Primo Levi "The Art of Witness" New yorker September 28 2015
I read the recent New Yorker this afternoon, and the article on Primo Levi really moved me. It is entitled, "The Art of Witness" with a subtitle, "How Primo Levi survived", by James Wood.
It reminded me when I attended the Primo Levi tribute at Princeton University, with Lili Kahler.
W.S. Merwin spoke at this event. He was with the native Hawaian woman with whom he had an important relationship. I never learned her name but met her and she was beautiful, and I knew he loved her.
Primo Levi was important among all the chroniclers of the holocaust. I had read Peter Matthiesen's return to Auschwitz, in his PARADISE...where he was examining with others, present the signifiance of this place. It was moving, in his seeking, and he died shortly thereafter; it was published posthumously.
A beautiful sentence: "The word becomes the monument, even as Levi disowns the building of it."
Levi writes of his friend, Eiulia Vineis: immune to the poisons of camp life... "in that place, the Lager", He was a man of strong ood will and had miraculously remained free, and his words and actions were free: he had not blowerd his head, had not bowed his back." "I believe that no one, in that place, was more loved than he." "A gesture of his, a word, a laugh had liberating virtues, were a hole in the stiff fabric of the Lager..."
The article cannot be more full of praise for Levi's ability to sustain narrative, to make a story of what took place...to give it dignity and to transcend the conditions of that ordeal. To make it an adventure and to survive.
The article concludes: "Job existed and was not a parable."
It reminded me when I attended the Primo Levi tribute at Princeton University, with Lili Kahler.
W.S. Merwin spoke at this event. He was with the native Hawaian woman with whom he had an important relationship. I never learned her name but met her and she was beautiful, and I knew he loved her.
Primo Levi was important among all the chroniclers of the holocaust. I had read Peter Matthiesen's return to Auschwitz, in his PARADISE...where he was examining with others, present the signifiance of this place. It was moving, in his seeking, and he died shortly thereafter; it was published posthumously.
A beautiful sentence: "The word becomes the monument, even as Levi disowns the building of it."
Levi writes of his friend, Eiulia Vineis: immune to the poisons of camp life... "in that place, the Lager", He was a man of strong ood will and had miraculously remained free, and his words and actions were free: he had not blowerd his head, had not bowed his back." "I believe that no one, in that place, was more loved than he." "A gesture of his, a word, a laugh had liberating virtues, were a hole in the stiff fabric of the Lager..."
The article cannot be more full of praise for Levi's ability to sustain narrative, to make a story of what took place...to give it dignity and to transcend the conditions of that ordeal. To make it an adventure and to survive.
The article concludes: "Job existed and was not a parable."
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