I agree with your observation that my phrase “I think too much.… I am too civilized” is inconsistent with this other frame of mind. Please grant me the right to inconsistency: in the camp our state of mind was unstable, it oscillated from hour to hour between hope and despair. The coherence I think one notes in my books is an artifact, a rationalization a posteriori.
Roth: Survival in Auschwitz was originally published in English as If This Is a Man, a faithful rendering of your Italian title, Se questo è un uomo (and the title that your first American publishers should have had the good sense to preserve). The description and analysis of your atrocious memories of the Germans’ “gigantic biological and social experiment” is governed, very precisely, by a quantitative concern for the ways in which a man can be transformed or broken down and, like a substance decomposing in a chemical reaction, lose his characteristic properties. If This Is a Man reads like the memoir of a theoretician of moral biochemistry who has himself been forcibly enlisted as the specimen organism to undergo laboratory experimentation of the most sinister kind. The creature caught in the laboratory of the mad scientist is himself the very epitome of the rational scientist.
In The Monkeys Wrench—which might accurately have been titled This Is a Man—you tell Faussone, your blue-collar Scheherazade, that “being a chemist in the world’s eyes, and feeling… a writer’s blood in my veins” you consequently have “two souls in my body, and that’s too many.” I’d say there’s one soul, enviably capacious and seamless; I’d say that not only are the survivor and the scientist inseparable but so are the writer and the scientist.
Levi: Rather than a question, this is a diagnosis, which I accept with thanks. I lived my camp life as rationally as I could, and I wrote If This Is a Man struggling to explain to others, and to myself, the events I had been involved in, but with no definite literary intention. My model (or, if you prefer, my style) was that of the “weekly report” commonly used in factories: it must be precise, concise, and written in a language comprehensible to everybody in the industrial hierarchy. And certainly not written in scientific jargon. By the way, I am not a scientist, nor have I ever been. I did want to become one, but war and the camp prevented me. I had to limit myself to being a technician throughout my professional life.
I agree with you about there being only “one soul… and seamless,” and once more I feel grateful to you. My statement that “two souls… is too many” is half a joke, but half-hints at serious things. I worked in a factory for almost thirty years, and I must admit that there is no incompatibility between being a chemist and being a writer: in fact, there is a mutual reinforcement. But factory life, and particularly factory managing, involves many other matters, far from chemistry: hiring and firing workers; quarreling with the boss, customers, and suppliers; coping with accidents; being called to the telephone, even at night or when at a party; dealing with bureaucracy; and many more soul-destroying tasks. This whole trade is brutally incompatible with writing, which requires a fair amount of peace of mind. Consequently I felt hugely relieved when I reached retirement age and could resign, and so renounce my soul number one.
Roth: Your sequel to If This Is a Man (The Reawakening; also unfortunately retitled by one of your early American publishers) was called in Italian La tregua, “the truce.” It’s about your journey from Auschwitz back to Italy. There is a legendary dimension to that tortuous journey, especially to the story of your long gestation period in the Soviet Union, waiting to be repatriated. What’s surprising about The Truce, which might understandably have been marked by a mood of mourning and inconsolable despair, is its exuberance. Your reconciliation with life takes place in a world that sometimes seemed to you like the primeval Chaos. Yet you are so tremendously engaged by everyone, so highly entertained as well as instructed, that I wondered if, despite the hunger and the cold and the fears, even despite the memories, you’ve ever really had a better time than during those months youcall “a parenthesis of unlimited availability, a providential but unrepeatable gift of fate.”
You appear to be someone who requires, above all, rootedness—in his profession, his ancestry, his region, his language—and yet when you found yourself as alone and uprooted as a man can be, you considered that condition a gift.
Levi: A friend of mine, an excellent doctor, told me many years ago: “Your remembrances of before and after are in black and white; those of Auschwitz and of your travel home are in Technicolor.” He was right. Family, home, factory are good things in themselves, but they deprived me of something that I still miss: adventure. Destiny decided that I should find adventure in the awful mess of a Europe swept by war.
You are in the business, so you know how these things happen. The Truce was written fourteen years after If This Is a Man: it is a more “self-conscious” book, more methodical, more literary, the language much more profoundly elaborated. It tells the truth, but a filtered truth. It was preceded by countless verbal versions: I mean, I had recounted each adventure many times, to people at widely different cultural levels (to friends mainly and to high school boys and girls), and I had retouched it en route so as to arouse their most favorable reactions. When If This Is a Man began to achieve some success, and I began to see a future for my writing, I set out to put these adventures on paper. I aimed at having fun in writing and at amusing my prospective readers. Consequently, I gave emphasis to strange, exotic, cheerful episodes—mainly to the Russians seen close up—and I relegated to the first and last pages the mood, as you put it, “of mourning and inconsolable despair.”
I must remind you that the book was written around 1961; these were the years of Khrushchev, of Kennedy, of Pope John, of the first thaw and of great hopes. In Italy, for the first time, you could speak of the USSR in objective terms without being called a philo-Communist by the right wing and a disruptive reactionary by the powerful Italian Communist Party.
As for “rootedness,” it is true that I have deep roots and that I had the luck of not losing them. My family was almost completely spared by the Nazi slaughter. The desk here where I write occupies, according to family legend, exactly the spot where I first saw light. When I found myself “as uprooted as a man can be,” certainly I suffered, but this was far more than compensated for afterward by the fascination of adventure, by human encounters, by the sweetness of “convalescence” from the plague of Auschwitz. In its historical reality, my Russian “truce” turned to a “gift” only many years later, when I purified it by rethinking it and by writing about it.
Roth: You begin The Periodic Table by speaking of your Jewish ancestors, who arrived in the Piedmont from Spain, by way of Provence, in 1500. You describe your family roots in Piedmont and Turin as “not enormous, but deep, extensive, and fantastically intertwined.” You supply a brief lexicon of the jargon these Jews concocted and used primarily as a secret language from the Gentiles, a jargon composed of words derived from Hebrew roots but with Piedmontese endings. To an outsider your rootedness in this Jewish world of your forebears seems not only intertwined but, in a very essential way, identical with your rootedness in the region itself. However, in 1938, when the racial laws were introduced restricting the freedom of Italian Jews, you came to consider being Jewish an “impurity,” though, as you say in The Periodic Table, “I began to be proud of being impure.”