Avoiding Banal Explanations Of Hate Poem by gershon hepner

His pen like a burin
engraved words in Turin
whose holiness was holocaustic,
and yet they were trumped
when he gave up and jumped
to his death, for a moment agnostic.

Though he had been curious,
avoiding the spurious
explanations of hate as banal,
his death would suggest
that absent a quest
life hasn’t a strong rationale.


Primo Levi’s suicide after producing so many life-enhancing masterpieces after surviving Auschwitz remains a puzzle. Richard Bernstein’s explanation of Philip Roth’s analysis of Levi in “Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work” (Houghton Mifflin) , in the NYT (“Philip Roth and the Power of the Word, ” September 26,201) , makes me wonder whether he did not finally lose his curiosity. Bernstein writes:

Levi, Mr. Roth notes, lived in Turin in the apartment house where he was born, and that bourgeois solidity, that absence of geographical mobility, underscores something about Levi's art: that his 'life of communal interconnectedness... constitutes his profoundly spirited response to those who did all they could to sever his every sustained connection and tear him and his kind out of history.' Mr. Roth surmises that Levi, who made his living both before and after the war as a chemist in a paint factory, survived Auschwitz not because he was strong or lucky but because he was a thinker. Levi is properly skeptical about what seems a touch of wishfulness on the part of another thinking man. He never discerned much of a logical pattern between survival and character, Levi says. 'I have seen the survival of shrewd people and silly people, the brave and the cowardly.' But he continues: 'I had an intense wish to understand. I was constantly pervaded by a curiosity that somebody afterward did, in fact, deem nothing less than cynical: the curiosity of the naturalist who finds himself transplanted into an environment that is monstrous but new, monstrously new.'

9/26/01