by Primo Levi
a Jewish Italian holocaust survivor
Is anything sadder than a train
That leaves when it's supposed to,
That has only one voice,
Only one route?
There's nothing sadder.
Except perhaps a cart horse,
Shut between two shafts
Ad unable even to look sideways.
Its whole life is walking.
And a man? Isn't a man sad?
If he lives in solitude a long time,
If he believes time has run its course,
A man is a sad thing too.
6 comments:
Just recently read re his very sad and enigmatic end (of this world.)
you read re?
I would so appreciate a link:')
s'matter of fact - can you post the link?
ich nit veis vi to do links, but i can copy and paste but the article is zeir zeir layng, how much you want??
8 Sometime after 10:00 a.m., Saturday, April 11, 1987, on the third floor of a late-nineteenth-century building in Turin, the concierge rang the doorbell of Primo Levi's apartment.1 Levi—research chemist, retired factory manager, author of our most humanly compelling accounts of the Holocaust—had been born in that apartment 67 years earlier. He opened the door and collected his mail from the concierge like every other day. He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt. He smiled, thanked her as usual, and closed the door. The concierge descended on foot the ample spiral staircase occupied in the middle by a caged elevator. She had barely reached her cubicle on the ground floor, she later told the police, when she heard Levi's body hit the bottom of the stairs by the elevator. It was 10:20. A dentist who lived in the building heard her screams. He immediately saw, he subsequently reported, that Levi was dead.2 The autopsy established that he died instantaneously of a "crushed skull."3 No signs of violence unrelated to the fall were found on his body.4 At 12:00, barely an hour and a half after the event, I heard the news on the radio in Rome. There was already mention of suicide. The police inquiry simply confirmed that conclusion.
Levi's death, especially the manner of it, came as a terrible shock to his many admirers in Italy and abroad. His friends were devastated by what some considered a totally unexpected event. "Until the day of his death I was convinced he was the most serene person in the world," Norberto Bobbio said.5 Still, no one showed much difficulty in coming to terms with it. After the fact, Levi's death seemed so predictable-the "inescapable" end of the life of an Auschwitz survivor. Natalia Ginzburg, a Jewish writer, wrote that "of those years [in Auschwitz] he must have had terrible memories: a wound he always carried with great fortitude, but which must have been nonetheless atrocious. I think it was the memory of those years which lead him towards his death."6 Ferdinando Camon, a friend and Catholic writer, said in an interview: "This suicide must be backdated to 1945. It did not happen then because Primo wanted (and had to) write. Now, having completed his work (The Drowned and the Saved was the end of the cycle) he could kill himself. And he did."7
The most poignant comment in this regard came from his son Renzo: "Now everyone wants to understand, to grasp, to probe. I think my father had already written the last act of his existence. Read the conclusion of The Truce and you will understand."8 In November 1962, Levi had written:
it was interrupted.
what is the end?
Click here to read the full article.
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