Primo Levi’s Halting Return to Judaism

Reviewing the recently released English-language Complete Works of Primo Levi, Alvin Rosenfeld tackles the two major questions that remain about the Holocaust survivor, author, and chemist. Was his death in 1987 a suicide, as is the opinion of most biographers and the Italian authorities, or an accident? And to what extent should this assimilated and unbelieving Italian Jew, who famously declared “at Auschwitz I became a Jew,” be considered a Jewish writer? On the first question, Rosenfeld—basing himself not only on Levi’s correspondence and the accounts of his friends, but also on the literary evidence found in his final book, the haunted and guilt-ridden The Drowned and the Saved—sides with those who believe Levi’s death to have been self-inflicted. On the second, Rosenfeld writes:

During his time in the camp, Levi was thrown together with large numbers of East European Jews. The Ashkenazi culture they represented was barely known to him, and much about it both baffled and intrigued him. As chronicled in The Truce, his many months of wandering through Eastern Europe opened his eyes to “an exploded, mortally wounded Jewish world.”

Once back in Italy, he spent years investigating and paying tribute to the richness and nobility of that world. He taught himself Yiddish, picked up more Hebrew, and deepened his knowledge of Jewish folklore and folkways, Jewish humor, theater, and music, and Jewish texts. References to the Bible and Talmud, the Passover Haggadah and Shulḥan Arukh, Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer appear in the Complete Works; the title of If Not Now, When? is, of course, taken from Hillel’s famous saying in Pirkei Avot.

He also wrote about Itzhak Katzenelson, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Léon Poliakov, and other Jewish writers. In sum, in the post-war decades Levi read and wrote his way into a Jewish cultural patrimony that was broader and richer than anything he had known in his early years. It shaped his sensibility as a man and author and also directed the response of many of his readers in ways that gratified him. . . . “[A]s a result of having been defined as a Jewish writer,” [Levi wrote], “I actually became one.”

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: Arts & Culture, Holocaust, Judaism, Literature, Primo Levi

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society