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Booklet of abstracts
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Franco Baldasso (New York University):
The Other as the Judge: Testimony and Rhetoric in Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo
In Holocaust accounts such as Primo Levi’s testimony, what is at stake for the
speaker is not just an attempt to make sense of a traumatic experience through storytelling.
The witness’s aim is also that of reestablishing a community – one that such experience
shattered. The mythopoetic function of these texts can be critically aligned with the concept
of persuasion at the core of ancient rhetoric. I attempt an analysis of Levi’s testimony, Se
questo è un uomo, from the viewpoint of the rhetoric and the persuasion Levi employs in the
relationship with the implied reader.
Since the very title of the book, Levi charges his reader with a high responsibility: the
one of the judge. Still, Levi seemingly grants his addressees not only the responsibility, but
also the right to judge. But what and who are they supposed to judge if Se questo è un uomo
“has not been written in order to formulate new accusations,” as Levi himself claims in the
“Prefazione?” My analysis shows that the violent impulse, the sense of “interior liberation”
Levi spoke of as the ground of his testimony was something more than the overwhelming
drive to let “the others” know of the Holocaust. It was also an appeal for a suspension of the
judgment about his personal case. By proving the inconsistency and the impossibility of any
established right to judge what happened within the camp, and by pulling the reader to the
bottom of human existence that the survivor experienced, Levi asks “the others” for a
suspension from the guilt of surviving he was feeling. In this regard, Se questo è un uomo is
not only a testimony, but a confession.
Martina Bertoldi (University of Trento):
The Construction of The Periodic Table
Among Levi’s works, the one which best represents the senselessness of the division
between science and literature and the author’s will to achieve a necessary recomposition
between the two, is no doubt The Periodic Table. In this book the gap is closed thanks to a
game of continuous interactions in the description of the misadventures of the chemist-writer
(explicit at content level but especially important as regards style and form). This approach is
based on Levi’s conviction that between the two forms of culture there exists a bridge built by
the sharing of the same forma mentis, that interprets both the needs of the chemist and
those of the writer as both figures tackle the irreducible complexity of reality; this complexity,
while escaping the schematism of formulations and continuously challenging the boundaries
of the speakable, involves both figures in the identical fight aimed at gaining knowledge,
within which they become gnosiological tools by means of their similar positioning within a
regulated system of signs: Mendeleev’s table and literary practice respectively.
“To build”, a verb that, in the words of the author himself, 1 brings chemistry and
writing together within the framework of a more complex sharing of methods – this is
precisely what Levi does in conceiving the balanced architecture of the collection of stories,
by setting around a core of texts that recall the fundamental experiences of his life all the
other elements in charge of communicating the biographical events as well as the actually
recurred recomposition of his two souls, in a skilfully structured work within which the two
cultures mingle and evoke each other both in the content and in the "position" of the stories,
and are reunited in the final short-circuit that once again states the complexity of the tangle
that shapes the Centaur Levi.
A philological approach to the text, indirectly authorized by the author himself when in
one of the stories he transforms the solution of a chemical problem into an exercise in
philology, shows how the special conformation of the collection is the result of subsequent
work on the layout of the texts.
In particular, the variation-based pattern obtained by the comparison of a group of
stories anticipated in dailies and magazines or previously compiled and later edited and
included in the collection, and of the original typewritten manuscripts kept in the Archives of
the editor Einaudi (that offer many examples of the author’s own adjustments), with the final
1
P. Levi, Opere, vols. I-II, edited by M. Belpoliti, Einaudi, Turin, 1997 (page 872, vol. I)
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compilation, clearly shows Levi’s care in not leaving any of the stories unrelated and most
importantly his intent to build an ordered and per se significant structure that, by transmitting
several thematic elements, may offer yet another sign of what occurs in the texts, once again
diluting via the synthetic process the clear distinction between shape and content.
Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr. (Northern Michigan University/ Brandeis University):
Levi Avec Lacan: “Enjoyment” of the Holocaust & the New Anti-Semitism
Jews and Israelis stand accused of exploiting the Holocaust to their advantage.
However, against this accusation, I will contend that the complaint itself, more often than not,
stems from a fantasy lying at the root of contemporary anti-Semitism. Moreover, I argue that
an imagined obscene Jewish “surplus enjoyment” of Holocaust memory (an excessive
“genocide jouissance”) is itself a prime object of racist enjoyment today (after the end of the
Cold War, in particular). In other words, the contemporary Judeophobe enjoys the enjoyment
of the Other—or, in simple terms, is fascinated by his own projection onto the Jew of a
“fullness of satisfaction” that, it is imagined, can only come from being the world’s exemplary
victim. As the distinguished political scientist, Robert Meister observes,
In a world that has learned to feel good about itself by feeling bad about the Jews,
one can take special umbrage at Jews who refuse to apply the Holocaust’s lessons to
their own treatment of Palestinians. These Jews are to be criticized for thinking that
they are the only real Jews, and that the Holocaust confers special privilege on
actions they take to protect themselves from those who, as enemies of the Jews,
become the moral equivalent of Nazis who would bring about the Holocaust again.
This attitude has become a seemingly new offense that Jews, and Jews alone, can
commit now that their victimary identity has been universalized. 2
As Bernard-Henri Levy has likewise observed, in a similar vein, the “new anti-Semitism” of
today is thus explicitly anti-Zionist:
We have nothing against Jews, the new antisemite protests, as always. What we’re
against is people who traffic in their own memory . . . and push out the memories of
others . . . for the sole purpose of legitimizing an illegitimate state.3
My own discussion of this problem—as identified by Meister and Levy—deploys the notion of
a “politics of enjoyment” (jouissance), as developed at length recently by the Lacanian social
theorist, Slavoj Zizek, in order to account for what I have elsewhere referred to as “Holocaust
Envy.”4 As Zizek notes, not the reality of the Jew himself but the fantasy of the Jew is what
has always fueled the libidinal economy of anti-Semitism:
What the perpetrators of pogroms find intolerable and rage-provoking, what they react
to, is not the immediate reality of Jews, but the image/figure of the “Jew” which
circulates and has been constructed in their tradition.… [T]his image overdetermines
the way I experience real Jews themselves. What makes a real Jew that an
antisemite encounters on the street “intolerable,” what the antisemite tries to destroy
when he attacks the Jew, the true target of his fury, is this fantasmatic dimension.5
With this fact in view together with the problem of “Holocaust envy” (indicated by Meister and
Levy), my paper explores the nature of the “fantasmatic dimension” of the Jew today. It does
so specifically with regards to the Holocaust as an object of “enjoyment”—contrasting the
2
Robert Meister, After Evil (New York: Columbia UP, 2011), 175-6.
Bernard-Henri Levy, Left in Dark Times (New York: Random House, 2008), 158.
4 Gabriel N. Brahm Jr, “Holocaust Envy,” The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (Vol 3., No. 2),
Winter 2012.
5 Slavoj Zizek, On Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 66-7; my emphasis.
3
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latter fantasy with the harsh reality of Auschwitz and the real burden of its memory, as
recorded in the works of Primo Levi. To bring out the difference between the fantasmatic Jew
and the real one, the Holocaust as it is “enjoyed” and as it was lived, I refer in my discussion
to Survival at Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved.
Arthur Chapman (Edge Hill University), Alice Pettigrew (Institute of Education,
University of London) and Adrian Burgess (Institute of Education, University of
London:
‘It happened, therefore it can happen again’: an exploration of English Sixth Form
Students’ Ideas about the lessons of the Holocaust
The notion that there are ‘lessons to be learned’ from the Holocaust has become a
very familiar trope within contemporary Holocaust education. But what exactly does it mean
to ‘learn from’ the Holocaust? And what, if any, are the lessons that could, or ‘should’, be
learnt?
Primo Levi devoted his life as a writer to reflecting on and communicating his
experiences in Auschwitz and was driven, from his earliest to his final work, by the conviction
that the events he had personally experienced must be more widely confronted and
understood: ‘it happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to
say’ (Levi, 1988: 165-70). He called upon his readers to ‘meditate that this came about’ and
‘carve’ the words in their ‘hearts’ (Levi, 1987: 17) but also recognised the challenges to
understanding that these experiences present for those who live in different times (Levi,
1988: 121-36 and 165-66; Levi, 1987: 386-89).
This paper will draw on data collected as part of an evaluation study of the Holocaust
Educational Trust’s ‘Lessons from Auschwitz’ project (Chapman, et al., 2011). Using a
sample of the post-participation interviews with 16 - 19 year old students who took part in the
project, the paper will critically consider the forms of ‘learning from the Holocaust’ that the
students articulate in relation to the educational imperative articulated within Levi’s work.
References
Chapman, A. (et al.) (2011) Evaluation of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from
Auschwitz Project: Final Report. London: Institute of Education.
Levi, P. (1987) If This Is A Man / The Truce. Translated by Stuart Wolf. London: Abacus.
Levi, P. (1988) The Drowned and The Saved. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. London:
Abacus.
Catherine Charlwood (Independent scholar):
‘Il resto [non] è silenzio’: The Friendship of Texts between Hamlet and Se questo
Whether or not Levi intended it, his reference to Hamlet at the end of ‘The Canto of
Ulysses’ immediately has all English readers hearing the dying words of the Danish Prince. A
transmission of meaning between the Shakespeare play and the Auschwitz account helps to
shed light on Levi’s own situation. Both texts are exploring what it is to wait: one waits to kill,
the other to die/drown/be saved. Incarcerated in a concentration camp, Primo’s moral
compass is left to spin wildly, just as is Hamlet in Denmark’s ‘prison’ with only dreams to fall
back upon.
Just as the question overhanging the whole text is the essential ‘what is a man’, this
paper asks what good might come from considering Levi through a Shakespearean lens, by
adding Hamlet’s near-identical concern with ‘what is a man, if his chief good […] be but to
sleep and feed? A beast, no more.’ The comparison which the initial intertextuality invites can
be extended to include the philosophy of the protagonists: Hamlet’s ‘there is nothing either
good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ (Folio, 2.2), helps one to understand Levi’s insights
into ‘la felicità perfetta’ (‘Il Viaggio’).
I hope to show that such a friendship of texts further allows Se questo to
communicate with its readers, a poignant concern given that both texts display the desperate
need to tell others and the frustration that comes from finding language inadequate to the
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task. I use Hamlet here to open up the questions that Levi puts before us, both to reappraise
his text and to re-emphasise its literary resonances.
Mirna Cicioni (Monash University, Melbourne):
Anti-Babel: Inter-linguistic Communication in Levi's Work
"We can and must communicate," Levi states uncompromisingly in The Drowned and
the Saved, and adds that refusing to communicate, irrespective of cultural and linguistic
barriers, is ethically wrong. In his earlier essay "Tradurre ed essere tradotti" he had singled
out translators and interpreters as particularly worthy of recognition, "because they work to
limit the damage done by the curse of Babel".
I look at some of the many instances of inter-cultural and inter-linguistic
communication in his works, focusing on two recurrent themes. The first is the position of
Levi's autobiographical self vis-à-vis the languages, or fragments of languages, he comes
across. The second is his representation of makeshift interpreters – individuals who in a
variety of situations are required to perform speech acts on behalf of other people – and the
cognitive and ethical dilemmas they face, some tragically ironic, others humorous.
My analysis draws on interpreting theory and on theories of humour. It is a
contribution to further discussions of Levi's humour, his ethics and his view of differences as
sources of meaning and knowledge.
Anisha Datta (Brandon University):
The politics and violence of caste in the light of Levi’s ethics
The caste system has been officially abolished under the Indian constitution. However,
every eighteen minutes a crime, often violent in nature, is committed in India on a dalit
person. As a sociologist studying social inequalities and social justice, I find Primo Levi’s
thoughts on social ethics to be immensely relevant and illuminating. In Survival in Auschwitz
he wrote, “[F]or a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and
efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too
powerful”. Using this philosophy as a guiding light, I examine the role of the Indian state in
protecting dalits against caste based violence. Drawing on recent scholarship on violence
against dalits, I contend that the Indian state fails to maintain a ‘civilized and just’ social
condition in the country. In addition, I focus on the prevailing ‘upper caste’ critique of the
affirmative action in India, to show how it goes against the principle of alleviating the
harshness of ‘low caste’ birth. In this paper, I also attempt at a productive synthesis of Levi’s
thoughts on ethics and the theory of egalitarian liberalism from John Rawls and Amartya Sen.
In the end, I argue that literature (e.g., Levi’s writings) provide a viable mode of pursuing
critical sociology of social inequality and justice, the essential goal of which is to unpack the
irrational contradictions within social and political formations, and to indicate the possibilities
of emancipatory human action.
Lia Deromedi (Royal Holloway, University of London):
Identity After Trauma: Language and Selfhood in Primo Levi’s If Not Now, When?
Primo Levi, like many survivor-authors, writes with an intimate sense of the struggle
between the new idea of identity forged through trauma survival and a search for meaning
through representation. Positioned between varying identifications of selfhood - chemist,
Italian, partisan, Jew, prisoner, survivor, writer - Levi's perspective demonstrates the distinct
conflict faced by Holocaust experiencers. Levi depicts his own struggle with identity through
his collection of characters that portray varied nationalities, religious adherence, genders,
ages, and political ideologies. Levi’s novel tackles the complex issues at the heart of a work
on the problematic subject of the Holocaust: how does trauma affect identity and how does
one communicate this literarily?
Primo Levi’s novel narrativises the effects of trauma on individual and collective
identities that is well documented in non-fiction. It cannot be examined outside the framework
of Levi’s pivotal essay collection, The Drowned and The Saved. Written simultaneously as If
Not Now When, the essays act as a companion to interpreting Levi’s trauma narrative.
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Although most known for If This is a Man, considered along with Elie Wiesel’s Night and
Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl to be of the most influential accounts of Holocaust
survival, I believe Levi’s novel demands study apart from his autobiographical work. It is my
contention that Levi’s ability to fictionalize his and others’ Holocaust experiences in novel
form offers unique insight into the human condition and the question of identity after trauma.
Giuseppe Episcopo (University of Edinburgh):
On Solid Air: Primo Levi’s Words through the Radio Waves
By resorting to the mythological creature of the centaur, Primo Levi adopts a
metaphor to depict the duality of his own nature: on the one hand he belongs to the empirical
world of hard science and the factory, on the other is bond to the deductive elaboration of
empirical reality through literature. Interestingly the centaur is not just the combination of two
elements, for he is mainly the result of this combination, a new figure. And the new figure is a
cause effect compound of multiplicity: insofar in his analyses sine ira et studio Primo Levi
bridges scientific structures and social body, where Latin perluciditas and modern
multilingualism are guided by the new literary status that Levi assigns to the voice.
This is why among the precious legacies left by Primo Levi, his collaborations with the
Italian public service broadcaster RAI would occupy an interesting position. This paper will
investigates specifically the works that Primo Levi realized with Radio RAI during the Sixties,
when “Terzo Programma” was experimenting and exploring new genres thanks to directors
such as Giorgio Bandini, Andrea Camilleri, Carlo Quartucci, Giorgio Pressburger. Besides
adapting Se questo è un uomo for the Italian radio in 1964 (it is known that Levi appreciated
the version broadcasted by a Canadian radio station in 1963), the collaboration with “Terzo
Programma” was particularly intense. From 1964 to 1968 Levi assiduously wrote radio
dramas: Il versificatore (aired on February 4, 1966), Trattamento di quiescenza in 1968 and
Intervista aziendale, broadcasted the same year on the 29th of November. These radio
dramas demonstrates the ways in which Levi’s writing elaborates multiple elements and
sources: fictional narrative, science-fiction, documentary, faction. Moreover the specific
qualities of the radio enhance the implicit multiplicity of Levi’s texts: by balancing voices,
dialogue, silence, natural or ambient sounds, and white noises, the centaur has found his
own landscape— for a while—within the complex soundscape of his audio dramas .
Vittorio Fichera (Istituto Comprensivo San Polo, Canossa):
Intertextuality in Primo Levi and George Orwell
Since the half part of Seventeen’s, Primo Levi’s celebrity has bound by a close
knowledge of If This Is A Man and the role of him as witness of the most terrible tragedy in
the last Century.
This strict point of view has prevented to see the real value of Primo Levi’s narration.
During recent ages, many studies have allowed a renovation of research’s
prospective, in particular from the publication of «Riga» (Belpoliti, 1997).
The new season of studies seems to converge with two main directions: the discovery
of the unknown Primo Levi’s production, that is not based about the experiences of Lager;
the analysis of author’s literary, thorough the effective instruments of intertextuality
(Berardinelli, 2000).
My main aim is to show the whole image of Levi as a reader and a re-writer of a
dystopian narration. The description of the upside-down world of Lager as a reality
controlled by the power’s eye is an important literary resource to understand totalitarian
system.
I’ll try to demonstrate it, using the instruments of thematic criticism: the representation
of a ‘dystopic’ world like an enclosed island, the control of the past, the discipline of wills and
the falsification of reality, the creation of a grey area in which persecutors and victims could
be mixed.
In other words, my attempt consist in a creation of a net of cross-references, a
palimpseste (Genette, 2007), where the literary tradition can meet the reality where literary
subjects and theirs shapes can contribute to describe the nightmare of Lager.
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To argue my thesis, I have to show the places where the narration of Levi’s Lager is
similar to the dystopian word of Airstrip One.
It is possible to find a relationship between Primo Levi and George Orwell in other
places of Levi’s work. In Censura in Bitinia, a story composed at the same time of the If This
Is A Man, Levi speaks about an author of a modest manual about farming animals (Levi,
1997, p. 411). Probably, this periphrasis of Animal Farm hides the name of Orwell. Moreover,
we could pay attention to another reference of Orwell in I mnemagoghi, included in the same
book, Storie Natuali.
The most clear reference is available in I sommersi e i salvati, (Levi, 1986, p. 20)
where Levi – about the process of manipulation of records – writes: “the orwellian falsification
of memory”.
In my opinion, the use of intertexuality, focused on Levi and Orwell, could be a
contribution to give us an advice to succeed in analyzing the relations between each other:
Orwell’s knowledge by Levi would be suggestive reading key for Levi’s work.
REFERENCE LIST
BELPOLITI, M. ed., 1997. Primo Levi, Milan: Marcos y Marcos.
BERNARDELLI, A., 2000. Intertestualità. Firenze: La Nuova Italia.
LEVI, P., Censura in Bitinia. In: Opere, vol. I, cit., p. 411. 1950.
ORWELL, G., La fattoria degli animali, 1947. Traslatinon of Tasso B., Milano: Mondadori.
ORWELL, G., Homage to Catalona 1948. Translation by Monicelli, G., Milano: Mondadori.
ORWELL, G., 1984. Il Mondo. [between the 7th Geannuary e il 20th May 1950].
Christina Foisy (York University, Toronto, Canada):
Hatred in the Holocaust Classroom: Reading Primo Levi affectively toward social
change
“For us to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult. We see it as a duty and,
at the same time, as a risk: the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to. We
must be listened to beyond our personal experiences...” (Levi, the Drowned and the Saved
199)
The above quote by Primo Levi evokes the inherent anxiety in Holocaust education of
not being able to communicate the incommunicable events of the Nazi lagers—yet weighty
obligation for education to do so. While striving to help students read ethical possibilities
within the limit-cases of difficult history—provoking many to work-though the unthinkable
atrocities of the past—there is always the risk of not being listened to, and stirring up
student’s defences, or worst, boredom. Working against passive forgetting, autobiographical
accounts of the Holocaust read in pedagogical situations are charged with an imperative to
focus on the personal and be welcomed by students unquestionably. Such demands seem
hardly ethical, or morally possible, since students must be able to interpret these difficult firstpersonal narratives in morally active, self conscious, ways rather than be passively
empathetic—or caught memorializing every word. Levi’s life writing thus takes readers
beyond his personal recollection, toward a humanistic perspective on issues arising from the
Holocaust. As such, many have disputed his place in the life writing canon given his essaylike “scientific” prose. However, Levi is not without emotion.
Debating whether The Drowned and the Saved belonged on a life writing syllabus, a
fellow student exclaimed: “I hate him!”referring to his “privileged” position and “luck”. Many
questions arose from this debate, namely how someone could hate a survivor wrought with
shame regarding his survival—and risk such an avowal in a classroom studying the
Holocaust?
Such anxious questions turned my attention toward psychoanalysis. Deborah
Britzman, in The Very Thought of Education, develops an affective theory of reading that
contests the practice of remaining faithful to an original text. Instead, readers must destroy
the text from the inside then put it back together. Embracing this transformative process that
departs from “instrumental” reading, Britzman contemplates on being a slow reader, one who
reads too carefully not being able to “let go” and forget the book. As such, reading cannot let
7
go of an affected life: “we are always reading between the lines—wagering meaning and
deferring it” (56). Similarly, Primo Levi’s revisionist account, The Drowned and the Saved,
presents a paradox in life writing; a type of writing that begs to “let go” of history—and life—
through the very act of remembering it.
I offer a reading of Levi’s writing through the lens of Britzman’s theory of reading. In
my reading of the classroom reception of Levi that begun ironically with hatred, I gesture
toward Julia Kristeva’s reading of hatred in the forgiveness of the unforgiveable—what she
calls “postmoral” pardon (191). Somewhere between the lines of The Drowned and the
Saved and the limits of autobiography, I have come to think that my fellow student had
indeed attended to Levi. She had ironically articulated the point of the book. Levi was never
the hero of this story; he had drowned his personal story in the stories of others, for all to
read.
Margareth Hagen (University of Bergen):
Chemical Autobiographies
Primo Levi and Oliver Sacks have both written autobiographical novels based on their
knowledge of, and experience with, chemistry. Il sistema periodico (1975) and Uncle
Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001) are novels that mix the essayistic,
philosophical style with popular science and autobiography. In order to assess Levi’s
narrative and mnemonic use of his trade, the paper will confront the different representations
and symbolical uses of chemistry in these two autobiographical books.
Christopher Hamilton (King’s College London):
‘These things are part of us’: Primo Levi's philosophical anthropology
In If this is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi claims that the
prisoners in Auschwitz were reduced to animals, in the process losing their personality. In
this paper I suggest that the idea of animality in Levi is not at all clear and I seek to provide a
more plausible conception of it. To this end, and using a specific idea in the work of Levi, I
explore the role of personal property in the construction and protection of the human
personality. I suggest that Levi has a radical conception of the human personality according
to which it is constructed by the things by which the human being is surrounded, and is thus
radically fragile. I explore this fragility, and claim that Levi pushes us to recognize a tragic
aspect of our condition that, in general, has been overlooked in philosophy.
Gregory Herman (University of Aberdeen):
Jorge Semprún and the Legacy of Primo Levi
For Theodor Adorno, the existence of Auschwitz marked an irreparable rupture in all
cultural and creative norms. More recently, within a field that we may loosely term as ‘trauma
studies’ the (im)possibility of closure for the ‘revenant’ or survivor of the camps has become
a favoured trope of the academy. In an exploration of these theories, this paper shall ask
whether through the act of imitatio, cultural convention can be restored, and the potentially
cathartic benefits of writing and testifying can be actively facilitated. This question shall be
posed through a consideration of the influence that Primo Levi would have on Buchenwald
deportee, Jorge Semprún, and the following citation.
The camp was indeed our only truth. The rest – family, nature in flower, home – was
no more than a brief interlude, an illusion of the senses [...] Nothing was real outside
the camp, that’s all. The rest was only a brief pause, an illusion of the senses, an
uncertain dream. And that’s all there is to say.
Bearing more than a strong resemblance to the closing paragraph of Primo Levi’s The Truce,
it would be easy to attribute these desperate and despairing words to different editions or
translations of the Italian author’s work. And yet it is not from Levi’s account that this extract
is taken. Rather it is from Semprún’s Literature or Life (1994: 243-251). Such instances of
intertextual referencing, imitation and paraphrases are numerous within Semprún’s writing;
8
however this particular example is perhaps worthy of more extended consideration, since it
opens up a number of intriguing and complicated questions rooted in literary theory,
psychoanalysis and trauma studies; these questions moreover will build upon the different
value that each author found in writing: Levi “found peace for a while and felt [him]self
become a man again, [...] neither a martyr nor debased nor a saint [...] [his] baggage of
atrocious memories became a wealth” (The Periodic Table: 151-3). By contrast, Semprún’s
first work, The Long Voyage (1963), “thrust [him] back into death, drowning [him] in it,
choking [him] in the unbreathable air of [his] manuscript” (1994: 250).
With this fundamental difference established, why is it that Semprún imitates so
explicitly the style and vocabulary of Primo Levi? Is it an affirmation perhaps of Semprún’s
assertion that “nobody could say it better than Levi” (1994: 304), or is it only through imitation
that Semprún himself is able to ‘become a man again’? Is Semprún’s imitation of Levi an
example of ‘mere’ empathetic identification with another deportee, or is it an altogether more
aggressive adoption or assumption of identity? If so, what are the implications of imitation
within testimony for the possibility of ‘working-through’ and ‘acting out’ vicariously the
traumatic experience? Lastly, is it possible for an uninfluenced, original and subjective voice
to testify to the concentrationnary experience, when a writer such as Primo Levi has, albeit
against his wishes, come to be recognised as the authoritative voice of the univers
concentrationnaire?
Marije Hristova (Institute for Language, Literature and Anthropology; Centro de
Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, CSIC, Madrid/ Maastricht University):
Remediating Levi: Primo Levi in Spanish Contemporary Literature
In my paper I will analyse the remediation of the literary testimony of Primo Levi
through a reading of two contemporary Spanish novels: Sefarad (2001) from Antonio Muñoz
Molina and El comprador de aniversarios (2002) from Adolfo García Ortega. Both novels are
to be understood as a product of the recent literary interest in the Holocaust by contemporary
Spanish authors.
Until the 1990s the memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust has been
foreign to Spanish collective memory. This is not surprising, considering the complete control
of public memory by the Franco dictatorship until 1975. While the efforts of the Blue Division
were inserted in the discourse of glorification of the ‘martyrs’ who had died for Spain during
the Spanish Civil War, the memory of the republicans in the German concentration camps
were silenced and banned together with the republican memories of the Spanish Civil War.
The now emerging interest in the Holocaust in Spain shows again a remarkable synchrony
with the re-emergence of the remembrance of the Spanish civil war. I am interested in the
approximation to the memory of the Second World War from the Spanish perspective.
Interestingly, the two novels considered here, explicitly use the work of Primo Levi as
a reference for constructing their literary representation of the Holocaust. García Ortega
turns Hurbinek (appearing in Levi´s La tregua (1963)) into the main character of his novel,
while Primo Levi himself becomes a personage and a primary literary reference in the novel
Sefarad by Muñoz Molina. With this, their work poses questions related to the boundaries of
the representation of the Holocaust, but also related to the representation of the Holocaust
by authors who are in principle foreign to the cultures of Holocaust remembrance.
I will argue that the work of Primo Levi is particularly appealing for these
contemporary Spanish novelists. Firstly, their particular focus on the Sephardic background
of Primo Levi enables the linkage between Spanish collective memory and the memory
construction of the Holocaust. Secondly, the hybridity in Levi´s testimony and his concern for
a larger map of historical injustices answer to the contemporary trend of universalizing the
memory of the Holocaust. However, with that, I do not wish to attack these novels of
reducing the uniqueness of the Holocaust, yet I will understand the remediation of Levi´s
work as an example of the multidirectional processes of memory, as pointed out by Michael
Rothberg (2009).
9
Sante Maletta (IES Milan/ University of Calabria):
Political Philosophy after Primo Levi: Totalitarianism or Biopolitics?
The aim of this paper is to consider the heritage of Primo Levi’s works from the
perspective of contemporary political philosophy. In particular, I will refer to Roberto Esposito
and his opposition of the biopolitical paradigm (based on Foucault’s thought) to the
totalitarian one (based on Arendt’s). With reference to Primo Levi’s writings, I will argue in
favour of the compatibility of the two paradigms. In summary, humanity can accept the
challenge of the third millennium only if it does not forget the teachings of last century
totalitarian experience.
Maria Anna Mariani (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul):
Paper Memories, Inked Genealogies: About Primo Levi's The Search for Roots
My proposal is focused on Primo Levi’s La ricerca delle radici [The Search for Roots]
(1981), the anthology which collects writer’s favourite reading. This book provides much food
for thought. Here I would like to isolate two points.
The first one relates to the following question: according to Primo Levi, what are
roots? The most immediate answer identifies them in his stylistic influences. But this is not
the only issue. Observing La ricerca delle radici shape, we notice that the pages selected by
Levi are connected to very precise biographical experiences, summarized in short
introductions placed at the top of each excerption. In order to put together this collection, Levi
looks at his favourite shelf, where all the books which were especially important to him are
aligned, underlined in their most striking parts, and in doing so he comes across the
souvenirs associated to all those pages. In this way, biographical souvenirs and reading
souvenirs amalgamate, increasing the remembered moment intensity. Therefore, Levi’s roots
are first of all his memory and life roots. This anthology is an autobiography.
My proposal aims to comment on the inclusions and exclusions of Levi’s peculiar
canon, extending these considerations towards a theoretical proposition about the following
issues: the concept of personal anthology, the relationship between canon and memory, the
ethic choice opposed to the aesthetic judgement (Levi’s choices, who excludes the classics
and includes questionable works, are exemplary in this sense).
The second matter for reflection generated by Levi’s book comes up to the problem of
genealogy. Genealogies are an increasingly recurrent thematic in contemporary culture
which, together with the search for local identity and an obsession with the theme of
persistent memory, betray a deep and evident need for roots in a society which may appear
in many ways to be only interested in the present.
But here the search for roots is not addressed in terms of blood relationship; whereas,
Levi insists on the importance of literary and cultural ancestors. Through this book, the writer
seems to leave us a problematic legacy: the legacy of evaluating the various influences
which both genetics and culture contribute to a process which might be described as “how
we become who we are”.
Kirsty McCulley (Edge Hill University)
Conveying the Holocaust: If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table
In its exploration of trauma and representation, this paper offers a comparative
reading of Levi’s narrative voice in two texts: If This is a Man (1947) and The Periodic Table
(1975). The study focuses upon the way in which the Holocaust is omnipresent within Levi’s
writing, but his handling of this topic has altered over time. The study explores Levi’s
authority as a narrator and questions the way in which his writing style reflects the anxieties
of a survivor writer. The paper explores notions of detachment, isolation and alienation, as
well as investigating the way that Levi utilises his narrative to pose philosophical questions to
his readership. It questions the problematic nature of language and its inability to represent
physical experiences, and examines Levi’s own descriptions in order to explore the way in
which his prose, and his approach to the Holocaust, alters as his career progresses.
10
Sara Miellet (Sussex University):
Primo Levi and language: From a sense of belonging through language to limits of
language and the untranslatability of Auschwitz
In many of Primo Levi’s works, his fascination with languages, philology, and
literature is a recurring theme. Although a avid reader of literature, Levi’s interest in the ways
in which languages operate and function, apart from a simple appreciation, manifest what
Lepschy and Lepschy (2007:121) have described as a “linguistician’s mindset”. This paper
illustrates how this early fascination with languages which Levi sustained throughout his life,
in similar vein as Levi’s writings on laughter and humor, is deeply marked by his later life
experiences, and particularly his survival in Auschwitz,.
The mastery of different languages, particularly German and French, which initially
sprang from a curious mind and of an avid reader, later became decisive in the struggle for
life and death in the Lager. It should be noted that Levi only become exposed to languages
such as Dutch, Yiddish and Hungarian in Auschwitz, and in some cases Levi’s relation to
them (particularly German and Polish) remained forever tied up with memories of the camp.
As Patruno (1995:83) suggests, for Levi “linguistic ability is as much an issue of cultural
assimilation and communication as one of gaining technical proficiency and an ability to
survive”. The radical incommunicability of life in the camps which prevented communication
between camp inmates, according to Levi furthermore “formed an important element in the
demolition of the personality and the dehumanization imposed by the Lager” (Lepschy and
Lepschy, 2007). That the mastery of language(s) can offer protection as well as a sense of
belonging, is an idea that springs up in many of Levi’s works, such as in his chapter Argon in
the Periodic Table. Here Levi’s interest in the Jewish-Piedmontese idiom is underpinned by
the idea that this jargon manifests the contradictory condition of Jewish communities in the
Diaspora. According to Levi, this contradictory condition consists of, on the one hand, the
divine call of the Scriptures. and on the other, the daily misery of the wretched life in exile.
The Piedmontese-Jewish dialect although understood by Levi as a language of the defeated,
thus offers protection as well as a sense of belonging, due to its intricate mixture of
Piedmontese and Hebrew. Although Levi’s writings on language suggest that linguistic ability
is closely intertwined with issues of identity and assimilation, Levi’s thoughts on language are
more complex, as his writings on the untranslatability of his traumatic experiences in
Auschwitz suggests. In this paper I thus offer an interpretation of Levi’s complex views on
and engagement with language(s). This involves a discussion of the various ways in which
language is understood by Levi as e.g. offering a sense of belonging – be that imposed (as in
Levi’s cased with Yiddish) or self-affirmed – or alternatively as the medium through which the
very destruction and dehumanization of the personality can and was brought about in the
Lager.
Catherine Mooney (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev):
Understanding and Judgement in the ‘Gray Zone’: Moral Ambiguity and the Holocaust
This paper is intended to open a discussion as to the need for a new and distinct
moral category that would be able to contend with the morally ambiguous persons that crowd
the pages of Holocaust literature.
Primo Levi begins his essay ‘The Grey Zone’ by questioning if survivors of the
Holocaust have been able to understand and make others understand their experience. In
asking this question he raises the further question of what it means to actually ‘understand’
and it is in answer to this second question that he sets the scene for the discussion that
follows. He argues that attempts to understand the Holocaust, and more generally the world
around us, are highly susceptible to the human desire for simplification. This desire, he
states, ‘is justified, but the same does not always apply to the simplification itself’.
In this paper I will examine Levi’s suggestion that the moral status of many of the victims of
the Nazi system is not malleable to the clear distinctions that are often drawn in moral
philosophy between moral and immoral. The silence that surrounds the question of the
ethical status of persons such as Chaim Rumkowski, the ‘President’ of the Łódź Ghetto, is
due in large part to the inability of traditional ethical theories, with their fixation on ethical
11
absolutes or moral laws, to capture the complexities of the persons and situations that
present themselves to us the readers of the Holocaust. I will further contend that the ethical
ambiguity of these individuals cannot become transparent to us; ambiguity is their final moral
status. In so far as ambiguity is their moral status the ‘suspension of judgement’, that Levi
advocates, should not be understood as a temporal status that could find resolution through
the application of the traditional ethical theories but rather should be understood as an act of
judgement in and of itself. The paper will conclude with what I suggest as a solution to the
problem posed by moral ambiguity. I assert the need for a distinct moral category that can
accommodate the vast expanse of ambiguous persons that evade the black and white
distinctions that are so central to western philosophical thought. This category being neither
black nor white but grey.
Inés Valle Morán (Universidad Complutense de Madrid):
Une Histoire des odeurs: Primo Levi and the olfactive world in concentration camp
narratives
Starting with the analysis of one of Levi’s first short stories, I mnemagoghi (1946),
after just coming back from Auschwitz, the aim of this paper is to reflect on the importance of
the olfactive world in the remembrance process, not only in his writings but also in many
other written by the survivors of the Holocaust. Smell will be considered as a key element in
recalling memories, a deeply suggestive instrument which builds a whole evocative universe.
Memory, as Levi underlined at the end of his life, is a marvellous instrument but it also can
crystallize, be manipulated, be fallacious or even turn into a “memoria-protesi”. In the end the
aromas of the past will not disappear at all and cannot be controlled. As Jorge Semprún
wrote, « Il suffirait de fermer les yeux, encore aujourd’hui. Il suffirait non pas d’un effort, bien
au contraire, d’une distraction de la mémoire remplie à ras bord de balivernes, des bonheurs
insignifiants, pour qu’elle réapparaisse ». « Elle» is the aroma, the strange, sickly sweet,
provocative and obsessive “odeur” of the crematorium, that many survivors recalled in their
writings and testimonies. Some aromas inside the concentration and extermination camps
arouse a souvenir from the past, others will appear even in the prisoners dreams, and the
smell of death and illness will pursuing them from the first day in the camp. Many smells
would be “printed” in their memories, preserved in a metaphorical “storehouse”, like the little
glass flasks of Dottor Montesanto in Levi’s short story. The fear that just only one of his
memories could be erased forced him to embody and capture them in chemical compounds,
recreating the smells, perfumes and essences that had defined his life.
Antony Rowland (University of Salford):
Primo Levi: Poetry as Testimony
Testimony is generally seen as an ‘unaesthetic’ form of written or oral attestation to
historical suffering opposed to more self-consciously literary forms such as poetry. Hence
some critics assume that the poetic and the testimentary are somehow incompatable: as Sue
Vice illustrates, ‘it is not poetic testimony but prose testimony that is typical of Holocaust eyewitness, while Holocaust poetry is considered a separate and self-contained genre’. In this
paper I argue that - when a critical opposition between poetry and testimony is unravelled Primo Levi’s poems can be read productively as testimonial acts. They are sometimes
positivistic, recounting historical details in poetic form, but, more importantly, they also
comprise metatestimonies, modulating Levi’s famous prose narratives such as If This is a
Man and The Drowned and the Saved. In addition, they often testify to the author’s post-war
experience, shedding new critical perspectives on the ‘grey zone’, and Levi’s ambivalent
response to the figure of the musulmann, which Jean Améry describes as a camp inmate
who was ‘a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions’. In
Remnants of Auschwitz Giorgio Agamben discusses the figure of the musulmann as an
aporia in Levi’s prose testimony, but in this paper I argue that attention to the poetry reveals
that Levi sometimes figures himself as a musulmann in both the poems and neglected
sections of If This is a Man.
12
Pradeep Sharma (Addis Ababa University):
Primo Levi and the Problematic of Assimilation/ Alterity
The perceived “differentness” of an ethnic group by the majority population or the
dominant ideological force in a nation is the genesis of the problematic of assimilation from
both sides – the minority (usually the diasporas, but it may be any minority group anywhere)
finding the experience of assimilation harrowing since it is impossible to merge completely in
a new situation without the complete loss of identity, which is neither desirable nor possible
for various reasons; or conformity to the standards of propriety directly or indirectly set by the
host, otherwise running the risk of living sub-human/non-human life; while the majority finding
it difficult to accept these “different” people as proper human beings because –
i.
they belong to a different race,
ii.
their skin colour is not the same as theirs,
iii.
their religious practices are different from their own, and
iv.
they pose a threat to the security and polity of the country by being different,
etc. etc.
The emerging alterity dangerously perpetuates the idea of the opposition of
human/non-human/ less than human human-beings and supports the myth of the monolithic
character of ethnic groups. The standards of the concept of “human being” measure human
being against the yardstick of the ideological constructions of the dominant power. It primarily
neglects the human being per se, and respects only certain traits in human being – lack of
those traits make him less than human. It is dangerous since it pervades almost all the
spheres of human life and goes deeper in a host of prejudices / hatred / undermining
practices. The surprising revival / resurrection of various neo-Fascist/neo-Nazi
groups/ideological constructions all through the world is a living testimony to the pernicious
trend.
Primo Levi’s primary concern in his works has been to speak for the dignity of human
being – a respect for the human being as such. My aim in this paper is to explore the issue of
the problem of assimilation and the resulting alterity in Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table and If
This is a Man, as well as the concept of human being which, from a certain perspective, is
problematic. My interpretation will include analysis of the neo-Fascist and Neo-Nazi trends
emerging everywhere, that justify their resurrection through ‘perceived / imagined threats’ to
the survival of the majority because of the existence of the “different” people in their midst.
David Shteinman (Australian Centre for Commercial Mathematics/
Engineering Pty Ltd):
The Stern Judge: Primo Levi’s Legacy of a Philosophy of Work
Stamen
Matter is also an education, a genuine school for life. Fighting against it, you mature and
grow” Primo Levi interview with Giorgio De Rienzo and Ernesto Gagliano, reprinted in The
Voice of Memory, p.92
In the Periodic Table and The Wrench Primo Levi has left the legacy of a set of ideas
from which an original philosophy of industrial work can be built. Levi’s focus was on the
skilled technical work of applied science, engineering and the technical trades that transform
physical matter for commercial purposes.
Using references to these two works, this paper will discuss the unique features of
Levi’s ideas on work that allow those ideas to be extended to many types of work not
originally considered by him. Levi's philosophy of work is found to be relevant to the
contemporary cultural problems of "virtuality" and the separation from direct contact with
primary matter.
Levi’s ideas on work start from the fact that any type of work imposes a set of
demands on the practitioner in order to practice successfully. These demands, by daily
repetition, become habitual in the practitioner, and then become ingrained as “character”.
Levi’s insight (influenced by Conrad) was that working in the indifferent media of physical
matter – the sea, chemical elements or Faussone’s structures - imposes performance criteria
13
that are purely objective. Levi examined the moral effect of working in such indifferent media
as chemistry and structural engineering, where one is forced to “measure oneself against
matter”. The work of industrial chemist or rigger, and others like it, are subject to the
indifferent laws of nature that are the ultimate judge of success or failure. Such an objective,
indifferent and strict judge demands a certain character to meet its continuous tests.
Using Levi’s insight on the role of the worker’s relation to matter, I clarify the ethical,
epistemological and ontological demands of working with matter in a general sense. These
demands that produced the characters of Faussone , and Levi too, include a thorough
empiricism , ontological realism about truth, a reliance on particular, specific knowledge, an
aversion to abstract generalizations that cannot be tested, and an austere economy in the
use of language in general . Successful engineers cannot have a relativist view of truth when
they are on the job – by definition.
Levi’s focus on industrial chemistry and structural engineering can be extended to any
technological transformation of matter. This widens the “reach” of Levi’s philosophy to all
branches of engineering as well as manufacturing, transport, mining, agriculture - any type of
work where the laws of nature are the judge (as opposed to the “judgment” of public opinion,
fashion, taste etc). Based on the author’s own industrial experience in manufacturing,
mineral processing and operations research, real examples are given to support the
extensions of Levi’s philosophy.
There are also parallels in Levi's philosophy of work to Wittgenstein’s views on types
of knowledge, and the Wittgensteinian concept of a “Form of Life”.
Wittgenstein’s focus on the type of understanding that consists in “seeing
connections” – as opposed to abstract theoretical understanding - is the parallel to Levi’s
critical discrimination between “know how” and “know what”. With Levi (and Wittgenstein, the
trained engineer), “know how” or seeing connections is the kind of knowledge required for
successful industrial work. It refers to skill, judgment based on experience, the appropriate
use of theory combined with understanding of matter. The habits of “know how” become, in
Wittgenstein’s phrase, a “Form of life”. In the character of Faussone Levi has explicitly made
the industrial form of life manifest, without resorting to any theorizing. In Wittgensteinian term
this is a case of “showing”, rather than just “saying”.
Marco Sonzogni (Victoria University of Wellington):
Literary Legacies: Translating Primo Levi’s poem ‘Schiera bruna’ into English
A cliché of translation is that the translated text, in one way or another, is inevitably
worse than the original. Yet there are illuminating exceptions: sometimes at macro-level and
more often at micro-level – a passage, a sentence, a single word even. In my paper I will
look precisely at the translation of a single word – namely, the adjective brown – and how its
meanings and movements between times, languages, cultures and literary traditions
ultimately enriches both the originals and the translated texts.
Starting from the etymology and usage of brown (The Oxford English Dictionary), I
will first examine the translation into Italian of a rare ‘publicity jingle’ penned by James Joyce
in 1930 to salute Faber & Faber’s publication of Anna Livia Plurabelle (the fluvial instalment
of his new work in progress, which would come out in its entirety almost a decade later, in
1939, with the same publisher but with a new title: Finnegans Wake). Though the obvious,
most common Italian translation is marrone, there is another and more intriguing alterative,
which is visually and acoustically (as well as etymologically) closer to the English: bruno.
Moreover, this word has a powerful literary pedigree: Dante, in fact, uses it in Canto XXVI of
Purgatorio to liken lustful sinners and their movements to a brown file of ants (“così per entro
loro schiera bruna | s’ammusa l’una con l’altra formica, | forse a spiar lor via e lorfortuna”:
Purg XXVI 34-36). This very image is borrowed verbatim by Primo Levi in his 1980 poem
‘Schiera bruna’. The translation into English of this poem – which was not included in
Feldman and Swann’s edition of Levi’s Collected Poems (based on the 1984 Garzanti edition
of Ad ora incerta) – reinforced my belief that 1) literary translation ought to be considered and
carried out as comparative literature in action; and 2) in doing so, one can aim at producing a
translation that is equal to its original in literary and linguistic terms.
14
My paper will also look at the literary pedigree of another word in Levi’s poem:
formiche, ants, whose presence and symbolism bridges classical and contemporary literature
from Homer to Hudspith, from Apuleius to Atwood, from Virgil and Ovid to Montale and
Wilson.
Didem Uca (University of Pennsylvania):
Losing Oneself in the Past and Finding Oneself in Unlikely Places: Language, Identity,
& Community in Levi
Häftling. Stück. Jude. These are words from the German language that served to
control and dehumanize the prisoners of the concentration camps. Though Primo Levi
associates pain and hatred with these words, he credits his comparatively strong knowledge
of German with his survival. Meanwhile, one might assume that a prisoner’s native language
would provide prisoners with a sense of comfort. However, Levi’s relationship with Italian is
far more complicated. In some instances, speaking Italian serves to remind him of his
humanity, such as in his interactions with Lorenzo and Jean the Pikolo. But as Levi sees the
community of Italian speakers dwindling, any connection with home makes him liable to the
viciously unforgiving sweet agony of memories. When he is unable to understand Yiddish, “di
fatto la seconda lingua del campo”1, Levi feels isolated from many of the other prisoners. The
lack of a common language between the Jewish prisoners problematizes the notion of a
Jewish people, as a term of both external and internal identification. My presentation will
explore the various effects of language on the psyche of the concentration camp prisoner
and survivor, focusing on language as it builds and destructs community, and as it constructs
and deconstructs identity. The sources that will be discussed include Levi’s Se questo e un
uomo and La tregua.
Amanda Venable & Jennifer Killham (University of Cincinnati):
Portraying Primo: A Case Study Exploring an Ethical Dilemma through the
Perspective of Primo Levi
This paper presents the story of an educator’s journey into the life of Primo Levi.
While many people have studied the legacy of Primo Levi, few have explored his life through
the perspective of role-playing within an online simulation game. The arena for this
exploration is called the Jewish Court of All Time (JCAT). JCAT is a web-mediated, roleplaying simulation for middle school students in Jewish day schools across North America. It
is a place out of time: a place where figures from history comingle with contemporary figures;
a place where fictional and “real” persons meet for the first time.
In the fall of 2010, over 170 of these people from all walks of life converged virtually in
JCAT. Guests gathered in this place out of time to work out a very important scenario: how to
decide the fate of a family of Darfurian refugees seeking asylum in Israel. While the middle
school students are the primary players, their teachers, mentors and facilitators from the
University of Michigan, and participant-researchers from the University of Cincinnati all
worked together as a community to decide the case before them. One of the university
mentors from the University of Michigan chose to portray Primo Levy in this particular
simulation.
This paper follows the journey of the mentor, Alan (pseudonym), as he explored
JCAT as Primo Levi. Through portraying Levi in this game, Alan was able to form a deeper
connection to Levi’s story than he had through previous research and reading. In attempting
to adopt Levi’s written voice and his personality when interacting with others online, Alan
developed a new understanding of Levi’s experiences, which allowed him to develop what is
called “historical empathy,” or sometimes “perspective taking.” These reflective practices are
useful in the teaching of history, specifically, but are also useful in teaching rhetoric and
writing skills. They allow students – of all ages – to delve into the personal stories that run
parallel to the vast, and oftentimes nameless, history of mankind. Alan was also able to use
Primo’s biography as a tool to help mentor the middle school students as they attempted to
portray their characters while also helping to make important decisions within the game.
15
Alan’s experiences portraying Levi have much to teach us about the nature of educational
play, the history and life of Primo Levi, and about further opportunities for incorporating
empathetically-focused methodology in teaching and learning. In an era of intense religious,
cultural and ethnic strife, we must ask ourselves how we are teaching students of all ages to
build complex understandings of those they consider “other,” (those whom they consider
different from themselves) as well as strengthening our written connection with social,
historical, and cultural curricula (Wineburg, 2007). JCAT offers participants the opportunity to
engage in this thoughtful process, and through studying Alan’s experiences within the
simulation as Primo Levi, we can begin to understand both Levi and the perspectives of
others more fully.
Minna Vuohelainen (Edge Hill University)
Primo Levi, memory and the oblique
Holocaust memoirs are famously preoccupied with the appropriate means of
representation, or, following Theodor Adorno, the ‘unrepresentability’ of the Holocaust. In If
This Is a Man, Primo Levi notes the need for a new kind of language: ‘If the Lagers had
lasted longer, a new, harsh language would have been born; and only this language could
express what it means to toil the whole day in the wind, with the temperature below freezing,
wearing only a shirt, underpants, cloth jacket and trousers, and in one’s body nothing but
weakness, hunger and knowledge of the end drawing nearer.’ 6 Often seen as the
authoritative witness of the Holocaust, Levi writes about the camps concretely and with great
precision. This paper explores his negotiation between such direct confrontation of his
experience and his occasional deployment of an oblique approach, when he appears to be
angling towards the Holocaust from the margins. It explores some of the ways in which Levi’s
writings approach the Holocaust – and the memory of the Holocaust – not directly, but
instead through abstraction and ambiguity.
Brian Walter (St. Louis College of Pharmacy):
The Offense of the Memory: Abstraction and Metaphor in The Drowned and the Saved
In his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi seeks to balance the
complex and overwhelming atrocity of the Nazi lagers against the fragility and fallibility of
human memory. He combines his personal experience of surviving the camps with the
written testimonies of others to produce a meditation on memory and historical horror that
both galvanizes and crucially delimits the authority of the witness, producing (in effect) a
philosophical study of the relationship between experience, memory, and language.
In its efforts to separate the actual historical events from the complicated and
inevitably declining authority of witness accounts, The Drowned and the Saved carefully but
necessarily abstracts important themes from the Holocaust record, an approach and effect
that would seem to imperil the book’s own authority (according to its author’s judgments).
The epigraph from Coleridge, with a heart that burns the witness until he finds another
occasion to impart his tale, neatly encapsulates the conflicting forces, the need to preserve
historical truth set against the teller’s imperative to relate subjective experience in ways that
inevitably transform it into art, if not fiction.
In his efforts to have credible history and still tell his portion of it too, Levi rather
ironically relies on the rhetorical and therefore inherently suspect power of metaphor to
authenticate his claims. Repeatedly throughout The Drowned and the Saved, Levi constructs
comparisons explicit and implicit to thwart skepticism – verbal artfulness employed for the
sake of historical veracity. In the process of seeking terms for events that have frequently
been declared unimaginable or inexpressible, Levi envisages a form of memory and
memorialization which rather improbably resembles the historically willful, even triumphantly
subjective model that his contemporary, Vladimir Nabokov, constructs in his autobiography,
Speak, Memory. Where psychoanalytic models of traumatized memory are frequently
invoked in Holocaust criticism to suggest that the events experienced could not be processed
6
Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Everyman, 2000), p. 147.
16
in the way that conventional memories would be – rendering the act of witness ineffable –
Levi with his metaphors subtly and carefully exerts a specialized form of Nabokovian control
over a segment of history which famously disarmed subjective perspective, in the process
inscribing a disciplined but highly suggestive rhetoric of abstraction and memory.
Paweł Wolski (University of Szczecin, Poland):
From Poland Without Love: Why Do We Read Levi Now and Why We Did Not Before
As in the whole reading world also in Poland Primo Levi’s books have become an
important reference point in the Holocaust debate. But, quite perplexingly in the case of one
of the best known Holocaust writers, it has been so for only few last years: the first editions of
La Tregua and Il sistema periodico appeared in Polish translations as late as in 2009 and
2011 respectively. In the first post-war decades Primo Levi was practically absent in the
Polish Holocaust literary debate (first edition of Se questo é un uomo was published in 1978;
the Einaudi Archives include correspondence between Levi and his Polish translator
concerning some other, never published translations) and although he has been discussed
among professional readers (cf. Barbara Skarga, Michał Głowiński etc.), his reception in
Poland until recently could have been described as follows: unlike many other Holocaust
writers he has been nor hated nor loved – he remained virtually unnoticed.
The reasons for the astonishingly long absence of Levi in Poland may be many: the
communist censorship shaping the specific Holocaust memory (cf. Pierre Nora, James. E.
Young), the influence of the Polish writers such as Tadeusz Borowski or Zofia Nałkowska
(cf., particularly in the case of Borowski, Alvin Rosenfeld and Arkadiusz Morawiec) etc. But
the main reason for his absence and, more importantly, his sudden (re)appearance is the
fact, that both in the Polish and in the World literary discourse the Holocaust literature as a
separate genre did not exist until the late 60’s or 70’s. Even in Italy Levi has been recognized
as a writer only in the late 50’s when he (re)entered the literary stage not as a memoir
novelist (which did not bring If This Is a Man success in the first 1947 edition), but as a
Holocaust writer (which made him a recognized artist). Much of the Holocaust writing has
remained unattractive to the reading public until it has become a part of the post-Holocaust
ontology, slowly reacting to the influence of the Holocaust experience on the post-war
philosophy(cf. Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Zygmunt Bauman etc.).
In the article I will present the history of reception of Primo Levi’s works in Poland in relation
to the forming of the genre of the Holocaust writing. Additionally, by showing similarities
between the works by Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski on various levels (e.g. irony – cf.
Robert S. Gordon, post-human theory – cf. Bozena Shalcross etc.), I will prove that the
reason for the astonishing absence of Levi in Poland was not predominately based on the
fact that the Polish literature already had its own canonical writers, but that the Polish (and
world) Holocaust literary canon has been established only recently and only recently both
Borowski and Levi have been read as Holocaust writers and not “just” as writers which made
reading them as complementary and not competing narratives possible. In the conclusion I
will use Levi’s example to briefly present the state of the Holocaust studies and the way they
shape our way of reading the Holocaust texts.