What I Am Reading: "The Periodic Table" by Primo Levy

I knew this book would be about chemistry, but I guess I didn’t realize that it would be mainly about chemistry. Italian memoirist Primo Levy’s experiences growing up during the reign of Italian Fascism, and during the Holocaust, are related in other books, which we are referred to for more information.

He sets out instead to relate vignettes from the life of a chemist; and not a chemist who works collectively with others in a large institution, but a chemist who works among peasants with “junk shop” tools. The stories, a few of which are fictional, second-hand, or only unofficially autobiographical, are themed around elements from the periodic table. The eponymous element always makes an appearance, though sometimes ephemerally. This leads to a lot of opportunities for metaphor, and my favorite comes in an early chapter on his schooling:

“…so tender and delicate zinc, so yielding to acid which gulps it down in a single mouthful, behaves, however, in a very different fashion when it is very pure: then it obstinately resists the attack. One could draw from this two conflicting philosophical conclusions: the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. I discarded the first, disgustingly moralistic, and I lingered to consider the second, which I found more congenial. In order for the wheel to turn, the life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.” (p. 34)

I came to this book for history and found science, which is fair enough. I can see why a scientist or enthusiast of popular science would find it interesting. I also think it might be of interest to modern chemists: the humble, cobbled-together, back-alley chemistry Levy practices to improve local shoddy lipsticks and identify arsenic for an old tradesman suspicious of poisoning must be something of a romantic existence for the contemporary chemist, who presumably works in a sterile and well-funded lab. Levy relates several occasions where he almost blows himself up.

There are a couple of chapters about his youth that touch on Fascism at the time, one on the Resistance, and one on Auschwitz. After the middle part of the book is taken up by chemistry stories, politics returns in the end. The chapter ”Vanadium” details a serendipitous professional encounter in the ‘60s with a German who worked at a chemical factory near Auschwitz, and who interacted with Levy during his slave labor there. Levy tells this man, not personally a war criminal, that “honest and unarmed” men “clear the road” for the “armed” men, and that thus “every German must answer for Auschwitz, indeed every man, and after Auschwitz it is no longer permissible to be unarmed.” I can’t help but hope that this rattled the cage a bit of someone who clearly at least partially swallowed the “Good German” narrative of the Adenauer years; and the chapter was an interesting reflection on the subject of collective guilt. I assume there is much more of this content in Levy’s holocaust memoirs.