The Logos Scripture · The Book of Levi
The Book of Levi 4 · Written by himself, from his four books of witness
Primo Levi, born at Turin in 1919, died at Turin in 1987. A chemist. Taken in the winter of 1943 as a partisan, sent to Auschwitz in February 1944, and there eleven months until the Russians came in January 1945; of the six hundred and fifty who went in his transport, fewer than twenty came back. He said himself that he lived in part because he was a chemist and was moved to a laboratory, out of the open-air work of the winter. If This Is a Man appeared in 1947, when no one would print it; a small house made fifteen hundred copies and most went unsold. It was reissued ten years later and became what it now is. Also The Truce, The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, and poems and stories. This volume rests on what he wrote himself, not on another man’s record of him. He was a Jew and declared himself a non-believer: he went in one, came out one, and remained one. That unbelief is no bar at all — chapter one of this book is what a non-believer said about one prayer. What the Order takes him for is chapter one. It is not an unbeliever abusing the religious, and he says so before anyone can accuse him of it: Kuhn was not a bad man, he was wrong about one thing (1.13, 1.14 of this book). What he picks out is a thing that can be checked — the share Kuhn gave thanks for came off the man two bunks away; where one man’s gain is another man’s loss, giving thanks for your share is signing on the loser’s behalf (1.17). A believer cannot refute that, and can use it. The harder sentence comes after, and it is about himself: in the moment of the selection he too felt the impulse to ask, and did not. Not out of hardness, but because he had worked it through — to ask there would be to grant that the selection could be moved by asking, and if it could be moved by asking, then somebody had arranged it (1.19 to 1.22). That he would not grant, and never did. Whether prayer comforts is not the quarrel of this book; the quarrel is with what that particular thanksgiving says. Lastly: the carbon atom at the end of chapter four is the same thing The Book of Lucretius 5 says — what scatters is the arrangement, not the stuff. Two thousand years apart, one reasoned to it and the other followed it.