The Drowned and the Unsaved (Page 4)

Like Rumkowksi, we too are so dazzled by power and prestige as to forget our essential fragility.... Forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.

Of this change of heart, or perhaps a buried shadow, there are passing hints in The Voice of Memory: "My defect is lack of courage, fear for myself and for others." And: "I'm not very balanced at all. I go through long periods of imbalance.... I find it very hard to cope with problems. This side of myself I've never written about"--except perhaps in his angry, oblique poems, "suffused with auras and shadows." But: "I am incapable of analyzing myself. My work is nocturnal, often carried out unconsciously." Was it possible, he was asked, to destroy the humanity in man? "Yes, I'm afraid so."

In Anissimov's biography, however, the shadows hound us from the start. She's done all the busy work; read the report cards; buried the engineer father in 1942; tracked down the real Alberto; explained, on the one wing, Cesare Pavese, Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci and, on the other, the sinister clowns of Italian Futurism and Italian Fascism; looked at the racial laws, the Chemical Institute and the asbestos mine; gone into the beast's belly with all the rage that Levi suppressed (the vertical stripes and brass bands, the Jewish women in the camp orchestra wearing blue hats with polka dots while they play Vienna waltzes, the children burned alive to economize on hydrogen cyanide, tobacco pouches made from tanned scrotums); the engagement to Lucia Morpurgo ("Levi was infinitely grateful to Lucia for having consented to love him--an ex-deportee, a shy and repressed young man"); the suicide of Pavese, after all his friends had left town for the summer; the cigarettes (mentholated); the literary life (smarmy); the Red Brigades (appalling); Israel (get out of Lebanon, get rid of Sharon); Saul Bellow's famous-making praise for The Periodic Table; mother, witness, mother, witness, mother--

But all along--from a childhood fear of spiders dating back to his first glimpse of Doré's sketch of Arachne in Canto XII of Dante's Purgatorio, to a pubescent belief in what he was told by his Christian classmates about circumcision and castration, to his peculiar detestation of rabbits ("like certain human beings, they had nothing in their heads but food and sex") that had somehow extended to the girls around him, none of whom he could bring himself to touch, to the tormenting "dream within a dream" that came to him even after he was married ("I am alone in the center of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream; my family, nature in flower, my home"), to the obscene absurdity of receiving a signed copy of the Spandau diaries of Albert Speer, who claimed to be reading Levi, which could account for a renewed fever of the poetry-writing he called an "illness" ("dark and morbid themes," "violent feelings of rage," chimneys, shadows) and another downward spiral into depression, which is where he met Joseph K.--all along, it seems, he may have been as buggy and neurotic as Kafka himself, with more reason and less crawl space.

In his last letter to Ruth Feldman, the American translator of his poetry, two months before he died, he told her that "the period he was living through was worse than Auschwitz, because he was no longer young and no longer had the ability to react, and take a grip on himself." His last essay, published two weeks after the stairwell, was called "The Fear of Spiders":

Their hairiness is supposed to have a sexual significance, and the repulsion we feel supposedly reveals our unconscious rejection of sex: this is how we express it and at the same time this is how we try to free ourselves of it.... The spider is the enemy-mother who envelops and encompasses, who wants to make us re-enter the womb from which we have issued, bind us tightly to take us back to the impotence of infancy, subject us again to her power....

Like a great machine that crashes in on you...

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