In September 1943, Primo Levi took to the mountains in northwest Italy to escape the Nazis. A keen mountaineer since the age of 14, for Levi the Alps had long been a sanctuary for physical release and spiritual recovery. High up in the alpine tundra, he exulted in hard battle with the elements, the same “Mother-Matter” he confronted at the Chemical Institute in Turin, where he worked as a chemist on the molecular structure of carbon. The mountain’s geological morphologies, the combined sense of its instant creation and eternal presence, the fellowship amongst climbers roped together across pleated terrains: these had been Levi’s greatest pleasures. “Evenings spent in a mountain hut,” he later wrote in a short story called “Bear Meat” (1960), “are the most sublime and intense that life holds.” But after the Nazis established Mussolini’s Republic of Salò and occupied the north of the country, intensifying the roundup and deportation of Jews, the “rocky gymnasiums” became his place of greater safety.

PRIMO LEVI’S RESISTANCE: REBELS AND COLLABORATORS IN OCCUPIED ITALY by Sergio Luzzatto Metropolitan Books, 304 pp., $30.00

Levi had never intended to pursue armed resistance against the Germans. “I was a young bourgeois pacifist and I’d rather have died than shoot anyone”, he recalled in an interview with his biographer, Ian Thomson. Like a lot of Italian Jews, he thought the best option was to wait for an Allied liberation. But Nazi-Fascism presented an unforgiving choice for most Jewish citizens of occupied Europe: hide, resist, or, as Arendt documented in Eichmann in Jerusalem, cooperate. Levi’s initial concern was for the safety of his mother and sister, and on September 9 they left for St. Vincent, a spa town 100 kilometres north of Turin in the Valle d’Aosta, where they stayed with friends. But after the Nazis drowned forty-nine Jews in Lake Maggiore near Switzerland, including Levi’s uncle, Mario, any hesitations he had about armed resistance disappeared. On October 1, along with a couple of disbanded Italian soldiers, as well as other Jewish refugees and anti-fascists, Levi became part of a small and shambolic resistance group.

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF PRIMO LEVI BY PRIMO LEVI, edited by Ann Goldstein Liveright, 3008 pp., $100.00

Sergio Luzzatto’s newly translated Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy is the story of Levi’s time as a partisan. Drawing on materials housed in local archives throughout northwest Italy, as well as interviewing many of those involved in the early Resistance, his book is a micro-history of what happened in the two months between Levi becoming a partisan and his arrest and deportation to Auschwitz in December 1943. The most intriguing part of Luzzatto’s story, though, is an event that took place a few days before Levi’s capture, when his band executed Fulvio Oppezzo and Luciano Zabaldano, two teenagers accused of threatening the secrecy and survival of the rebel group. After the war, Levi remained disturbed by the execution, and questioned the lengths people in conditions of weakness go to survive. His writings were not just shaped by his experience of Auschwitz, but by a life at the frontier of powerlessness as both a partisan and a prisoner.



It is still Levi the prisoner that we know best, and this is what informs much of his writings. Levi recorded his experience of the Holocaust in If This Is a Man (1947), and over the following decades gained success as a writer who, with astonishing self-control, chronicled Europe’s tragic danse macabre. Yet as Ann Goldstein—editor of the Complete Works of Primo Levi—notes, the tag “Holocaust writer” does Levi “a regrettable injustice”. A remarkable three-volume set of memoirs, novels, short stories, essays, commentary, book reviews, and poetry, the Complete Works now enables us to appreciate the tangle of forms and identities that defined Levi as a writer: memorialist and fantasist, scientist and sensationalist, puritan and jester, poet and political commentator.

What most clearly stands out from this body of work is the experience of violence in service of the absolute—absolute racial purity, for example, or absolute security and freedom, or absolute control over people through force, or even the absolute mastery of the material world through scientific endeavor. He even argued that “perfect happiness” was unattainable, owing to the certainty of our death, nor “perfect unhappiness”, since death saves us from the daily agonies of existence. For Levi, then, the twentieth century was so violent because societies strove for the absolute and infinite, and much of his work documented the experience of the powerless when confronted by that ambition.