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Rewriting Race Law: Primo Levi's La tregua
James Thomas Chiampi
MLN, Volume 122, Number 1, January 2007 (Italian Issue), pp. 80-100 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2007.0025
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/213123
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]Rewriting Race Law:
Primo Levi’s La tregua
❦
James T. Chiampi
“Gli ebrei non appartengono alla razza italiana”: in 1938 fascists
declared the Italians a race and excluded Italian Jews from it. Il
manifesto della razza was elaborated by a committee of fascist scholars
in consultation with German race experts and published on August
5, 1938: “Gli ebrei rappresentano l’unica popolazione che non si è
mai assimilata in Italia perché essa è costituita da elementi razziali
non europei, diversi in modo assoluto dagli elementi che hanno dato
origine agli Italiani.”1 The exclusion of Jews from the life and history
of la nostra Patria would culminate in the Grand Council of Fascism’s
Dichiarazione sulla razza published on October 6, 1938. A little over a
month later, on November 17, 1938, over the signature of King and
Emperor Vittorio Emanuele III, Mussolini and other gerarchi, appea-
red the Provvedimenti per la difesa della razza italiana.2 Levi recalled,
1
La difesa della razza 1 (1938). 20 June 2006. . In the camps, it was actually the Italian Jews’ assimila-
tion into Italian life that caused their annihilation. Unlike the Polish Jews, they spoke
no Yiddish, so they could not obey commands screamed at them in German.
2
Most Italians ignored the race laws and their exclusions. Despite the invention of
the ghetto, Italy possessed no native tradition of anti-Semitism that could be remotely
compared to the French, Austrian, Russian or German. Indeed, Italian anti-Semitism
could be said to congeal around the advent of Hitler in 1933, when anti-Semites such
as Roberto Farinacci began urging Mussolini to an alliance. This is certainly not to
diminish the viciousness of the Italian laws, although the Italians claimed they were
milder than the German. Susan Zuccotti (The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution,
Rescue and Survival [New York: Basic Books, 1987]) notes that “there is no evidence
that Hitler or his top aides ever demanded an anti-Semitic program as the price of
German friendship” (33). With the invasion of Italy and the loosing of the SS, its police
MLN 122 (2007): 80–100 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University PressM LN 81
“. . . [D]i purezza si faceva un gran parlare, ed io cominciavo ad
essere fiero di essere impuro.”3 Finally, the Republic of Salò’s Carta
di Verona of November 14, 1943 would define Levi as a “stranier[o]
e parte di una nazione nemica.”4 The Carta di Verona announced his
final transformation: from ebreo as impurity to ebreo as enemy. Fascist
notions of purity established a hierarchy whose consequence would
be atrocity. Put another way, by an act of juridical fiat, purity captured
its other, named it impurity—elemento non europeo—and attempted to
annihilate it. In short, the race laws were crucial to transforming ebrei
italiani into174000s. This is the moment when the Jewishness which
Levi later called a supplement (“una ruota di scorta o una marcia in
più”) rationalized his deportation to Auschwitz on February 22, 1944.
La tregua is Levi’s reponse to a lethal contagion of unity and purity,
and witness to his pride in being impure.
La tregua is central to the Levi corpus because it is a dramatized repu-
diation of the representation of the Jew that Italian fascists, following
their Nazi masters, invented and propagated. By representation, I mean
an index of the reduction of Jewish identity to a series of behavioral
and racial stereotypes, schemata and rules. That is, although it is written
almost fifteen years after Se questo è un uomo and understands itself as
the completion of the earlier work, La tregua is actually prefatory in its
concern with Jewish identity. Despite, or on account of, memories of
fascist redefinition, exclusion and condemnation, Levi refuses to ape
the fascist—la nostra Patria—model by making a shared, pure Judaism
and Einsatzgruppen on the Italians, aided by rabid Fascist antisemites such as Giovanni
Preziosi, the Italian SS, and bands such as the Muti Legion, the registration of Jews
prescribed by article nine of the Provvedimenti per la difesa della razza italiana made it
easier to locate Jews to murder. For an insider’s view of the passing of race legislation,
see Count Galeazzo Ciano, The Ciano Diaries, 1939–1943, ed. Hugh Gibson [Garden
City: Doubleday, 1946]), and the anecdotes collected by Fausto Coen, Italiani ed ebrei:
come eravamo: Le leggi razziali del 1938 (Genova: Il Ponte, 1988).
3
Germaine Greer, “Colloquio con Primo Levi,” Primo Levi: Conversazioni e interviste,
Belpoliti ed. (Torino: Einaudi, 1997) 73. Perhaps Levi puts it best metaphorically in
Il sistema periodico (Torino: Einaudi, 1975), describing himself as an impurity in the
chapter “Zinco:”
Potrebbe addirittura diventare una discussione essenziale e fondamentale, perché ebreo sono
anch’io. . . . Sono io l’impurezza che fa reagire lo zinco, sono io il granello di sale e di senape.
L’impurezza, certo: poiché proprio in quei mesi iniziava la pubblicazione di “La Difesa della Razza,”
e di purezza si faceva un gran parlare, ed io cominciavo ad essere fiero di essere impuro. (37)
Levi the impurity aims to become Levi the allergen in La tregua. See also Giorgio
Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Torino: Einaudi, 1995).
4
Mario Avagliano, “Ebrei e fascismo: storia della persecuzione,” Patria indipendente 6–7
(2002). 20 June 2006 .82 JAMES T. CHIAMPI the source of an all-unifying, mystical, Hegelian transcendence that would gather together all the singularities he describes in the work. In La tregua, he refuses to privilege the Jewish remnant as a latter-day chosen people particularly blessed with justice and insight thanks to their experience of unspeakable atrocity. La tregua does not legislate an exemplary new polis of enlightened Judaism complete with laws and punishments. Recalling the Leggi raz- ziali, Levi is suspicious of laws that define and enforce harmony. On the contrary, the convoy proceeds in a state of benevolent anarchy: “[L]’intera carovana viveva in buona armonia, senza orario né regole.”5 In short, Levi does not reject fascism’s reason and universals only to replace them with Jewish versions. Nor does Levi posit a profound mutual understanding shared only by Jewish “brethren”—a Jewish transparency. Not even the shared experience of Auschwitz makes his fellow travelers “brethren.” He carefully maintains an interior distance from most of them; fraternity is not his metaphor for community. Indeed, Mordo Nahum—a species of Jewish Zorba—is anything but a brother. Nor are these men and women the other self that classi- cal philosophy understood the friend to be; on the contrary, each is grasped in his singularity. Thus, a historical Jewish contingency rather than transparent Jewish identity brings together this extremely singular—but not purely singular—assembly of Jews. After all, unlike many Jews whose paths cross his, Levi has no desire to continue on to Palestine. He is content to return to Torino. La tregua is the masterly narration of the reuniting of Levi’s ebraicità with his italianità. These elements are once more as reciprocally con- taminating as they had been under fascism, but here they combine to create a “racial” identity far more profound, yet elusive, than the contamination which fascism used as its alibi for exclusion. Here, Jewish italianità, no less than Italian ebraicità, becomes an openness both to the other and to the future; ultimately the means to differing from oneself, more an admission of unknowing than a program for understanding oneself. This is hardly surprising; Levi finds himself among others who have survived history’s most relentless, atrocious and inexplicable attempt at totality. La tregua is both testamentary and ironic: it recounts the journey home of a gathering founded not on the same, but on difference, that is a gathering of singularities.6 La Se questo è un uomo; La tregua (Torino: Einaudi, 1989) 193. 5 Throughout this study, “community” should be understood to be within quotation 6 marks to render the author’s ironic distance from this concept in La tregua. Levi and
M LN 83 tregua affirms more relentlessly than Se questo è un uomo the lesson of Auschwitz: that one correlative of the subsumption of the singular into the universal was the transformation of the singular Jew into smoke and ashes; for the Nazis, indeed individuum ineffabile est. In fascist Italy, a Jew was not an Italian; in Auschwitz, an Italian was not a Jew. In Se questo è un uomo, Polish Jews denied the 174000s Jewish identity because the latter spoke no Yiddish: Tutti sanno che i centosettantaquattromila sono gli ebrei italiani: i ben noti ebrei italiani, arrivati due mesi fa, tutti avvocati, tutti dottori, erano piú di cento e già non sono che quaranta, quelli che non sanno lavorare e si lasciano rubare il pane e prendono schiaffi dal mattino alla sera; i tedeschi li chiamano “zwei linke hände” (due mani sinistre), e perfino gli ebrei polacchi li disprezzano perché non sanno parlare yiddisch. (43) “Perfino gli ebrei polacchi li disprezzano”: Levi entered the infirmary (“Ka-Be”) with an accidental injury to his foot, and overheard Polish attendants lump him—174517—with his incompetent, easily victim- ized, fellow Italian Jews. For Levi, 174000 names a despicably low caste within Judaism, Italian Judaism—“tutti avvocati, tutti dottori”—a caste to which he does not wish to belong. The memory of his bumbling, quickly murdered compatriots—though not co-religionists—mortified Levi-narrator in the earlier work, in part because 174517 was so very like them: cultured, educated, professional, unprepared, impractical. La tregua records each step in the education in cunning that frees Levi-narrator of the taint of relegation to the 174000s described in Se questo è un uomo. Now Levi is at pains to disown that name/number; it humiliates him to be judged a helpless victim. Jewish identity by whatever name may be complex and differential; it could be fatal even after the Holocaust. For example, early in La tregua a kindly Polish lawyer whom Levi meets during a brief stopover in Trzebinia hides his fellow voyagers are on the run from the armed and totalitarian forms that com- munity took under fascism which identified itself as la Nazione. My reading of La tregua owes much to Jacques Derrida’s Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995); Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference,” Social Theory and Practice 12 (1986): 1–26; Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992) 39–61; Wil- liam Corlett, Community without Unity: A Politics of Derridian [sic] Extravagance (Durham: Duke UP, 1993); and John D. Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham UP, 1997). I owe a special intellectual debt to both Caputo’s Demthologyzing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993) and to his More Radi- cal Hermeneutics: On Not Knowing Who We Are (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000). Against my position, see Robert S.C. Gordon’s excellent chapter “Friendship,” in Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001) 219–36.
84 JAMES T. CHIAMPI
Levi’s Jewishness to protect him from a potentially lethal antisemitism:
“L’avvocato mi descriveva al pubblico non come un ebreo italiano, ma
come un prigioniero politico italiano” (191). Later, during a stop in
Proskurov, two young Russian Jewish women, Sore and her sister, burst
into laughter at the very idea of a Jew who spoke no Yiddish (241).
(Years later Levi, who barely recalled Hebrew, took Yiddish lessons.)
What makes a Jew authentic?
Emil L. Fackenheim legislated an “authentic” Jewishness in the quasi
Talmudic proscriptions in his essay “The 614th Commandment:” “[W]e
are forbidden to turn present and future life into death, as the price
of remembering death at Auschwitz. And we are equally forbidden to
affirm present and future life, at the price of forgetting Auschwitz.”7
He then conjures up Hitler in order to pronounce his 614th com-
mandment: “The authentic Jew of today is forbidden to hand Hitler
yet another, posthumous victory” (23). Two questions that arise from
Fackenheim’s mitzvah are: “Forbidden by whom?” and “Why should
Levi be inscribed in Fackenheim’s ‘we’?”. During the Holocaust, Levi
paid a high price in fear and pain for his very complex Judaism only
to have his authenticity impugned afterward. Now, long after the
Holocaust, Fackenheim does him and the other survivors further vio-
lence by levying on them a debt owed a defunct sociopath, even if it
is a perpetually insolvent debt, or better, an aporetic debt. Why must
Jews put their authenticity in the spectral hands of Hitler, the tyrant
who falsified Jewish identity during the Thousand-Year Reich? How
then can Levi accept Fackenheim’s debt and achieve Fackenheim’s
particular version of authenticity?
Levi’s text defines authenticity for itself. La tregua testifies that the
present and future life of one who was forced to drink deeply of the
inexhaustible fountain of evil that Levi calls Auschwitz are incurably
pervaded by death: “[L’offesa] dilaga come un contagio” (158). The
contagion of Auschwitz certainly leaves him in perpetual violation of
Fackenheim’s purist rule, but this contagion is the groundless ground
of Levi’s authenticity. La tregua defines for Levi an authentic, but not
pure, Jewishness: the definition it elaborates makes him a Jew as not-
Jew by virtue of his—an impurity’s—contamination by Auschwitz. La
tregua asserts that authentic Jewishness lies in a continual attempt both
to affirm and deny oneself as Jew within an economy of Jewishness.
Levi’s Judaism is never present, but always underway. The matrix of
7
The Jewish Return into History: Reflections in the Age of Auschwitz and a New Jerusalem
(New York: Schocken, 1978) 22.M LN 85
the definition La tregua proposes is an abominable but ineradicable
contamination, one which “risale come infamia sugli oppressori, si
perpetua come odio nei superstiti, e pullula in mille modi, contro
la stessa volontà di tutti, come sete di vendetta, come cedimento
morale, come negazione, come stanchezza, come rinuncia” (158).
No contamination, no La tregua, no Levi.
Since, as Levi claims, Jews were murdered simply for being, one
repudiation of Hitler is the vaunting of one’s survival. Such repudiation
of Hitler is a familiar gesture in the literature of the post-Holocaust:
George Steiner, for example, claims that he returned to Europe at his
father’s behest to prove that Hitler had failed to make Europe juden-
rein.8 La tregua is a testimonial repudiation of Hitler and of the Teutonic,
but one which also possesses a ludic side because it also stages Levi’s
rebellion against the potentially fatal proprieties and limitations of his
middle-class torinese, Jewish upbringing. One example: Levi unlearns
middle-class, unquestioning respect for authority somewhere in Russia
when his friends find themselves on a train with an unoccupied infir-
mary car: “Perché non ci saliamo,” asks Cesare, “proibito,—risposi io
insulsamente.” Cesare responds, “Perché doveva essere proibito e da
chi?” (249). The new company that he keeps marks Levi’s mutation
from impurity into allergen.
Levi meets Cesare after hearing him speaking Italian on the other
side of the wall of the Infektionsabteilung of Ka-Be (“attraverso la parete
di legno, a pochi centimetri dalla mia testa” [205]), finds him, brings
him water, feeds him, nurses him, and thereby establishes a “lunga e sin-
golare amicizia” (206). Singolare is the operative concept here because
it describes both Cesare and their friendship. It is by virtue of Cesare’s
singularity that they are friends. But the necessary condition for their
meeting at all is that they are both Italian Jews—displaced impurities
languishing together in the infectious diseases ward of Auschwitz. Levi
idolizes Cesare: taking part in Cesare’s activities “costituiva un’espe-
rienza unica, uno spettacolo vivo e corroborante, che mi riconciliava
col mondo e raccendeva in me la gioia di vivere che Auschwitz aveva
spento” (213). The activities of Cesare that evoke such fulsome praise
are essentially commerce, charlatanry and theft. Levi honors Cesare’s
skills because their acquisition frees him of the “174000” label and
provides a belated remedy to his helplessness in Auschwitz, as if to say
8
George Steiner, Errata: An Examined Life (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988) 54. See also
Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (New York:
Random House, 1998) 303.86 JAMES T. CHIAMPI
“never again.” Moreover, “una virtù quale quella di Cesare è buona
in sé, in senso assoluto; è sufficiente a conferire nobiltà a un uomo,
a riscattarne molti eventuali diffetti, a salvarne l’anima” (213). Levi
admires “[i]l fascino di Cesare”(213)—his Auschwitz sprezzatura, an
expression of his singularity. That is, he teaches Levi the gioia di vivere
of the outlaw, survivalist Jewishness. Cesare’s linguistic idiosyncrasy is
an index of his uniqueness: “parlava solo italiano, anzi romanesco,
anzi ancora, il gergo del ghetto di Roma, costellato di vocaboli ebraici
storpiati” (214). Levi’s generous praise of Cesare is obviously in excess
of any debt Levi owes to either this singular individual or to truth
understood narrowly. Cesare’s lawlessness adds further contamination
to the already impure Levi. For sport, Cesare and Levi leave the camp
at Katowice, passing Levi’s identification to each other: “non uscimmo
dal buco nel reticolato. Uscii io per primo dalla porta grande” (211).
Such is Cesare’s contamination of him that each playfully identifies
himself as “Primo Levi.”
“Ognuno è l’ebreo di qualcuno”: that “qualcuno” can even be
oneself. Levi, en route, grows progressively other to the Jew he had
been in Torino and Auschwitz.9 His trip is the gradual elaboration of
a different, impure and above all non-fascistic Jewishness, but it is not
one Levi could ever adequately render as a concept. That is, Levi’s
Jewishness is an unknowing of his own Jewishness. One instance: La
tregua performs Levi’s rejection/repudiation of the person he was when
he was captured by the Fascist militia on December 13, 1943. In Se
questo è un uomo, Levi-narrator shamed the future Levi-Häftling thus:
Avevo ventiquattro anni, poco senno, nessuna esperienza, e una decisa
propensione, favorita dal regime di segregazione a cui da quattro anni le
leggi razziali mi avevano ridotto, a vivere in un mio mondo scarsamente
reale, populato da civili fantasmi cartesiani, da sincere amicizie maschili
e da amicizie femminili esangui. Coltivavo un moderato e astratto senso
di ribellione. (11)
This impractical Primo Levi died at Auschwitz. La tregua announces
a new Levi’s apprenticeship in the practice of a kind of traditional
Italian flexibility, one familiar from Renaissance literature, in par-
ticular from Ariosto who created Astolfo, a sublimely absurd Luft-
mensch. Levi is apprentice first to Mordo Nahum, then to Cesare,
and finally to Giacomantonio—all thieves—in skills he could use to
preclude his ever again being the helpless victim, as according to the
9
Se non ora, quando? (Torino: Einaudi, 1982) 187.M LN 87
law he enunciated in Se questo è un uomo: “Chi non sa diventare un
Organisator, Kombinator, Prominent (truce eloquenza dei termini!)
finisce in breve mussulmano” (81). In Mordo the Greek, Levi finds
a Jewish version of Odysseus polytropos, a man never at a loss, whose
Salonikite-Jewish metis “equivaleva ad una garanzia di raffinate abilità
mercantili, e di sapersela cavare in tutte le circostanze” (179). One
might object that Levi’s portrait of Mordo-Odysseus is an anti-Semitic
stereotype—a latter-day Fagin—but it too has a ludic side: the bold
vaunting of stereotype.
The mysterious Dr. Gottlieb is no less sharp: “Ogni difficoltà si
sfaceva in nebbia davanti alla sua sfrontatezza, alla sua alta fantasia,
alla sua prontezza di spadaccino” (239). Under the tutelage of such
men, the journey through each stop and stage traces Primo Levi’s
wanderjahr education in furbizia and resourcefulness. Put somewhat
differently, La tregua recounts the development of Levi’s openness to
the other that is to come, the à venir. His itinerary sets it forth: Levi
never knows what direction the train will take, hence what dangers
await, where the next stop will be, who will join them, who leave, who
die. Put somewhat differently, each adventure in unknowing brings
him closer to grasping himself as the other of the other.10 Thus, he
10
On La tregua, see Anne Boulé, “La tregua ou l’infini retour,” La licorne 33 (1995):
155–72; Gian Paolo Biasin, “The Haunted Journey of Primo Levi,” Memory and Mastery:
Primo Levi as Writer and Witness, ed. Roberta S. Kremer (Albany: State U of New York P,
2001) 3–19; and JoAnn Cannon, “Storytelling and the Picaresque in Levi’s La tregua,”
Modern Language Studies 31.2 (2001): 1–10. In her excellent study, Cannon writes that
La tregua is “an extroverted account of the rediscovery of community. The author’s
‘gioia di vivere, gioia di liberazione’ is one with his rekindled interest in the other,”
and concludes that it is “the account of the reawakening hunger for human contact as
a fundamental need of mankind” (1). I have reservations about Cannon’s first position:
I believe that Levi privileges the individual in his variety, idiosyncrasy and eccentric-
ity—his singularity—over what one might call “the community.” It is a metaphysical
position. Consider in this regard Gianni Vattimo’s observation regarding the relationship
between violence and metaphysics (“Metafisica, violenza, secolarizzazione.” Filosofia ’86,
ed. Gianni Vattimo [Bari: Laterza, 1987]):
I forni crematori di Auschwitz, dice Adorno, non sono solo conseguenze di una certa visione
razionalistica del mondo; sono anche e sopratutto l’immagine anticipata di ciò che il mondo
amministrato è e fa nel suo andamento normale, che afferma e rende universale: “l’assoluta
indifferenza alla vita di ogni singolo.” (76)
In La tregua, Levi is thinking a way of being together without thinking it as community
and especially not as Jewish community. Levi is a Jew without being Jewish, a man with
an identity that does not coincide with itself. His narrative of petty crime and of the
eagerness with which his friends would scam each other would have scandalized a
Hegel for whom the mark of community is the internalization of its laws. According
to Cornell, “Obedience to the rules is correct consciousness. Those who don’t obey
the laws don’t know who they really are” (47). In Levi, the substance of the individual88 JAMES T. CHIAMPI
can submissively accept and, with contempt for the man he was, relate
Mordo Nahum’s denigration of him: “Je n’ai pas encore compris si
tu es idiot o fainéant” (188). Recounting Mordo’s denigrating words
underscores Levi-narrator’s responsibility to Levi-viator’s singular-
ity. Levi-narrator demonstrates his humility toward a self that is not
pure, transparent, self-sufficient nor under his control. Thus, if any
of his fellow voyagers seem strange, it is because each is a singular,
unknowable “I” like Levi himself—and this simple fact of identity
amazes him.11 And it is out of other such selves that he forms the
“community” of this work.
Far different from Levi-narrator who damned Kuhn and Kraus in Se
questo è un uomo is Levi-narrator of La tregua. Levi-viator, whom Levi-nar-
rator describes in La tregua, is in varying degrees Von Grimmelshausen’s
Semplicissimus and Voltaire’s Candide, moving across great devastated,
decimated European expanses not unlike those which Calvino would
describe in Il visconte dimezzato. Still, the narrator’s awareness of pass-
ing through a tregua (195) between World War and Cold War in these
foreign places gives the journey its aspect of fête. One finds neither the
quotidian nor the uniform: during this brief time of truce, Levi travels
on a train that becomes a Babelic community, a formation in cease-
less transformation, a community constantly adding and subtracting
members: “Vi erano francesi, italiani, olandesi, greci, cèchi, ungheresi,
ed altri: alcuni erano stati operai civili della Organizzazione Todt, altri
internati militari, altri ancora ex Häftlinge” (195). So various in itself
is this “community” that victims travel beside those who yesterday had
been their tormentors—former Häftlinge share space with Kapos such
as Hanka, Henek and unnamed others—like the lambs of Apocalypse
who sit down with wolves. No coupling is illicit: during this journey of
truce, the propinquity traditionally associated with the friend is now
shared with the former enemy. No hard and fast border separates
friend and enemy in this “community” that differs with itself. These
are indeed displaced persons.
There is neither propriety nor private property here: the voyagers
are an ad hoc assembly of Lager-trained, expert organizzatori: everything
they have they have stolen, borrowed or improvised—“organized,”
does not derive from the collectivity. La tregua rejects the Hegelian notion of the state
as adapted by fascism.
11
For a fuller discussion of the play of Levi’s representations of himself, see James T.
Chiampi, “Testifying to His Text: Primo Levi and the Concentrationary Sublime,”Romanic
Review 94 (2003): 491–511.M LN 89 in the language of Auschwitz. Possessions do not define them, and everyone must have a function: “Tutte le vie sono chiuse a chi appare inutile, tutte sono aperte a chi esercita una funzione, anche la piú insulsa” (198). Just as private property is not safe, there is no stable pro- prium, and stop by stop one uses one’s wit to cobble together an ethic. Levi accordingly underscores the foreignness of the once expected, familiar, rational and planned. The Russians give out rubles and the cry goes up, “dànno soldi!” (295), but not long after, the Russians search out and confiscate those very rubles, because exporting rubles is prohibited (305). Not even the train’s engineer knows the route; he will go where he can find viable track (301). And where are they anyway? With the exception of the remaining battle lines, all borders have broken down, awaiting the treaties that will recreate them. Poland, USSR, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, Italy: Levi’s train crosses vaporous borders. In a similar way, the thematics of La tregua works toward the diminishing of collective identity in favor of the individual as singularity: Levi describes travel through invaded states soon to be invaded again and refashioned by the Soviet Union, the precariousness and transience of being together, the relative and varied Jewishness of his fellow passengers, their ingenuity. As in a play of macrocosm/microcosm, these invaded and contaminated states are no more stable and self-identical than Levi and his fellow displaced. He and the forty or so former inmates of San Vittore encapsulate a species of Italian-Jewish state. Classic metaphysical thought prizes unimpeded—ideally immedi- ate—movement from sign to signified, efficient journeys. But efficiency here is pejorative, evoking the Teutonic and atrocious. The serpentine journey of La tregua, with its stops, twists, returns and detours; a journey undertaken by accident and continued in unknowing by all parties involved, is, by its failure of efficiency, a repudiation of the metaphysi- cal connotations of the Teutonic. Metaphysics prizes hard and fast distinctions among universals, so caricatural, miniature and harmless versions of an Auschwitz in bono appear as contaminants throughout the journey. In Szczakowa, for example, the Polish Red Cross sets up a kitchen that seems to Levi “il Lager a rovescio” (180), as if it were an antidote to the killing machine. Levi’s itinerary becomes an inscription of contamination across Europe, the imagistic subversion of Teutonic efficiency intent on purification. Detour, deferral and distraction stand in antidotal antithesis to the lethally direct, efficient, and relentlessly teleological transportation of Jews to their murder. The journey elaborates a differential community that abides beneath
90 JAMES T. CHIAMPI
no stable universal if only because its population is too transient to
admit identification. Russian Galina, for example, disappeared, as if
“risucchiata dalla vacuità dello spazio russo” (201). Who knows where
they are heading? “In tutto il convoglio non esistevano che due o tre
carte geografiche, senza tregua disputate” (302)—the maps are dispu-
ted like Dantesque cruces, or Talmudic laws. These disputations, how-
ever, establish no single normative reader and permit no charismatic
leader. Levi himself lacks even the rudimentary qualifications—belief,
culture—properly to play this role. Indeed, Ian Thomson reminds us
in his 1987 interview with Levi that Levi “never practiced the Jewish
faith.”12 Levi often claims in interviews that Auschwitz made him a
Jew. On the radio program “Il paginone (Il teatrino della memoria),”
Levi claims that he was already marked as a Jew by the Leggi razziali of
1938: “Io ero già segnato, con altri miei compagni di studio eravamo
catalogati come ‘cittadini italiani di razza ebraica.’”13 His tattooed
number is his second marking. Levi’s decision not to have his number
erased is thus in conflict with Jewish identity as maintained by law:
the Talmud strictly forbids the burial of a tattooed Jew in a proper
Jewish cemetery.
The fascist dismissal of Levi’s italianità is repudiated by his fidelity to
an Italian ethic of flexibility, and to its openness in his understanding
of himself and others. In Se questo è un uomo, he recounted how his
fellow Häftling Steinlauf, formerly Sergeant Steinlauf, Iron Cross in
the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First World War, counseled
12
“Primo Levi in Conversation,” PN Review 14 (1987): 18. In Se non ora, quando?, the
Russian Jewish partisan Mendel tries hard to imagine this strange place called “Italy”
and these equally strange Italian Jews:
Se un re è un personaggio da favola, un re d’Italia è due volte da favola perché l’Italia stessa
è favola. Era impossibile farsene un’immagine concreta. Come si può condensare nella stessa
immagine il Vesuvio e le gondole, Pompei e Fiat, il teatro della Scala e le caricature di Mussolini
che si vedevano sul Krokodíl. . . . Chissà se c’erano ebrei in Italia. Se sí, dovevano essere ebrei
strani: come puoi figurarti un ebreo in gondola o in cima al Vesuvio? Ma ci dovevano pure
essere. . . . (40–41)
It is as if Levi, a Jew who is not a Jew, is returning to a place called Italy, which is not a
real place. Mendel’s experience is a suppressed paean to the goodness of Levi’s fellow
Italians, “. . . [n]o, non tutti avevano una casa come la sua: né cristiani né ebrei. Non
tutti ma molti, Milano è una città ricca. Ricca e generosa, molti ebrei erano rimasti in
città, nascosti o con documenti falsi; i vicini e gli amici che li incontravano facevano
finta di non conoscerli, però di nascosto gli portavano da mangiare” (253). By way
of gloss, see Jean Améry’s memorable chapter, “On the Necessity and Impossibility
of Being a Jew,” At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its
Realities (trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld [Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1980]) 82–101.
13
In Primo Levi: Conversazioni e interviste, 8.M LN 91 him to spend the warmth and calories to wash, even if he did not want to in order to maintain his dignity. But to be Levi means rejecting contamination by an ethics formulated di là delle Alpi: Queste cose mi disse Steinlauf, uomo di volontà buona: strane cose al mio orecchio dissueto, intese e accettate solo in parte, e mitigate in una piú facile, duttile e blanda dottrina, quella che da secoli si respira al di qua delle Alpi, secondo la quale, fra l’altro non c’è maggior vanità che sforzarsi di inghiottire interi i sistemi morali elaborati da altri, sotto altro cielo. (36) Levi is more accepting of Italian thieves than of foreign ethics: the failed thief Ferrari tells bourgeois Dottor Levi, laureato in chimica, “ho seguito per molti anni la scuola dei ladri di Loreto” (202) without graduating. That is, feckless Ferrari represents himself as Italian, but does so using the stereotypical figuration of the Roma (gypsy), professional of theft, that is, the figuration of foreign Untermenschen. Ferrari is not alone in defeating stereotypes of the proper company for a bourgeois Italian Jew: the Greek Jew Mordo Nahum is, among other things, a thief and eventual whoremonger. Prominent among the thieves are Cravero, Trovati and Jewish Cesare, as well as the pla- giarist and fantast, Signor Unverdorben. Italian Flora is a small-time prostitute who worked for the Todt Organization. Other Jews/Italians are antisocial, such as the hermits Cantarella and the Velletrano. Still others are either overt or borderline madmen such as Avesani and D’Agata (176). Italian Luftmenschen, “i soliti furbi” (255), abound. The “nomadic” shepherd boy Vincenzo suffers unpredictable seizures (315). For every Dr. Gottlieb or Lorenzo, there is a fraud like the mar- ginally competent accountant, “Colonello” Rovi, in his preposterous, improvised uniform, who conjures up power by manipulating signs. All repudiate the stereotype of the 174000s, “tutti dottori, tutti avvocati.” Levi is writing a hagiography of the Untermensch. Levi-narrator is not simply recounting his colorful adventures with madcap individuals, but rather expressing a friendship with them that is based not on sameness, but on difference—on not knowing who they are. The pervasive shame Levi described in Se questo è un uomo is absent here. This is a very different narrator from the various sardonic, cruel and morally austere Primo Levi of the earlier work. In the meantime, the stereotype of the invincible Teuton has also crumbled: SS Herrenvolk walk on their knees to beg Daniele for food (248); two hidden Wehrmacht auxiliaries survive on theft and saltuary prostitution “finché lo stanziamento italiano aveva portato loro pros- perità e sicurezza” (271) (they are protected by Italians!). Wehrmacht
92 JAMES T. CHIAMPI
prisoners lie about like untended cattle (“Nessuno li sorvegliava”
[247]). Their present herd existence travesties the transparency and
purposiveness of the German Volk which Nazi propaganda eulogized.
In Vienna, a garishly made up twelve-year-old prostitutes herself (313).
Levi even witnesses something like a selezione of the Germans: a Polish
policeman warns him not to speak German because “stanotte tutti
tedeschi kaputt” (192), as if suggesting a miniature Endlösung of the
Deutschenfrage.14 The war is over; the mighty have been brought low;
the Untermenschen have inherited the earth.
Levi frees leadership from the charismatic by means of comic per-
formativity. Accountant Rovi “organizes” a title and power according
to the Russian model of bureaucracy:
Aveva organizzato una scrivania, con moduli (scritti a mano, in bella scrit-
tura con svolazzi), timbri, matite di vari colori e libro mastro; pur non
essendo colonnello, anzi, neppure militare, aveva appeso fuori della porta
un vistoso cartello “Comando Italiano—Colonnello Rovi;” si era circondato
di una piccola corte di sguatteri, scritturali, sagrestani, spie, messaggeri e
bravacci. . . . (196)
This description of Rovi’s invention of power and a court suggests
the humor of Calvino and Borges. Sanctioned by no authority, Rovi’s
caprice alone supports his elaboration of inane differences. A similar
caprice underwrites Cesare’s taxonomy of his clients: “Aveva ormai al
mercato un posto fisso e una clientela affezionata, da lui stesso evo-
cata dal nulla: la Baffona, la Pelleossi, Repiscitto, ben tre Chiappone,
Fojjo de Via, Franchestein, una ragazza giunonica che lui chiamava
Er Tribbunale, e vari altri” (217). Evocata dal nulla: commerce too
is magic. Once again, the train conductor himself does not know
where they are going (303), and if they know, the Russian authori-
ties are not telling. Leadership is ignorant, fumbling and provisory,
anything but charismatic; no Duce nor Führer directs this convoy. As
Hegel knew, around such preposterous leadership no group identity
can coalesce.
14
I believe that in order best to understand the overall tone of La tregua one must
compare it to its countertext in Se questo è un uomo, a crisis moment in Levi’s sense of
himself as Jewish: the night before the departure for Auschwitz from Fossoli, when
he watches the women of Gattegno’s family quickly finish all the preparations for the
journey, and set everything in order so that they might have enough time for mourn-
ing, light their funereal candles, and spend the entire night in prayer, weeping and
lamentation: “Noi sostammo numerosi davanti alla loro porta, e ci discese nell’anima,
nuovo per noi, il dolore antico del popolo che non ha terra, il dolore senza speranza
dell’esodo ogni secolo rinnovato” (13).M LN 93
Home as such is perpetually deferred by its detour into the Unheim-
lich. In short, a great irony of the journey is that going home means
that Levi is on his way to the one place where he is in constant danger
of the eruption of an interior Auschwitz, a notion that might well have
appalled and outraged Fackenheim. Thus, Levi’s personal response
to Fackenheim’s abjuration, “[W]e are forbidden to turn present and
future life into death, as the price of remembering death at Auschwitz”
(22), might be that present and future life are both penetrated by his
concentrationary past, which is to say, by a familiar tout autre, death. Levi
illustrates this most vividly in his poem of January 11, 1946, “Alzarsi.”
He writes: “Sognavamo nelle notti feroci / Sogni densi e violenti /
Sognati con anima e corpo: / Tornare, mangiare; raccontare . . . /
Ora abbiamo ritrovato la casa, / Il nostro ventre è sazio, / Abbiamo
finito di raccontare. / È tempo. Presto udiremo ancora / Il comando
straniero: / ‘Wstawac;’” (vv. 1–4; 9–14).15 He broke off recounting only
for the moment: in La tregua—completed in November 1962—tornare
once again becomes sognare. Contamination means that Auschwitz can
reappear to impose its chaos:
[T]utto cade e si disfa intorno a me, lo scenario, le pareti, le persone, e
l’angoscia si fa piú intensa e piú precisa. Tutto è ora volto in caos: sono
solo al centro di un nulla grigio e torbido, ed ecco, io so che cosa questo
significa, ed anche so di averlo sempre saputo: sono di nuovo in Lager, e
nulla era vero all’infuori del Lager. Il resto era breve vacanza, o inganno
dei sensi, sogno: la famiglia, la natura in fiore la casa. Ora questo sogno
interno, il sogno di pace, è finito, e nel sogno esterno, che prosegue gelido,
odo risuonare una voce, ben nota; una sola parola, non imperiosa, anzi
breve e sommessa. È il comando dell’alba in Auschwitz, una parola straniera,
temuta e attesa: alzarsi, “Wstawac;.” (325)
Nulla era vero all’infuori del Lager: in his dream, home has been invaded
by a future which is past. Thus does Corso Re Umberto 75 dissolve
into Nacht und Nebel. It hardly surprises that in the edition of La
tregua cited in this paper the chapter of his homecoming, “Il risveg-
lio,” takes up three and one half pages; it is a brief “reawakening.”
Odysseus remains only briefly in Ithaka before setting out again to
sack more cities. Levi sits down to write about Auschwitz. Unlike Se
questo è un uomo, nowhere in La tregua—with the possible exception
of the episode of the letter Cravero delivers to Levi’s mother for him
15
Primo Levi: Opere, II, 45. See Gina Lagorio, “La memoria perenne e la poesia ‘Ad
ora incerta,’” Primo Levi as Witness: Proceedings of a Symposium Held at Princeton University
April 30–May 2, 1989, ed. Pietro Frassica (Firenze: Casalini, 1990) 63–75.94 JAMES T. CHIAMPI
(231–32)—does Levi mention a yearning to contact his mother and
sister (Levi’s father died in 1942, before his deportation).
Contamination is homelessness. In La tregua, Levi elaborates a shift-
ing and constantly improvised community of the afflicted, a community
of the road, a civitas viae without the walls and armaments suggested
by the etymon com-munire of community; without its obsession with
unity and impermeability, one indifferent to national boundaries,
one belonging to no state. The closest we come to distinctions is the
railway cars in which the passengers take up residence, but even this
is provisory at best. Contamination clearly has its virtues: the abundant
and deeply felt gratitude and appreciation that Levi feels toward the
Russians are occasioned both by their inefficiency and by their inabil-
ity or nonchalance at maintaining boundaries, that is, at maintaining
purity—this is Russian unknowing. Russian hospitality lies in the Rus-
sians’ reluctance to impose either constraint or coercion on their sub-
jects. It performs the antidotal contrary to the murderous bureaucracy
of Auschwitz that authorized the tattooing of names on forearms, and
elaborated separations and distinctions to expedite murder. Russian
soldiers, unlike the Teutons, are “miti in pace e atroci in guerra, forti
di una disciplina interiore nata dalla concordia, dall’amore reciproco
e dall’amore di patria; una disciplina piú forte, appunto perché inte-
riore, della disciplina meccanica e servile dei tedeschi” (195–96). If,
in a sentimental moment, Levi projects onto the Russians a yearning
of his for harmony and single-mindedness, he must then reconcile
their presumed disciplina interiore with their positive adoration of inane
bureaucracy, which is traditionally understood to be an exteriority. In
short, the irony of the text actually makes Russian goodness reside in
the very bureaucracy that sabotages inner discipline and single-minded
harmony. Theirs is ultimately an Italianate, anti-fascist goodness that
knows no hierarchy “. . . [T]utti i loro rapporti gerarchici erano
indecifrabili” (195). Russian inefficiency enacts a parody of Socialist
egalitarianism, because Russians neither impose nor coerce: “Non vi
era da parte russa alcuna velleità di pressione ideologica, anzi, nessun
tentativo di discriminazione fra noi” (265).16 To travesty the Levi of Se
non ora, quando?, “ognuno è l’italiano di qualcuno.” As if ignoring his
dispossession by the fascists, Levi is quick to locate an Italy in those
16
I shall make Iris Marion Young’s words my own to describe Levi’s experience of
the city of return: “A model of the unoppressive city [which] offers an understand-
ing of social relations without domination in which persons live together in relations
of mediation among strangers with whom they are not in community”(“The Ideal of
Community” 2).M LN 95 he loves. Stalin’s show trials, mass starvations and capricious murders lie outside La tregua, because their absence is essential to maintaining the atmosphere of fête. One form the antithesis between the negligenza oblomoviana (294) of the Russians and the perpetually alert Teutonic rage for order takes is expressed in the multiplication of useless propusks that allow what can rarely be forbidden. Viewed most positively, such bureau- cratic formalism is an expression of Russian hospitality, because it neither dominates nor alienates. Thus, Russian hospitality lies not in protective dominion, but in the renunciation of dominion over their unruly often marauding guests. For example, the Russians may gladly manipulate their indecipherable hierarchies and rules to the benefit of individuals, but they adore them all the same: “Sembrava amassero la burocrazia di quell’amore platonico e spirituale che non giunge al possesso e non lo desidera” (197). Their adored red tape becomes a charmingly innocuous poetry of organization, proffering a fiction of power crafted from signs. It is atelic: not ordered to ends, or perhaps autotelic: having no end but itself. In either case, their red tape is open to capricious interpretation and indifferent to faithful implementa- tion. Marja Fjodorovna’s hospitality lies in her manipulation of just this monolithic, irrelevant bureaucracy: “Si scarabocchiò il mio nome sul pezzo di carta, e il giorno seguente mi consegnò solennemente il ‘propusk,’ un lasciapassare dall’aspetto assai casalingo, che mi auto- rizzava a entrare e uscire dal campo a qualsiasi ora del giorno e della notte” (199). Marja Fjodorovna’s ad hoc bureaucracy adjudicates ran- domly and eccentrically, yet generously, hence hospitably, but above all harmlessly. For example, although Russian rules provide free medical care only to members of the Bogucice camp, anyone who requested it received it (199). No universally applied criterion of eligibility gets in the way of Fjodorovna’s extending medical care to whomever she pleases. Russian boundaries of eligibility have as many holes in them as do Russian fences. There is a comic generosity in this writing of hospitality that elaborates inane, porous, and unenforceable differ- ences that neither exclude nor imprison anyone. A constellation of images regularly accompanies descriptions of the Russians’ administration of order: guards who fall asleep or leave their posts such as the mongolo gigantesco at Katowice (194), and ubiquitous holes in fences. Unlike the guards of Auschwitz, “davanti alla porta del campo la sentinella . . . russava ubriaca e sdraiata per terra, col mitra a tracolla; poi non si vide piú” (220). In Staryje Doroghi, unlike Auschwitz, “intorno alla Casa Rossa non c’era ombra di filo spinato”
96 JAMES T. CHIAMPI
(279). (In Auschwitz the electrified wire carried 6000 volts, making it
the common means of suicide.) Far from imprisoning or electrocut-
ing, Russian fences do not even separate. In Katowice, for example,
“chiunque poteva benissimo uscire attraverso il buco nei reticolati,
e andarsene in città libero come un uccello del cielo” (204). The
captured Cesare, who pretends illness, eludes his benevolent Russian
captors with not a care for danger, “liscio come l’olio, e se ne tornò a
Bogucice a piccole tappe” (208). The thief Cravero leaves the train,
arriving at Torino in record time, “sgusciando come un’anguilla attra-
verso innumerevoli posti di blocco” (231). Confinement is foreign to
the Russians, so there is not the distinction between the inside and
outside that establishes purity. In Bogucice even the kitchen is safe
“fuori della recinzione” (210). The camp at Sluzk “non era cintato”
(254), nor, finally, is Levi. He will not let the recinzioni of bourgeois
upbringing and cultura set him apart. Dottor Levi, apprentice charlatan,
redeems the 174000s.
Levi will leave Romania heading for parts unknown, protected by the
Russians’ benevolent, Italianate incompetence, “in balia della indeci-
frabile burocrazia sovietica, oscura e gigantesca potenza, non malevola
verso di noi, ma sospettosa, negligente, insipiente, contraddittoria, e
negli effetti cieca come una forza della natura” (245). Bureaucracy as
difference: the description of this huge, self-contradictory and inscru-
table force suggests that Levi’s journey is undertaken under the aegis
of irony. The Russians are benignly indifferent to the camp at Sluzk
“tanto da far dubitare che esistesse” (254). Contradictory laws give rise
to desultory enforcement: breaking the rules of the camp, Levi and
his companions kill horses for meat. Nevertheless, “neppure di questo
saccheggio i russi del Comando si diedero il minimo pensiero” (278).
Russians are the anti-Hegel: Russian identity is utterly unrelated to
law. Russian hospitality is also characterized both by its indifference
to the identity of its guests and by the unforeseeable abundance of
provisions, as Levi explains in the context of the journey through Roma-
nia. Russian provisioning is more like haphazard foraging directed
by someone lost in the bureaucratic muddle “probabilmente i russi
stessi della scorta, i quali prelevavano a casaccio, da ogni deposito
militare o civile che capitasse a tiro, i generi alimentari piú disparati
. . . Era un gioco d’azzardo quotidiano: quanto alla quantità, le razioni
erano talvolta scarse, talvolta ciclopiche, talvolta nulle; e quanto alla
qualità, imprevedibili come ogni cosa russa” (309). Russian ineffi-
ciency at provisioning contrasts with the Germans’ precise counting
of calories to induce starvation. When the Russians recruit the menM LN 97 at the Katowice camp to dig a tank trap as defence against German counterattack, it becomes another performance of their difference from the Germans: “Sullo spiazzo centrale del campo si era quindi svolta una sorta di versione caricaturale delle selezioni tedesche” (207). These are selections in bono. Currency also crosses borders: the people of Staryje Doroghi honor any currency, but the suspicious prefer coin: “Di queste ultime, circo- lavano le piú impensate: monete del tempo zarista, uscite da atavici nascondigli famigliari; sterline, corone scandinave, perfino vecchie monete dell’Impero austro-ungarico” (262). Here foreign currency is honored for domestic transactions, and its value is fixed only by the ad hoc caprice of bargaining. Moreover, the coins bear the stamp of governments long defunct. Some currencies may have significance, but can make no claim on goods or services: the value of the Romanian lei, for example, is “principalmente simbolico” (308). The currency is largely a system of expression. The convertibility of money is mir- rored in language: together with his pidgin Polish and mixture of Lager and Gattermann’s scientific German, Levi finds himself speaking the classical Latin he studied as a boy (“Pater optime, ubi est mensa pauperorum?” [188]) to earn the good will of a Polish priest (187–88). Levi wishes that ethical codes shared the fluidity and permeability of his models of language or currency, but they don’t: “I codici morali, tutti, sono rigidi per definizione: non ammettono sfumature, né com- promessi, né contaminazioni reciproche. Vanno accolti o rifiutati in blocco” (184–85). Ethical systems are indifferent to the exigencies of the singular; one cannot pick and choose among their values. For Levi, any system that permits no reciprocal contaminations smacks of fascist purism. Thus, in place of a system, Levi offers a practice of sensitivity to individuals. Levi treats Mordo Nahum with the utmost tolerance, well aware of the sort of man he is: “Sapevo che non era altro se non un mercante un po’ furfante, esperto nel raggiro e privo di scrupoli, egoista e freddo: eppure sentivo fiorire in lui, favorito dalla simpatia dell’uditorio, un calore nuovo, una umanità insospettata, singolare ma genuina, ricca di promesse” (184). Singolarità becomes Levi’s impossible absolute, one he demonstrates in his relationships with Mordo and Cesare. Still, it is clear to Levi that when Mordo Nahum choreographs a spontaneous performance of calore umano, he does so to procure a night’s room, board and information from the Italian soldiers. Levi applies the same toleration to the Italy that betrayed him. He is eager to redeem his beloved country: he will claim in later writings
98 JAMES T. CHIAMPI that the Italian militiamen who turned him over to the Germans knew nothing of Auschwitz, and will contribute his testimonial to a book eulogizing Italians who helped the Jews. Levi wants to purify Italy of anything he regards as Teutonic, but he will not permit even despised moral rigidity to become the pretext for discrimination. He will turn no Italian/Teuton into a Jew: “Si rimprovera ai carabinieri, perversamente, la loro eccessiva disciplina, serietà, castità, onestà; la loro mancanza di umorismo; la loro obbedienza indiscriminata; i loro costumi; la loro divisa” (312). Many believe that they take an oath to kill father and mother (312)—another ethical caricature. In the penultimate chapter of La tregua, Levi meets a kindly, gentle carabiniere with the patience of a martyr which he displays by tolerating the abuse of self-righteous thieves. Familiar with the evil of stereotyping, Levi befriends this vittima predestinata (312) to give him credibility. The encounter with the gentle carabiniere, coinciding with Levi’s arrival in Torino, announces that the contamination of Italian goodness by racial ostracism is at an end. The vignette is an oblique repudiation of the Leggi razziali. Indeed, on the threshold of Italy, Italian smug- glers—themselves a contaminant that penetrates borders—will offer him “il saluto della patria” with gifts of chocolate, grappa and tobacco (323). A chilling variation on this theme of redemption takes place in Austria, where Levi receives a disinfection with DDT from the Americans. It is actually an anti-disinfection, because “disinfection” was the lie the Sonderkommando told the Jews to pacify them, get them naked and into the gas chambers. Not now: disinfection becomes a comic rite de passage: after a brief scuffle between an American soldier and an Italian protecting his lover from an unwanted, but required, disinfection, she is properly deloused, and “tutto rientrò nell’ordine americano” (319) with neither anger nor vengefulness on the part of the Americans. The summit of Levi’s hospitality toward former prisoners of the “gray zone” occurs early in the book in the chapter “Il campo grande” when young Henek, former Kapo of a children’s block, cares for a three-year-old baby named “Hurbinek,” who cannot speak. Henek treats this wholly other being with maternal solicitude: feeding him, attending to his needs, carrying news of Hurbinek’s presumed attempts to communicate. But Hurbinek is a living secret. Henek’s nurturing of Hurbinek is a moment of sublime gratuity in La tregua as well as one of non-ethical excess, because baby Hurbinek is incapable of response. Hurbinek is an uccello di passo who will not survive his liberation despite the tireless efforts and patient tenderness shown
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