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 on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2277/if-this-is-a-man/