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by Primo Levi (1971)
translated from the Italian by Ruth Feldman

Written unplanned at different times and on different ocassions, Moments of Reprieve is a collection of fifteen short stories, each centred on one character only. There was Eddy, a self-absorbed green-triangle juggler and a thief, Tischler, a carpenter who recounts the story of Lilith. Bandi, a mild Hungarian whose name was Endre Szántó (reinforcing in Levi “the vague impression that a halo seemed to encircle his shaved head” to which Bandi explained laughingly: “Szántó means plowman, or more generically, peasant”), whom Levi taught to steal and cheat. Wolf, a Berlin pharmacist who “secreted music as our stomachs secreted hunger”, riddled with scabies but didn’t scratch. Grigo, a gypsy who asked Levi to write a letter to his girl saying that he was sending a doll. Otto, a barracks chief who gave a wash to Vladek, an imbecile but labeled as “politico”, and saved starving Ezra’s his ration for the next day because he could not eat his soup on the eve of Yom Kippur. Alberto, Levi’s interchangeable twin. Lorenzo, a mason, “voluntary” civilian worker. Last Christmas of the war. Levi’s “private attempt at bacteriological warfare”. Avrom. Rumkowsky.

Levi is one of a few writers whose works I have considerable difficulties writing my thoughts for, in part because it is very tempting to just quote the words (or shove the books to the person whom you’re talking about him to) and let them speak for themselves. He is also one of the many I enjoy rereading, thus rendering all previous (written) impressions inadequate. As overused it is for lame backcover reviews and acclaim, the phrase “superb storyteller” (and he, to some degrees, knows what a good story-telling is) is fully justified in the case of Levi: concise, analytical (but never dry) descriptions of details told in almost a sense of wonder, an appreciation, but never paraded in flamboyance.

Yet you can never miss the survivor’s guilt (”You feel others have died in your place, that we’re alive because of a privilege we haven’t deserved, because of an injustice done to the dead. It isn’t wrong to be alive, but we feel it is.”). I remembered his quote — with the familiar self-blaming resonancy — that went, “The survivors are the ones who can’t even tell the stories. We who can are not the real survivors.”

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Tags:fiction, holocaust, Italian-literature, Italy, Jewish-Literature, Primo-Levi, short stories