April 11th marked the twentieth anniversary of Primo Levi's death, something I did not notice until today. Levi was a laboratory chemist in 1943, when the Germans invaded Italy. He joined the resistance, was betrayed, and ended up in Auschwitz. More than 600 were sent along with him. He was one of 26 who survived. Auschwitz, he would later say, made him a writer. His death in 1987 from a fall down a stairwell may or may not have been suicide.
I read some of Levi's Holocaust writings when I was working on a paper I delivered at an international conference, Remembering For the Future, at Oxford, England, in 1988. But it was not the first time I encountered his writings. I read a short piece, "Beetles," that was published in his collection On Other People's Trades. It was a stunning piece of writing. Here is the opening of the essay:
It is said that the famous British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, at a time when he was a convinced Marxist (and that was before the Lysenko scandal shook some of his certainties), asked by a churchman what his conception of God was, answered: "He is inordinately fond of beetles."
I did not know until I read that essay that there were over 350,000 cataloged species of coleoptera, or that one and a half million species are thought to exist; nor did I know that what distinguishes beetles is the fact that a second set of wings evolved into a retractable armor. The latter fact is one of those pieces of biology that stuck with me, and I have been mildly fascinated by beetles ever since. All the essays in the book are worth reading. For Levi, scientific curiosity was one of the traits that redeems the human species. Here is another quote from the book, cut from The Modern World:
The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and the infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return to barbarism.
I do not know whether Levi committed suicide, and if he did I do not know what it means. Was it merely the result of the clinical depression he suffered at the end? Or was it a "delayed reaction" to the terrible fact of the Holocaust? The latter possibility is something of a scandal among his admirers. Diego Gambetta covers the uncertain facts and all the weight they carry in his article for the Boston Review. All I know for sure is that Levi was a wonderful writer and a beautiful mind.
One final postscript: it was because of my fascination with his essay that I bought for my daughter, then a small child, a book on beetles. It was to be a Christmas present. For this I caught a lot of grief from a lot of women. I gave into pressure and got her something else. That surrender is one of my few regrets as a father.
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