If there is an Auschwitz, then there cannot be a God.
         (Primo Levi)

For the most part the Levi we meet in The Voice of Memory is the man in his books: "I'm Italian, but I'm also Jewish. It's like having a spare wheel, or an extra gear." He is also an "amphibian, a centaur," split in two--on the one hand, the chemist and technician; on the other, the writer who gives interviews. That he survived, unlike 647 of the 650 Italians who accompanied him to Poland, he attributes again to "sheer luck," "sound instinct," "unsuspected stamina," "knowing German" and "professional background." (Believing in God, which he didn't, and bearing witness, as he would, were irrelevant. He had happened to be a chemist in a concentration camp that was also an I.G. Farben synthetic rubber factory.) That he should have passed through the dark of Survival in Auschwitz to the light of The Reawakening seems a miracle. That he should have married, fathered, worked in a paint shop, made radio programs, won literary prizes--"Paradoxically, my baggage of atrocious memories became a wealth, a seed; it seemed to me that, by writing, I was growing like a plant"--and lectured schoolchildren in the same "calm and reasonable tone" is practically a benediction.

In the Roth interview, we see him in his study, in the room where he was born, with the flowered sofa, easy chair, word processor, color-coded notebooks, a big wire butterfly, a little wire bug and an owl. In the pages that follow, as if from Dr. Gottlieb in The Reawakening, "intelligence and cunning emanated from him like energy from radium, with the same silent and penetrating continuity." Or so we want to believe. He repeats, rethinks, amends, clarifies. We hear again about spoons and shoes; the "healing" in his first book and the "joy" of his second. About socialism and Sophie's Choice. About Rabelais, Dante and Ariosto. About solidarity in the camps (none) and resistance (futile). About James Joyce (whom he likes) and Bruno Bettelheim (whom he doesn't). He describes his chemical work ("at war with the obtuse and malign inertia of matter"), his responsibilities as a writer ("All we can ask of those who create is that they should be neither servile nor false") and what he reads in his spare time ("I prefer to stick to the tried and tested, to make a hole and then nibble away at it, perhaps for an entire lifetime, like woodworms when they find a piece of wood to their taste").

This is who we want him to be. It argues that perhaps something of the best of us, skeptical, ironic and aware, could outlive the worst. Like a Nobel Prize acceptance speech, it answers our secular-humanist need for a secular-humanist grace, a darting and undaunted intelligence capable of suggesting in 1980 that "Auschwitz may be the punishment...of barbarian Germany, of the barbarian Nazis, against Jewish civilization--that is to say, the punishment for daring, just as the shipwreck of Ulysses is the punishment of a barbarian god for human daring. I was thinking of that vein of German anti-Semitism that struck chiefly at the intellectual daring of the Jews, such as Freud, Marx, and all the innovators, in every field. It was that daring that irked a certain German philistinism much more than the fact of blood or race."

So if, in The Reawakening, he asked us to look at a Chagall-like scene in Zhmerinka ("The walls of one of the station latrines were plastered with German banknotes, meticulously stuck there with excrement"), we also saw the Russians dancing, the Gypsy orchestra at Slutsk and the train with a piano car. And if, in The Periodic Table, he recalls "the vilification of the prayer shawl," turned into underwear for Lager Jews, he also explains the political chemistry of Jewishness: "In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed...in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed.... I am the impurity that makes the zinc react, I am the grain of salt or mustard." And if, in The Monkey's Wrench, he had to tell us about the German engineer who went to Bombay's Towers of Silence and informed the Parsees "how German technicians had designed a grille to be placed at the bottom of the towers: a grille of electric resistors that would burn the dead body...without flames, without smell, and without contaminating anything," he also told us what it tastes like to drink a glacier's melting snow: "I couldn't explain it to you, because you know how hard it is to explain tastes and smells, except with examples, like if you say the smell of garlic or the taste of salami. But I would actually say that water tasted like sky, and, in fact, it came straight down from the sky."

But by the time he got to The Drowned and the Saved, the year before he died, it was as if the dogs ate the hare. It tore him apart to consider the pathos, ambiguities and collaborations of the "gray zone" in the camps, the "filtered memories" of victims and the survival strategies of even the bravest: "I come first, second, and third. Then nothing, then again I; and then all the others." This calm man was suddenly furious: "We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the 'muslims,' the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception." He seemed almost to relish the sleazy story of Chaim Rumkowski, "king of the Jews" of Lodz, who collaborated himself all the way to the gas chamber:

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