IF NOT NOW, WHEN? (Se non ora, quando?)

Novel by Primo Levi, 1982

Among Primo Levi's works of witness to the Holocaust, Se non ora, quando? (1982; If Not Now, When?, 1985) stands out, at first consideration, as a striking but unlikely project. Levi had set his remarkable powers of observation, his almost flawless memory, and his taut narrative style unyieldingly against the Nazi will to obliterate all record of the Holocaust and to denigrate as fiction whatever accounts did survive. In this work, which he was beginning to conceive already in 1966—though it did not appear in print until April 1982—Levi dares to write a romanzo, a "novel of adventure," concerning a group of Jewish resisters in Eastern Europe who made their way from Russia to Italy en route to Palestine.

His will to do so is best understood in terms of three reference points. One was the experience, which he recounts in The Reawakening, of meeting in his journey home a band of young Zionists on their way to Palestine. A second was an account of such a band that passed through Milan told him in detail by a friend, Vita Finzi; Levi drew heavily on the notes he made of this narrative and added to it the results of a year's study in historical sources, chiefly on resistance in Eastern Europe. A third impulse was added by the charge, already leveled by the Nazis and revived in one form or another in the years after the war's end, that the Jews were cravenly docile and compliant in the face of the slaughter they endured. Levi wrote this book in part because no one else seemed to be writing a work of witness that would refute this libel and because he had, in this story, the means to counter the charge. Elsewhere, in answers to questions in the schools he visited in the decades after the Holocaust, he elaborated on the reasons why such resistance was virtually unthinkable, psychologically and physically, either on the way to Auschwitz or when in camp. Levi makes abundantly clear, then, that this is a work of historical fiction and refuses to be constrained from telling an important truth even though it must at times be told through fiction.

It is in this context that the title of the work should be understood: Levi takes it from the famous phrases of Hillel recorded in the Pirke Avot ("The Sayings of the Fathers"), "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I think only of myself, what am I? If not now, when?" Mighty and urgent phrases these; they echo in a poem that Levi composed and for which he creates a fictional author, Martin Fontasch, a Jew captured and killed by a German who nonetheless allowed Fontasch one last wish—which was to compose this poem. In the book the poem reaches a character by the name of Gedale, and it became known, then, as "Gedale's Song." Containing some of Hillel's lines quoted above, it also bears the marks of Levi's reading of Paul Celan 's shatteringly evocative poem "Totesfuge" ("Death Fugue"). At the end of this entry I give the poem in its entirety as a concise presentation of the huge impact of this novel and as an example more generally of the complexity and power of Levi's verse.

Perhaps the best summary of the work, which involves the acts of resistance and the project of survival and freedom undertaken by a group of Jews who band together and join with other, non-Jewish resisters, is that given by a character named Pavel to a relief worker, as the group arrives in Italy: "Gruppo, lovely signora. Group. Sempre together. Russia, Polandia. March. Forest, river, snow. Dead Germans. Many. We partizani, all of us, porca miseria. No DP. We, war, partizanka. All soldiers, madosha. Women, too."

The story follows the huge strains the group experienced, partly rejected because they are Jews, partly accepted by other resisters. In presenting the community thus formed, Levi creates a number of striking individuals, both men and (to a degree outstanding in his work) women, including one man, Mendel, who, of the figures in this work, is most like Levi himself. The work, as is characteristic of Levi, never sentimentalizes, showing not only the rancorous prejudice the Jewish resisters encountered but also their own internal conflicts and tensions, sexual and otherwise, their limitations of energy and patience, and their huge tenacity. The extent of their courage and calculation in damaging German rail lines and disrupting German retaliation is told without easy heroization but without diminution either.

"Gedale's Song" both quotes from Hillel's lines and is a midrash on them for the world after the Holocaust. It conveys much of the spirit of this work and many of the key terms and elements of Levi's work as a whole. Like much of his verse, of which this poem is here presented as an example, it is less reticent than is characteristic of the prose of his works of witness and, while highly allusive, is more direct in its evocation of anger and pain.

Do you recognize us? We are the flock of the ghetto,
Fleeced for a thousand years, resigned to the offence.
We are the tailors, the scribes, and the cantors
Withered in the shadow of the Cross.
Now we have learned the paths of the forests,
We have learned to shoot, and we hit straight on.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If not thus, how? And if not now, when?
Our brothers have risen to heaven
Through the ovens of Sobibor and of Treblinka,
They have dug themselves a grave in the air.
Only we few have survived
For the honor of our submerged people,
For vengeance, and for witness.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If not thus, how? And if not now, when?
We are the sons of David and the stubborn ones of Massada.
Each of us bears in his pocket the stone
Which smashed the forehead of Goliath.
Brothers, away from the Europe of tombs:
Let us climb together toward the land
Where we will be men among other men.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
And if not thus, how? And if not now, when?

—Ralph G. Williams