The writings of complex authors do not readily reduce to briefly stated “messages,” but in the concluding chapter of his last book, Primo Levi—a richly complex writer—sought, in the following words, to capture concisely what he regarded to be the essence of his work: “It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.” Levi had no need to spell out what “it” refers to, for from his first book, Survival in Auschwitz, to his last, The Drowned and the Saved, Levi was preoccupied with trying to understand and get others to understand “what happened.” He called it “the greatest crime in the history of humanity.” A victim of that crime, following his liberation from Auschwitz Levi devoted prodigious efforts to contemplating and seeking to clarify “the enormity and therefore the non-credibility of what took place in the Lagers.”

In his short but admirably thoughtful book, Berel Lang stands against positioning the Holocaust as the core of Levi's life and work. He emphasizes that Levi, a chemist, was also drawn to write about other subjects, including science and its intricate decipherings of the material world. Yet what is likely to draw most readers to Levi's books is not so much natural history as the history of human extremity that Levi himself experienced as a prisoner in the most notorious of Hitler's camps. He once referred to Auschwitz as his “university,” and what he learned there and managed to convey with remarkable precision and lucidity makes Levi one of the most penetrating, indispensable writers of the postwar period.

Levi was the author of some fourteen books—memoirs, novels, essay collections, poetry, short stories—and hundreds of articles in newspapers and journals. He also translated six books from various languages into Italian. Recognizing Levi's versatility as well as his productivity, Lang seeks to discourage the view “that there was or should be only one Primo Levi, an essence or core that he would or did become….” (144). His chief interest is in making the connections between Levi's multiple interests and varied experiences and the ideas that appear in his writings.

Lang subtitles his study “The Matter of a Life,” but the book is not intended as a full-scale biography, and readers already familiar with the biographies of Levi available in English will not come away from reading Lang with any new facts about the author's life. They may, however, feel moved to ponder what they find in these pages about Levi's death. Lang devotes to this a whole chapter, in which he strongly contests the idea that writers' deaths might “retroactively alter their creations” (14). “Why should Levi's suicide…loom so large in thinking and speaking about him…?” he asks. “The words and sentences…of his writings remain exactly as they would have however he had died” (12). In a literal sense, this last sentence is true, but so, too, is it true that a writer's death can, and often does, influence the way we read his or her books, sometimes decisively so. To cite but one prominent example: Anne Frank's famous diary almost certainly would never have achieved the canonical status it has today had the book's youthful author survived the war. As Philip Roth put it in The Ghost Writer, were the diary “known to be the work of a living writer, it would never be more than it was: a young teenager's diary of her trying years in hiding during the German occupation of Holland.” Inasmuch as readers commonly bring some knowledge of Anne Frank's premature and tragic death to their reading of her book, their encounters with the diary become a more troubled, but also a more moving and meaningful, experience. The same may be true of those who read Levi's writings about the Nazi death camps in the shadow of his death. They are not wrong to do so. Lang opposes biographical readings of literary texts, though, and is dismissive of Elie Wiesel's remark that “Levi died at Auschwitz forty years after” (4). Lang argues otherwise, but his argument is unlikely to win over those who regard Levi's end as an unavoidable and even crucial factor in reading him.

The major contributions of this book lie elsewhere, especially in the two chapters that focus on Levi as a writer and thinker. Lang has a refined appreciation of Levi's literary sensibility and comments perceptively on the intelligence and artfulness that distinguish Levi's work at its best. He seeks to identify the various components of what he calls a “unified field theory of writing,” or “theory of discourse,” that informs Levi's oeuvre, and while he may not be entirely successful in this ambitious effort, he is certainly correct to note the great importance that Levi attached to “clarity, precision, and method” (65), as well as his impatience with the lack thereof. To Levi, as Lang convincingly argues, writing was “a moral act” (71), and, consequently, lucidity and intelligibility were judged to be not only aesthetic qualities but moral ones as well. In noting as much, Lang raises and usefully answers an important but heretofore largely unasked question, namely, “where to place Levi in the landscape of literary history?” (78). He puts him, interestingly, in the company of such figures as “Montaigne and Thoreau, Pascal and Aesop, Emerson, Camus, and Orwell.” One would like to see this category of “moralist or edifying writers” (87) fleshed out some more, but Lang's intuition of associating Levi with these writers on the basis of their commitment to the goals of an active and enlarged moral intelligence seems well founded.

It is not uncommon for strong readers to refashion strong writers in their own image, and Lang, a professional philosopher, does something of this sort in his book's penultimate chapter, which is devoted to Levi as a thinker. Lang acknowledges that Levi “did not consider himself a philosopher,” “expressed impatience with the abstractions of traditional philosophy,” and “rarely mentions the canonical figures of philosophy” in his writings (113). Nevertheless, he believes that Levi “appears as something like a ‘natural’ philosopher” (114), and he examines five topics that strike him as useful for a consideration of Levi's thought: “theories of human nature, evil (and good), justice and the ‘Gray Zone,’ the unspeakable, and God” (116). Lang's comments on each of these are well informed and often insightful, especially as they situate Levi's ideas within the framework of his historical moment and war-time experiences. They are too brief, however, to tie Levi's thought together into anything like a coherent philosophy or to place it more fully and revealingly within the philosophical traditions of the past, a task that Lang is clearly capable of performing but one that he foregoes for reasons of space limitation. No doubt for the same reasons, extended readings of Levi's most important texts are absent in this chapter (and elsewhere in the book). Foregoing detailed, broadly focused textual analysis, Lang typically abstracts his author's ideas from the books in which they are developed instead of explicating them over the course of their development in these books. By proceeding in this way, Lang's reflections on Levi as a “natural philosopher,” while always interesting, are registered at somewhat of a remove from the works themselves. Separating “the writer” from “the thinker” may have certain advantages schematically, but it detracts from the coherence and diminishes the effect of Levi's actual literary practice.

Over many years, Berel Lang has shown himself to be one of his generation's most dedicated and astute scholars of the Holocaust, and there is no doubting the seriousness of his engagement with Levi. He is moved by Levi's life and writings, and in a more expansive study, he could have done even more to illuminate both. “Jewish Lives,” the Yale University Press series within which this book appears, however, seems to have confined him within a format that is too restrictive to allow him to do full justice to his thinking about this author. One leaves this book grateful for what one has learned from it, but also wishing that the author had been at liberty to give us still more.