Primo Levi in Poland

...In any event, the AK men were not "absorbed into the Red Army" following the War...

...Nor would he use the real Polish equivalent, "Mar-cin," for that could only be someone who didn't want to be associated with Jews at all...

...The partisans making up the Polish AK, or Home Army, loyal to the government-in-exile in London, for example, refused to deliver military equipment to the Warsaw Ghetto on the grounds that they themselves did not have enough...

...Indeed, he tells us in an Author's Note that before taking up his pen to recount the fictional ordeal of some 30 Jewish men and women who fought through the forests of Russia and Poland to the Promised Land of Israel, he had to study many books to become acquainted with their social and psychological background...

...The author's third misconception has him portraying his resisters as aware from almost the outset that the destruction they had witnessed extended to every Jewish enclave, that they had no place and nobody to come back to...

...in the occupied territories the Nazis confiscated radios, and anybody caught listening to one was severely punished...

...the latter never existed, and no Polish group collaborated with the Germans during World War II...

...Finally, perhaps because he feels insecure, Levi explains too much that a novelist on familiar ground would leave to his audience...

...Redest keyn Yiddish is not Yiddish...

...was meant to answer a question: Did the Jews of Eastern Europe "allow themselves to be led to the slaughter without resistance...

...Thus he writes: "The Polish partisans of the Interior Army, the old guard, who had fought the Germans since their 1939 blitz...

...Levi has tried something impossible...

...The religious majority viewed them as irresponsible daredevils who could bring destruction to the community...

...Every day, too, Jewish men and women were shot and killed on Polish country roads attempting desperately to flee their besieged communities...

...The model for Levi's Fontasch was Mordechai Gebirtig, a name whose Jewishness speaks for itself...

...Actually, however, the Hitlerites practiced systematic disinformation...

...if we were alive, some of our family or friends might be too—or at least someone capable of telling us the rest of the story...

...It is preposterous to say the Germans "don't trust the Czechs and the White Poles now...

...it should beRedst nit keyn Yiddish...

...With my mother, I watched the deportation of our provincial Polish community to Treblinka...

...Weapons were virtually unattainable...

...The truth is that to many readers his material will seem less exotic than it does to him—one more misconception that hinders this usually brilliant and sensitive thinker...

...So the whole question about the presence or absence of a Jewish armed struggle is irrelevant...

...Moreover, Levi can pack no fewer than three historical blunders into half a sentence...

...On the contrary, in the War's aftermath NSZ units stopped trains, pulled out returning Jews and murdered them on the spot...

...A Yiddish folk poet-singer in Poland could never have been called "Martin," as is Levi's Martin Fontasch...

...With the Nazis waging total war against thedefenseless and starving Jewish civilians, fighting for food was their basic form of defiance...

...But the official English title of the force was the " Home Army," it wasnotset up until 1942, and it consisted mainly of people far too young to have seen action in 1939...

...Levi is an assimilated Italian Jew...

...Second-hand information and "things told me many years ago by a friend" areno foundation forasuccessfulwork of fiction...

...Further, an AK lieutenant would not have told a group of people he had just captured in the forest, "There are Jews in our force, too": Hardly anyone knew thetrueidentitiesoftheAK'smembers, and the Jews among them passed as gentiles...

...Even Jewish children braved enemy fire to cross the Warsaw Ghetto wall and bring bread to their families...

...My personal experiences illustrate how little most Jews understood about the depth of the catastrophe...

...The NSZ, to start with a glaring case, was an extreme Right-wing Polish underground organization that did not for a minute mind the Jews' extermination...

...Yet when Gedaleh, the leader of Levi's band, encounters NSZ forces holding two Jews, one of the prisoners is "sunbathing...

...Other absurdities abound...

...The Talmudic wisdom his main characters constantly invoke was not the spiritual sustenance of the relatively few Jewish combatants...

...In reality he would have been dead or at least seriously injured, and theothercaptivewouldat the minimum have received a severe beating during his NSZ interrogation...

...Levi's partisans never look back...

...if not deported to Siberia, they were moved into the Army of Poland's new Communist regime...

...In 1942 a little boy quoted in Janusz Korczak's Ghetto Diary wrote, "My father was a fighter for a piece of bread...

...Later, passing as gentiles, we saw the Warsaw Ghetto annihilated...

...The leader of Levi's group could not have realized that "what you saw at Op-atow has happened wherever the Germans have set foot, in Poland, in Russia, in France, in Greece...

...Besides his fundamental errors, Levi makes many small careless mistakes that expose him as an outsider...

...The "old guard" was mostly dead, in prisoner of war camps or fighting on distant fronts...

...They were isolated rebels opposed to Judaic teaching, including its preference for nonviolence, and instead drew upon the revolutionary doctrines of Europe's socialist and nationalist movements...

...they also attacked the few Jews who managed to get back to the villages...

...Isidor" is similarly ridiculous for a Polish or Ukrainian Jew...

...Precisely...

...Levi did not encounter them until he was himself deported to Auschwitz...

...And that is merely a sample of the book's many distortions of Yiddish, Polish, German, and Georgian names or expressions...

...his task is difficult even if he is describing his own culture and experience...

...Certainly the officer, portrayed as a good commander, would not have talked about the hopelessness of the fighting while his soldiers were present...

...their attitude is completely inauthentic...

...Levi'sintentionswerenoble but, alas, he based his novel on several misconceptions...

...A novelist has to tell less than he knows, and know more than his readers...

...Not until their searches were over did the remaining Jews think of leaving Poland...

...Levi's second misconception relates to the religiosity of his protagonists...

...Isaac Bashevis Singer, for instance, would notgjveusthe meaning of I'chaim...

...A Jewish resister could not have walked into a tavern where "the radio was on...

...Nonetheless, immediately after the liberation she rushed to our little hometown to find out who had survived...

...since 1967 In a paper for a conference on "The Survival and Transformation of Jewish Cultural and Religious Values in Literature After World War Two," Primo Levi suggested that If Not Now, When...

...We spent the last year of the Nazi occupation in the countryside, where my mother heard many rumors regarding the decimation of the Jews...

...He added that he wanted to honor those," whether few or many, who in their desperation found the force to oppose the Nazis...

...His Ashkenazi brethren were "not known to him firsthand," as Irving Howe puts it in the Introduction...

...In short, from beginning to end the Jews used all available means to survive...

...practically to the end Jews did not know the fate of Jewish settlements other than their own...

...Factual mistakes undermine the credibility of the novel's Polish dimension as well...

...One of these concerns the limits of possible resistance in such places as Warsaw...

...It was important to know—just as it is today for the families of VietnamMIAs...