Lilith

We hear a selection from "Lilith," read first in Italian by Dr. Francesco Spagnolo and then in English translation by an actor:

In the space of a few minutes the sky had turned black and it began to rain. Soon, the rain increased until it became a stubborn downpour, and the thick earth of the work yard changed to a blanket of mud, a hands-breadth deep. It was impossible not only to go on shoveling but even to stand up. Our Kapo questioned the civilian foreman, then turned to us: we should all go and take shelter wherever we could.

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Host Aaron Henne: Welcome to The Dybbukast. I'm Aaron Henne, artistic director of theatre dybbuk. In this episode, presented in collaboration with The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley, we explore "Lilith," a short story by Primo Levi. "Lilith" was featured in his 1981 collection, known as Moments of Reprieve. You heard actor Jon Weinberg read a selection from “Lilith” at the top. He will continue to read portions of the story throughout the episode and will also share text from Levi's first memoir, If This Is a Man (also known as Survival in Auschwitz).

Dr. Francesco Spagnolo, Curator of The Magnes Collection and Professor of Music and Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley, discusses the ways in which "Lilith," with its combination of memoiristic storytelling, sharply drawn characters, and mythic resonances, speaks not only to the work Levi created throughout his career, but to Italian Jewish history, and beyond. And now, “Lilith”:

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Dr. Francesco Spagnolo: Of course, when I read Primo Levi and I think of Primo Levi, I think about Primo Levi in Italian because that's my first language and that's how I met this author, but I'm very much not alone. His key memoirs, and especially If This Is a Man, became part, in the 1970s already, I believe, of sort of quasi mandatory reading in Italian public schools. So all Italians in one way or another, especially those of my generation, encounter Primo Levi. And his literary work has become a contemporary classic of Italian literature.

Moments of Reprieve is the English translation of a book by Primo Levi that came out in 1981. I remember when it came out. I was of age. And so I remember reading it when it was published by Einaudi publishing house in Turin, which was the historic publishing house that really published all of his books, except for the very first one. But it came out with the title of “Lilith,” and we’re today talking about the core story, and it's a collection of short stories. So I'm not really sure how the title in English came about, but it's one of those wars among cultures where, you know, each culture titles things differently.

The bulk of the book involves stories that are kind of — you know, there are two ways to look at this: One is that there are the outtakes of his two memoirs: Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man, aka Survival in Auschwitz), and La Tregua, (The Truce). But the other way is to actually use a Hebrew term, the Tosafot. The Tosafot are those narratives that are part of the Talmud, but not really part of the Talmud. They're added on — additional thoughts, additional ideas, additional stories that complete the gigantic architectural structure of the Talmud. So in a way, this is a collection of Tosafot. It's a collection of add-on stories from his short-lived residence in the complex of Auschwitz. He was an inmate of Buna which was one of the satellite labor camps of Auschwitz.

Actor: “Lilith” by Primo Levi.

Francesco:“Lilith,” — in Italiano, “Lilit” — is a six-page-long story. It's a very short story, and it starts on a lucky, rainy, and muddy day in Buna Monowitz. The forced labor squad is out working, but the rain and the mud make it really impossible. And Primo Levi notices in his telling the story how the kapo, the head of the squad, consults with the civilian foreman. So there is a chain of bureaucracy that eventually allows the workers — the enslaved workers — to stop working and seek shelter. So they're told: go and find shelter wherever you can. And so he finds — there's like a big pipe, and it's a construction site.

Actor: Scattered about there were various sections of iron pipe, about seventeen to eighteen feet long and over a yard in diameter. I crawled into one of these and halfway down it I met the Tischler, who had had the same idea and had come in from the other end.

Francesco: He crawls in on all fours, and he finds out that from the other end of the pipe another fellow inmate, part of the same labor commando, has also found shelter. And his name is Tischler.

Actor: Tischler means carpenter, and this was the only name by which he was known to us.

Francesco: And they're both there, and, as they're sheltering, they notice in a nearby pipe, another shelterer.

Actor: In the meantime, in the pipe opposite ours, a woman had taken refuge. She was young, bundled up in black rags, perhaps a Ukrainian belonging to the Todt Organization, which consisted of "volunteer" (they had little or no choice) foreign laborers recruited for war work. She had a broad red face, glistening with rain, and she looked at us and laughed.

Francesco: But this woman is there sheltering from the rain. And she's scratching her body. She's moving her clothes and she is combing her hair.

Actor: She scratched herself with provocative indolence under her jacket, then undid her hair, combed it unhurriedly, and began braiding it again. In those days it rarely happened that one saw a woman close up, an experience both tender and savage that left you shattered.

Francesco: Now, this detail of her undoing her braids and combing her hair and redoing her braids is key in the setting of the story in, I think, two ways. One is very explicit, and Levi, in telling his story, says how the two men see a woman, and that's a very unusual sight for them. They don't see women in the camp. But the other is that this woman has hair, and that's not said in the story, but if we know his work, we can navigate back to a poem that he wrote while he was commuting back and forth to his job right after the war, and it's a poem titled “Shema,” after the Jewish prayer and the text from Deuteronomy, Shema Yisrael, “Hear Oh Israel,” and it's a poem in which he enunciates the title of his first memoir, If This Is a Man.

Actor: Consider if this is a man

Who works in the mud.

Francesco: Just like they are in the scene that he's depicting in “Lilith,” and then —

Actor: Consider if this is a woman,

Without hair and without name

With no more strength to remember,

Her eyes empty and her womb cold

Like a frog in winter.

Francesco: So this is clearly another kind of woman. It's a woman that evokes female power. And so this character that comes in also evokes the story within the story that is told in the “Lilith,” and it's the story that the Tischler starts telling. He looks at this woman, this character, the carpenter, who, by the way, is a carpenter, not by profession, but by necessity.

Actor: So the Tischler was Tischler and nothing more, but he didn't look like a carpenter and we all suspected that he was no such thing. In those days it was common practice for an engineer to register as a mechanic, or a journalist to put himself down as a typographer. Thus one could hope to get better work than that of a common laborer without unleashing the Nazi wrath against intellectuals.

Francesco: And again, this line reminds me of another line of Primo Levi's writing. Later in his life, and he will report on this in his last work, The Drowned and the Saved, which is kind of a philosophical meditation on camps and on history and on life in general, he reports an ongoing debate between himself and another survivor of Auschwitz Birkenau, Jean Améry. And Jean Améry tells the story of a new arrival to the camp who was interviewed by a Nazi soldier, and is asked what his profession was and he states that he's a Germanist. And the irony of a Jewish specialist in German culture and literature is not lost on the Nazi, who essentially shames and spites the Jewish inmate even more so than he would have done under normal circumstances. So the little note in the story, in “Lilith,” about the enmity that Nazis experience for intellectuals says volumes.

Actor: At any rate, Tischler had been placed at the carpenters' bench and his carpentry was pretty good.

Francesco: And so the carpenter has a nickname and he's the Carpenter. So there is a tailor, then there is the other tailor, there is the fool, there is this, there is that. Everybody’s a nickname.

Actor: There were also the Blacksmith, the Russian, the Fool, two Tailors (respectively the Tailor and the Other Tailor), the Galician, and the Tall Man.

Francesco: And then he says about himself —

Actor: For a long time I was the Italian; then, indiscriminately, Primo or Alberto, because they mixed me up with another Italian.

Francesco: Now that little aside — Alberto was another Italian —really points us to the shift in how Primo Levi conceives his narrative here. Alberto is a key character in Survival in Auschwitz.

Actor: Alberto is my best friend. He is only twenty-two, two years younger than me, but none of us Italians have shown an equal capacity for adaptation.

Francesco: Not only he was a friend, they had been deported together. So they arrived to Auschwitz, one, and they go through the initial selection together. And they were really each other's companion. We know that in the strategies of survival of the camps, having a close other, a close partner, was essential to survival. Somebody one could share any kind of clothing or food, anything that was found in the crevices of life in the Nazi camp. We know that having a partner meant being safe at night, having someone else that one could share the meager space of, the meager rest that one could get and not risk being robbed of one's possessions.

And so Alberto was that person for Primo Levi. And, as we know, because he tells us the story partly at the end of If This is a Man, and then at the beginning of The Truce, Alberto, unlike him, is not sick at the time of the evacuation of the camp of Auschwitz by the Nazis, and so Alberto is taken on the death march and will die there.

Actor: And then finally Alberto came, defying the prohibition, to say good-bye to me from the window. We were inseparable: we were “the two Italians” and foreigners even mistook our names.

Francesco: And so Alberto is really a major character in the memoirs. And in this case, he's just referred to as another Italian. What this means is that we're entering a different zone, a zone in which the characters of the memoir are not as relevant as such, and maybe even Primo Levi is no longer just the one who remembers, but he's also very much a character in the story, and he assumes a role in the play. So there is a play going on here.

Actor: Tischler noticed that I was staring at her and asked if I was married. No, I wasn't. He looked at me with mock severity. To be celibate at our age was a sin. However, he turned around and stayed that way for some time, looking at the girl. She had finished braiding her hair, had crouched down in her pipe, and was humming, swaying her head in time with the music.

Francesco: So the woman is immediately equated by Tischler as Lilith, and then it's very clear that Primo Levi has no idea who Lilith is.

Actor: "It's Lilith," Tischler suddenly said to me.

"You know her? Is that her name?"

"I don't know her but I recognize her. She's Lilith, Adam's first wife. Don't you know the story of Lilith?"

I didn't know it, and he laughed indulgently. Everyone knows that western Jews are all Epicureans — apikorsim, unbelievers.

Francesco: And so here, a new story comes in. And it's actually almost a theatrical story because the two characters have roles that they have to follow. And Levi writes that there is sort of an agreement; that the agreement is that Tischler will be the believer and the one who knows the tradition and who conveys the import of Jewish tradition. Whereas Levi is there as the nonbeliever, the ignorant one, the one who is supposed to be made to feel ignorant and not knowing what the tradition — what the story is.

Actor: A typical situation was developing, and a game that I liked: the dispute between the pious man and the unbeliever who is by definition ignorant, and whom the adversary forces to gnash his teeth by showing him his error. I accepted my role and answered with the required insolence.

Francesco: There is an add-on which is kind of interesting here, which is that Tischler, even though he's a Polish Jew and his first language is Yiddish, had learned some Italian from his father — an Italian that was all made apparently of opera librettos.

Actor: Tischler's Italian was amusing and full of errors, consisting principally of scraps from librettos of operas, his father having been a great opera buff.

Francesco: And so here, Tischler starts telling Primo Levi something very neat. He says, well, you know that the story of the creation of the woman in the Bible is told twice. And Levi says —

Actor: Yes, it's told twice but the second time is only the commentary on the first.

Francesco: And he says, no. Tischler says, no, if you really knew how to read the Bible, then you would know that the two stories are not the same and there is a lot to be told about them.

Actor: If you had read the Bible carefully, you would remember that the business of the creation of woman is told twice, in two different ways. But you people — they teach you a little Hebrew when you reach thirteen and that's the end of it.

Francesco: So what Tischler is doing is actually instructing Primo Levi in Midrashic literature. He's teaching him how to read the Bible and how to read in between the lines of the Bible, and he's doing so by deploying a series of legends that revolve around the character of Lilith.

Actor: The first story is that the Lord not only made man and woman equal, but He made a single form out of clay — in fact, a Golem, a form without form, a two-backed figure; that is, man and woman already joined together. Then He separated them with one cut but they were anxious to be joined again, and right away Adam wanted Lilith to lie down on the ground. Lilith wouldn't hear of it: “Why should I be underneath? Aren't we equal? Two halves made of the same stuff?”

Francesco: So this is where Midrash comes in; when the whole — what's not written but just told comes in. The two creatures are separated. At this point, they're equal. One is male, one is female, but they're equal. They're equal in relevance, and they're equal in strength. And Lilith refuses to be under Adam. And the refusal in the being under is both hierarchical, but also very much sexual. And Lilith refuses to be submitted to Adam's authority and sexual power also because Adam doesn't have power over Lilith. They are equally strong, and so she rejects this role.

Actor: Adam tried to force her to, but they were also equal in strength and he did not succeed. So he asked God for help. He was male too and would say Adam was right. And so He did, but Lilith rebelled: equal rights or nothing, and since the two males persisted, she cursed the Lord's name, became a she-devil, flew off like an arrow and went to live at the bottom of the sea. Some even claim to know more and say that Lilith lives in the Red Sea precisely.

Francesco: Some believe under the Red Sea, and then she comes out at night and has two key powers. One power is that of threatening newborn children. So she flies over the world and finds homes where newborn children are just being born and threatens to choke them, to kill them as they're being born.

Actor: You have to watch out. if she gets in, she must be caught under an overturned bowl. Then she can no longer do any harm.

Francesco: And then she has another power. And that's a sexual power. Lilith is very much focused on a male seed, on sperm. And so she's a collector of sperm, whether it's from wet dreams —

Actor: — especially between the sheets —

Francesco: — or sperm that, because of lust or other reasons, is not deposited in the place where it's supposed to go.

Actor: That is, inside the wife's womb.

Francesco: And so all of this sperm is collected by Lilith, who endlessly gets pregnant and gives birth to demons. And these are not big demons, so even though Lilith is a pretty powerful creature, and she's able to threaten newborn children, in this case the demons that are born from, let's say, spilled seed are not very powerful. They do, like — they just molest people in very silly ways in their daily life.

Actor: They're evil little spirits, without bodies. They make milk and wine turn, run about attics at night, and snarl girls' hair.

Francesco: If you can't find your glasses, it's because one of Lilith's children, you know —. If you can't locate the keys to your car and so on and so forth, well, that's because the children are there taking care of you that way.

Actor: But they are also the sons of man, of every man; illegitimate, it's true, and when their fathers die, they come to the funeral along with the legitimate sons who are their half-brothers. They flutter around the funeral candles like nocturnal butterflies, screech, and claim their share of the inheritance.

Francesco: And so the story goes on, and each time Tischler tells more, and each time Primo Levi acts in some kind of disbelief, but it's part of his character. He has to be acting in disbelief.

Actor: You laugh precisely because you're an unbeliever and it's your role to laugh. Or perhaps you never did spill your seed. It may even happen that you will get out of here alive. Then you'll see that at certain funerals the rabbi and his followers circle the dead man seven times. That's it. They are putting up a barrier so that his bodiless sons will not come to give him grief.

Francesco: And the story goes on and actually enters the realm of theology, because it ends with this idea, which is a Kabbalistic idea. And so the range of knowledge of Tischler goes from Talmud and the Midrashic aspects of Talmud all the way to Zohar — is that in this abandonment of Lilith, also God feels alone. And Adam has Eve and then men have women and so on. So humanity is taken care of in a way. But God actually mates with Lilith, couples with Lilith, and this is not good for anyone.

Actor: Because you must know that this obscene tryst has not ended, and won't end soon. In one way, it's the cause of the evil that occurs on earth. In another way, it is its effect. As long as God continues to sin with Lilith, there will be blood and trouble on Earth.

Francesco: And this is the cause of the root of evil in the world and including the very evil that brings Tischler and Levi together in that pipe on that rainy day, surrounded by mud.

Actor: We heard a distant racket and, shortly afterwards, a Caterpillar-tread tractor passed alongside us. It was dragging a snowplow. But the mud it cleaved immediately joined together again behind the machine. Like Adam and Lilith, I thought to myself.

Francesco: The story ends with a note by Levi, and the note is that the sadness of how this story is told is the sadness of how fallen civilizations tell their own stories.

Actor: Fortune has been good enough to me but not to Tischler. And it happened many years later that I actually attended a funeral that took place exactly in the way he had described, with the protective dance around the coffin. It is inexplicable that fate has chosen an unbeliever to repeat this pious and impious tale, woven of poetry, ignorance, daring acumen, and the unassuageable sadness that grows on the ruins of lost civilizations.

Francesco: Primo Levi was born in the city of Turin in northern Italy in the region of Piedmont on July 31st of 1919. Now this year and date are really relevant to his biography because being born in 1919 made it so that he was of the right age to enroll in university, even after the antisemitic laws that were passed in Italy in the fall of 1938 barred Jews from academia. He was already enrolled and this is typical of the Italian legal system. Since some Jews were already enrolled, there was an exception made, and so those Jews who had already been enrolled in university were allowed to complete their studies. In the absurdist theory of antisemitic legislation, they would never be allowed to use their degree, but they were allowed to have an academic life, until, of course, everything went down the hill for everybody. By the fall of 1943 hunting season was proclaimed in northern Italy and Jews were just prey to murder, robbery and of course deportation. So 1919 is significant for that and, of course, the date of his birthday is significant, July 31st, because the story “Lilith,” takes place on his birthday, on his 25th birthday. So we are in 1944, July 31st, and it's the birthday of both characters.

Actor: But this was a special day. The rain had come for him because it was his birthday — twenty-five years old. Now, by sheer chance I was twenty-five that day too; we were twins. Tischler said it was a date that called for a celebration since it was most unlikely that we would celebrate our next birthday.

Francesco: He is born in Turin. Turin is a very important place in the history of Italian Jews. It's the place where Italian Jewish national identity and perhaps Italian national identity are really conceived and implemented. It's the center of the Risorgimento and of Jewish emancipation in the 19th century. It's also a small but very intellectually vibrant community that had resulted from the confluence of many other small communities and ghettos in the region of Piedmont. So there were Italian Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Sephardic Jews, French Jews that all lived and shared in the life — in the Jewish life of the city of Turin. Levi attends liceo, the so-called classical high school, so he studies Latin and Greek at Liceo d'Azzeglio in Turin, and then enrolls in 1937 at the University of Turin, where he will eventually graduate in chemistry. And this is a time in Italian academia, European academia, when most of scientific studies are conducted in German. So he has to learn German in order to read textbooks. And his knowledge of German will save his life in the camps, both because he's able to understand others minimally, understand orders, understand fellow inmates who speak Yiddish. And Tischler, the key character in “Lilith,” communicates to him also in a sort of German Yiddish.

Actor: His mother tongue was Yiddish but he also spoke German, and we had no trouble understanding each other.

Francesco: So they're able to communicate that way, and also this will land him a job during his internment. So Primo Levi will be actually able to work in a chemistry lab and therefore shelter himself from the winter of ’44-’45. And this is a — was one of the keys of his survival during the deportation. In ‘42, he works under the table in Milan, et cetera, and eventually joins the partisans, and he's arrested as an anti-fascist. And that's where his first memoir really begins, his arrest and the beginning of the deportation. That’s the very beginning of If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz.

Actor: I was captured by the Fascist Militia on 13 December 1943. I was twenty-four, with little wisdom, no experience and a decided tendency, encouraged by the life of segregation forced on me for the previous four years by the racial laws, to live in an unrealistic world of my own.

Francesco: And, in his innocence, possibly thinking that this may save his life, he says to the fascist militias who’re arresting him as an anti-fascist and are ready to shoot all of them — he says, I'm Jewish. And in fact, he's immediately spared and instead he's taken to a concentration camp in the town of Fossoli in the north of Italy from where convoys shipped inmates off to Auschwitz. He spends from January of 1944 until January 1945 in Auschwitz. And, as I was saying earlier, he's an inmate of Buna Monowitz, which was a — essentially a rubber factory and that employed slave laborers and other laborers in contribution to the German war effort. And so he works and lives there under the conditions that he recounts in his memoirs, and the camp is liberated on January 27th of 1945 by the Red Army and he's there.

His biography continues essentially in a very interesting and uneventful way after liberation. He recounts his journey in his second novel. It’s the memoir, his journey back home from Poland all the way back to Turin, to his home where he finds again his family and where he moves back into the same apartment where he not only had lived before the war, but where exactly he was born. And he lived in this apartment his entire life.

He's hired by a small factory that makes paint as a chemist. The factory is just outside of the city, so he commutes back and forth, but he's immediately diving into life. He gets married right away, children come not too late after that, and he's traveling back and forth by train. And, as he tells us in his writings, he just writes on the train, and he writes at night compulsively, and he wants to tell his story. By 1947, he has a memoir that's well formed, and so he publishes his book with a small publishing house. So If This Is a Man first comes out as just a sidelined volume and just the result of his own flow of consciousness, and it will take about a decade when an exhibition, of all things; a sort of, like — a museum exhibition about the camps will be presented with photographic reproductions of scenes from mostly Dachau and Mauthausen. I'm not sure that Auschwitz Birkenau were covered by that exhibition, but he becomes a known person as a survivor of the camps and especially attracts the attention of young people who start clustering on him and asking about his life.

So the book is reissued in ’56, ’57, and very quickly in the next few years, English, French, and German translations appeared. And in 1965, he will make his first visit to Auschwitz. He will make several visits, including, at times, accompanying schools — like high school students — and others who visited from Italy, visited Auschwitz Birkenau. So as a tour guide of sorts — as a witness and tour guide.

In 1967, he publishes Natural Stories, or Storie Naturali, a collection of essentially science fiction under pseudonym. And so instead of Primo Levi, which was his name, he put this book out as with the pseudonym of Damiano Malabaila. Malabaila means it's something like — it's not a clear term in Italian, but it kind of means “bad, evil wet nurse”.

And in 1975, he publishes Sistema Periodico, aka The Periodic Table, which was a collection of short stories that includes all sorts of autobiographical sketches, including some that have to do with Primo Levi's life in the German concentration camp.

In 1975, he retires from his job as a chemist and embraces writing as a full time activity. He publishes more work starting then, including Moments of Reprieve, which is the book we're discussing today.

Actor: Now the story of Eve is written down and everybody knows it; the story of Lilith, instead, is only told, so that few know it — know the stories, actually, because there are many. I'll tell you a few of them, because it's our birthday and it's raining, and because today my role is to tell and believe; you are the unbeliever today.

Francesco: I think that “Lilith,” this very short story by Primo Levi, is unique in the canon, if there's such a thing — but maybe there is — of what we call Holocaust literature, which is really a subchapter of a broader literature of extreme situations, of course. But it's unique in as much as Primo Levi's work is unique in — within that canon — the way it's written, the clarity of writing, the sort of distance from emotion, even from the relating of emotions. Emotions are there, but they are the object of study. So there is a filter, which is the filter of the writer, of the thinker, of the philosopher, that really thinks about humankind, in the moment. The characters say it's their birthday, and even a birthday present is shared; a slice of apple —

Actor: He took half an apple out of his pocket, cut off a slice, and made me a present of it, and that was the only time in a year of imprisonment that I tasted fruit. We chewed in silence, as attentive to the precious acidulous flavor as we would have been to a symphony.

Francesco: They don't expect to live beyond the moment. And this clarity also in one’s destiny, I think, is very clear. So there is no suspense. There is no expectation. There is no sense of, well, things will go well in the end that some Holocaust literature seems to lead us to. There is no redeeming ending to any of these stories and no redeeming ending to “Lilith”. In fact, “Lilith” ends with a tragic ending. It says, this is how civilizations tell their own collapse. So it's really not just the end of the characters, not the end of the story, it's the end of a whole world that's represented here in very few words and singularly; so, for an Italian writer, in very short sentences. It's hard for us Italians to get adjusted to writing in English, and I speak here as an immigrant, right? Because we're so used to constructing very long sentences with all sorts of parentheticals and implied sentences and bracketed things and verbs that go in all sorts of — and we love to elaborate this, and Primo Levi always said that it was his chemistry background, his sort of — his scientific mind that sort of led him to cast language, to forge language in a very shortly precise way.

Actor: I liked Tischler because he never succumbed to lethargy. His step was brisk in spite of his wooden clogs, his speech was careful and precise, and he had an alert face, laughing and sad.

Francesco: Interestingly enough, even though — and even the Italian is the source of this motto, “traduttore, traditore,” — the fact that translator is also somebody who betrays the text they translate, right? Even though, yes, all translation is an adaptation and a form of betrayal of the original text, I have to say that translating Primo Levi in English is not too inappropriate. Specifically because of the structure of his sentences, because of the pace of his syntax. It fits well in English.

So I think we're really in good hands as English readers of Primo Levi, and I say this as an Italian reader first. Of course, something is lost. What is lost is, I think, two linguistic aspects. One is that a lot of Levi's works evoke layers and layers, volumes and volumes of Italian core literary knowledge.

He's very aware of the history of the language he uses. And I'll just give one example. In the introduction to If This Is a Man, in the preface, he begins with these words, “per mia fortuna”— “by my own luck,” I was only deported to Auschwitz. And the fact that one could be deported to Auschwitz and talk about it as luck indicates, of course, an inversion of moral values of sorts, but also, to an Italian reader, actually indicates the word fortuna means something very specific.

The word fortuna means Niccolò Machiavelli. Niccolò Machiavelli spends a lot of his pages discussing the concept of fortuna, which I'm not translating into fortune or luck. It's something else. It's its own concept. It's its own world. And so this is an example of how every word in Levi also brings in all kinds of other knowledge, which is classical knowledge, which is core European literary knowledge. And I mean, of course, Dante is there, including in If This Is a Man.

Actor: Who is Dante? What is the Comedy? That curious sensation of novelty which one feels if one tries to explain briefly what is the Divine Comedy.

Francesco: There is a whole chapter about trying to reconstruct Ulysses' canto, the whole story of Ulysses in Dante's Inferno. And the references are there in all kinds of directions. The other thing linguistically that maybe is lost, and I think “Lilith” is a good example of that, is Levi's own ignorance of the Jewish tradition. The way Primo Levi describes Tischler is also a sign of Primo Levi's own ignorance of the East European Jewish world. He's describing a character who at night recites rhymes in Yiddish and sings.

Actor: Sometimes in the evening he staged entertainments in Yiddish, telling little anecdotes and reciting long strings of verses, and I was sorry I couldn't understand him. Sometimes he also sang, and then nobody clapped and everyone stared at the ground, but when he was through they begged him to start again.

Francesco: So what he's describing is actually a badchen. He's describing a very specific figure in the cultural economy of Yiddish land. The badchen is the traditional jester who has had some kind of coding in rabbinics, but he's not a rabbi so he's not officiating the wedding, and he's not the klezmer. He's not the musician who plays the music at the East European Jewish wedding, but he's the entertainer, the jester who makes — who improvises rhymes, couplet and couplets — usually very involved in the rituals, like the one of unveiling the bride, sitting the bride, getting the bride to cry. So reciting all these verses that basically bring the bride to tears by saying, “Oh, your life is over. Now you're going to leave your parent’s home. You're going to be in the hands of this horrible husband and et cetera, et cetera.” And once the bride cries, that scene is over and the wedding can keep going.

And so Levi has no idea what a badchen is, but he's describing one, and he's doing it in Italian, and when he spells Yiddish, he spells Yiddish in the German way, so the sh sound is s-c-h, because he's interpreting it in German. So all of these things are sort of lost in translation, but it's a translation that's a cultural translation. It's not just a linguistic translation.

And so that type of knowledge is lost in Levi, and, of course, that lack of that loss is lost in the translation. And that's true on a number of occasions. In other words, reading critically Primo Levi brings also the issues of translation to a whole other dimension in terms of finding out what his knowledge is and not assuming that everything Primo Levi writes is only Jewish is important.

So something really interesting happened with Moments of Reprieve beyond the title, which is actually the initial translation was a partial translation.

So it contains the part that was first translated and published, which is a series of stories about the camps. And then a series of fictional stories, some of which are sort of impossible, present kind of science fiction, and others are outright science fiction. So, total imagination. And it's the first time that he does this under his own name. And, in fact, it's sort of the little crime that was committed in publishing Moments of Reprieve. By eliminating his fiction and keeping only the stories of deportation, it’s telling of a way in which Primo Levi is read in translation as an only Jewish author. And he's many more things than that.

Actor: Why are you laughing? Of course, I don't believe this, but I like to tell these stories. I liked it when they were told to me, and it would be a shame if they were lost. In any case, I won't guarantee that I myself didn't add something, and perhaps all who tell them add something: and that's how stories are born.

Francesco: He traveled, especially when he became a more well-known writer. He was invited to give lectures and so on. He will go, early 1985-’86, on a lecture tour in the U.S., so hitting major college campuses, and, in 1987, one morning, April 11th, he will jump off the rail by the staircases of his apartment building and kill himself. And I remember — still remember as if it were today — how the news reached all of us in Italy, in the daily news. And it was not acceptable. It was — we were all in disbelief. I remember carrying this shock. I had not met the person. I later met his family and heard stories from his family about him. But what I remember of his death in ’87 was really just this profound sense of loss. We all felt we’d lost someone key to our Italian and Jewish experience all wrapped into one.

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Aaron: Thank you for listening to this episode of The Dybbukast, “Lilith." The main story, “Lilith,” as well as other pieces of writing featured in this episode were read by Jon Weinberg. Thank you to Dr. Francesco Spagnolo for sharing his insights. Story editing was led by Julie Lockhart with support from me, Aaron Henne. This episode was edited by Gregory Scharpen. Our theme music was composed by Michael Skloff and produced by Sam K.S.

Please visit us at theatredybbuk.org, where you will find links to a wide variety of materials which expand upon the episode’s explorations. And if you want to know more about theatre dybbuk’s work in general, please sign up for our mailing list on that same website.

The readings from "Lilith" are from a translation of Moments of Reprieve by Ruth Feldman. The readings from If This is a Man are from a translation by Stuart Woolf.

This episode was presented in collaboration with The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.

With this episode, we are concluding Season 4 of The Dybbukast. Thank you for listening. This season of The Dybbukast was generously supported by a grant from Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah. The Dybbukast is produced by theatre dybbuk.

•••

Actor: But I still have to tell you the strangest story of all, and it's not strange that it's strange because it's written down in the books of the cabalists, and they were people without fear. You know that God created Adam, and immediately afterwards He realized it wasn't good for man to be alone and He placed a companion at his side. Well, the cabalists said that it wasn't good even for God Himself to be alone, and so from the beginning, He took as His companion the Shekhina, which is to say, His own presence in the Creation. Thus the Shekhina became the wife of God and therefore the mother of all peoples. When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans and we were dispersed and enslaved, the Shekhina was angered, left God, and came with us into exile. Actually I myself have thought this: that the Shekhina also let herself be enslaved and is here around us, in this exile within exile, in this home of mud and sorrow.