Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist

Readers of Levi's works will find this bio complements the works. Entering Auschwitz in his early twenties - on the brink of life itself, love, work, education, friendship - young Primo through his works of literature, his school visits, his articles, his interviews, bore witness to the efficient workings of the German business and military machine as it worked its way through murdering millions of undesirables, mainly people of the Jewish faith. One of the interesting contradictions in Levi's world was his belief in the power of the scientific method on the one hand, which governed his approach to literature, and his love of the inefficiencies and carelessness of the Russian liberators of the death camps, on the other. In the former, it was the Germans very use of science and methodical organization that made it so successful in killing then cremating so many so efficiently. In the latter, it was the absence of method that he found so endearing, so human. If his goal was to bear witness, he has achieved that goal, and his legacy will live forever. No matter how many films we see, or pictures of the dead, or documentaries, it will be through literature that the real legacy of Naziism will be immortalized and it is mainly to this chemist, this great writer, that we owe thanks, a writer who manages to reach the soul of the reader. His other great legacy will be his respect for the accurate and most effective use of language which he was passionate about and which he sees as being directly connected to the search for "truth" in his work as a scientist (chemist). It is this passion which connects him directly to such writers as George Orwell. Undoubtedly, the reader leaves Levi's works and this biography with a a greater, perhaps lasting, sensitivity to words, words such as ARBEIT MACHT FREI (work sets free) which was the gateway motto of Auschwitz death camps, but which, ironically, Levi believed and practiced throughout his life. Ms Anissimov's work makes excellent reading and she has done a great service in bringing us closer to this fine human.

Until Myriam Anissimov published this comprehensive biography of Primo Levi in 1998, the world knew him primarily through his own writings. He was born into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Turin, Italy, in 1919. His people were not observant Jews, and Levi, apparently, knew little about "Jewishness" until Mussolini's anti-Semitic policy taught him something about his heritage. His father, Casare, was an electrical engineer and an avid reader. Primo learned from him that the humanities and the sciences need not be separate worlds. Trained as a chemist, he was arrested during the Second World War as a member of the anti-Fascist resistance and deported to the Monowitz concentration camp, part of the Auschwitz complex in 1944. Badly beaten and half-starved, Levi was determined to spend his time mentally recording his irrational world "with the curiosity of the naturalist." His background in chemistry actually saved his life, Levi was to acknowledge later. After being transferred to work in the camp laboratory his situation improved dramatically. Anissimov's account of the final days at Auschwitz - when Levi, suffering from scarlet fever, managed to forage, with a few comrades, through a semi-dismantled concentration camp in the freezing cold - is the focal point of her book. Her research is meticulous. Levi survived 11 months as slave laborer 174517 until the liberation of what he called "that hideous distortion of humanity." Seven months after the war, he was still a refugee in Russia, trying to make his way home. When he returned to Turin, to the same apartment where he had always lived, he felt a terrible need to bear witness. He had watched as fellow inmates were stripped of their essential selves before they died in the flesh. His powerful memoirs, works of fiction and poetry describe his experience in the death camp and his later travels in Eastern Europe. Levi wrote. "And I felt like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, who waylays on the street the wedding guests going to the feast, inflicting on them the story of his misfortune." The civilized world did not seem to care what he had to say, however. No large publisher would accept his powerful manuscript, "Survival in Auschwitz." Anissimov reports that the book received a few positive reviews but was "distributed rather than sold." For the last forty years of his life Levi devoted himself to understanding why he was not killed in the concentration camp. "The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died," he said. He spent much of his time writing about literature, astronomy, philosophy, the wonders of the natural life and the dignity of manual labor. Married with two children, he was a lifelong agnostic, and was described by some coreligionists as a stranger to Jewish culture. He worked at his profession, as a research chemist and factory manager, until his retirement. Plagued by survivor's guilt, and inner wounds, as well as the coverage the media was giving to Holoc

Primo Levi: Tragedy Of An Optimist is a major biography which delves deeply into the life, mind and work of an influential writer, philosopher, and Holocaust witness. Drawing from exhaustive research, interviews with friends and relatives, as well as numerous unpublished texts and testimonies, biographer Myriam Anissimov explores the complex nature of a most singular, shy, intelligent, and diffident man who was both a strong-spirited survivor and a sufferer of depression, a man who felt misunderstood, certain that future generations would inevitably forget, and even deny, that the Holocaust happened. Indeed, on April 11, 1987, his self-deprecating depression was to lead him to suicide by throwing himself down the staircase of the building in which he was born. Primo Levi is a superbly presented biography and an important, singular contribution to Holocaust studies.