutes out of every hour and waking up, systematically, at the stroke of every hour in order to listen to the “news” transmitted by the radio all night long.

Since I continually listened to the “news” for five minutes every hour, I was always on top of the situation. Once I had formed a general picture of the latest developments, I got up at 5:30 and by 6 I was already at WOV, where I found all the stories on the teletype in the newsroom from the three major American agencies, AP, UP and International News Service. I digested them, usually finding confirmation of what I had already heard on the radio during the night, and sat down at the typewriter. In an hour and a half my “piece” was written, and by 8 o’clock in the morning, before I started my normal job at WOV, I handed the manuscript to a VOA messenger who came over regularly to get it. I met up with my “piece” again in the early afternoon when I left WOV on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57^th Street and walked the few blocks to the Voice of America headquarters at the corner of 57^th Street and Broadway.

Once his piece had passed all the political and military censorship, Gerbi could finally go on the air. And, after so much scrutiny, everything went smoothly in comparison to Lopez’ time. Little by little, Giuliano became more proficient and his program more popular.  Evaluations by his bosses were always “excellent.” Duties and salary improved. On January 16, 1944 he went from “announcer” to “script editor,” and on August 1, “radio commentator,” which meant that he was also in charge of inspecting his colleagues’ texts, which were often written in rather poor Italian.

9. Vivian, Giuliano’s daughter, has preserved in the family archive in Milan typewritten copies of all of Mario Verdi’s commentaries, including cuts made by the censors. Perhaps a copy of the texts themselves may be found in the National Archives where twenty or so of Giuliano’s recorded broadcasts have been saved. Before I go into the content of these commentaries and how they evolved over time, I should like to recall a letter my father Antonello, who as I mentioned above was a faithful listener from Peru, wrote to his brothers from Lima on February 7, 1944:

I’ve listened to our Giuliano many times, during vacation and again yesterday, Sunday […].  His diction seemed simply perfect to me (and much better than what I remembered from Milan): clear, well-cadenced yet not singsong, without the slightest uncertainty or slip of the tongue […].  [Speaking of his accent] it is pure, and there is a certain ‘airiness’ about his words as if, instead of reading, he were actually conversing. The tone is just right, serious and confidential. In short, I am not at all surprised that he is so appreciated by his various bosses. As far as the contents are concerned, I realize that he doesn’t have much freedom of choice;  there is a bit too much cheap propaganda, which I doubt is really good propaganda, precisely because it is cheap. I hope his listeners recognize that the fight is neither easy nor already won. And perhaps – the average Italian listener should be considered fairly intelligent – a touch of humor, or self-irony, or even a serene bitterness would not be out of place. But here I see that I am criticizing, not Giuliano, but his spiritual directors.

10. Now we come to the contents themselves of Giuliano’s broadcasts which, as his brother had pointed out, were largely dictated by the directives he received. Little by little, however, his comments became more refined, his journalistic experience had the better of political restrictions and his popularity grew, even though it would never reach that of his colleagues at Radio London. Technically his programs were transmitted to London via shortwave and then re-transmitted to Italy by medium wave which gave far better reception.  This was borne out by the ever-increasing number of letters which Gerbi received, from Italian prisoners of war as well as from his fellow countrymen, especially after the Allied landing in Sicily, in July of 1944. By the last year of the war, Gerbi was receiving hundreds of letters a month, some of which he answered on the air.

His broadcasts were all structured the same way. An announcer signaled that Mario Verdi’s program was about to go on air.  Then the same announcer or Giuliano himself, from time to time, read a summary of the main news stories from the various war fronts (this was repeated at the end). Then came fifteen minutes of commentary by Mario Verdi which, although at the beginning more oriented towards bare facts, became over time more and more elaborate and full of opinions which naturally reflected the official policy of the American government. It was all  well put together, with a good sense of rhythm and a growing show of familiarity with Italian affairs.

11. From the end of September 1943 to the liberation of Europe in May of 1945 (and afterward as well, although it doesn’t interest us here), Mario Verdi followed the main events of the war and  international politics step by step, strictly adhering to the directives regarding Italy. On the other hand, he had free rein when it came to constantly denouncing Hitler and the atrocities that his German soldiers were committing, even against civilians. It is important to remember that this was the period of time after El Alamein and after Stalingrad, a period of increasingly heavy losses for the nazis.

Verdi underlined the age-old hatred of Italians for the Germans.  He showed gratitude for those Italians who helped Allied prisoners to escape. He evoked important anniversaries, like October 19, 1812, when Napoleon began his retreat from Russia. On October 29, 1943 he announced the end of the New York blackout, as threats of a German invasion had ceased. He said repeatedly that fascists and nazis would have to undergo a severe purge at war’s end and that Italy would be allowed to choose its future government on a democratic basis. He never tried to hide the losses and difficulties of the Allies as they battled their way up the Peninsula. He criticized the errors of American isolationist policy prior to Roosevelt. He supported both Italian and Yugoslavian partisans (he would always refer to  them as “patriots”). He was enthusiastic about the decision to let Italian soldiers fight side by side with the Allies (“co-belligerency”).

On Christmas day, 1943, he recalled the festivities in warm tones:

The feeling of nostalgia for days gone by is alive today more than ever. Nostalgia for fireplaces with crackling logs. For the joyous pealing of the church bells. Nostalgia for chestnuts, for ricotta cakes, for panettoni, for good wine from our own vineyards. For traditional dishes, for the sounds of bagpipes and fifed. For dances in costume. For serene and smiling faces. Nostalgia above all for Peace (December 19, 1943).

It would have been hard for people to imagine that they were listening to a Jew forced into exile by the fascist regime.

Just as unlikely for us today was the celebration of Stalin’s birthday:

Today Marshal Stalin is 64. It is perhaps the happiest birthday of the Soviet       Statesmans’s entire political and military life. The most sumptuous gift has come from his soldiers. The most gratifying reward for him is the consciousness that he has done everything in his power for the good of his Country. His talents had already manifested themselves through his policies in times of peace. Through an intense campaign to raise the spirit of the Russian people, to give this people, enslaved by the Tsars, the awareness of their own national strength (December 21, 1943).

12. There are far too many such examples to mention all of them here. The documents are available to scholars wanting to consult them. I should like to mention at least one broadcast, dated July 17, 1944, in which Gerbi narrates the liberation of the city where he spent his childhood, Livorno. In the early Eighties, one of his schoolmates, the “livornese” Jew Laura Castelfranchi recalled:

I’ll never forget how moved I was on July 19 [recte 17], 1944 when, in hiding in the Versilian mountains, I heard Giuliano Gerbi, who […] announced the liberation of Livorno evoking the Quattro Stagioni school where he had studied.

She had actually recognized, in the voice of Mario Verdi, her old schoolmate, Giuliano. Yet it probably wasn’t so very hard to recognize him if we listen to Mario Verdi’s own words:

Italian listeners, good evening. […] Many memories link me to Livorno.  Several tombs, in a cemetery outside the walls, on which I hope one day to be able to place a flower once more; the classrooms of the elementary school “Quattro Stagioni” and those of the “Guerrazzi” gymnasium where I spent several years of my early youth, the  “Fides” club where Beppe Nadi, father of the Olympic champions, taught me fencing, the “Baracchina” in Ardenza where I had the best ice cream of my life and hundreds and hundreds of others.

14. Now it is time to draw some conclusions about what we’ve said up to now. In order to describe the two phases of the Voice of America there is no better way than to delve into the above-mentioned Report to the President, written in 1945 by OWI director, Elmer Davis. Davis writes:

an information agency [OWI], in a war which was in some of its aspects ideological, naturally attracted many free-lance writers and others who had been used to working by themselves and had always jealously cherished their personal integrity and freedom of expression. Such a man is very apt to insist that he must proclaim the truth as he sees it; if you tell him that so long as he works for the government he must proclaim the truth as the President and the Secretary of State sees it, he may feel that this is an intolerable limitation on his freedom of thought and speech.  In that case, he must go.

As happened in the case of Roberto Lopez and many others.

Yet their initiative, their imagination, their passionate conviction (if only it could have been channeled) were all qualities that OWI needed, and was poorer without.

All these concepts fit the Lopez “case” perfectly.  But Elmer Davis concludes – and we with him – by expressing an opinion which match the Gerbi case even better:

The more credit is due to the many other men and women of that type who were able to subordinate their personal feeling, when occasion required, to the national interest, and who gave us outstanding service as members of the team.

Levi’s experience as a partisan—and the execution of two teenage boys—showed him humans’ capacity for extreme violence.

A review of Sergio Luzzatto’s Primo Levi’s Resistance and Collaborators in Occupied Italy. Metropolitan Books, 2015

In September 1943, Primo Levi took to the mountains in northwest Italy to escape the Nazis. A keen mountaineer since the age of 14, for Levi the Alps had long been a sanctuary for physical release and spiritual recovery. High up in the alpine tundra, he exulted in hard battle with the elements, the same “Mother-Matter” he confronted at the Chemical Institute in Turin, where he worked as a chemist on the molecular structure of carbon. The mountain’s geological morphologies, the combined sense of its instant creation and eternal presence, the fellowship amongst climbers roped together across pleated terrains: these had been Levi’s greatest pleasures. “Evenings spent in a mountain hut,” he later wrote in a short story called “Bear Meat” (1960), “are the most sublime and intense that life holds.” But after the Nazis established Mussolini’s Republic of Salò and occupied the north of the country, intensifying the roundup and deportation of Jews, the “rocky gymnasiums” became his place of greater safety.

Levi had never intended to pursue armed resistance against the Germans. “I was a young bourgeois pacifist and I’d rather have died than shoot anyone”, he recalled in an interview with his biographer, Ian Thomson. Like a lot of Italian Jews, he thought the best option was to wait for an Allied liberation. But Nazi-Fascism presented an unforgiving choice for most Jewish citizens of occupied Europe: hide, resist, or, as Arendt documented in Eichmann in Jerusalem, cooperate. Levi’s initial concern was for the safety of his mother and sister, and on September 9 they left for St. Vincent, a spa town 100 kilometres north of Turin in the Valle d’Aosta, where they stayed with friends. But after the Nazis drowned forty-nine Jews in Lake Maggiore near Switzerland, including Levi’s uncle, Mario, any hesitations he had about armed resistance disappeared. On October 1, along with a couple of disbanded Italian soldiers, as well as other Jewish refugees and anti-fascists, Levi became part of a small and shambolic resistance group.

Sergio Luzzatto’s newly translated Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy is the story of Levi’s time as a partisan. Drawing on materials housed in local archives throughout northwest Italy, as well as interviewing many of those involved in the early Resistance, his book is a micro-history of what happened in the two months between Levi becoming a partisan and his arrest and deportation to Auschwitz in December 1943. The most intriguing part of Luzzatto’s story, though, is an event that took place a few days before Levi’s capture, when his band executed Fulvio Oppezzo and Luciano Zabaldano, two teenagers accused of threatening the secrecy and survival of the rebel group. After the war, Levi remained disturbed by the execution, and questioned the lengths people in conditions of weakness go to survive. His writings were not just shaped by his experience of Auschwitz, but by a life at the frontier of powerlessness as both a partisan and a prisoner.

It is still Levi the prisoner that we know best, and this is what informs much of his writings. Levi recorded his experience of the Holocaust in If This Is a Man (1947), and over the following decades gained success as a writer who, with astonishing self-control, chronicled Europe’s tragic danse macabre. Yet as Ann Goldstein—editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi—notes, the tag “Holocaust writer” does Levi “a regrettable injustice”. A remarkable three-volume set of memoirs, novels, short stories, essays, commentary, book reviews, and poetry, the Complete Works now enables us to appreciate the tangle of forms and identities that defined Levi as a writer: memorialist and fantasist, scientist and sensationalist, puritan and jester, poet and political commentator.

What most clearly stands out from this body of work is the experience of violence in service of the absolute—absolute racial purity, for example, or absolute security and freedom, or absolute control over people through force, or even the absolute mastery of the material world through scientific endeavor. He even argued that “perfect happiness” was unattainable, owing to the certainty of our death, nor “perfect unhappiness”, since death saves us from the daily agonies of existence. For Levi, then, the twentieth century was so violent because societies strove for the absolute and infinite, and much of his work documented the experience of the powerless when confronted by that ambition.

In contrast to fascism’s hate of difference and irregularity, Levi celebrated the fine gradations of being in The Periodic Table (1975), a memoir of his life in chemistry:

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is know, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist…. Immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.

Natural Histories, a collection of Huxley-esque science fiction stories first published in 1966, is another example of the cohabiting themes and anxieties that imprinted themselves on Levi after what he witnessed between 1943 and 45. Written in an absurdist key, he mixed the potential of science to attain absolute control and understanding of the physical universe with a deep paranoia of its subversion by the wild spirit of the innovator, the unpredictability of experimentation, and the consequences of human vanity.

In “Angelic Butterfly,” one of Levi’s most disturbing fictions, Dr Leeb, a researcher based on the Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele, transforms humans into birds, which are then devoured by hungry crowds (the story takes place in post-war Germany, which Levi said was “a civilized form of reprisal”). Similarly, “Versamnia” is about the attempt to convert complete pain into pure pleasure, during which the human subjects loose their minds and the inventor commits suicide. And in “The Magic Paint,” in which Levi displays a dark comedic genius, it is the pursuit of everlasting luck that causes death. Having discovered a paint that brings good luck to anyone exposed to it, the scientist-narrator calls on an old friend, Michele Fassio, whose gaze from the right eye brings him eternal misfortune. After having the right lens of his glasses coated in the magic paint, Fassio puts them on and dies immediately—the lens was concave, reflecting his powers of bad luck off the paint and back into himself, a “blameless victim of our experiment”.

But Levi wasn’t just concerned with the tragic, usually violent, consequences of pursuing the absolute. He also grappled with the origins and nature of that violence. As a partisan, he participated in a brutal execution in the winter of 1943, and as a Jew he witnessed the industrial murder of entire peoples. Both issued, in different magnitudes, from what Levi called “the sleep of reason”. But they also resulted from contrasting positions of power: the paranoid fragility of the early partisan movement on the one hand, and the “indiscriminate power” of Nazi Germany on the other. Levi’s writings are not celebrations of the human spirit, as is so often claimed, but reflections on the effects that power and powerlessness have on the human capacity for violence.

Levi’s mountain rebels in Aosta were too weak and inexperienced for effective guerrilla warfare. His only weapon, he recalled, was a tiny pistol, “all inlaid with mother of pearl, the kind used in movies by ladies desperately intent on committing suicide”. The group’s leader, Guido Bachi, would later admit that they weren’t really partisans at all, but simply “refugees—Jews on the run”. Many rebels also mistook banditry for resistance. Partisans were free from the codified norms of national armies, and could devise their own protocols. Young men, armed and proud, descended into towns and villages in the name of resistance and assaulted locals, hijacked cars, plundered food, and burnt property—willful violence cloaked in the mantle of anti-fascism.

Luzzatto ascertains that Oppezzo and Zabaldano’s unruliness ultimately led to their executions. They had terrorized locals around the village of Amay, threatening to denounce to the fascist authorities anyone who tried to prevent them. On 8 December 1943 they joined up with Levi’s band of rebels. The next day, their new alpine comrades executed them. There was no trial, no solemn march to a remote clearing where deadeyes lined up and fired. The killing was sudden and without warning, a volley of bullets in the back as the youngsters walked through the snow—it was known as “the Soviet method.”

Luzzatto is less concerned with who actually shot them. What’s important is the severity of the punishment, which, he writes, Levi’s partisans “can only have arrived at after searching their consciences”. The decision to execute was a collective one, which Levi granted in The Periodic Table. In the chapter ‘Gold’, an account of his arrest and imprisonment by fascist militiamen, he admitted publicly for the first time his part in the ‘ugly secret’:

an ugly secret weighed on us, in every one of our minds…. Conscience had compelled us to carry out a sentence, and we had carried it out, but we had come away devastated, empty, wanting everything to finish and to be finished ourselves; but also wanting to be together, to talk, to help each other exorcise that still so recent memory. Now we were finished, and we knew it; we were in the trap, each one in his own trap, and there was no way out but down.

Like so much of the early days of anti-fascist resistance, seen close-up, the application of physical force is stripped of all romanticism. Levi’s partisans weren’t indomitable heroes in steadfast pursuit of victory. Even if their original intentions were good, they were neophytes who, weak, powerless, and desperate to survive the Nazi dragnet, turned to violence and immediately regretted their decision (Levi said that afterwards, they lost the will “to resist, even to live”).

Levi’s participation in the execution is well known. Ian Thomson mentions it in his biography Primo Levi, as do Carole Angier in her book about Levi The Double Bond and Myriam Anissimov in Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. But Luzzatto zeroes-in specifically on this episode, and in so doing, is more judicious and systematic. He writes with verve (rendered beautifully into English by Frederika Randall), and has mined a great many sources to provide a decent account of life under arms in the Aosta Valley.

Yet his conclusions are no more assured than previous interpretations. It still remains unclear how much Levi was involved beyond the debate to execute (was he
a triggerman, for example?). Nor whether the lawless behavior of Oppezzo and Zabaldano was the real reason for the execution. It also cannot be proved that Levi participated in the burials of the two teenagers. Luzzatto speculates that he did, pointing to his poem ‘Epitaph’ (1952) that is “far from any kind of historical proof”, but that provides the strongest suggestion. The narrator in the poem is a dead partisan, buried beneath the soil of Aosta. Like Oppezzo or Zabaldano, he was condemned to death by his comrades:

Here where my comrades dry-eyed buried me, […] I, Micca the partisan, lie here. Brought down by my comrades
For no small wrong, and not many years ago,
Nor many years did I have when I met the night.

The sporadic clues in Levi’s writings that allude to his “ugly secret” are tantalizing in their promise to yield more treasure about a darker past. Luzzatto’s book is in part hostage to this temptation. He readily admits that he might be “insisting on a very minor episode in the overall experience of the Italian Resistance, not to mention in Primo Levi’s personal existence.” A harsh conclusion might be that this book is, above all, about the imaginative license the historian has when confronted with patchy source material.

It is, however, clear that the experience of the execution deeply informed Levi’s writing and thought. Levi forged his voice in opposition to neat moral distinctions like good and evil, innocence and guilt, justice and injustice, honesty and deceit, strength and weakness, perpetrators and victims, and life and death. For him, these coexist in one and the same person in precarious balance. While he never denied the goodness of human nature, the essential truth of his works—filtered through his experiences of Europe between 1943-1945—is that powerlessness, too, or desperate weakness, manifests itself in the baser part of our natures. What else can the absolutely powerless do when confronted by absolute power?

In The Drowned and the Saved (1986), his final work on Auschwitz written one year before his suicide, he described those who survived, like he did, as driven by despair to all forms of egoism, violence, insensitivity, and collaboration. Only the “drowned”, those who never returned, “did not plumb the depths” of moral compromise: “The best all died”. This was not to condemn the “saved”, only to recognize that powerlessness served to accelerate the violent and calculating potential within men and women. This, if anything, was the true sign of victimhood—being forced to unlock the darker side of human nature.

Like the mythical creature the centaur, a symbol of man’s liminal status, humans, Levi believed, live in a state of tormented oscillation between conflicting moral drives, such as virtue and cruelty, truthfulness and deception, courage and cowardice. (Natural Histories also contains a fable called “Quaestio de Centauris,” in which Levi imagined himself as half man, half horse). In conditions of extremity, like a death camp, that oscillation is of course more radical. But it was also a state of being Levi recognized during his time as a partisan, as he put it in the poem ‘Partigia’ (1981):

What enemy? Every man’s his own foe,
Each one split by his own frontier,
Left hand enemy of the right.
Stand up, old enemies of yourselves,
This war of ours is never done.

Luzzatto examines Levi as someone who, after being part of an execution, was aware of being “split by his own frontier” between wanting to do good on the one hand, and being capable of extreme violence and bloodshed on the other.

Levi’s brief account of life in the Resistance in The Periodic Table was published in 1975, a moment in Italian history when the Resistance was celebrated with unqualified certainty. To portray it as something less than wholly virtuous—and as something that led to his eventual imprisonment in Auschwitz—was an example of his characteristic honesty. Levi knew better than most that the fight against Nazism was an undeniable good mixed with incidents of profound wrong. No human was entirely free of these ambiguities. For him, categories of good and evil aren’t to be found in extremis, only choices and compromises.

Primo Levi’s Resistance provides the most in-depth account of the most formative experience of Levi’s outside of Auschwitz, and reveals a side of Levi we’re not used to seeing—a man implicated in a most pointless killing. The significance of The Collected Works is that it gives us a far more eclectic and interesting writer, one who ranged across a vast intellectual terrain that included astronomy, history, linguistics, classical literature, art, current affairs, memory, and religion. Together, the books not only show the formative effect violence as both a partisan and a prisoner had on his writings, as well as the fundamental relationship between violence and powerlessness.

They also display the basic honesty of Levi’s work: the human condition as one of countless moral shades. Perhaps that is why, away from writing, he loved mountaineering, because of its refreshing certainties. Spared of the complications of human existence, which he celebrated but found so exhausting, rock climbing came down to nothing more than the strength of a piton driven into the mountainside. As he wrote in The Periodic Table: “the rope holds or it doesn’t”.

I first met Primo Levi in February 1963, a month before the release of his book The Truce. I had just walked into the press office at Giulio Einaudi publishing house. I had not yet read If This Is a Man, which had initially been turned down by Einaudi in 1946, but finally came out in 1958 in a new edition with 30 additional pages. I knew absolutely nothing about Levi, but the first three pages were enough proof even to a beginner that he was reading a masterpiece.

We became friends, in the way many Torinese are friends: with discretion, reserve; doing together the things that needed to be done without too much talking.

Within the catastrophe of the Shoah, humanity was fortunate that the train leaving Italy for Auschwitz in February 1944 was transporting a very special envoy: an anthropologist not yet aware of his talent; a young chemist who would later become a writer and who had already written short stories and poems. One of them, set in a Milanese suburb among factories, describes a morning siren, announcing the start of the workday – that seems to prefigure the chilling sirens of the camps. Levi is capable of elaborating an articulate interpretation of the facts because his approach is rational (not impressionistic, not rhetorical) and comprises a wide range of disciplines, from the sciences to linguistics and ethology. Of course, knowledge in and of itself is not enough: it needs to be transmitted, as Galileo, Darwin, and Freud, all excellent writers, were able to do.

Long described as a mere witness, Levi the scientist is a great writer, among the greatest in the Italian postwar panorama. Witnessing is not enough. It is necessary to be able to see, understand, and tell. A writer has the ability to choose among the thousand details that compose an instant, a situation, or an event—those very details that explain, interpret, and reveal it. Writing is the place where everything becomes true and necessary. Precisely because he is a scientist and writer, Levi is not satis ed with his initial results but repeats his tests multiple times. Till the very end, he keeps checking experimentally all the data gathered. This expert in vortexes, as he described himself, the calm rationalist, the presumed positivist, never hid his fascination with the opposite: chaos and impurity. As he used to say, “Life is born out of impurity.”

In this respect, Levi was a son of the 20th century. He knows that the human existence unfolds amid ambiguity and duplicity. He knows that the human being, the “confused creature” described by Thomas Mann, faces every day in the first person the clash of mercy and brutality; error and truth, wisdom and folly, generosity and selflessness.

For the longest time, as a conscientious laboratory technician, Levi observed this hybridity, appalling and fascinating at once, knowing that the entanglement of flesh and mind, divine breath and dust, can not be undone.

Levi warns us: “I have avoided brutal details and rhetorical or polemical temptations. The readers may think that other more atrocious reports have gone overboard. While this is not the case, this is not the aspect of truth that I am interested in. Nor did I want to recount exceptions, of heroes and traitors, but I tried to concentrate on the multitude, the norm, the ordinary man, who is neither a bastard nor a saint, whose only asset is pain, but he is able to under- stand it and contain it”.

For these reasons The Drowned and the Saved, that summarizes 40 years of researches and reflections, is one of the key books of the 20th century. A book that should be delivered to every citizen who reaches adulthood, along with a copy of the Constitution, to furnish him o her with a compass with which to navigate the world.

Levi is not an anthropologist of the exceptional, of the extreme-case, of the devilish. He is concerned with the disturbing normality of the human being, of his promptness to be manipulated, indoctrinated, forged and then thrown against another man. Levi works on the man as is. He knows his limitations and weaknesses, but does not make them the object of a moralistic condemnation. He does not forget and does not simplify. He recognizes in the human being the inability to suffer everybody’s pain, but he insists on the importance of not returning the blow, of not entering the spiral of revenge that degrades the victim to the same level as its oppressor. He reaffirms the idea that often it is the worst who survive, the most sel sh, the most violent, insensitive, the collaborators of the “grey zone,” the spies. That the Lager can be described only by those who lived it completely. He dis- mantles and remounts the mechanisms of memory to denounce their weak- ness. He feels that he is never impartial enough, not even when he studies the justi cations invented by Eichman and Hoess, the Auschwitz commander who had invented the gas chambers.

Human memory is a defective instrument. Memories are not engraved in stone. They tend to change and vanish under the weight of trauma, the interference of other memories, repressions, and denial. The memory of the victims removes the most profound wounds and concentrates on the moments of respite and on funny episodes.

A chemist, Levi indefatigably continued to distinguish the elements, weigh them, and analyze their properties. For him knowledge passes through the hands, the nose, and the senses. He does not have the ambition to arrive at the absolute root of knowledge. He only wants to go from one level to another in an attempt to understand more than before.

He refuses overall interpretations and the shortcuts of ideology and escapes the temptation to ascribe facts to an assumed nature of the Germans. He knows well that he cannot attain the reality and the truth: ”I know that I reconstructed a segment, a small segment of reality. In an industrial laboratory this is a great victory”.

The message of Primo Levi was never cathartic, reconciling, or reassuring. Levi does not seek paci cation, he is not a positivist who wants to re-establish the violated order of the world. Through literary strategies, often subtle and dis- simulated, he faced the tensions and contradictions of the 20th century but at the same time claimed an intellectual flexibility that does not fear contradictions, but in fact accepts them as a necessary ingredient of life.

Levi enacted short-circuits between claims to order and transgressive curiosities, he imagined the creation of new hybrids and did not subtract himself from the risk of the monstrous. As he himself claimed, his scientific mindset was equally attracted to the absurdity and the harmony of nature, which he enjoyed subverting.

Levi’s passion for hybridity is well known. He seeks clarity not through magnifying lenses or a strenuous search of nuances, but through the clash and a spark between the opposite poles of the oxymoron. In a superb essay, Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo showed that the oxymoron is key to understanding Levi’s attitude toward the spectacle of a reality that is at once fascinating and sinister. His multiple oxymorons (for instance, “shaken, skeptical, and moved”) represents the highest homage that Levi’s rationality paid to the complexity, the chaos, the ambivalence that characterize a great part of reality.

Levi teaches us diffidence toward all that seems easy, immediate, understandable. His work is not archeology but an ever open laboratory overlook- ing the future. Like his friend Calvino, Levi thinks that from easiness can come only disaster. He is used to moving in a hostile environment. He knows that matter is ambiguous and is a traitor. The universe is possessed by a ferocious and permanent instability. The essential components of matter are governed  by asymmetry: the topic of his doctoral dissertation returns obsessively in his last writings.

Today more than ever we must cultivate discomfort and awareness. The game stays open, the laboratory can not afford to close. To defend the little that is left of the human being we must continue to write our story over and over, go after new documents, consider new evidence, organize it according to new interpretative models. Italo Calvino said that a classic is a book that never stop saying what it has to say. Well, our under- standing of that contemporary classic embodied by Primo Levi has just begun.