Soul Cousins from Piedmont
“If I die tomorrow or in a year, it is the same — it is the message you leave behind you that counts.” — Rita Levi-Montalcini
— “Were you cousins?” asks Simonetta Fiori from La Repubblica in an interview with Rita Levi-Montalcini in 1996, about her relationship to the famous chemist and author Primo Levi.
— “We pretended to be.” responds Rita. “Our relationship was an invented one. Same surname, same native region: the Monteferrato, same Jewish origin. We were also united by the same family lexicon: the Piedmontese dialect; full of words like ‘barba’ (uncle) and ‘magna’ (aunt).”
Rita and Primo had become good friends after the war; and she, Rita Levi-Montalcini, calls his friend Primo: ‘my imaginary cousin’.
“I was a good friend of his sister Annamaria. She had told me about this brother that she adored, giving me the typescript of ‘If This Is A Man’. I was struck. And I was astonished — and not just me, by the rejection of a great publishing house in Turin.”
Back to year 1909…
Rita Levi-Montalcini is born in Turin as one of the twin babies of Adamo Levi — an electrical engineer, and Adele Montalcini — a painter. A fair amount of hardships are waiting her along the way of pursuing her studies in medicine. Not only because of the racial laws in Mussolini’s Italy after 1936, barring people of non-aryan origin of such practices; but also because her father does not believe in higher education for women. Rita overcomes the latter obstacle by her assertiveness and her dedication to hard work. Her father ends up supporting her. As for the other and more impenetrable barrier put in her way, still does she find a way to hack it: She builds a clandestine laboratory at home and keeps assessing experiments with chicken embryos. She explains in Les Prix Nobel:
“After a short period spent in Brussels as a guest of a neurological institute, I returned to Turin on the verge of the invasion of Belgium by the German army, Spring 1940, to join my family. The two alternatives left then to us were either to emigrate to the United States, or to pursue some activity that needed neither support nor connection with the outside Aryan world where we lived. My family chose this second alternative. I then decided to build a small research unit at home and installed it in my bedroom.”
Now let’s go back in time again, this time to year 1919.
Primo Levi, child of Cesare Levi and Esther ‘Rina’ Luzzati, is born in Turin. Growing up, he is a shy and academically driven kid; likes chemistry and astronomy. After reading ‘Concerning the Nature of Things’ by Sir William Bragg, he decides to study chemistry, which he will practice almost for his entire life, and it will — in a way, save his life.
Both Levis suffered under Italy’s racial laws and during the World War II, but they had different fates. In the end though, both were able to make it back home to Turin when the war ended.
In wartime, Rita and her family went into hiding in Florence. She worked tirelessly during her hiding and after the war; both in her native Italy and the United States where she later worked and got a citizenship. She was to become a world renown neurologist and eventually win a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986 with Stanley Cohen ‘for their discoveries of growth factors’. She kept her passion for science alive until her peaceful death at the age of 103. She never quit. For her, loving one’s work was “the closest thing to happiness on Earth.”
Primo on the other hand joined the partisans and was captured by the Fascist militia in 1943. To avoid being shot as an Italian partisan, he preferred to confess being a Jew as he describes in the first pages of his infamous first book ‘If This Is A Man’:
“I was 24, had little sense of judgement, zero experience (…) I cultivated a moderate and abstract sense of rebellion. (…) I preferred declaring my condition of ‘Italian citizen of Jewish race’ (…) admitting my political activity would assure torture and death.”
He was later sent to Auschwitz concentration camp. There, he worked as a forced labourer for 11 months. He survived thanks to a combination of lucky circumstances such as speaking enough German, being a good chemist, and most importantly being very ill on the day the death march began but healthy enough to remain alive until the Red Army arrived. In the most captivating last page of ‘The Truce’, Levi describes his return after his nine months long Odyssey across Poland, USSR, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany and finally Italy:
“I arrived in Turin, after thirty-five days of travel: The house was standing, all the relatives were alive, nobody was expecting me.”
Almost immediately after his return, Primo Levi started writing about his experiences in the Lager as he felt this was his ‘inevitable duty’ and a ‘psychological need’. He published autobiographical books, novels, short stories and poetry. In the appendix of ‘If This Is A Man’, he links his becoming an author to the Lager experience:
“Had I not lived the Auschwitz stage, probably I would never have written anything. I wouldn’t have had a motive, an incentive to write. (…) It was the Lager experience that constrained me to write: I didn’t have to fight laziness, (…) it seemed to me, I had this book already inside my head and only had to let it out and be on paper.”
He continued to write and work as a chemist until his death in 1987.
At 67 years of age, Primo Levi died at his home in Turin where he was born and raised and lived all his life. The cause of his death is a much discussed suicide.
While another Nobel Laureate and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel commented: “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz 40 years later”, Rita Levi-Montalcini remains a skeptic on this issue:
Fiori:
— “Nearly 10 years after his death, you reject the hypothesis of a conscious suicide.”
— “I said it then, unheard. I repeat it today with greater conviction. His wasn’t a voluntary action. Primo didn’t have any intentions of putting an end to his life. The suicide is considerably distant to the lucidity of his writings… A few days earlier we had talked on the phone. He was depressed; I and other friends suggested to come and meet in Rome. He replied to me that he couldn’t leave his ill mother alone, not even for an hour. Do you think in that mental state he could throw himself voluntarily into the stairwell? Couldn’t a chemist of that quality like Primo find a less dramatic and theatrical way to put an end to his life? A pill is much more discrete. (…) It’s neither suicide nor homicide: a sudden raptus, a momentary loss of consciousness, dictated certainly by the depressive mood. (…) Who has known depression knows what I’m talking about.”
During their interview, Fiori asks Rita about her then-recent-book ‘Senz’Olio Contro Vento’ consisting of 10 letters to 10 people, all very private, concerning death and pain — amongst these, of course, one for her imaginary cousin Primo.
— “Professor, why did you want to make such personal sentiments public?
— “This book has shown me how one should die. And I would like it to have the same meaning for others. At the age of 87, I can’t ignore the approaching of this event.”
— “But how does one bring herself to die? Is there a way to learn it?”
— “I am profoundly secular. I do not believe in the hereafter and hence in a salvation. My brain will follow the fate of my body: The rest doesn’t matter.”
Both Rita and Primo were scientists and humanist non-believers. Rita explains to Simonetta Fiori how she defines her Jewishness:
“We [Primo and I] were Jews for belonging to the same ethnicity, but we weren’t ‘in working’, well, professionals of Judaism. I became aware of my condition of being Jewish only with the racial laws, with the perversion of persecutive and iniquitous rules. Never before that. I have never entered a synagogue except for my father’s funeral. Primo was driven by the same secular spirit.”
Primo Levi confirms this in his last book, ‘The Drowned And The Saved’ published a year before his death:
“(…) I too have entered the Lager as a non-believer, and as a non-believer I was liberated and lived as such till today; in fact, the experience of Lager, its frightening iniquity, confirmed me in my secularism.”
About the Jewishness, Primo Levi had observed humourously:
“A Jew is someone who at Christmas does not have a tree, who shouldn’t eat salami but does, who has learned a little bit of Hebrew at 13 and then forgotten it.”
Regarding their shared scientific background, Rita notes that although they were both dedicated scientists, Primo and her were different in the way that they perceived science:
“Yes, sure [we were both scientists]; but with much difference. Primo was much more of a scientist then I was, in the sense that he was more logical, naturally driven to the material knowledge. I am more intuitive.”
Maybe in all what they shared and contrasted, what divides the two soul cousins is their fate of living and dying:
— “You look very serene.”
— “Sure. I don’t approve of the gloomy idea of the old age, a vision ‘alla Simone de Beavoir’. (…) I had the luck of having my advanced ages even better than my youth days.”
She then recites a poem by W. B. Yeats:
“ An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress”
To compare her serenity to Primo Levi’s mental state — without necessarily jumping into conclusions about his death*, maybe it’s sufficient to look at the ending paragraph of ‘The Truce’, and the poem that he chose to ‘recite’ at the very beginning of ‘The Drowned And The Saved’ to his readers:
“[And] a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals. It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, apparently without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly and brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses, and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed into chaos; I am alone in the centre 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. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command, of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, ‘Wstawàch’.”
“Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns,
And till my ghastly tale is told
This heart within me burns. “
(S. T Coleridge, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)
*For a detailed discussion on Primo Levi’s cause of death, see: http://bostonreview.net/diego-gambetta-primo-levi-last-moments.
Sources
Levi-Montalcini, Rita. El Elogio de La Imperfección. TusQuets, Barcelona. 2011.
Levi, Primo. La Tregua. Einaudi, Torino. 2014.
Levi, Primo. Se Questo È Un Uomo. Einaudi, Torino. 2014.
Levi, Primo. Il Sistema Periodico. Einaudi, Torino. 2014.
Levi, Primo. I Sommersi E I Salvati. Einaudi, Torino. 2014.
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1986/levi-montalcini/auto-biography/
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/how-did-he-primo-levi-exchange/
