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. Translated by Frederika Randall

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”.

Should we assume, as we usually assume in ordinary parlance, that the word “symbol” signifies something beyond what appears at first glance, we should, I will argue, agree that Venice is indeed a symbol, a most intriguing element of cultural discourse, in need of what we call interpretation. For most people, Venice sends an inspiring message as a cultural symbol of west European history—through painting and poetry, prose and sculpture. It emerges from what historians have called the “myth of Venice”: a myth of internal security, stability, conservatism, and economic prosperity, rooted in a domestic  order guaranteed by the most judicious—and pragmatic—institutions. Yet, for the Jewish people, Venice is also the city of the “ghetto,” a linguistic term for which this city may claim “copyright,” though the concept itself was scarcely

a novelty in 1516, the year the Ghetto was established, and therefore also sends a really disturbing message. Can these contradictory messages merge in a congruent one?

Is Venice unique in such opposing situation? As everybody knows, the answer to that is definitely no. One could easily reel off dozens of analogous historical ones. One could recall, for example, the so-called “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century” yet an age that remained dark for the Jews. Or, one could recall the so-called discovery of the New World in 1492 and the resultant restructuring of Western civilization within the framework of the other so-called Renaissance, at the very same time the Jews were expelled from Spain, indeed from all Western Europe. One could further mention the experience of our own epoch, recalling how this age of unprecedented technological and scientific progress has also been the age of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Assuming then axiomatically that Jewish culture and history are integral parts of world culture and history, our first question is but a part of a more general one: How are we to assess phenomena which we believe represent positive moments in world history and culture as being coherent with such disturbing ones for the Jewish people? Can Venice be a symbol of Jewish history in the sense that we posit its symbolism for history in general? The answer, I will now argue, is definitely yes—Venice must be viewed as a most efficient metaphor, a visible case study of the enigmatic allegory of Jewish history, concretely proposed, among other things, to sensible observers leaning against the bridge at the Rialto and weighing the purely human dimensions behind the aesthetic perfection of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. In the first decade of the sixteenth century, following one of those casual incidents that so often set historical forces in motion, the most Serene Republic  found itself facing “the Jewish question.” After having permitted the Jews of its territory to enter the city as war refugees, the end of that war made it a compelling matter of deciding how to deal with them. In the eyes of the Venetians themselves, the issue at stake was the defense of the cultural values fundamental to their own self-perception. All the values, as it were, that the “myth of Venice” held most essential: justice, liberty, and welfare, all rooted in perfect government, and, most importantly, a defense of the Christian ethos, without which no justice or welfare was conceivable. Opinion was divided, yet what is most striking today is how compelling the persuasive

force was on both sides. Arguing for principles of pragmatic utility or even humanity was certainly no more convincing than arguing for the divine majesty of law.

Let us listen to the Venetians themselves: “If they [that is the Jews] are kept,” warned one of the most powerful senators, “we should beware of the wrath of God, for in France and in Spain there are no Jews, and God makes those monarchs prosper.”1 These words were pronounced in November 1519—three years

after sealing the Jews off in the Ghetto, when the terms for their residence were up for renewal. The Venetians had their own categories for looking at history, and a profound respect for its teachings. France was then riding the crest of glory, guided by the bold self-assurance of the twenty-five-year-old Francis i, while Charles, the nineteen-year-old monarch of Spain, was only five months away from becoming Holy Roman Emperor. And France and Spain, of course, held most of Europe in sway. For Venice, which was then

licking its wounds after the recent war against the Empire (that very same war which brought the Jews into the city proper), it was certainly no easy task to know which of these two kingdoms would eventually have the upper hand, once the inevitable showdown took place. Nor were their deliberations made any easier by the fact that yet another royal stripling, Henry viii of England, was moving toward a rapprochement with France, or by the reports filtering back from the Pontifical Court of Leo x, hardly a grey-beard himself. For the Venetians, who were traditionally deferential of wise and experienced leadership, all these boy–kings playing at war and politics were undoubtedly a source of anxiety. And for the religiously-oriented, this was no doubt a time to be wary of God’s wrath. To clinch the argument, yet another great senator stood up and reminded the Assembly that not only had Spain driven the Jews out of its lands, but that they went to Naples and, there you have it, King Alfonso lost his throne. Moreover, the Duke of Milan had also been driven from power for showing the Jews favor. “And now,” said the amazed senator, “we are going to do the same thing and incur the wrath of God up against us”!2 Thus the tradition of centuries, supported by a genuine piety and fear of God’s wrath, no less than a healthy respect for the teachings of history, all conspired to keep the Jews out.

But there were other voices abroad in the Senate, one of which belonged to an eighty-six-year-old man, for whom the prospect of God’s wrath was no doubt a matter of greater concern than for the younger politicians with a career to carve out. The main argument now was that the Jews had to be kept for the

poor. If before we saw the Venetian categories of political thought in action, inspired by their own “myth of Venice,” we now find another category at work, and another perception of that myth, one that combined the concept of perfect government with the Christian ethos of charity. Such is to say, the argument pointing to the wrath of God could be countered with another example of recent Venetian experience: After all, was it not “during the time that they [that is, the Jews] lived in Mestre that Mestre was burned down by our enemies, and then, when they came to live in the city, [that] we recovered our dominions?” Moreover, “when the Jews were driven out of Spain, they took with them much gold. They went to Constantinople, and Selim conquered Syria and Egypt.”3 History’s teaching, then, was not at all linear. From the Venetian standpoint, concerned with Turkish aggression no less than with the threat posed by France and the Holy Roman Empire, the growing prosperity of the Ottoman Empire was no less paradigmatic than that of France or Spain. For these men, then, history was telling them to harness the mythical Jewish riches to the service of Christendom. Hence a consciousness of the Venetian tradition of perfect government, sensitive to the needs of the poor, and a no less healthy respect for the teachings of history than the other side of the body politic, all conspired to keep the Jews in.

Given such conditions, little wonder that public opinion was seriously divided. The vote that followed the discussion we have just cited resulted in ten abstentions, sixty-four in favor, sixty-six opposed, so that for a while the Jewish settlement was seriously threatened. A subsequent vote reversed the previous decision and left the Jews where they were. So it was that the Ghetto became a permanent fixture in the Venetian landscape.

To be sure, any actual view of the Ghetto must conjure up a sense of basic intolerance, of frustrating constriction of vital living space, of the compelling necessity to expand vertically, and its axiomatic metaphor of yearning upwards, towards heaven, far away from earthly care. What, then, kept the Jews of the Ghetto from leaving? After all, they were not totally deprived of viable alternatives, as some of us might imagine; the road to the Eldorado of the Ottoman Empire was wide open to the Italian Jews, and a considerable number of them indeed took that route.

The Jews, it would seem, preferred to see the institution of the Ghetto as a step towards a new era of tolerance. They could thus quite reasonably even consider their situation as having turned the tide of Jewish exclusion from the European west. In Venetian parlance: a first fragile bridge between two diametrically opposed ideologies—Christianity on the one side, and Judaism on the other. Yet, from the vantage point of some five hundred years, historians less worried by pragmatic considerations and more inclined to ponder on the sense of history sine ira et studio may very well hold such opinion.

In fact, we may do well to rethink the Venetian experience, for this specific Ghetto conveys not only the idea of exclusion but also of inclusion, not only of segregation but of integration. As a mirror of exclusive, even imperialist, ideologies, the Ghetto forced these ideologies to come to terms with their own reflected image and, ultimately, to wear them away. Seen in retrospect, the Venetian Ghetto thus embodies a compromise as organic, as evolutionary—and yet as ambiguous—as any history has to show. As a symbol of Jewish History, this Ghetto may thus represent not only the enigma of coping with General History, but also offer a first step towards its solution. It may, that is to say, symbolize a major aspect of the convoluted path of Jewish experience in Western Europe, through the ambiguous and laborious process of bridging over exclusively imperialist ideologies. As a paradigm of Jewish integration in the fabric of Western society, the judgment of history cannot, in the final account, be wholly negative.

The special functional model of community life that took root in the Ghetto, devised by the various ethnic groups of Jews clustered within, is a phenomenon of the late sixteenth century, thus more or less contemporary with the institution of the Ghetto itself. Of course, the novelty was not in the mere fact of pluralism within Judaism: this was a tradition of old. In Venice itself, Italian and Ashkenazi Jews had lived under the same roof since the very beginning of Jewish settlement there. The novelty was, rather, in including the Portuguese Jews under that roof, and in their integration within the framework of community life. While it is true that the Portuguese Jews belonged to the same Iberian stock as the Levantine Jews, who came to Venice from the Ottoman Empire, the Portuguese were not simply one more variety of Judaism. They were Jews who had formally returned to the ancestral faith after having spent two or even three generations as nominal New Christians in the lands of the Iberian Peninsula. There was another aspect of Venice that brought the Portuguese Jews to its shores: the bustling commerce of a maritime power still capable of bridging between East and West and thus maintaining the vitality of that route, despite the fact that the sea-lanes of international commerce were shifting, and the discovery of the New World had affected Venetian trade routes. The economic activity in which the Portuguese Jews engaged, principally trade, was conducted through a ramified network of contacts stretching from the Netherlands to the Ottoman Empire, and extending over much of Italy.

But if the economic role of these Portuguese Jews was unassailable, their religious identity was another matter. Many of them did not openly return to Judaism, preferring to conceal their Judaism and to remain as Christians among Christians. A considerable number of these Jews settled in Venice. They lived outside of the Ghetto, even though it was common knowledge that they were Christian in appearance alone. Thrown into a world where religious identity was rigorously defined, the Portuguese Jews brought, then, a whole new set of meanings to the terms Jewish and Christian, simply by their very being. They ran the entire gamut, from being a hundred percent Jews living inside the Ghetto to a hundred percent Christians living among Christians, all of them interrelated by ties of both family and business. A New Christian who returned to Judaism and lived in the Venetian Ghetto might quite often be related to genuine Christians living in Spain or in Portugal, to less genuine Christians living outside the Ghetto in Venice itself, as well as to genuine Jews off in the Ottoman Empire.4 In other words, the converso phenomenon had thrown down the gauntlet to Jews and Christians alike, for according to the reigning mentality, ethnic and religious self-definition was still coterminous with precisely defined norms of behavior. Hence it was not only the traditional stereotype of the money-lending Jew that the Portuguese helped to dispel, there on the banks of the Venetian canals, but also the traditional categories of religious self-definition. One might almost see them as harbingers of the modern Jew, defining him- or herself more in terms of ethnicity than religion. And so it was that however unconscious, however unintentional or even unwilling, these Portuguese Jews helped to mediate between the old and the new, and to build yet another bridge between Jewish and Christian preserves.

Once Judaism was permitted to take root again in Western Europe, the Jewish self-government of later Sephardi communities such as those in Amsterdam and London modeled itself on the Venetian example. In other words, one may safely say that after having been eradicated from Western Europe, the Judaism that regenerated there followed the institutional and cultural model of Venice, which had first integrated the emerging new kind of Jew into its institutional and cultural melting pot. However, triumphant though the picture may be—and what is the Great Synagogue of Amsterdam, for example, if not an expression of confident Judaism—it must have been quite a painful experience, attended by a lingering sense of alienation born of the inability to integrate smoothly into the existing structures of Judaism, try as they might to discard the residuals of Christianity. Yet all in all, it must also have been a very rich and creative experience, one that was to have, in the long run, a tremendous impact for the shaping of European Jewish history.

From this perspective, both aspects of the Venetian Jewish experience symbolize the uneasy, often painful maneuvering between mutually exclusive ideologies, and of regenerating by setting across bridges of understanding and communication, to meet the rejecting as well as rejected Other. Both are equally representative of the ambiguity inherent in the very nature of such cultural bridges.

Venice is certainly the most appropriate place for talking about bridges. Those piles and bricks thrown over a tamed yet very often threatening sea are themselves part of the visual translation of the myth and history of Venice, as much as the great art and architecture with which the city abounds. And from the perspective of Jewish memory, the essential prerequisite of myth and history, these fragile bridges may be even more powerful symbols than all the gilded splendor of St. Mark’s Square. Steering our representation of the past and our quest to find meaning in the present, they inspire us while building our future.

While we are not so naive as to believe that history can teach us in the way that we were once told (historia magistra vitae), we should not feel too confident in dismissing it either. History can inspire by its symbols, in the sense that it can cause their interpretation to give meaning to cultural tradition, itself the only way of consciously perceiving one’s existence in the present. That is to say, our task is one of balancing the demands of universal culture with the search for a proper definition of a specifically ethnic one—no matter whether Christian or Jewish culture—the task of translating the Venetian vestiges of the past into the concrete experiences of the present, of becoming a cultural bridge between East and West, in every possible sense of the word, one to which we must be as dedicated, as committed and, in short, as wedded, as ever Venice was wedded to its sea.

Endnote

1 M. Sanudo il giovane, I Diarii [mccccxcvi-mdxxxviii], ed. R. Fulin, 58 vols. (Venice, 1879–

1903, reprint: Bologna, 1969), vol. xxviii, col. 62.

2 Sanudo, vol. xxviii, col. 63.

3 Sanudo, vol. xxviii, col. 64.

4 B. Pullan, “‘A ship with two rudders’: ‘Righetto Marrano’ and the Inquisition of Venice,” in

The Historical Journal, xx, 1 (1977): 37.

The Tragic, Enduring Relevance of Arendt’s Work on Statelness

While Hannah Arendt is most known for her reflections on totalitarianism and the banality of evil, eighteen years of statelessness (1933-1951) brought her philosophical questions of how one might be at home in the world into sharp relief. The fact that she was Jewish and German during the first half of the twentieth century profoundly influenced her life and writing. Given today’s refugee crisis, Arendt’s work is being examined anew in order to understand the ways in which mass statelessness has influenced the world since the twentieth century. As historian Jeremy Adelman wrote in The Wilson Quarterly: “Arendt’s voice is one we can turn to as we grapple with the spread of statelessness in our day. Camps and pariahs are still with us.”[1]

More than 70 years ago, Arendt wrote about the refugee crisis during World War II in a brief essay entitled, “We Refugees.” Published in a small magazine, Menorah Journal, it was re-printed in various anthologies, but often overshadowed by Arendt’s writings on totalitarianism and Eichmann, as well as her relationship with Martin Heidegger.[2] In 1993, fifty years after the publication of “We Refugees,” the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben reflected on Arendt’s essay within the context of his time. If the refugee was regarded “as the paradigm of a new historical consciousness,” the camp became the symbol of modernity itself.[3] In his reading of Arendt’s essay, the refugee is a kind of homo sacer. Arendt’s argument that statelessness is a consequence of the modern nation-state forms the backbone of much of Agamben’s powerful critique of sovereignty. The political and legal structure of the nation-state based on the rights of man and citizen excludes those who are not citizens. The exclusion of the stateless, as we witness today, results in the administration of the excluded by national agencies, smugglers, strangers, charities, international organizations and, most tellingly, the police. Agamben is, of course, right. “We Refugees” needs to be read in the context of Arendt’s writings on the Jew as pariah and her analysis of imperialism and rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism. But there is also a more immediate context to Arendt’s brief essay — that of her own life experience as a stateless person and her participation in a generation who shared the same fate.

After leaving Germany for Paris in 1933, Arendt worked with Youth Aliyah, a Zionist organization helping Jewish children emigrate to Palestine. In 1940, with the Vichy occupation, she was sent as an “enemy alien” and “undesirable” to an internment camp in Gurs. After a fortunate escape, Arendt joined her husband, Heinrich Blüchner, and eventually received an emergency visa for the United States through Lisbon. Although she knew that she was lucky to obtain this visa, she was not yet a citizen when she wrote “We Refugees” in 1943. She did not yet have what she would spend much of her life writing about — the right to belong to a political community. Most tellingly, “We Refugees” was written in the aftermath of the death of two fellow Jewish refugees who identified themselves as Europeans: Walter Benjamin took his life in September 1940, and Stefan Zweig ended his in February 1942.

Arendt had become friends with Benjamin during their time in Paris and had received her visa for America a few months after him. As fate would have it, the border to Spain closed the day Benjamin attempted to cross and re-opened the next day. With his hopes to emigrate to America dashed, he took his life in September 1940. Arendt carried his last manuscripts when she took the very same route, a short time later from France to Spain, arriving in New York in May 1941. In her essay on Benjamin, she retraced his flight from Germany and noted how his world had been steadily taken away. His apartment in Paris had already been confiscated by the Gestapo and part of his library given to the Bibliothèque Nationale. “There were few who still knew his name when he chose death in those early fall years of 1940.”[4]

If Benjamin saw his individual fate as part of a break in civilization, Arendt looked towards the political foundations of the nation-state: “All politics dealing with minorities, and not just with the Jews, have foundered on the existent and abiding fact of state sovereignty.”[5]World War I meant the end of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires and the creation of newly independent states with “Minority Treaties” to protect those whose ethnicity did not coincide with the state that they suddenly resided in. As a consequence of these treaties, a new class of people emerged: the stateless, or as Michael Marrus phrased it in his remarkable book, The Unwanted. “If one regards European history as the development of the European nation-state, or as the development of European peoples into nation-states, then these people, the stateless, are the most important product of recent history.”[6] The stateless became “modern pariahs.”

Jeremy Adelman writes: “The real plight of the pariah is not just to be driven from home. That has been a misfortune of our world for a long time. God did it to Adam. Rulers have made outlaws from time immemorial. No, what singled out the modern age was that no one would take in the pariah.”[7] Benjamin despaired when the Spanish police closed the border and feared that no one would take him in. Although Zweig was able to take refuge in Brazil, for which he was grateful, he was unable to cope with his degradation to a pariah, and he and his wife took their lives in a hotel room in 1942. Zweig’s suicide note is the chilling testimony of a person wrenched out of his world:

Every day I learned to love this country more, and I would not have asked to rebuild my life in any other place after the world of my own language sank and was lost to me and my spiritual homeland, Europe, destroyed itself.

But to start everything anew after a man’s 60th year requires special powers, and my own power has been expended after years of wandering homeless. I thus prefer to end my life at the right time, upright, as a man for whom cultural work has always been his purest happiness and personal freedom — the most precious of possessions on this earth.

I send greetings to all of my friends: May they live to see the dawn after this long night. I, who am most impatient, go before them.[8]

Zweig identified himself with “my spiritual homeland, Europe.” His last book, The World of Yesterday (1942) recounts his exile from Austria and Europe. “So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars.”[9] In her essay “Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday,” also written in 1943, Arendt reflects on Zweig’s inability to cope with being a refugee. “That he himself, only yesterday so famous and welcome a guest in foreign countries, should also belong to this miserable host of the homeless and suspect was simply hell on earth.”[10] Stefan Zweig, the famous Austrian writer, had been degraded to “Jew Zweig.” He could not come to terms with being labelled a Jew and a pariah. “Without the protective armor of fame, naked and disrobed, Stefan Zweig was confronted with the reality of the Jewish people.”[11] To be thrown onto his bare humanity meant that he was rights-less and stateless. By his own account, The World of Yesterday was both an autobiography and portrait of a generation. “The times provide the pictures, I merely speak the words to go with them, and it will not be so much my own story I tell as that of an entire generation — our unique generation carrying a heavier burden of fate than almost any other in the course of history.”[12]

Arendt recalls Zweig’s last article, “The Great Silence,” from March 1942, in which he writes how Europe — Central Europe in particular — was “shocked into silence” at the rise of National Socialism and anti-Semitism. In the wake of today’s rising populism, the building of walls in Central Europe and fear of mass immigration of non-Europeans into the continent, one wonders whether history is repeating itself. Is Europe, and by extension, the United States, shocked into silence when confronted with the mass of refugees seeking asylum? Does the agreement between the European Union and Turkey in 2016 represent silence towards those waiting in refugee camps or those hiding in war-torn Syria?

Read in the context of Arendt’s reflections on Benjamin and Zweig, “We Refugees” is a portrait of a particular generation of extraordinary Jewish intellectuals, who were not only able to find a place in a new country, but who also contributed greatly to the world we live in today. Such people include Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Hans Cassirer, Siegfried Kracauer, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Jonas, Erwin Panofsky, Karl Popper, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. But, unlike Zweig, Arendt did not limit herself to those who enriched the sciences and humanities; rather in “We Refugees” and later in The Origins of Totalitarianism, she gives voice to ordinary people who were somebody in their world and in their language. “We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings.”[13] These people, most of whom were European Jews, in seeking refuge had to leave everything behind, only to become “the stateless” or modern pariahs.

At the very beginning of “We Refugees,” Arendt is at pains to distinguish between how the stateless are identified by sovereign states (as “refugees”) and how those same people view themselves. “In the first place, we don’t like to be called refugees. We ourselves call each other ‘newcomers’ or ‘immigrants’”[14] The title “We Refugees” emphasizes the shared experience of flight, homelessness, loss and adjustment to a new home. In the essay, she writes less about her own private life, and more about what the stateless have in common. “A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held… Now ‘refugees’ are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by refugee committees.”[15]Even though they are identified as “refugees,” Arendt foregrounds their fierce desire to be someone who belongs to a community. Using irony and dark humor, she portrays those who try to integrate into their new world, like Mr. Cohn, the Jew from Berlin, who was “150 percent German” while living in Germany. However, when forced to leave, in Prague, he became “150 percent Czech.”

From being someone who belongs somewhere, Arendt describes the radical loss of the world experienced by many refugees. They seem to be nobodies who belong nowhere. Moreover, “We Refugees” includes poignant reflection on those who took their lives. “We are the first nonreligious Jews persecuted — and we are the first ones who, not only in extremis, answer with suicide.”[16] Stefan Zweig felt degraded, from being a famous Austrian and European writer, to simply a Jew. Walter Benjamin was humiliated by the experience of hiding and fleeing. Their deaths were not rebellious but a desire to end their uprooted wandering. “Yet our suicides are no mad rebels who hurl defiance at life and the world, who try to kill in themselves the whole universe. Theirs is a quiet and modest way of vanishing; they seem to apologize for the violent solution they have found for their personal problems… If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded.”[17] What binds refugees together as a “we” is the fact that they were once somebodies. In their new state of limbo, some were able to cope; others could not. “Once we were somebodies about whom people cared, we were loved by friends, and even known by landlords as paying our rent properly.”[18] Indeed in a letter to Karl Jaspers in 1946, Arendt writes of waiting for an end to her statelessness. “I am still a stateless person, and your picture of me living in a furnished room is to some degree still accurate… As you see, I haven’t become respectable in any way.”[19]

Whether pariah or parvenu, once Jews lost their citizenship and political rights during the Third Reich, they lost their own distinct place in the world. “The pariah Jew and the parvenu Jew are in the same boat, rowing desperately in the same angry sea. Both are branded with the same mark; both alike are outlaws.”[20] Can we not say the same about today’s refugees, who are “rowing desperately” to avoid war and violence, but who are regarded as “outlaws” when they reach the borders? At the end of “We Refugees,” Arendt outlines a way to overcome the stigma of being refugee, pariah or outlaw. By becoming a “conscious pariah,” she was able to speak for those in her generation and maintain her identity. “Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their people — if they keep their identity.”[21]

The stateless, as an unwanted and superfluous product of the international order, are a fact that can neither be ignored nor wished away. Today, more than seventy years after the publication of “We Refugees,” we face a similar problem. There are approximately 60 million refugees in the world, half of them children, who will spend much of their childhood in a refugee camp. What is, of course, different about the refugees then and now, is that today’s refugee is not European, and often Muslim. And yet the question remains: how should we respond? Arendt reminds us that patterns of exclusion, the proliferation of refugee camps and masses of people seeking refuge, bear more than a passing family resemblance to 20thcentury statelessness. “We Refugees” is more than an early essay outlining her later analysis of rights and the nation-state. It speaks both to the refugee crisis of the 20th century and to ours.

Endnotes

[1] Jeremy Adelman, “Pariah. Can Hannah Arendt Help Us Rethink out Global Refugee Crisis?” Wilson Quarterly, June 2016.  Accessed 27 August 2016.

[2] Originally published in 1943 in Menorah Journal (January 1943), pp. 69-77. It was reprinted in The Jew as Pariah, edited by Ron H Feldman, New York: Grove Press in 1978, pp. 67-90. It is currently printed in The Jewish Writing, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H Feldman, New York: Schocken Books in 2007, pp. 264-274.

[3] Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights” in Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Trans. by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000, p. 14. Also see his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

[4] Arendt, Hannah “Introduction. Walter Benjamin 1892-1940” in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, p.1.

[5] Hannah Arendt, “The Minority Question” in The Jewish Writings, edited by Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman, New York: Schocken Books, 2007, p. 127.

[6] Ibid., p. 128.

[7] Jeremy Adelman, op.cit.

[8] National Library of Israel,  Accessed 28 August 2016.

[9] Zweig, Stefan The World of Yesterday. Trans Anthea Bell, London: Pushkin Press, 2014. Foreword, p. 2.

[10] Arendt, Hannah, “Stefan Zweig: Jews in the World of Yesterday” in The Jewish Writings, op.cit., p. 318.

[11] Ibid., p. 328.

[12] Zweig, Stefan op.cit. p. 1.

[13] Arendt, Hannah “We Refugees” in The Jewish Writings, op.cit., p. 264.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.,p. 268.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid., p. 269.

[19] Correspondence 1926-1969 by Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Trans. Robert and Rita Kimber, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1992, p. 29.

[20] Arendt, Hannah “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” in The Jewish Writings, op.cit., p. 269.

[21] Arendt, Hannah “We Refugees,” op.cit., p. 274.

Opening remarks at Third Annual Symposium on Primo Levi

I feel both honored and inadequate for the role of opening this symposium since I am neither a literary critic nor a historian. Still I have read practically all of Primo Levi’s writings and have spent more time with my first cousin’s husband than probably anyone here. So I accepted the invitation to speak as one who had had the good fortune of enjoying his company at various times over a period of nearly four decades.

I first met my cousin Lucia’s new husband at my Bar Mitzvah in Turin in 1948. I had already known of him for at least a year.  And when my mother received from her sister a copy of the first printing of “Se Questo e’ un Uomo” in 1947, I assisted my father with an awkward English translation of its first chapter.  Its intended recipient was Boston’s renowned literary rabbi, Joshua Loth Liebman, author of the highly successful title “Peace of Mind” which had enjoyed a long run on the New York Times book list. I don’t recall how the good rabbi was enticed into meeting with two members of Boston’s tiny Italian Jewish community, my father and Anna Foa Jona, Primo’s first cousin.  In any case this first  attempt at introducing Levi to an American public came to naught with Rabbi Liebman’s assurance that the public (presumably including Jewish readers)  had heard enough of the Holocaust and such a book would never find an audience. Whether or not he was correct, my young mind was affected strongly as the entire  text was read to me by my father.

A step back for clarification. My parents, Achille and Maria Viterbi, and I, their only child, left Italy in mid August of 1939 as a consequence of the Racial Laws.  After two years in New York City, we settled in Boston where my father, formerly the chief ophthalmologist at the major hospital of Bergamo, restarted his truncated career, opening a practice at nearly sixty years of age. But my parents’ heart and spirit never left Italy. For at least the next  twenty-five years the primary lifeline to their former homeland was the weekly correspondence between my mother and her five Luria siblings, all born in the mid-size town of Casale Monferrato, located about midway between Turin and Milan, but very Piedmontese in dialect and character. Her closest sibling, in age, temperament and warmth was Beatrice (known to me as zia Bice). Her husband, Giuseppe Morpurgo was a highly respected professor at a Liceo in Turin and a much published author of school books and of Jewish themed novels, most notably Yom Ha-Kippurim, the chronicle of a mixed marriage. During the era of the Racial Laws, zio Giuseppe was the Principal of the Jewish School of Turin, which provided an education for the Jewish children barred from attending (and polluting!) the schools for Aryan chidren. Zia Bice and zio Giuseppe and their unmarried twin daughters spent the years of Nazi occupation in hiding among the good and reliable peasants of the high Piedmontese Alpine country. Returning to their home at war’s end, they began the cycle of correspondence with the news of how all family members had survived the Holocaust. Not long afterward came the news that both the twins, Gabriella and Lucia, had become engaged, the latter to the chemist and Concentration Camp survivor, Primo Levi.

Three years later, as I turned thirteen with only the slightest exposure to Hebrew prayer practice and no relatives nearby, we came for the summer to Italy to celebrate my Bar Mitzvah among a host of aunts, uncles and cousins.  Only zio Giuseppe with his Jewish community credentials could secure the tutor for a crash course in Hebrew and ritual and obtain rabbinical approval in spite of my limited religious preparation. So that was the occasion where I first met Primo. I must admit that though he was already a celebrity within the family, I was so nervous and focused on my challenging task that I was hardly aware of him. On the other hand, my father, a renaissance man with wide cultural interests, was much impressed by this brilliant young man and engaged him in extensive conversation.

Little more than a decade later, having moved to California to work in the space program and married, I returned to Italy with my wife, Erna, who was expecting our first child. Having participated in the first successful U.S. satellite launch, I was invited to lecture in England, France and Italy. We visited the whole family including, of course, uncle and aunt Morpurgo and their daughters with their families. Recently, my primitive 8 mm. films from that trip were digitized and I viewed scenes I hadn’t seen in several decades. The moving images of the whole young Levi family, Primo, Lucia and both young children standing on the narrow balcony of my aunt’s apartment startled me bringing back cherished memories. Our next visit to Italy was of much longer duration. In 1967 and 68, taking a sabbatical leave from my UCLA faculty position and spending most of it at the Milan Polytechnic, we visited my aunt in Turin a few times. On each visit, Primo and family would come by and we would exchange the latest family happenings and catch some glimpse of Primo’s latest literary output. I also recall on those occasions the kindness and respect shown by Primo to his in-laws. Our travel to Italy became ever more frequent over the subsequent years. On several of these visits we were invited to the Levi apartment on Corso Re Umberto, where I best remember Primo’s study filled not only with books but with hanging mobiles which he fashioned himself. Over the years, we developed a warm relationship, occasionally discussing scientific matters.

Beginning in 1967, my father having passed away the previous year, my mother came to visit her beloved sister Bice nearly every summer for the next dozen or so years. Part of each visit, along with another sister and brother, they spent “in villegiatura” at a modest pensione in Frabosa Soprana, a village in the lower Piedmontese Alps. Primo’s mother was occasionally their companion. One time in the late 70’s, both the entire Levi family and ours visited there at the same time and stayed briefly at the pensione.  There we had the pleasure of meeting not only Primo’s mother but his sister, Anna Maria, and her husband, an American film script writer exiled to Rome’s Cinecitta’ as a victim of the infamous Hollywood Blacklist during the McCarthy era. My brief conversation with this colorful and direct American brother-in-law of Primo would have seemed more natural back home in Los Angeles than in rural Piedmont.

My most vivid recollection of Primo was our last encounter, both because of its length and the circumstances. This was in April, 1985 during Primo and Lucia’s only visit to the United States. Much of this visit, with its intense book tour schedule, has been chronicled in biographies of the now renowned author.  What I can add is that the few days in California spent with family provided something of a respite from the crush of admirers that surrounded him throughout the tour. After a day or two in Los Angeles where along with meetings with film industry figures, they visited Lucia’s and my mutual cousins (who had arrived in the U. S. at almost the same time as I). Then my wife and I picked them up and drove them the hundred or so miles to our home in the San Diego area. There they spent two days. The main attraction was a visit with my overjoyed 91 year-old mother. But we also arranged a brunch for Primo  to meet some of our university community’s chemists and historians, most notably H. Stuart Hughes, an emeritus Harvard history professor, who was spending his retirement years  at UC San Diego and writing his memoir. Hughes had at one time been the “Peace and Freedom” party’s candidate for the U.S. presidency, but more successfully had written the monograph “Prisoners of Hope” recounting the stories of a half dozen Italian Jewish authors, including Primo, Carlo Levi, Natalia Ginsburg and Giorgio Bassani. That encounter was not particularly memorable, but another guest at the brunch, my next door neighbor, Professor Gustaf Arrhenius, grandson of one of the earliest Nobel laureates in chemistry, recalled the meeting and my relationship with Primo for years afterward.  From San Diego we drove with the Levis to Claremont, a college town about a hundred miles to the northeast, where he was to lecture. On the way, Primo spoke to us of the manuscript of “The Drowned and the Saved” whose galley proofs he was correcting at the time. Needless to say, his lecture at Harvey Mudd College on the subject of the book was outstanding not only for its content but as well for his delivery in fluent if accented English.  He even handled the Q&A in English, after an abortive attempt to insert a translator who was not up to the task. We left Primo and Lucia in the comfortable visitors’ living quarters and the kind hospitality of the Hillel rabbi of the college. After they returned home we corresponded a couple of times, the last time within days of his death.

The foregoing are the plain facts of my interactions with Primo Levi, my first cousin’s husband.  Words are not adequate to describe the essence of the man.  I can only say that he was extremely kind, warm, thoughtful and more sociable than how he is usually described in innumerable articles and books. I was indeed fortunate to have interacted on a human level with the remarkable individual whose memory and literary patrimony we honor tonight.