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 David
Kirby
Greatness is always just around the corner—how
unbearable life would be if it were always there nudging
us and insisting that we do better! Fittingly, then,
the book that changed my life is (a) not all that well
known, (b) exists under different titles, and (c) is
really two books. Primo Levi’s If This Is
a Man and The Truce can be found in a
single 400-page volume published by Abacus, but as Survival
in Auschwitz and The Reawakening, it appears
as separate books by other publishers. But no matter
what form it takes, this is a single story, which is
that of Levi’s imprisonment in the notorious concentration
camp and then his loopy wanderings from Poland back
to his family home in northern Italy.
 The
best part about Levi’s writing is its spare concretion.
A lot of writers gave up on the Holocaust because they
say they couldn’t describe the indescribable,
but Levi did. When the train arrives at Auschwitz, you’re
there. When you get down from the car, you can hear
the gravel crunch under your feet. And when the war
stops and the gate swings open, you can’t believe
in your freedom yet, but you can see it down a muddy
road.
After style, the second great thing about Levi’s
memoir is its sustained narrative, especially on the
trip home, where he meets people who live in trees and
other tokens of life’s essential weirdness. The
third is that the story ends exactly where it starts,
and once again we are reminded how much we like tales
that, like the ones by Homer and Dante, come full circle.
The fourth point about Levi is that, with subtlety and
even charm, he reminds his readers, especially we history-hating
Americans, of the importance of our shared past; elsewhere
he writes, “We too are so dazzled by power and
money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that
all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced
in, that beyond the fence stand the lords of death,
and not far away the train is waiting.”
Despite all that, Levi maintains an open-eyed, almost
chipper attitude throughout his chronicle, which is
the fifth and final reason why I love him. As he said
later, he was never depressed in Auschwitz, only after.
He was a great poet, too, and one of the three marquee-name
fiction writers of the twentieth century who were also
paint factory managers (the others are Italo Svevo and
Sherwood Anderson). In the end, he couldn’t keep
it up, and he took his own life. I wish there were a
way for me to thank a Jewish chemist from Turin who,
better than anyone I know, explains me to myself.
— David Kirby
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