Primo Levi returns to some of his old characters, describing his experience of each of them in the same intriguing style employed in "If This Is A Man" et al. The tone of the book seems more hopeful and less despairing than his other Auschwitz memoirs. An essential read for anyone who has read Levi's more famous works.

"We too are so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto us fenced in, that beyond the fence stand the Lords of death, and not far away, the train is waiting."

I loved this as you could pick which order you wanted to read the stories in (of real people!). I sort of admire the fact that after everything that happened in the camp and everything he witnessed, he still chose to write a book on positive and uplifting stories of the people he met.

ko tieši es vēl varētu iedot labākajam 20. gs. stāstniekam?

“Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence stand the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting.”

A classic is a book that is never finished saying what it wants to say. Warm, wise, human, profound, and timely all the time.

This book comprises short stories about the human figures that Primo Levi encountered in Auschwitz, the people that he got to know and how those people influenced him and made them memorable.

The astonishing revelation is that Primo Levi ate a bowl of frozen soup along with his bunkmate, Alberto. The soup was left over because the person eating it died during the meal. Levi never had scarlet fever when he was a child, but Alberto had. The soup was contaminated with scarlet fever and so Levi was in the sick bay when the time came to evacuate the camp, where the inmates who could walk were taken on a death march to the West, whereas the sick were left to the Russians.

The stories are wonderful and I marvel at how generous some inmates of Auschwitz were to their fellow prisoners. When the Germans left, some of the prisoners decided to walk back to Italy.

Remarkable and recommended.

So, so moving. Starkly beautiful. This memoir captures and proves that in the darkest of times, the human spirit is an amazing thing. A simple act of kindness can be the difference between life and death - and Primo Levi shows us just how many people were willing to risk their own lives in order to help save others.

A beautiful book from a gifted writer. In spite of the title's implication, I was still astonished that it contained so much light and hope. Levi is humbly aware of his own fragility, which makes his perceptions and inferences all the more penetrating. "The delicate investigator of movements of the spirit, vibrant as an oscillating circuit..." This is a short book, but it is worth taking your time with it. Primo Levi is "vitally important." He is essential.

This was one of my favorite passages:
Actually Ezra wasn't really meshuge. He was heir to an ancient, sorrowful, and strange tradition, whose core consists in holding evil in opprobrium and in "hedging about the law" so that evil may not flood through the gaps in the hedge and submerge the law itself. In the course of the millennia, around this core has become encrusted a gigantic proliferation of comments, deductions, almost manically subtle distinctions, and further precepts and prohibitions. And in the course of the millennia many have behaved like Ezra throughout migrations and slaughters without number. That is why the history of the Jewish people is so ancient, sorrowful, and strange.

Primo has an eye for the human personality. He wrings out these curious, tragic memories that illustrate the resilient, irrefutable subjectivity of everyone they describe.

Moments of Reprieve

Primo Levi was imprisoned in Auschwitz from February 1944 to January 1945. His books 'If This Is A Man' and 'The Truce' constitute Levi's attempts to bear witness to the misery, trauma and evil of existence in the camp. Levi, however, could not forget and continued to write, giving life to his memories of atrocity until his suicide in 1987.

'Moments of Reprieve' is a short booking containing 15 brief vignettes which focus on a single individual or moment of humanity and generosity which provide a brief 'moment of reprieve' from the degradation and suffering of daily existence in the camp. As he writes in the book itself, "with the passing of the years these memories do not fade, nor do they thin out. They become enriched with details I thought were forgotten, which sometimes acquire meaning in the light of other people’s memories, from letters I receive or books I read". Each of these memories are memorable and moving in different ways. I found two particularly memorable:

Small Causes:

Levi works in a chemistry lab, where he steals some pipettes and smuggles them back into camp to sell to the infirmary. Conscious of his bargaining power, the head of the infirmary refuses to pay for them with bread and instead offers half a bowl of soup, which, frozen solid, has memorably been eaten "as a cake". Aware that the only reason for a patient in the infirmary to have eaten only half a bowl of soup was because he had died halfway through, Levi and his friend Alberto finish the soup anyway. Levi develops scarlet fever and is taken to the infirmary, where he remains as the Germans evacuate the camp to escape the advancing Russians. Alberto, immune to scarlet fever through childhood exposure, is taken on the death march and never heard from again. Levi, sick, survives.

Story of a Coin:

Levi realises, years later, that a coin he discovered in the ruins of Auschwitz was minted at the order of Chaim Rumkowski, the the leader of the Łodź ghetto between 1941 and 1945. A willing puppet of the Nazis, Rumkowski used his position as head of the Judenrat to confiscate property and businesses that were still being run by their rightful Jewish owners in the ghetto, organised deportations, oversaw and orchestrated slave labour of hundreds of thousands and is remembered for his speech "Give Me Your Children", pleading with the Jews in the ghetto to give up children 10 years of age and younger, as well as the elderly over 65 for selection. A power-crazed and dictatorial figure, Rumkowski violently broke up demonstrations in the ghetto with the Jewish police and requested assistance from the Nazis to help enforce their orders when faced with dissent. In his memoirs, Yehuda Leib Gerst described Rumkowski as: "Toward his fellow Jews, he was an incomparable tyrant who behaved just like a Führer and cast deathly terror to anyone who dared to oppose his lowly ways. Toward the perpetrators, however, he was as tender as a lamb and there was no limit to his base submission to all their demands, even if their purpose was to wipe us out totally". He was murdered in Auschwitz in 1945.

Levi ponders the story of this ridiculous and evil figure, who enforced and organised the running of the trains that bore him to his own death, reminding us that: "Like Rumkowski, we too are so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence stand the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting".

What Levi's writing and imagination does in each of the 15 anedoctes that Moments of Reprieve contains, as one review notes is, "shape and mould what were once real people and real events into patterns which have a greater depth and resonance than normal life allows. This activity: this deepening and widening and ennobling, is Levi’s characteristic achievement".

So this is the first Primo Levi book that's left me disappointed. Moments of Reprieve is a sort of collection of deleted scenes from Levi's most famous work, If This is a Man, an account of his internment at Auschwitz, and before we get to Moments, it's important to consider why If This is a Man was such a success. Though that book was translated as Survival in Auschwitz for the benefit of the American market, the original title gives you a sense of what makes it so involving: Levi's attempt to work through the confusion and guilt that Auschwitz had left him, the sense of being something both above and below his captors. Levi would later recall how cathartic the writing of that book had been, how he felt himself "become a man again, a person like everyone else, neither a martyr nor a wretch nor a saint, but one of those people who has a family and looks to the future, not the past", and his ability to reconcile so many different selves is one of the marvels of that book. Most prison camp memoirs are either incoherent with rage and grief or are clear, calm recitals of facts that (quite understandably) aim to recount a season in hell without having to relive it. It's a rare book that can return to the abyss without being consumed by it, and a rarer one still that can do so without self-dramatizing, through modest, sincere self-presentation. Conflicted, meek, loyal, kind, forthright, humiliated, resilient, faithful to science, uncertain of himself and mankind, Levi comes across as a kind of Leopold Bloom in Auschwitz, and he emerges as another figure of the triumph of one of the highest human virtues, real decency, over unimaginable incitements to hatred and despair.

After that, then, you would figure there isn't much more to be said, and before he wrote this book, Levi would've agreed with you. In the introduction, he notes that having finished his memoir of the camp, he was ready to return to being a chemist, but that success as a writer and surprisingly imperishable memories of his ordeal compelled him to write this collection of 'bizarre, marginal moments of reprieve', accidental incursions of life into the nullity of Auschwitz. These moments are presented in a mixture of vignettes, some about brief, prevailing incidents of camp life -- a Spanish gypsy asks Levi to transcribe a letter to his lover, Levi and a friend attempt to hide a care package of chocolates, a stool pigeon mocks a strong, silent German prisoner for attempting to conceal a bad case of lice -- while others are concerned with more uplifting stories about refugees outside the camp in wartime.

The problem is that, counterintuitive as this may sound, Levi doesn't write well about subjects other than himself. This may seem strange, given how virtually every other writer needs to fixate less upon themselves, but Levi is so honest with himself and so good at using his own struggles as a prism to illuminate the world that you seldom tire of listening to him talk about himself and his fascinations. When he writes about other people, however, his sympathy betrays him, and I think a throwaway remark of his in The Periodic Table may explain how. Levi mentions that he made a terrible salesman because he identified too much with his customers - that if they were skeptical and diffident, he became skeptical and diffident, and if they were excited about a product, he'd let them sell a product to him. In the non-camp stories here this manifests as seeing good people as they see themselves, resulting in a lot of flat, pat humanist homilies about virtue in wartime that do the worst thing one can do to a story of a good person - make it trite. Levi seems to be doing little more than relaying other people's stories, but most people aren't natural storytellers, and too many of these stories end up reading like feel good pieces in a local newspaper. The stories of camp life, on the other hand, seem to suffer from Levi fighting to resist his impulse to sympathize and overcompensating somewhat. I think I understand why he does this -- he realizes he might forgive too much -- but he's uneasy in the role of accuser; he is too much of a modern Italian, genial, cosmopolitan, generous, to play a role that demands an ancient Roman, someone righteous, stern and terse. This is hardly a character flaw, but it does dilute the serum of this book.

Beyond that, the camp vignette does not play to Levi's strengths as a writer. It was hard for me not to be thinking of Kolyma Tales as I read this, and while I don't think there's any shame in not comparing to Varlam Shalamov -- I don't know if there's ever been a writer on this earth who can match Shalamov in gravity and impact -- Levi does not have the same genius for capturing the essence of camp life, the mix of the mundane and the infernal, in a single image or remembered phrase; this is just not his mode. The result is that all these stories, cast adrift from Levi himself, seem random and somewhat forced at the same time, like Levi has all the burden of remembrance with none of the freedom to release it that he granted himself in If This is a Man. I love Primo Levi, he wrote two of the great memoirs of his century, but this is not a book that does him justice.

A collection of short, powerful remembrances of a number of the men with whom Levi's life intersected in Auschwitz, some of whom he even managed to track down in later life. Each of the stories is another reminder by Levi - whom I consider among the very best chroniclers of the Holocaust - of the good and evil that may reside within all humanity at its darkest moments.

1981 or 1986 [borrowed from Henk and Emily]

Vignettes of several individuals Levi encountered during his year in Auschwitz.
Each chapter centers on one person, sometimes another prisoner, sometimes a guard.
Like Levi's other books, although the situation the account is set in is horrific, he manages to focus on the human-ness of each person and it is heartwarming to read.

Levi is very good at putting in a lot of detail. He explains: Psychologists divide up "survivors of traumatic events into two groups: those who repress their past en bloc, and those whose memory of the offense persists, as though carved in stone, prevailing over all previous or subsequent experiences....I belong to the second group. Of my two years of life outside the law I have not forgotten a single thing.....not a detail was lost."