Wartime Resistance and Republican Political Agency in Primo Levi's Partisan Novel

Abstract

Primo Levi is best known as a Holocaust survivor whose works are considered to be indispensable contributions to the literature of testimony about Nazi genocide. In trying to draw politically-relevant insights from Levi, readers have generally focused on his analysis of the extremes of human deprivation in his Holocaust writings. This article considers Levi more broadly as an analyst of the various forms of human agency and argues that his novel of partisan warfare, Se non ora quando? (1982), presents a vision of virtuous republican political agency. Levi's partisan novel dramatizes the fraught relationship between civil and military values in order to investigate what it takes for a republic to be founded and maintained in a world of risk. Considered against the backdrop of Levi's own short-lived experience as a partisan, relevant writings from republican theorist and fellow Jewish refugee Hannah Arendt, and the early Eighties presidency of ex-partisan Sandro Pertini, Levi's novel is revealed to be a text that speaks (however ambivalently) to a republican tradition of endorsing citizen soldiers and affirming the worth of political foundation.

Keywords

Primo Levi Jewish partisans republicanism Hannah Arendt

Primo Levi is best known as a Holocaust survivor whose works, Se questo è un uomo and I sommersi e i salvati, are considered to be indispensable contributions to the literature of testimony about the horrors of the death camps. While Levi remained an active witness to his experience of the concentration camp system in visits to schools, participation in conferences, and journeys to Auschwitz commemorations throughout his life, he resisted being pigeon-holed exclusively as a camp survivor and witness. His writings crossed boundaries of genre and subject to include, besides Holocaust memoirs, collections of short works of science fiction and fantasy (e.g., Vizio di forma), volumes of poetry (e.g., Lilith), a novel of Jewish partisan resistance (Se non ora, quando?), and lightly comical creative non-fiction books that broached themes of work, career, and life satisfaction (Il sistema periodico and La chiave a stella). Despite the formidable range of subjects, genres, and styles of these non-testimonial works and despite the literary prizes and best seller status some them earned, Levi mostly remained at life's end, to critics and the reading public alike, a writer of the Holocaust experience.

Even as scholarly perspectives on Levi's work have proliferated across many academic boundaries, Auschwitz has remained the central experience around which these studies have oriented their insights into his work and life. Robert Gordon (2012) notes, for example, the influence of Alberto Cavaglion's “notion that Levi's entire oeuvre represents a sustained glossing of If This Is a Man” (Gordon, 2012: 83, emphasis added). This pattern of reading Levi's ideas as primarily responding to his death camp experience is noticeable in, among other places, the works of political theorists who analyse the political significance of Levi's work. Auschwitz looms large, for example, in a reading of Levi as a proponent of “civilized liberalism” who recognizes the limits of individualism: “The Holocaust taught him the urgency of understanding oneself as integrally connected with others, whether one wants to be or not” (Homer, 2001: 4). The same holds true in a work characterizing Levi as an ethical thinker of “ordinary virtues,” who develops “an ethics of active ‘civic’ consideration of others” through the adoption of a narrative style that “works its way around ethical issues by figuring out just such a practice of virtue(s), even in the face of Auschwitz” (Gordon 2001: 103, 25). The tendency to characterize Levi's importance as a social or political thinker in terms of his experience of the death camp system is exemplified most forcefully by another political theorist whose review of a book on Levi is organized around the claim that:

Primo Levi is an exemplary figure of the century just passed, precisely because, as the consequences of the accident of birth and contingent circumstances of place and time, he endured an experience that set him at the negative limits of human possibility (Dumm, 2003: 740).

While productive of many insights, the focus of so many of Levi's political theoretical readers on his experience of the “negative limits of human possibility” does leave significant aspects of Levi's political thought undeveloped. If Levi did not want to be known exclusively as a Holocaust memoirist—“I haven't stopped being an ex-deportee or a witness […] But I have no wish to be only that, to be pigeon-holed in some way, cloistered…” (Grassano, 2001: 121)—it was because that identity did not convey the breadth and depth of his engagement with the topic that most occupied him as a writer, the promise and pitfalls of human agency in its various modalities. While Auschwitz taught him many lessons about human agency, especially how radically limited it could become under conditions of extreme necessity, the insight gained in reflecting back upon that experience was restricted mostly to an appreciation of the costs of being stripped of agency.

Distruggere l'uomo è difficile, quasi quanto crearlo: non è stato agevole, non è stato breve, ma ci siete riusciti, tedeschi. Eccoci docili sotto i vostri sguardi: da parte nostra nulla piú avete a temere: non atti di rivolta, non parole di sfida, neppure uno sguardo giudice (Levi, 2005: 133).

His interests in human agency ranged much more broadly than that, encompassing the ways in which individual agency found expression and responded to challenges in various contexts, including men's relations to women (e.g., “La bella addormentata nel frigo” from Storie naturali), scientists' relations to nature (e.g., “Ottima è l'acqua” from Vizio di forma), and workers' relations to the conditions and products of their labor (e.g., La chiave a stella).

While it may be that Levi's experience of the negative pole of human agency decisively shaped all of his postwar writings to greater or lesser extents, even those writings seemingly far removed from Auschwitz, an approach mainly focused on “la memoria dell'offesa” misses aspects of Levi's understanding and appreciation of the positive pole of human agency. So, for example, making Auschwitz the leitmotif of Levi's work tends to bias consideration of his political thought in favour of liberal notions of political activity as, in essence, the struggle of rights-bearing individuals to preserve their freedoms against the encroachments of the state. To be sure, the danger posed by an overbearing state was one Levi well appreciated as when, on his way to a 1982 commemoration at Auschwitz, he noted that what distinguished Nazi anti-Semitism from prior forms of anti-Semitism was that “è stato progettato, pianificato, organizzato dallo stato” (Levi, 1992: 204). However, Levi's impulse to understand agency in its most political aspect, the relations of citizens to one another, went beyond the liberal imperative of carving out areas of individual autonomy against state power to notions of fraternal deliberation and collaboration consistent with a republican vision of agency.

Levi's notions of republican forms of political agency found their most extended and considered treatment in his partisan novel, Se non ora, quando?, where he makes the story of a makeshift band of Jewish partisans, who start as a self-styled “repubblica delle paludi” (Levi, 1982: 44) in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and then fight their way westward, his main dramatic subject. On first look, the subject of this novel invites an approach that privileges Levi's experience of the Nazi death camps and sees the story of effective Jewish resistance as a literary form of “returning the blow” (Angier, 2002: 616). Closer consideration of the characters and action of the novel, particularly the way they serve to foreground wartime emergency as a context both for the development of virtuous political agency and for the foundation of a participatory and egalitarian community, reveals a background of concerns and insights about political agency that transcend Auschwitz to include a venerable Italian tradition of civic-minded reflection about the nature and significance of the res publica. This story tracks his own evolution from alienated and marginalized Italian Jew under fascism in the prewar years to clandestine resister of fascism during the early war years to full-fledged partisan (in a group which came to affiliate itself with the center-left Partito d'Azione) against fascism and Nazi occupation. In short, Levi's only conventional novel reveals itself as a work assimilable to a republican tradition whose vision of patriotism, according to Maurizio Viroli, “inspired England's “Commonwealth Men,” Americans who fought for independence, French revolutionaries, and the many partisans of the Italian Resistenza who believed that to fight against Mussolini and Hitler was a patriotic duty” (Viroli, 2002: 16).

The patriotic Italian meanings of Levi's Jewish partisan novel become more discernible on a consideration of his longstanding postwar affiliation with ANED (Associazione nazionale deglie ex-deportati politici). Described by Gordon (2012) as being “originally and centrally focused not on the Jewish genocide but on the figure of the ‘political’ deportee, that is, the partisan, anti-Fascist deportee,” ANED contributed to a larger interpretive framework in postwar Italy in which it often seemed that “the Jewish experience was subordinate to and to be understood in terms of the Resistance and its dominant ideologies and values” (Gordon, 2012: 28, 29). According to Gordon, Levi fit a pattern of “many Jewish participants of ANED [who] embraced its ‘nationalising’ and ‘combatant’ mode of commemoration and discussion” (Gordon, 2012: 29).

Levi's Holocaust writings, with their emphasis on the importance of educating the public to recognize and reject authoritarian claimants to political rule, fit very well with Viroli's account of republicanism as affirming political participation to be an important “means to protect liberty and select virtuous and qualified citizens for positions of leadership” (Viroli, 2002: 11, emphasis added). In reaching for a notion of agency that hints at the autotelic rewards of political action, Levi's novel of partisan resistance and republican foundation, Se non ora, quando?, invites consideration with Hannah Arendt's variant of republican thought. A contemporary of Levi who barely escaped the Nazi dragnet, Arendt began her career as a public intellectual in the U.S. by calling for the formation of a Jewish army to help in the fight against Germany. While she never systematically followed up the implications of her early endorsement of military organization as a step toward political foundation, Arendt did draw much theoretical sustenance from Renaissance thinker Niccolò Machiavelli, whose own republican thinking was strongly informed by his involvement in Florentine military affairs and his advocacy for, and organization of, a popular militia. Arendt's wartime reflections on the political-existential significance of military resistance against Nazi Germany will provide theoretical context for understanding the patriotic significance of Levi's novelistic attempt at recovering the significance of Jewish military resistance in Eastern Europe. The biographical context for understanding the patriotic dimensions of that novel, as will be shown, was Levi's own attempt (however short-lived and hapless) at exercising agency as a partisan in the Val D'Aosta region of northern Italy. This experience, mediated through his long postwar collaboration with ANED, would allow him to look upon the Holocaust with the eyes both of a “political or Resistance fighter deportee, as well as [of a] Jewish victim” (Gordon, 2012: 73).

Levi's Partisan Experience in History and in Fiction

Se non ora, quando? tells the story of Mendel, Russian-Jewish watchmender and Soviet Army straggler, whose solitary existence living in a forest hideaway is interrupted by the chance arrival of another Russian Jew, Leonid, recently escaped from a German Stammlager for Soviet POWs. Mendel, whose connection to Jewish family and village life is rich and deeply-felt, takes the younger, morose and close-mouthed Leonid under his wing and begins a trek westward in an effort to join the organized resistance against Nazi occupation. In their wanderings, the two encounter one partisan group after another, each with a unique cast of characters and a distinctive collective organization and spirit: an anti-Semitic guerrilla band, a forest camp of desperately hungry Jewish refugees, a Soviet partisan unit, a motley of battle-tested group of Jewish survivors, a Polish Home Army unit. Laboring under heavy burdens of personal loss—Mendel lost his family and village to Nazi massacre, Leonid lost his father in the Stalinist purges and was abandoned by his mother—the two diverge in their fates, with Leonid eventually coming to grief after he is unable to transform his mute and near obsessive attachment to a female comrade into a relationship of emotional and physical mutuality. The novel ends with Mendel and his surviving Jewish partisan comrades passing through Milan (en route to Palestine) in time for one of the band to give birth as news arrives of the obliteration of Hiroshima.

As the only novel Levi completed and published, Se non ora, quando? held a special place in his writing experience. Composed over the course of the year 1981, his book was the product of an unprecedentedly diligent and wide-ranging program of research whereby Levi taught himself the basics of Yiddish, consulted collections of Yiddish sayings and proverbs, and read diaries and accounts of Jewish armed resistance in central and eastern Europe (Levi, 2002a: 232). He remembered the year of research and writing as a “happy one” and called the book “liberating” (Roth, 2001: 21).

In his remarks at a 1982 conference on Jewish literature, Levi referred to two seeds (“germi”) from which his partisan novel developed. One seed was his own encounter as a returning refugee at the Italian border with a group of resolute (“risoluti”) young Jews from all over Eastern Europe enroute to Israel in a rail car they had organized and, on their own initiative, attached to Levi's train (Levi, 2002a: 231). The other seed was a story one of his Turinese friends related in 1971 of a group of self-described Jewish partisans he had encountered at a refugee office in Milan in the waning days of the war. The political context in which these seeds took root was a debate sparked in Israel and elsewhere about Jewish resistance during the Holocaust: “una polemica inter-generazionale che si è accesa pochi anni fa (in Israele ed altrove) sul comportamento degli ebrei di fronte alla strage nazista: Veramente si erano lasciato condurre al macello senza resistare? Se sí, perchè? Se non, quanti, quando, dove, come avevano resistato?” (Levi, 2002a: 231). Drawing on his experiences as both a partisan and Auschwitz deportee, which taught him that effective agency has preconditions–“ci sono condizioni politiche e psicologici in cui resistere si può, ed altre in cui non si può”—Levi wrote his novel in an attempt to intervene in what he considered to be an ill-informed debate (“una discussione profondamente antistorici e inquinata da pregiudizi”) (Levi, 2002a: 232, 231). His large-scale action novel was intended to be an homage to the success of some Jews in undertaking effective agency in the face of great odds: “[un] omaggio a quegli ebrei, non importa se pochi o molti, che nella disperazione avevano trovato la forza di opporsi ai nazisti, e che nel combattimento ineguale avevano ritrovato dignità e libertà” (Levi, 2002a: 232).

Levi's concern to pay homage to Jewish resistance in Se non ora, quando? appeared to not a few of his biographers and commentators to be an exercise in imaginative compensation. Some suggested that his novel of effective Jewish resistance made up for his own short-lived and undistinguished partisan career. “[S]ince his own experience as a partisan had been brief and unsuccessful, he deliberately set out to create partisans who were both competent and effective” (Cicioni, 1995: 112). Homer suggests that Levi's failures as a partisan:

Levi's inclination to resist comes when he joins the partisans, knowing nothing about how to mount a refusal […] He lacks skills, guile, and experience.”—make his partisan novel into “a possible wish fulfilment [which] shows what happens to Jews who join a resistance movement and become successful partisans (Homer, 2001: 66).¹

Casting Levi as a person who created great literature as part of a lifelong struggle against near-crippling inhibitions, Angier reads Se non ora, quando? as, in part, an indicator of Levi's growing “need for compensation,” if not also a literary form of “returning the blow” (Angier, 2002: 616).

No one was a harsher judge of Levi's stint as a partisan than himself. By his own report, that experience was “infelice e schiappina” (Levi, 1992: 242). He lamented how quickly it ended: “finí prematuramente” (Levi, 2002b:111). He called it “il piú opaco periodo del mio partigianato” and “una storia di giovani ben intenzionati, ma sprovveduti e sciocchi” better left forgotten (Margot, 1987: 10). In the prelude to his brief service as a partisan, Levi was in Milan, part of a close-knit circle of intellectual Jewish friends, all of whom were living under the pressures of Fascist Italy's anti-Jewish campaign and Allied air raids. The picture Levi would later self-critically draw of their lives in Il Sistema periodico is one of alienated and self-indulgent passivity:

Scrivere poesie tristi e crepuscolari, e beppure tanto belle, mentre il mondo era in fiamme, non ci sembrava né strano né vergognoso: ci proclamavamo nemici del fascism, ma in effetti il fascism aveva operato su di noi, come su quasi tutti gli italiani, estraniandoci e facendoci diventare superficiali, passive e cinici (Levi, 1994: 132).

Taking heart from the Allied landings in North Africa in late 1942 and the German defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943, Levi and his friends began welcoming anti-fascist activists into their circle and engaging in modestly subversive forms of activity such as “tearing down Fascist posters and putting up anti-fascist ones at night” (Angier, 2002: 219). In the wake of the announcement of Italy's armistice in September 1943, the German Army occupied the northern half of the country and set up a puppet Fascist regime. Recognizing the mortal danger to Jews and anti-fascists posed by this turn of events, the friends dispersed, with Levi eventually finding refuge in October with his mother and sister in a tiny, out-of-the-way mountain hamlet in the Val D'Aosta region (Angier, 2002: 230-2). Within weeks, his sister and mother departed, the former to join the anti-fascist underground in Turin, the latter to begin a life in hiding. Remaining in his mountain hideaway, Primo fell in with a couple of young acquaintances, one of whom was a combat veteran who intended to join the fight against the fascists. As hundreds of other demobilized or AWOL Italian soldiers, country folk, and urban refugees across this border region did, they formed a partisan band and sought to affiliate themselves with the organized resistance.

In interview comments and in recollections he published long after the events, Levi would significantly underplay the capabilities of his partisan band and its few, minor successes, including a mission he and a comrade undertook to retrieve weapons. In Angier's view, “Primo's particularly dark judgment of the group does not reflect reality. It reflects his own deep horror of violence, and his guilt at accepting it” (Angier, 2002: 251). Levi's precarious morale as a partisan would suffer its greatest crisis when members of the band passed judgment on, and summarily executed, two recent teen-aged arrivals who were accused of refusing to submit to partisan discipline as a result of their confiscating food from a local peasant and (reportedly) threatening the band with violence or denunciation if the issue of their unauthorized confiscation was pressed (Luzzatto, 2013: 88). Within days of this crushingly demoralizing event—“Eravamo stati costretti dalla nostra coscienza ad eseguire una condanna, e l'avevamo eseguita, ma ne eravamo usciti distrutti, destituiti, desiderosi che tutto finesse e di finire noi stessi” (Levi, 1994:136)—in the early morning hours of December 13, 1943, Levi and three of his comrades were awakened and captured without a fight in a Fascist militia operation aimed at the elimination of a larger partisan band in a neighbouring valley. A little over two months later, after a period of internment in Fossoli at a Fascist camp for Jews and other undesirables, Levi was placed on a transport to Auschwitz.

The self-critical interpretations that Levi gave of his service as a partisan give prima facie support to the thesis that in writing his partisan novel, he was striving to be, in fiction, the unselfconscious and effective partisan which he had not been in reality. This view is consistent, for example, with the plot of one of the only other partisan-themed stories that he wrote, “Fine del Marinese” (1949). In this short work, Levi fictively recasts his ignominious capture, imagining what would have happened had he, crowded together with his captors in the vehicle taking him into captivity, activated the hand grenade hanging from an inattentive militia man's belt. Likewise, in the camp liberation scene of Se non ora, quando?, Levi offers a particularly poignant and seemingly self-referential scenario contrasting virtuous resistance and abject surrender, martial effectiveness and disarmed impotence. Moving cautiously westward through the Polish countryside, Mendel's Jewish partisan band hears of a nearby slave labor camp slated for liquidation by its German overseers before the impending arrival of the Soviet army. As the partisans take up positions on the outskirts of the camp, they detect a few surviving inmates disposing of the remains of their slaughtered comrades under the direction of a skeleton crew of German guards. After a brief skirmish in which the Germans are killed, the partisan leader makes an offer to the surviving inmates:

–Venite con noi,–disse Gedaleh a Goldner: ma la sua voce mancava di convinzione.

–Ognuno di noi fará la sua scelta,–disse Goldner,–ma io non verrò. Non siamo come voi, non stiamo bene con gli altri uomini. (Levi, 1982: 165)

It was this scene, perhaps, that Angier particularly had in mind when she wrote of the novel, “With Mendel, he would inhabit [a character] who, while Primo Levi was trapped like an animal in Auschwitz, fought back like a free man” (Angier, 2002: 616).

Notwithstanding the plausible motive Levi had to use his novel to re-imagine himself to have been an effective partisan, his text's sustained consideration of the preconditions and effects of political agency and solidarity (to be outlined in the next section) suggests a work that functions as more than a mere compensatory fantasy. Likewise, while Levi explicitly presented his novel, which borrows characters and scenarios from historical accounts of Jewish resistance (Belpoliti, 1982: 1538) and shares themes with Jewish exilic literature (Valbrega, 1997: 267, 270, 273), as an homage to Jewish resistance and survival, his text is not reducible to a mere homage. As will be shown below, the political theoretical dimensions of the novel are vouchsafed by the development in it of politically relevant notions of agency and passivity and by the ambivalent meditation it provides on the question of how wartime necessity can become a spur to forms of republican solidarity and agency.

Levi's Analysis of Partisan Warfare as a Moment of Republican Foundation

One indicator that Se non ora, quando? is not merely an homage to Jewish resistance but is also an analysis of individual and collective agency for the purpose of appreciating the promise of wartime conditions to foster republican habits of self rule is the novel's repeated presentation of characters and actions within a framework defined by the poles of activity and passivity. Take, for example, the pairing of Mendel and Leonid, whose initial encounter and subsequent partnership opens the novel. Having created for himself a forest hideaway complete with a jury-rigged shower, Mendel is revealed to be someone who can improvise in difficult circumstances. When he and Leonid are spotted in the woods by a village shepherdess, he immediately understands the implications of this chance encounter:

Finito; niente da far. Ecco cosa vuol dire vivere come i lupi […] Parlerà, e dirà che ci ha visti, e i tedeschi della guarnigione ci verrano a cercare: fra un'ora o fra un giorno, o fra dieci, ma verrano […] Peccato collega. Sei arrivato nel momento sbagliato. Su, dammi una mano, qui si fa trasloco. Mi rincresce per l'installazione, bisognerà ricominciare tutto da capo. Fortuna che è estate (Levi, 1982:10).

Mendel's decisiveness and equanimity in the face of setbacks are starkly contrasted with Leonid's passivity and brooding self pity. After hearing from a Soviet Army straggler of the presence of a partisan band, Mendel wants to move out and try to reach it. “Leonid non voleva andare in nessun luogo, o per meglio dire non sapeva dove voleva andare, e non sapeva neppure se voleva andare in qualche parte, o fare qualsiasi cosa […] esercitava un sottile attrito passive contro ogni spinta attiva” (Levi, 1982: 23). When the two reach the band and are asked individually why they want to join, Leonid is tongued-tied and vague in his answer, which leads the band's chief, Venjamin, correctly to guess that he had been a prisoner. “Ma glielo si vede in faccia” (Levi, 1982: 36). Sent on their way because of the chief's concern about their fitting in with band members who are anti-Semitic, the two reach the “republicca delle palludi,” a Jewish refugee community, minimally-armed and at the margins of survival, where Leonid obsessively attaches himself to the self-reliant and fearless Line. At the better-equipped partisan winter camp to which Mendel, Leonid, Line, and surviving comrades are forced to retreat after a German attack overruns the marsh “republicca,” Leonid's peculiarly solipsistic way of attaching himself to Line creates trouble for partisan discipline and solidarity. Line, who declares, “io non sono la donna di nessuno” (Levi, 1982: 135), eventually settles one late rainy night on Mendel as her sexual partner. Never having physically consummated his relationship with Line and unable to bear her choice of Mendel, Leonid eventually seeks release by recklessly and mortally exposing himself during the band's attack on the German Stammlager.

The polarized characterizations of Mendel and Leonid are not without political theoretical interest. In the first place, the two characters are paired through most of the novel (in their shared attraction to Line, in their shared membership in partisan groups) in a way that invites the reader to understand the differences in their temperaments and fates as having centrally to do with their different capacities for agency. In the second place, Levi does not use his narrative merely to dramatize this contrast in temperaments and fates; in contextualizing Leonid's passivity, his novel provides the means for analysing how a capacity for effective agency is fostered or undermined.

At the outset of their irksome partnership, Mendel considers Leonid's youthfulness as a factor contributing to his passivity: “Avrà preso polvere, anche se è giovane: è stupido dire che i giovani sono forti. Molte cose si capiscono meglio a trent'anni che a venti, e allora si sopportano anche meglio” (Levi, 1982: 23). Speculating that Leonid suffers from an inner wound (“cicatrice interna” [Levi, 1982: 24]), Mendel eventually discovers that his youthful companion, after losing his father to the Gulag, was abandoned by his mother. We also learn that Leonid had gone to prison at sixteen for theft. In developing a contextualized picture of Leonid, the novel offers the materials for reflecting on how the capacity to act, to respond to challenges with creativity and equanimity, to appreciate and take advantage of one's “fortuna” (Levi, 1982: 24) may be conditioned by circumstance and experience, including youthful callowness, periods of incarceration, and deprivations of parental love and care. In a similar way, the novel offers a nuanced picture of the bases of Mendel's predisposition to act and take initiative. Even while he actively takes steps to rejoin the fight against the Germans, he remains deeply ambivalent about doing so:

Doveva scegliere, e la scelta era difficile; da una parte c'era la sua stanchezza vecchia di mille anni, la sua paura, il ribrezzo delle armi che pure aveva sepolte e portate con sé: dall'altra c'era […] quella piccolo molla compressa, che forse era quell che sulla Pravda veniva chiamata il “senso d'onore e del dovere,” ma che forse sarebbe stato piú appropriato descrivere come un muto bisogno di decenza (Levi, 1982:17-18).

In giving us access to Mendel's second (and even third) thoughts, Levi suggests that effective action often presupposes an inner struggle against normal inhibitions (e.g., “paura”) as well as the burdens of habit and tradition (“stanchezza vecchia di mille anni”).

Among the inhibitions against which Mendel feels he must personally struggle is his Jewish background: “invece del sangue rosso del soldato, il sangue pallido della stirpe da cui sapeva discendere, sarti, mercanti, osti, violinisti di villagio, miti patriarci prolifici e rabbini visionari” (Levi, 1982: 17). Just as the poles of action and passivity serve Levi to delineate some of the major characters of his novel, they also provide a framework for drawing and problematizing cultural contrasts between Jews and non-Jews. In particular, the novel imagines how some Central and Eastern European Jews were able, under very adverse conditions, to exercise effective agency and muster the will and develop the skills to resist and survive the Germans' genocidal program. The conventional wartime wisdom which Mendel encounters time and again (and which the novel aims to interrogate) is that European Jews were passive and unable to fight. “C'erano ebrei anche al mio paese, bravi a fare commercio, un po' meno bravi a fare la guerra” (Levi, 1982: 15). When Venjamin rescinds his offer to Mendel and Leonid to join his band, Leonid impulsively reacts by defending the fighting prowess of Jews: “Noi ce ne andiamo, e tu dirai a quei tuoi uomini che a Varsavia, in aprile, gli ebrei armati hanno resistito ai tedeschi piú a lungo dell'Armata Rossa nel '41” (Levi, 1982: 39). A similar defensiveness about Jewish martial spirit impels Dov, the marsh republic's leader, to contribute a couple of able-bodied men from his camp's meagre troop of combatants in support of a less-than-urgent partisan operation: “Era importante dimostrare ai russi che anche gli ebrei sapevano combattere e lo desideravano” (Levi, 1982: 61).

With the exception of Dov's marsh republic, Mendel and Leonid encounter scepticism about Jewish fighting mettle in every partisan band and unit they encounter. The arrival of Gedaleh's battle-hardened band of Jewish fighters at the Soviet partisan winter camp is, thus, a watershed event in the novel insofar as it dramatizes the moment at which the stereotype of Jewish passivity is most powerfully challenged.

I russi di Turov li guardavano inquieti, come avviene davanti all'inatteso. Non riconoscevano in quei visi smunti ma determinati il žid della loro tradizione […] Il mondo si era capovolto: questi ebrei erano alleati ed armati (Levi, 1982: 104).

Consistent with his novelistic intention to reveal that “la presenza ebraica, entro il grande tessuto della resistenza europea, era il piú importante di quando comunemente si ritenga,” Levi singles out this same moment for extensive quotation in his paper. (Levi, 2002a:233). From this point onward, the novel becomes (among other things) a kind of testimony to the deeds and sufferings of Gedaleh's band, as it commits modest acts of sabotage and, by turns, engages or evades the German enemy in the closing months of the war.

After their initial wonderment at the arrival of Gedaleh's band and their impulsive decision to join it, Mendel and his friends experience uncertainty: “si sentivano piú sicuri prima, nel campo di Turov, dove non si pativa la fama né il freddo, e ciascuno sentiva sopra la testa un tetto di solide travi ed un'autorità […] Questi gedalisti (cosí chiamavano se stessi) era gente temeraria, randagia e povera” (Levi, 1982:110). As he becomes more familiar with, and integrated into, the band, Mendel comes to appreciate its distinctive qualities of leadership and organization. While the partisan commander at Turov manifested “coraggio-dovere che sembrava il frutto di uno studio e una disciplina” and exercised a heavy-handed authority, “il coraggio di Gedale era estemporaneo e vario, non scaturiva da una scuola ma da un temperament insofferente dei vincoli e poco propenso a scrutare l'avvenire” (Levi, 1982: 111, 111-112). In shocking contrast to the tight discipline and ordered hierarchy at Turov, in the Jewish partisan band, “le decisioni venivano prese alla buona, in assemblee chiassose; altre volte si accettavano spensieramente disegni temerari di Gedale, di Józek o di altri; altre volte ancora nascevano litigi, che però si placavano presto” (Levi, 1982: 112).

From comparisons of the leadership styles and organizational practices of the Gedalists and the partisan winter camp at Turov, the narrative opens up into a broader examination of community, in particular, of how a group, operating in an environment of extreme danger and risk, can accommodate and leverage the strengths of individuals with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives. War is the preeminent necessity that weighs upon the band members' prospects of survival and Mendel finds that they have adequately mastered that necessity. In the Gedalists' first combat action after leaving Tuvor, in which they capture a small supply train, Mendel admires the military skills of his new comrades, noting how “sarti, copisti e cantori […] avevano imparato presto e bene il loro nuovo mestiere” (Levi, 1982: 123). They also manage to master the necessity of feeding themselves through acts of purchase, barter (e.g., trading two cows for provisions at a town market near the Ukrainian border [Levi, 1982: 114]), confiscation (e.g., of a train car carrying potatoes in occupied Poland [Levi, 1982: 174]), and labor (e.g., fishing [Levi, 1982: 114] and crop harvesting [Levi, 1982: 152]).

While necessity strongly conditions Gedaleh's band, it does not define it. From the start, and consistent with his toleration of his band's decentralized and democratic mode of ad hoc decision-making, Gedaleh characterizes his community as free (“aperta” [Levi, 1982: 121]); no one is forced to stay with the band as it crosses out of Russian territory. Besides sharing bread and the risks of combat, the Gedalists share stories, songs, dances, folk and religious wisdom (Levi, 1982: 113-121). In these scenes of collective discussion and debate, affirmation and celebration, persons of different experiences and perspectives engage each other with good will, testifying to the band's appreciation of diversity and individual difference.² While they have become adept at combat, they have not (as the Germans have) embraced it as a way of life or as a defining philosophy of existence: “uccidere è il solo linguaggio che capiscano, il solo ragionamento che li fa convinti. Se io spara un tedesco, lui è costretto ad ammettere che io ebreo valgo piú di lui: è la sua logica, non la mia” (Levi, 1982: 74). Coming to a devastated Polish rural village whose fields are full of unharvested crops, members of the band, “stanchi di distruggere, stanchi delle opera negative e stupide a cui la guerra costringe gli uomini” volunteer their labor (Levi, 1982: 151). In using Mendel's entry into the Gedalist band as an opportunity to examine how a relatively egalitarian, pluralistic, and culturally-rich collective life can manage extreme necessities without being mastered by them, Levi is doing more than paying homage to Jewish resistance and courage. He is also imaginatively constructing a model of political community and putting it to the test of combat, so to speak.

To the extent that Levi's novel of partisan struggle offers a model of participatory political community, it invites comparison with the interpretation Hannah Arendt gives to the partisan experiences of René Char, “perhaps the most articulate of the many French writers and artists who joined the Resistance during the Second World War” (Arendt, 1979: 280). Char's reflection, that “‘if I survive, I know that I shall have to break with the aroma of these essential years, silently reject (not repress) my treasure’,” attests, in her view, to the existential rewards available to citizens who take an active and sustained share in the responsibilities of self government (Arendt, 1979: 280). She invites her readers to consider that even the most secluded, demanding, and risk-laden way of life demanded by membership in a cell of the Resistance could unexpectedly and inadvertently give rise to a space for practicing forms of action expressive of political freedom.

To be sure, Levi's Gedalists do not sing the existential praises of the political realm of public freedom as explicitly or as pointedly as Arendt does in her gloss of Char's words. When Gedaleh is pressed by a Polish Home Army officer to articulate his band's political ideology, he evokes a utopian socialist vision of life (reminiscent of Marx's oft-quoted description in The German Ideology) in which the activity of politics is apparently absent: “vogliamo comunità in cui tutti siano liberi e uguali, senza costrizione e senza violenza; in cui si possa faticare di giorno, e alla sera suonare il violin; in cui non ci sia denaro, ma ognuno lavori secondo la sua capacità e riceva secondo i suoi bisogni” (Levi, 1982: 183). Gedaleh does go on, however, to describe how the experience of partisan resistance has led his band members unexpectedly but gratefully to appreciate a kind of freedom that Arendt might have recognized as political:

Combattiamo per salvarci dai tedeschi, per vendicare, per aprirci la strada; ma sopratutto, perdonami la parola grossa, per dignità. E infino devo dirti questo: molti fra noi non avevano mai gustato il sapore della libertà, e l'hanno imparato a conoscere qui, nelle foreste, nelle palludi e nel pericolo, insieme con l'avventura e la fraternità” (Levi, 1982: 183).

More evocative still of Levi's recognition of the autotelic rewards of political freedom made available to Jewish partisans is his description of Gedaleh's comrades when they first come to Turov:

Erano allegri […] nell'avventura ogni giorno diversa della Partisanka, nella steppa gelata, nella neve e nel fango avevano trovato una libertà nuova, sconosciuta ai loro padre e ai loro nonni, un contatto con uomini amici e nemici, con la natura e con l'azione, che li ubriacava come il vino di Purim (Levi, 1982: 105).

The notion that freedom, defined here in terms of action and the presence of human plurality (“contatto con uomini amici e nemici”), can have an effect like alcoholic intoxication is one that Arendt conveys in her account of events in revolutionary France where the emergence of a “new public space” had “intoxicated” Frenchmen with “the wine of action which, as a matter of fact, is the same as the wine of freedom” (Arendt, 1979: 132-133).

Arendt's abbreviated 1963 reference to the example of the French Resistance is not the first place in her work that military self-organization is linked to the rewards of active citizenship. In November 1941, shortly after her arrival in New York City as a stateless refugee, Arendt published an editorial in a Jewish-American, German-language weekly newspaper calling on Jews to organize themselves “to join the battle against Hitler as Jews, in Jewish battle formations under a Jewish flag” (Arendt, 2007: 137). In “The Jewish Army—The Beginning of a Jewish Politics?”, Arendt argued that organized Jewish military resistance would not only help in the Allied war effort but (more importantly) would also foster the sense of civic agency and dignity necessary for Jews to assert themselves as a politically-organized people on the world stage. “We will never get that army if the Jewish people do not demand it and are not prepared by the hundreds of thousands with weapons in hand to fight for their freedom and the right to live as a people” (Arendt, 2007: 138-9, emphasis added).

In calling for the formation of a Jewish army, Arendt was in effect calling for Jews to break with their depoliticized past (or, as Levi puts it, to find “una libertà nuova, sconosciuta ai loro padre e ai loro nonni”) and establish their own civic order. Her wartime political editorializing, insofar as it envisioned the experience of collective self defense as a basis for developing civic virtue, anticipated her later partisanship as an academic political theorist for a tradition of republican thought whose adherents were known for a tendency to see a positive relationship between practices of military preparedness and habits of civic engagement. Foremost among these adherents was Niccolo Machiavelli, whose only major work published in his lifetime was Dell'arte della guerra (1521), a treatise dedicated to the proposition that a citizen army can be an effective fighting force without becoming a threat to republican liberty. In light of her own reflections on the necessity of a Jewish citizen army, it is noteworthy that Arendt apparently did not ever give much, if any, attention to Machiavelli's ruminations on military affairs. Her later interest in his ideas was focused on the other dimension raised in her 1941 analysis of the challenges facing stateless Jews—the founding of a civic order. For her, Machiavelli was pre-eminently a theorist of political foundation, whose attentiveness to the example of ancient Roman political founding had centrally to do with his interest in drawing lessons for establishing a united and independent Italian republic (Arendt, 1968:136, 138).

It may well be that Arendt's later reticence (if that is what it was) about Machiavelli's theorization of the link between membership in a militia and the development of civic virtue had to do with her dismay over the consequences of the outbreak of war in Palestine in 1948, particularly, the inflammation of Jewish fighting spirit and the much narrowed possibilities of Jewish-Arab cooperation and confederation.

After two thousand years of “Galut mentality,” the Jewish people have suddenly ceased to believe in survival as an ultimate good in itself and have gone over in a few years to the opposite extreme. Now Jews believe in fighting at any price and feel that “going down” is a sensible method of politics (Arendt, 1978, 181-2).

The spiralling violence between Jews and Arabs in Palestine had polarized and unified Jewish opinion to a politically dangerous extent, Arendt feared (1978, 182). In warning that the foundation of an exclusively Jewish-controlled state in Palestine would lead to a Spartan-like militarization of Jewish politics and society, Arendt implicitly calls into question her earlier praise of Jewish military self-organization against Hitler for its promise to promote civic virtue (1978, 187). Coincidentally, military conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East came to overshadow a portrait of virtuous Jewish military self-organization in the case of Levi as well.

Shortly after the publication of Se non ora, quando?, Israel, in an attempt to deprive the Palestine Liberation Organization of its base of operations, invaded southern Lebanon and settled into what would become a long-term military occupation. In the midst of polarized debates about the morality and wisdom of the Israeli invasion, the professional and popular receptions of Levi's novel became highly politicized: “Half his letters, Primo said, accused Se non ora of being Zionist, the other half of not being Zionist enough” (Angier, 2002: 628). Levi had, from the time of Israel's founding, felt torn between his conviction that Jews needed and deserved a homeland and his deep regret over the price Palestinians were paying for the survival of an increasingly militarized Jewish state. “Israel, less and less the Holy Land, more and more the military state, is starting to act like the other countries of the Middle East, with their radicalism, their distrust of negotiation” (Levi, 2015:2597).

The case of Israel aside, Levi recognized that political movements might face hard choices when it came to reconciling uses of force with self-professed principles of reasoned debate and human solidarity. “[N]on esiste programma politico, anche il piú moderato, anche il meno violento, che non ammettere una qualche forma di difesa attiva” (Levi, 2003: 109) So, for example, Dov, the leader of ‘“la repubblica della paludi”’ (Levi, 1982: 43), justifies to Mendel his decision to send two of his least able men to participate in a partisan operation that was important from a propagandistic standpoint but relatively meaningless and dangerous militarily in the following way: “Pensi che io abbia le mani sporche? Le ho; come tutti quelli che devono scegliere” (Levi, 1982: 61). Notwithstanding this recognition, it is significant that uses of violence, even those that are seemingly most justified, do not go uninterrogated in Levi's partisan novel. After the successful conclusion of the attack on the SS-run slave labor camp, some of Gedahlists question the righteousness of killing on the Sabbath (Levi, 1982: 228). Mendel, with whom Levi most identified (Belpoliti, 1982: 1540), remains a skeptic about the morality and wisdom of violence throughout the novel, even as he feels compelled to take up arms in individual and collective self defense. In the aftermath of a raid at Neuhaus undertaken in revenge for the shooting of Black Rokhele, Mendel questions the disproportion of German victims—“Abbiamo fatto come loro: dieci ostaggi per un tedesco ucciso”—and, despite the emotionally powerful rejoinder of his comrades (“Vanno sul conto dei milioni di Auschwitz.”), indicates his continuing moral unease by declaring that, “Il sangue non si pagga col sangue” (Levi, 1982: 227).

Against the many important moments of critical reflection about how wartime conditions place severe pressure on the morality of violence as a means, and vengeance as an end, of politics, Se non ora, quando? repeatedly poses the possibility that wartime conditions can also be conducive to the fostering of republican institutions and practices. In wartime, necessity weighs upon people in new and more urgent ways. Social routines and customs undergo destabilizing changes and authorities find themselves pressed to respond to novel situations. Strangers can be thrown together in relatively unstructured environments. Such conditions place a premium on initiative-taking and invention of new forms of collaboration. The special challenges wartime conditions oftentimes pose can be summed up by Arendt's characterization of the general challenge facing people who have broken with tradition; “being confronted anew […] by the elementary problems of human living-together” (Arendt, 1968: 141). As it turns out, Levi's World War Two novel offers a textbook study of these challenges as well as a republican answer of sorts to them.

That war opens up possibilities in unpredictable and not necessarily negative ways is signalled by Levi in the very passage he singles out for extended quotation at the conference on Jewish literature. Evoking the “new freedom” discovered by the young Jewish partisans, Levi refers to “l'avventura ogni giorno diversa della Partisanka” (Levi, 1982: 105, emphasis added). From the start of the novel, when Leonid chances upon Mendel's camp, wartime necessity explicitly becomes a factor in reshaping expectations and reshuffling human relationships. Two strangers, Mendel and Leonid, form a partnership based on the necessity of their novel situation; “Vedi, non aver scelta è un vantaggio. Io non ho scelta: mi devo fidare di te per forza” (Levi, 1982: 11). Significantly, it is Mendel, the more active and inventive of the pair, who recognizes that necessity can elicit positive changes in personal routines and habits; “quando c'è la guerra è tutto diverso, bisogna rassegnarsi a diventare diversi anche noi, e forse non ci farà male” (Levi, 1982: 12). Mendel is also the one who, in this fluid environment of chance encounters and developments, comes to appreciate having luck (“fortuna”) on one's side (Levi, 1982: 24).

The band's entry into liberated Italy, which begins the novel's concluding arc, is marked by a chance encounter in which two groups of people of vastly different experience begin, through the republican means of discussion and on the republican basis of mutual respect, to recognize in each other partners in the activity of political foundation. The crucial exchange takes place at the Brenner Pass between Gedaleh's band and a small scouting party of the Palestinian Brigade of the British Army. The soldiers make contact as the band is poised to cross the border into Italy. Having already been temporarily disarmed and interned by Red Army troops in occupied Poland, Gedaleh and his comrades are initially on their guard in their encounter with this group of regular army soldiers, especially after questions are raised about the wisdom of the band carrying heavy arms into liberated Italy. The Brigade soldiers, who are scouting liberated Europe for Jewish survivors and potential immigrants to Palestine, try to win over the trust of Gedaleh's band by inviting the members to gather for a group discussion on the grass by their railway car: “Da noi, questo si chiama kum-sitz, un vieni-e-siediti” (Levi, 1982: 240).

In an effort to persuade the partisans that, “non siamo nemici,” Chaim, the spokesman for the scouting party, evokes the Machiavellian discourse (from Chapter Eighteen of Il Principe, Machiavelli, 1994) “del leone e della volpe” (Levi, 1982: 240) to illustrate his appreciation of the vastly different experiences the two groups have had in their fight against the Nazis. The partisans have had to play the role of the fox, so to speak: “Voi avete dovuto fare da soli: avete dovuto inventare tutto, le difese, le armi, gli alleati, le astuzie.” By contrast, he and his Brigade comrades were more fortunate to be able to play the role of the lion: “Noi siamo stati piú fortunati: eravamo inseriti, organizzati, inquadrati in un grande esercito. Non avevamo nemici ai fianchi, ma solo di fronte; le armi non ce le siamo conquistate, ci sono state consegnate, e ci hanno insegnato ad usarle” (Levi, 1982: 241). What, in Machiavelli's text, was advice to an aspiring prince becomes, in Levi's text, part of a discourse aimed at unifying two groups for a collective project of foundation. The reader knows that foundation is their mutual goal, in part, because the partisans will, with the advice and help of the Brigade soldiers, make their way to the land on which the state of Israel will be founded. Less obviously and more interestingly, the novel signals the foundation to come through the deployment of another metaphor, birth, whose distinctive resonance in the republican tradition is vouchsafed by Arendt in her discussion of the political significance of Virgil's epic account of “the foundation of Rome as the re-establishment of Troy” in the Aeneid and his affirmation in the Fourth Eclogue “of the divinity of birth as such” (Arendt, 1979:210 – 211). By Arendt's account, the ancient Romans, insofar as they placed the foundation of their city at the center of their political self-understanding, were bound to feel attracted to “the Asiatic religions which centered around the birth of a child-saviour” (Arendt, 1979: 211).

The affinity between political foundation and natural birth expressed in Roman culture reflected a basic feature of the human condition, according to Arendt. It manifested the “idea that men are equipped for the logically paradoxical task of making a new beginning because they themselves are new beginnings and hence beginners, that the very capacity for beginning is rooted in natality, in the fact that human beings appear in the world by virtue of birth” (Arendt, 1979: 211). Significantly, Levi's resorts to biological and political notions of birth proliferate in the final pages of his partisan novel. As one of his partisan comrades goes into labor at a Milanese hospital, Mendel wonders aloud whether it is ever meaningful to bring another life into the world only to be rebuked by Line: “Taci, Mendel. Scaccia questi pensieri. Stanotte deve nascere un bambino” (Levi, 1982: 257). She goes on to draw a connection between the natural birth that is in the process of happening and the partisan experience they have all undergone:

Anche noi siamo stati partoriti […] Partoriti, espulsi. La Russia ci ha concepiti, ci ha nutriti, ci ha fatti crescere nel suo buio, come in una matrice; poi ha avuto le doglie, si è contratta e ci ha gettati fuori, e adesso eccoci qui, nudi e nuovi, come bambini appena nati” (Levi, 1982: 257).

If new beginnings is the theme on which which the novel is intended to conclude, that theme is sounded on a highly ambivalent note–the birth of a healthy baby boy, a new beginning of individual human life, but also the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the start of a Cold War nuclear standoff destined to cast a shadow over the world for decades to come.

Italian Resistance Culture and Levi's Partisan Novel

Reading Se non ora quando? as a republican-minded text that affirms, however ambivalently, the political significance of partisan organization and combat for developing the virtues of a democratic republican citizenry helps to illuminate the divergent fates of the book's receptions in Italy and in the United States. Se non ora, quando? was, according to the measures of critical response and initial book sales, the most successful of Levi's books published in Italy during his lifetime. Released in April 1982, the book won the Premio Viareggio in July and the Premio Campiello the following September. By the end of the year, in response to strong sales, four editions totalling 110,000 copies had been printed. The critical reception in Italian newspapers was overwhelmingly positive and, for the first time, interviewers did not make an issue of Levi's career as an industrial chemist and paint factory manager, from which he had retired in 1978. The enthusiastic reception of Se non ora, quando? in Italy completed Levi's transition from a Holocaust memoirist who wrote books in his spare time to a full-fledged man of letters (Belpoliti , 1982: 1540–2).

In contrast to the positive critical and popular responses to Se non ora, quando? in Italy, the English language version, which was published in translation in 1985 in the U.S., earned a mixed reaction. Respect for Levi's Holocaust writings in general and for his growing literary reputation in the U.S. was leavened by claims that his attempt to evoke the Ashkenazi language and culture of Eastern European Jews was unconvincing or that the novel's characters were “types rather than individuals” (Rothberg and Druker, 2009: 112). The Newsweek critic captured the ambivalence of U.S. responses with the assertion that “Levi is a better memoirist than novelist and one reads If Not Now, When? respectfully rather than eagerly” (Rothberg and Druker, 2009: 112).

Explanations for the relatively disappointing reception of the book in the U.S. have mainly focused on the fact of Levi's second-hand knowledge of the Ashkenazi language and culture which he, an assimilated Italian with limited exposure to Eastern European Jewish folkways and language, sought to recreate in his novel. As a result, the argument goes, Levi's novelistic characterizations came across as somewhat artificial and stilted to Jewish-American reviewers and readers whose knowledge of those same folkways and language was more direct and intimate. Perhaps the factor to be explained is less the tepid response of American readers than the enthusiasm of Italian readers. For many of the latter, the appeal of Levi's book would have been enhanced by the public memory of the partisan war the country had experienced from 1943 through 1945 at the cost of an estimated 35,000 dead, 21,000 wounded, and 9,000 deported to Germany (Ginsborg, 2003: 70). That partisan war not only raised hopes in many Italians that a new political foundation for the country would be possible after the expulsion of the German occupiers and the final overthrow of Mussolini's puppet fascist state. It also resulted practically in the establishment of republics, however temporary, in areas that came under partisan control. And it involved hundreds of thousands of men and women in acts of resistance and political self-organization, large and small. Many of these participants had envisioned a future republic of autonomous popular participation as their goal and could well subscribe to the words of the condemned partisan Giacomo Ulivi, that “the “public good” is ourselves; what ties us to it is not a cliché, a big empty word like “patriotism”” (quoted by Viroli, 2002: 89). Channelled by the ongoing activities of ANED and other postwar resistance memorialization organizations, aspirations for a genuinely participatory republic were undoubtedly strongly rekindled by the election in 1978 of Sandro Pertini, “an anti-Fascist and a Resistance figure of the first order” (Cooke, 2011: 127), to a seven year term as president of Italy. Against this historical and political backdrop, a novel about a partisan struggle aimed at republican foundation and written by an Italian veteran of the Resistance, whose own “hopes for a new Italy [had once been] boundless,” was sure to attract Italian readers (Thomson, 2002: 239).

Acknowledging Levi's own stated purposes in writing his novel, which included paying homage to a little recognized history of armed Jewish resistance and trying his hand at novel writing, we connect his work to a republican tradition of reflection focused on the problem of founding an egalitarian and pluralistic polity of active and involved citizens. In highlighting how wartime conditions impose necessities that can free individuals to act and collaborate outside the structures of traditional identity, custom, and bureaucratic routine, Se non ora, quando? provides a context for understanding the concern for military self-organization demonstrated by republican thinkers, including Arendt, a contemporary of Levi's who also struggled as a European Jew for survival and dignity in the face of Nazism's genocidal assault. To be sure, the republican-minded sensibility we have inferred from Levi's partisan novel was not the sole or even dominant presence in Levi's political thinking. The conclusions he drew from his survival in the face of extreme state violence at Auschwitz were more compatible with a liberal-minded politics of vigilance against the encroachments of tyrannical majorities. Nevertheless, his partisan novel stands as a moment in which he held a deep-seated personal aversion to violence in productive tension with a recognition of the republican possibilities raised by the experience of armed resistance against Nazi injustice.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

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