Survivors

For no very obvious reason, I have spent a lot of time lately reading about the politics of the mid-20^th century—the nexus being perhaps 1948, when I would have been 12. For even less obvious reasons, I’ve been pursuing a subset of what you might call “Jewish survival” literature, and I take it for granted that the theme of Jewish survival is a central theme of the period.

The keystone was surely Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir (link), which is in a class by itself. A companion piece Heda Margolius Kovály’s account of her life in and out of Prague (link)-not so elegant as literature, but an earnest, heartfelt tale by a woman who survived the death camps only to find herself thrust into the maw of the Soviet conquerors. I followed up on Kovaly with a memoir by her son, Ivan Margolius, born in a dark time, but surviving into personal and professional security, not to say recognition (link). I had high hopes for Ivan’s story because I like these “essays in retrieval,” and because Heda had left a lot of questions that I hoped he would answer. Indeed it is an okay book in its way, but it is full of a lot of rookie errors—sidetracks and space-fillers—that substantially impair its potential.

But then I moved on to two more which can be discussed somewhat as a matched set: Five Germanys I Have Known (link),and Amos Oz’ Tale of Love and Darkness (link). Each is the first person account of a boy who became a man amidst the turbulent politics of the time. And although neither experienced much directly in the way of political violence [Hah!--What was I thinking? Seen Afterthought II below], still each one found his life defined by it.

And that is the virtue they share: Stern and Oz both have a remarkable knack for uniting the personal and the political: of telling their own story, the stories of their dear ones, and to an extent the stories of their ancestors known and unknown, as part of the fabric of the times.

For Stern, it comes naturally: he’s an historian by trade. It is therefore not surprising that the best of his “Germanys” is no one of the five but rather a sixth—“it is the Germany of the years before World War I, that I think I understand the best.” He paints a vivid and compelling picture of the life of middle and upper-middle class Jews in the highly assimilated world of Wilhelmian Germany—indeed, I don’t know anyone who does a better job of setting the background for the Hitlerian cataclysm to follow.

Ironically, perhaps the happiest part of Stern’s book comes at its darkest hour. We’re talking about World War II, when the Stern family, emigrants at last, tries to scratch as place for itself in wartime New York City. Stern is not yet an adult—he was born in 1926—yet as the most mobile and the most adaptable of the clan, he finds himself thrust into an adult world. He is the manager, the fixer, even the housekeeper. It sounds like a much of a muchness, but in fact he thrives on it, juggling friends and connections on two continents, in half a dozen languages. He emerges almost like the Robert Mitchum Character in Herman Wouk’s Winds of War, or maybe Woody Allen’s Zelig, always on hand, always in the picture. We find him in a chat with Isaiah Berlin, then getting college advice from Albert Einsten. No wonder he went onto a distinguished career as an academic administrator and a member of the “invisible choir: of post-war German-American relations.

Sadly but perhaps inevitably, Stern’s book loses some of its force as he gains in eminence. It still has its merits, but more and more and more it becomes an essay in “and-so-I-told-the-Pope” (literally: see pp 339-42) which necessarily impels the reader into a snooze.

Oz’s life (and book) is the same only different. He’s about 12 years younger than Stern. He was born in Israel, the only child of two parents, each fighting his or her own disappointments, and in a vast network of relatives and neighbors, all with their own demons and aspirations. He’s a precocious child who seems to assimilate almost everything around him and so he is able from an early age to assemble a mosaic of Israel’s complicated place in a complicated world. Like Stern, Oz too has played a part in the public life of his time but unlike Stern, Oz doesn’t make much of it explicitly in the book. He’s a writer, not an historian. Perhaps by definition, then, his account is more inward and elegiac. Yet of all these, next only to Levi he does the best job of conveying what it is to be a person in these trying times.

Afterthought I: If you like the literature of survivorship, then for a total change of pace, read the biography of Judah P. Benjamin (link), the Confederate Secretary of War, who, after Apomattox, succeeded in reinventing himself as a lawyer and leading law scholar in London.

Afterthought II: Political violence? What was I thinking? I guess I was thinking of the Hitler wars in Europe. They missed that, alright, but Oz as a nine-year-old child underwent the Arab onslaught against Jerusalem after the partition in 1948. No day at the beach, let me tell you.

Alfred L.: Risoluto e Senza Gioia

[See update below]

I said something a few days ago about how much I admired Primo Levi, and how difficult I found it to pin down his peculiar virtue. Here’s an example that shows both the possibilities and the difficulties. In Se questo è un uomo –If This is a Man…, Levi’s great account of his year in Auschwitz, he includes a chapter entitled “I sommersi e I salvati”—“The Drowned and the Saved” (a title he also gave to his last book). Here Levi tries to explain Auschwitz through sketches of the lives of three inmates.

One of them is Alfred L., engineer, whose life, Levi tells us, “shows among other things the vanity of the myth of original equality among men.” Alfred had been director of a chemical products factory. Levi says he does not know how Alfred came to be arrested but he arrived in Auschwitz “come tutti entrato: nudo, solo, e sconosciuto”—as everyone comes in: naked, alone, and unknown. From first appearance, Alfred clearly had a manner about him, but two points in particular stand out: one, he has a pair of wooden shower clogs. And two, he washes his shirt. Can we conceive of how hard it must have been to wash a shirt in Auschwitz? You had to find the time and the place, and water, and soap—and you had to watch every minute so that no one stole it. But Alfred washes his shirt.

By such prodigies of inner discipline, Albert maintained an appearance:

Sapeva che fra l’essere stimato potente e il divenire effetitivemente tale il passo è breve; a che dovunque, ma particolarmente framezzo al generale livellamento del Lager, un aspetto rispettabile è la miglior garanzia di essere rispettato. (85)

He knew that between being esteemed and effectively being powerful the step is short; and that everywhere—but particularly in the general leveling of the Lager—a respectable aspect is the best guarantee of being respected. (94)

There comes a time when the guards undertake to select prisoners to work in a chemical factory. This is clearly good duty; if nothing else it greatly enhances the chance of survival. No wonder, then, that Albert is one of the first to be selected. He undertakes his new duties with the same air of command that have carried him so far. Levi concludes:

Ignoro il seguito della sua storia; ma ritengo assai probabile che sia sfuggito alla morte, e viva oggi la sua vita … (86)

I do not know the sequel to his story; but I count as reasonably likely that he eluded death, and lives his life today… (95)

Lives his life how? The Italian says:

fredda di dominatore risoluto e senza gioia. (86)

I really don’t know quite how to translate this. The standard English translation says:

cold life of the determined and joyless dominator. (95)

This is not right, but it is not easy to do better. Well: for “risoluto e senza gioia,” I think we can simply track the original: "resolute and without joy." “Fredda”=”cold,” which is good enough (but it perhaps it could be “cool”). But “dominatore”=”dominator” is a problem—I can’t think of any acceptable English expression that captures the idea so well. The point is that Albert is nobody’s victim, and will never be so. In the end, I would rather stick to the original:

Ignoro il seguito della sua storia; ma ritengo assai probabile che sia sfuggito alla morte, e viva oggi la sua vita fredda di dominatore risoluto e senza gioia. (86)

Sources: English quotations are from Survival in Auschwitz (Touchstone, 1995); Italian, from Se questo è un uomo (Einandi Tascabili 1958).

Update.: Must be something with the Italians and domination. I find this in a manuscripts by Eugenio Montale:

Sono codeste l’arche e le figure
Per chi nel mondo è trascorso
Con passo de dominatore
E encore sono gli emblemi che si guardavano
Senza tremore.

These are the arches and figures / for him who passed through the world / with a dominator’s step/and are still the emblems that were looked on / without terror.

--Eugenio Montale, Collected Poems 1920-1954 451 (2000)
(Jonathan Galassi trans.)

Levi: Not Like Kafka

I’m a great Primo Levi fan but I have sometimes struggled to explain what it is about Levi that makes his prose so magical, even when he is writing about one of the must wretched hours in human history (link). Lucid? Well, sure, but a good 12^th-grade term paper is lucid. Unadorned? Very often, but he can slide into flights of powerful rhetoric. Writes like a chemist? In an odd sense, perhaps he does write like a chemist, but it’s probably misleading, obscuring the true flavor.

Just I just now stumbled on the best possible account of Levi’s writing from—Levi himself. He’s comparing himself to Kafka:

In my writing, for good or evil, knowingly or not, I’ve always strived to pass from the darkness into the light, as…a filtering pump might do, which sucks up turbid water and expels it decanted: possibly sterile. Kafka forges his path in the opposite direction: he endlessly unravels the hallucinations that he draws form incredibly profound layers, and he never filters them. The reader feels them swarm with germs and spores: they are gravid with burning significances, but he never receives any help in tearing through the veil or circumventing it to go and see wht it conceals. Kafka never touches the ground, he never condescends to giving you the end of Ariadne’s thread.

So, how does Levi write? Not like Kafka. Oddly enough, I think this gets it exactly right.

Source: Anita Desai, quoting, in “What If?” a review of a collection of Levi stories, New York Review of Books 51, July 19, 2007.

Primo Levi on the Auschwitz Market

Most law-and-economists (and most economists?) are familiar with R. A. Radford’s seminal article, The Economic Organization of a P.O.W. Camp (I can’t seem to find a weblink, but the cite is: Economica, 12 (48), Nov. 1945, pp 189-201). I wonder how many are aware that there is a parallel treatment in a better-known literary source. That would be Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (“if this is a man”--wretchedly mistranslated as Survival in Auschwitz), his account of his confinement in the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz. Levi devotes a chapter to show how a system of trade and barter develops under the most extreme of conditions. Sometimes on their own, sometimes with the connivance or even the active participation of their captors, the prisoners traffic in bread, soup, shirts, “cigarettes” (= wood shavings)—indeed almost anything that might be valued inside the camp. Trade even leaps over the wall: prisoners work at their “day jobs” alongside free workers and goods pass more-or-less freely back and forth.

There is at least one “trading enterprise”—a group of Greek Jews from Thessalonika, in the camps for over three years, yet somehow able to maintain a sense of enterprise and a group cohesion. They hunker down around their own thick soup, “the product,” Levi says, “of their labor, their common purpose and their national solidarity” (73). The Greeks even help to define the face of the prison and its market, contributing a trade jargon (klepsi-klepsi: theft).

Levi is clearly fascinated by these guys, and it is not hard to see why. They are tough and pitiless yet they sing the old songs and retain an odd kind of cheerfulness—“the residue,” Levi reports, “of a wisdom, concrete and grounded, which draws together all the traditions of Mediterranean society” (id.).

Levi is also able to sketch out an arresting example of the ironic tensions constraining free choice in a larger society. As Levi explains, SS masters and the neighboring municipal authorities provide a context for the prisoners’ market economy. Yet their attitudes differ. The municipal authorities don’t mind the internal camp market, but they don’t like stuff jumping over the wall. The SS masters impose harsh punishments on the internal market, yet they tolerate, almost depend upon the smuggling trade. “I would now invite the reader,” Levi concludes acidly,

to reflect on what can be the meaning of our words “good” and “evil,” “just” or “unjust;” to consider in the context we have delineated and with the examples we have set forth , how much of common a shared morality we are able to sustain behind the barbed wire.

--Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo 77-8 (Einaudi Tascabili 1958)
(Translations are my own, be gentle)