3 - From If This is a Man to The Drowned and the Saved

Summary

Primo Levi disclaimed the role of prophet or seer, describing himself instead as 'a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual' (Racconti e saggi ('Stories and Essays', 1986; selections in The Mirror Maker), pp. 3-4; OII, 859). This self-description, with its characteristically wry modesty and its equally characteristic foregrounding of curiosity about phenomena 'metaphorical and actual', recalls Canto 26 of Dante's Inferno, central to the famous chapter, known to English-speaking readers as 'The Canto of Ulysses' ('Il canto di Ulisse'), in his first book, If This is a Man (Se questo è un uomo, 1947), implicitly equating the 'maelstrom' (vortice) of the Lager with the 'whirlwind' (turbo; Inferno 26, l. 137) which sweeps Ulysses' ship to destruction, while the 'virtue' (virtù) to which Levi refuses to attribute his own survival is compared to the 'virtue and knowledge' (virtute e canoscenza, l. 120) the pursuit of which Ulysses enjoins on his crew as the activity which distinguishes men from beasts. Tellingly, both words derive from the Latin virtus: the courage and worth which is fitting for a man, and which the Nazi death camps were designed to strip from their victims.

As he tells us at the start of If This is a Man, the maelstrom engulfed Levi in January 1944 when, along with his fellow internees in the detention camp at Fossoli, near Modena, he received what was in effect a coded death sentence: 'on the morning of the 21st we learned that on the following day the Jews would be leaving. All the Jews, without exception. Even the children, even the old, even the ill.