Abstract
Reviewed by: Valentina Geri, University of Notre Dame, USA
Robert Pirro’s book aims at going beyond the testimonial perspectives in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. As specified in the introduction, the book considers “the nature, limits, and significance of human beings’ capacity to act” (p. 1), making “agency” the most important perspective through which to interpret Levi’s writing. Issues of agency in Levi’s oeuvre are read through metaphors and tropes deriving from infantile dependence and maternal presence (Nancy Chodorow and Hanna Pitkin), and republican political ideas about civic virtue and fraternal solidarity (Machiavelli).
The book is divided into two main parts. Part One, “Motherhood and Fatherland”, aims to broaden the role of Levi’s testimony to the sphere of human agency. Starting from Carole Angier’s consideration that Levi’s sexual and emotional attitudes originate in his relationship with his mother (The Double Bond), the author rereads Levi’s short and science fiction as characterized by ambivalent and multi-layered issues of agency and relationship. In particular, two factors play a big role in Levi’s idea of agency: family dynamics and Levi’s brief time in the Italian Resistance. As for the first, family dynamics, the author analyzes how childhood experiences (like the struggle for the sense of separate existence from the mother) shaped Levi’s adult agency. While Levi is silent about his son-mother relationship, his science and fantasy fiction show how this relationship is connected to ideas of “individuation, dependance, and need” (p. 53). These three aspects are visible for instance in The Periodic Table (agency vs. passivity, substitutes for mothers), “Versamina” (reminding of infantile development), and “Angelic Butterfly” (men appropriating the power of creation). As for the second, patriotic resistance, the author sees the emergence of republican forms of agency in Levi’s work. If Not Now, When?, an “action novel” (p. 58), becomes the focus of the author’s analysis. If Not Now, When? explores the possibility of exercising agency in the most trying circumstances and focuses on collective and public agency. Civic engagement and participation come from the republican thought, of which Machiavelli is the main representative. Luzzatto’s reading of If Not Now, When? as a novel in which Levi reworks a dark episode of his partisan experience (the judgement and condemnation of two young partisans) is the starting point for the author to introduce his interpretation of If Not Now, When? In this work, the author sees the development of ideas of agency and passivity and the formation of republican ideas of solidarity and active involvement in wartime situations. The couple Mendel-Leonid reflect the two poles of active independence and passive dependence as well as the opposition of adult Levi/young Levi. Here the two main ideas of the book intertwine: the republican notion of freedom based on independence is in contrast with the idea of maternal dependence. For the author, Levi’s response to this contrast is the creation of characters (and citizens) that respond to oppression by engaging in political foundation, which is something linked to the idea of maternal generativity.
Part Two, “Motherhood and Fatherland in Auschwitz,” argues that the large presence of references to political agency in Levi’s works suggests that his testimonial impulse was in competition with political and ethical ideas. In the 1958 version of Survival in Auschwitz, Levi adds at the beginning of the book that he was captured as a partisan. The author interprets this addition as a way for Levi to express both his effective action and the limitation of his possibilities for agency. Survival in Auschwitz is a book that deals with the idea not only of loss of agency but also of a specific political form of agency: the collective republican one. Sharing Angier’s idea that Levi lived Auschwitz not as a trauma but as a moment of hard-won personal achievements (a period of maturation and not regression), the author also states that Auschwitz’s awful challenges may have mimicked Levi’s earlier experience of a powerful but withholding maternal presence. In other words, Levi had already worked out a psychological modus vivendi which he could deploy in the emergency of his survival at Auschwitz. Levi’s intellectual detachment over bodily or emotional life (related to disturbances of the mother-son relationship) helped infuse in him an idea of liberal democratic freedom and a special attention for situations of dependence.
Motherhood, Fatherland, and Primo Levi gives an overarching perspective on a topic that had not been fully explored before: the role of agency in Levi’s work. The book considers the notion of Levi’s agency both in its private dimension and in its collective and communal implications. In this sense, the author brings to light an important aspect of Levi’s writing, which contributes to enhancing Levi’s particular engagement with society and with others. In general, the author’s “Afterword” makes clear how to integrate Levi’s role as witness with other perspectives, which justly recognizes Levi’s multilayered figure. Bibliographical references throughout the book are numerous and well analyzed. In this regard, in Chapter 2, while analyzing the tendency to read Levi as a social or political thinker for his experience in the camps, Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz could have been an important point of reference (even in disagreement). In addition, two aspects of the book could have had further specifications mainly for the sake of clarity, especially in consideration of a wider audience: one is that the book relies largely on Carole Angier’s biography of Levi and less on Ian Thomson’s one, Primo Levi. A Life (Thomson is mentioned as “one/another biographer” on pp. 21, 26, 96), which is something that could have been motivated more clearly; the other is that the choice of referring to Levi’s If This Is a Man with the initial – yet nowadays scarcely used – American title, Survival in Auschwitz, could have been explained more in detail. Finally, on p. 96, if the author refers to the copies of Se questo è un uomo’s first edition (1947) published by De Silva, they were 2500.