Stories and Essays:

Levi's Minor Works

Levi's background as a chemist provided him with new ideas and creative outlets. Though Levi is remembered primarily for his memorial and witness writings about the Holocaust, his many short stories and essays and a collection of poems, all written over a span of nearly forty years, reveal a full range of interests that he presents with a keen sense of curiosity and a versatile and vivid imagination. His shorter compositions encompass a spectrum of subjects that include fiction, additional autobiographical reminiscences, and essays on current events and scientific and literary issues. In this material, which reflects the breadth of his vision, Levi writes with his customary clarity, accuracy, and concision and reflects moods that include the witty, ironic, funny, sad, and critical.

The vast majority of these shorter works originally appeared as single selections in journals and newspapers, primarily the Turin daily La Stampa. Storie naturali, Vizio di forma, and Lilit e altri racconti were first published in compiled editions in 1966,1971, and 1981 respectively, while L'altrui mestiere, largely a collection of essays, was published in 1985. The first two collections appeared in print between the Italian publications of The Reawakening (1963) and The Periodic Table (1975), which shows that Levi's interest in other subjects was concurrent with his writing about the extermination camps. Many of these stories have now been translated into English and gathered into volumes. The Sixth Day and Other Tales (1990) comprises a selection of stories taken from Storie Naturali and Vizio di forma. Other People's Trades (1989) is the English version of L'altrui mestiere, and The Mirror Maker: Stories and Essays (1989) is a translation of Racconti e saggi di Primo Levi (1986). While Levi would be the first to admit that these shorter works are not on a par with his major ones, they are nonetheless important to a complete understanding of his literary opus and his concerns. This study focuses on the collections of short works that appear in English translation.

Storie naturali, in The Sixth Day and Other Tales, contains twenty tales that border on science fiction, though none of the plots is distant from possible reality. These tales, for which Levi received the 1967 Bagutta Literary prize, were written between 1952 and 1964 with the exception of the first, "The Mnemogogues," which was written in 1946. On the whole, they denounce the social malaise gripping modern society and affecting its moral fiber.
Following the advice of one of his editors, Roberto Cerato, Levi originally wrote Storie naturali under the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila. He did so out of shyness and modesty. He conceded that he had a "vague sense of guilt" for the relatively light treatment he gave these pieces.' Since he regarded them as mere divertimenti, light pastimes of limited relevance that he jotted down as they popped into his mind, he was reluctant to give them his name, which had become synonymous with the prison camp, experience he described in his somber works published earlier. Once he realized, however, that the views he espoused in these stories had been determined in great part by his experience in camp, he no longer saw any reason for using a nom de plume. In fact, he openly admitted that he agreed to the publication of these stories because he saw a continuity between them and his earlier works. In any case, readers familiar with Levi's writings would have had no difficulty identifying the author's hand. Some of the stories had already appeared elsewhere under his real name, and a statement on the book's back clearly identified the writer as the author of two earlier works connected with his experiences in the concentration camp.

The title Storie naturali is a paradox of sorts because, on the surface, there appears to be little content in these stories that can be deemed conventionally natural. The author's objective, in fact, is to underscore the anomalous, the bizarre, and the irrational. The title's reference to the natural is not only paradoxical but ironic, if it is viewed in light of the lapse of the natural reasoning process on the part of a large section of society that resulted in the Holocaust. This event is still unequaled as one of what Levi called on the dustjacket of Storie naturali "the monsters generated by the sleep of reason" (my translation). While the stories reveal on the surface a writer of lighter and more amusing disposition, beneath the levity the effects of Levi's experience in the camp are evident. The author's departure here from his earlier autobiographical mode is therefore nothing more than a subtle masking, an attempt to divert his own and his readers' attention temporarily from his awful experience. This is futile, however, because the memories of the camp cannot be erased; they continue to reveal themselves in these stories. The tragedy of the Holocaust forced Levi and all people of conscience to confront their responsibilities to humanity. These stories are the author's further attempt to effect that confrontation.