On the bus with Primo Levi

Early in the morning, with the sun barely rising, earlier than my mornings with Rocky when we head out together for the beach or the gardens or even the streets of our neighbourhood, that place which is home, I had stood in the lovely square in the centre of Turin, the streets deserted still, and I thought of Rocky and I hoped that he somehow knew our walking days are not over.

There are always moments of melancholy in these beautiful places, like this square in Turin, moments when I feel like a stranger, an outsider, an accidental tourist, a reluctant traveler, yearning to go home.

But I do not mean to suggest that these are any more than moments, though they can be powerful and painful, as if I cannot locate where I live, even who I am. 

The moment passed. I walked the streets around the lovely square. I felt glad to be here, where there are no posters on walls or in windows about the war in Gaza or about the Zionist genocide.

I am in Italy on a tour organised by YIVO, the New York based cultural institution for the celebration of Eastern European Jewish culture, much of which was destroyed in the Holocaust. The tour is taking us to towns and villages which once had a significant Jewish population but are now almost free of Jews. We have visited beautiful old Synagogues in towns where there are no longer any Jews. We have visited squares which once were Jewish ghettos before the emancipation of the Jews in 1848. 

It is a tour in the main of Jewish Italian ghosts. 

One of the ghosts I encountered a week ago was the ghost of Primo Levi. In the Jewish cemetery in Turin, there are graves going back centuries. I stood beside Primo Levi’s grave. There is a Japanese maple tree at the foot of the grave and the stone is fringed with ivy. It is inscribed with this;

                                                                PRIMO LEVI
                                                                  1919 - 1987

That is all. Levi died in 1987. He fell down the stairwell in the apartment building where he had lived with his mother and his wife since he had come back to Turin after the war. There is a sort of consensus that Levi threw himself down the stairwell. In other words, that he took his own life. 

Some people believe he did it because of despair, a delayed reaction to his time in Auschwitz. Others, in this time of medicalised pain, believe he was suffering from depression. And that he should have been on depression medication. 

I have come to believe he fell down the stairs. It was an accident. My experience tells me accidents happen. And change history. 

I think about Levi and the way accidents can change history because standing there at his grave, I wondered, had he survived and lived a very long life, what would he have thought of what is happening in Israel, to Israelis and Palestinians. Levi was - and  remains - the greatest of writers about the Holocaust. In If This Is A Man, Levi describes the indescribable. 

After visiting the grave, we went to the Primo Levi Centre in Turin. The Centre’s director talked to us about the importance of Levi in Italian literature and how Levi struggled to be seen as a writer rather than as a Holocaust witness. But If This Is A Man is more than the bearing of witness - it is magical, the way great writing is magical.

The director’s English was poor and he seemed to me tortured by his inability to describe what Levi has meant to him and to the researchers at the Centre. There was a moment, however, when he seemed particularly tongue tied. Silenced almost. He was asked what impact October 7 and its aftermath has had on the Centre and on the reputation of Primo Levi.

The director understood the question. Primo Levi had been a staunch supporter of Israel. He believed Israel was vital as a refuge for Jews and for Jewish agency in the post-Holocaust world. He remained committed to Israel even though he was a fierce critic of the Begin Government, of the settler movement and in particular of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

But today, Levi would be considered a Zionist by many on the left and therefore a supporter of genocide and so his sublime writing about Auschwitz would be regarded by some as a form of Zionist propaganda. I think the Centre’s director was saying something like that because he looked very troubled by the question. Then again, because of where I am on all these things, perhaps I am verballing him. 

And so then, on the road from Florence to Modena I was thinking about the fate of Primo Levi - will he be canceled? - and then I found myself thinking, fleetingly I must say, about Louise Adler and about my book and about what I wrote about her in my book. I had read the article in The Age on Saturday, which apparently was an edit of a speech she gave to mark UN Peace Day or something like that.

I thought I had nothing much to say about the article except to say that I wished she would not use her family history in the Holocaust to give moral force to the position she has taken on Israel and the Palestinians and to make the comparison between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto.

But then I visited Primo Levi’s grave and I listened to the director answer the question about Levi post October 7. And then I thought about Louise Adler’s article again. And I thought about the rise of Jew hatred in the world and how Jews were reacting to being subjected to a hostility most of them had never experienced before.

In 1938, when Mussolini introduced the race laws which were a copy more or less of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, Jewish professors were dismissed from universities. Students were expelled. The professions were emptied of Jews. 

Primo Levi was a chemistry student in 1938 at the University of Turin. He was an opponent of Fascism. He was allowed to continue his studies because under the Italian race laws, Jewish students close to finishing their degrees were allowed to complete their courses. The fact that he graduated as a chemist before he was taken to Auschwitz went some way to saving his life.

Levi was a secular Jew from a more or less assimilated Jewish family. But in 1938, when the race laws were passed and when Jews were forced out of Italian life, Levi joined a group of Jews that called themselves an Oneg Shabbat collective. They  studied Jewish texts, including the Talmud and the writings of some of the venerated Rabbis. The group existed until the Nazis invaded Italy and until some of the Jews of Turin, including Levi, ended up in Auschwitz.

Are there not echoes in this story of Levi’s joining a group studying Judaism, with what is happening today, with young Jews, confronted with growing antisemitism, some of them secular, assimilated young Jews, wrestling with what it means to be Jewish at a time like this. 

This is what I was thinking about on the bus traveling from Florence to Modena. I was also thinking about whether Levi’s reputation would survive the current surge of hostility to Jews. Levi had remained committed to the survival of Israel and would therefore now be regarded as a Zionist and a supporter of colonialism and racism and genocide.

Now the bus has stopped and we are at the remains of the Fossoli Concentration Camp which is in a small village not far from Modena. It is in ruins. What is left is brick walls and fractured stone floors. Fossoli was a prisoner of war camp for captured British soldiers until 1943 when the allies liberated southern Italy and the German Army invaded from the North and set up a puppet Italian government with Mussolini as its leader. 

The British prisoners of war were transferred to prison camps in Germany and Fossoli became a concentration camp for political prisoners and Italian Jews - families of Italian Jews that had been rounded up from the cities and small towns of northern Italy.

There were 2800 Jews in Fossoli by December 1943. Primo Levi was among them. Of these 2800 Jews, over 2000 were transported to Auschwitz. Primo Levi was among them. 

And standing here in the ruins of Fossoli brings me to Louise Adler again and leads to this question:  Would she, If Levi was alive, invite him to her Adelaide Writers Week? Where no Israeli writer has appeared and no writer you could describe as a Zionist - which now means anyone who supports Israel’s existence - has made an appearance? 

Would she invite Levi, a writer whose lived experience of Auschwitz in part made him a firm supporter of Israel - its existence and its necessity? 

Would she have a Zionist like Levi at her Writer’s Week?  

In her article in The Age, Louise Adler writes that the lesson she took from her family history of the Holocaust was that it was her moral duty to become a fighter for the cause of Anti-Zionism.

Primo Levi, the unmatched chronicler of Auschwitz, did not believe that Zionism was a colonialist, racist evil that had to be eradicated. The evidence seems to suggest that he would have considered such a position morally indefensible.

Were he alive, I doubt that he would be honored with a session at Louise Adler’s Adelaide Writer’s Week.