Post-Holocaust Postmortem

ROSENFELD, ALVIN H.

Post-Holocaust Postmortem The Double Bond—Primo Levi, a Biography Carole Angier New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 898 pp., hardcover $40 REVIEWED BY ALVIN H. ROSENFELD The death of...

...Like all complex human beings, Levi, no doubt, experienced his share of personal frustration, ambivalence, and strain within his family and among his most intimate friends, but as root causes of his depressions and explanations for his death, these things seem inadequate...
...In describing and diagnosing these depressions, Angier rninirnizes the role that Levi's wartime experiences may have played in his latter years...
...While others may have concluded too hastily that it was Auschwitz alone that killed him, Angier's conclusions that "depression and suicide were in him from the start" and ultimately brought him down discounts the weight of Levi's traumatic life and fails to recognize that a number of other Holocaust writers also ended their lives as suicides...
...In book after book he displayed such emotional balance and rational control that it seemed he had come through his ordeal as a Jewish inmate of Auschwitz with few psychic scars...
...How, then, could he, of all people, take his own life...
...She knows a great deal about Levi and offers valuable information about his family, friends, work, and writings...
...His testimony was one of extreme suffering, but in presenting it he displayed rare inner poise that even, at times, resembled something close to serenity...
...hatred was hardly to be found at all...
...It is well known that Levi was subject to depression and suffered a serious bout in his last months...
...At one point she even asserts that for Levi, "Auschwitz was an essentially positive experience," for it gave him a reason to write...
...Carole Angier, the author of a massive new biography of Levi, went in search of answers to this troubling question and claims to have come up with the "key to everything, his life, his writings, and his death...
...In exploring his inner life, and especially the more hidden sides of his psyche, however, her book runs the risk of all psychobiographies, which sometimes substitute surmise for evidence, and as a result, do not fully convince...
...Anger was rare in his writings...
...In filling in much that we have not previously known in Levi's biography, Angier's book is often illuminating, but as an explanation of his death, it is more suggestive than conclusive and cannot be the last word...
...It was "not Auschwitz, but his own private depression," Angier insists, that "killed him in the end...
...Levi was widely acknowledged to be among the most important writers to emerge from the Nazi death camps...
...898 pp., hardcover $40 REVIEWED BY ALVIN H. ROSENFELD The death of Primo Levi in April 1987, apparently a suicide, stunned the literary world...
...The real cause of the damage to his psyche she locates elsewhere—in what she sees as his repressed emotional side, troubled sexuality, and "pathological" relationships to both his mother and wife...
...Alvin H. Rosenfeld is an English professor and director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University...
...Angier is a diligent researcher and graceful writer, and her book is well informed and a pleasure to read...

Vol. 27 • August 2002 • No. 4


 
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