Rome Book Club: The Journey

The second installment of the Rome Book Club about Primo Levi focused on the central chapters of the Truce. Led by Professor Barry McCrea, the broadcast explored key structural and thematic features of the novel, such as its carefully constructed balance between opposite atmospheres and emotions, and its journeying from the dreadful order of fascism to the lively disorder of post-war Europe. The discussion went on to investigate the importance of narration as a therapeutic device and the ingenious forms of narrating the novel engages with. Finally, McCrea detailed the significance of two key characters, Cesare and the Greek, as archetypes of their cultures. The conversation was followed by a Q&A session with the public that addressed, among others, the themes of European antisemitism in the post war period, the ethical outline of Levi’s characters, and the ephemeral nature of memory in the novel.

The discussing began by situating the events narrated in the central chapters of the book within a “much more carefully constructed work of art than appears on the surface. It has a simplicity of form that is actually deceptive. it’s a fictionalized and much more carefully and artfully put together a document than it appears”(5.30). Some of the elements of the novel’s complexity are the dissonance between the emotional vis-à-vis the physical landscape of the story “it takes place in a physical landscape that is ravaged by war and poverty by violence and hunger it’s a world that is characterized especially by scarcity. However, its emotional landscape, the landscape that we encounter with our emotions as we read, it is one that is rich and plentiful and abundant” (6.36) The same conflict between the two realm is echoed, according to McCrea, in the novel’s movement from the ordered emptiness of the concentration camps “to the extreme disorder and chaos of Europe in the aftermath of the war we have a Babel of different languages, we have confusions of roles, confusion of authority, confusions of people, directions, ideas” (8.28).

The series’ discussion went on to emphasize the importance of two characters of the novel, namely Mordo Nahum, the Greek from Salonika, and Cesare, the Jewish merchant from Rome’s Ghetto. The former, far from being a morally pure character, nonetheless embodies the opposite of the concentration camps in his vitality and his narration of an “enormous profusion of great Greek things” (19.53) as opposed to the emptiness of the concentration camps. Cesare, the second significant character, according to McCrea, is a fictional composite meant to emphasize the features of working-class Jews from Rome, through his resourcefulness and ability to charm everybody. These figures incarnate two communities wiped out by the holocaust. Their very identities, according to McCrea, have a broader significance “it’s no accident i think that these two places, Greece and Rome, are the two great classical cultures of pre-Christian Europe. So, Levi is also indirectly laying, if you like, a universal claim out to Jewishness” (24:30).

Finally, the conversation explored the sense of joy the novel associates with the idea of negotiating and bartering. McCrea argued that these processes constitute vital, spontaneous activities opposites to the deathlike order of the camps; further, negotiating involves the same questions of narrating, as it compels us to emphasize with others in a therapeutic process; and, finally, trade in Levi’s book, represents the reverse of fascism “The opposite of the brutalizing system of the camp, the novel suggests, is to go out and engage with others, people different from oneself, in a spirit of inquiry and curiosity, to learn fragments of their language and, especially, to learn fragments of their inner life (Barry, McCrea 27:45)

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