Abstract
If Not Now, When?, published in 1982 and loosely based on historical facts, tells the story of a band of Eastern European Jewish partisans carrying out guerrilla activities against the German army between 1943 and 1945, in a westward progress from the forests of the Western Soviet Union to Milan, on their way to Palestine.1 It is generally judged to be Levi’s weakest work and it has not attracted significant critical attention, particularly in the English-speaking world. Its clear didactic aims are to show that some Jews, as Jews, did take up arms to fight the Germans, and to introduce the variety of Eastern European Jewish cultures to Levi’s Italian readers.
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Notes
Fernanda Eberstadt, “Reading Primo Levi,” Commentary (October 1985): 47.
Irving Howe, “How To Write About the Holocaust,” New York Review of Books March 28, 1985, 17.
Philip Roth, “A Man Saved by His Skills” [1986], in The Voice of Memory. Interviews 1961–87, ed. Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 20.
Ian Thomson, Primo Levi. A Life (London: Hutchinson, 2002), 409, 419.
Romano Luperini, “La lunga traversia non ha fine,” review of Se non ora, quando?, Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno (May 27, 1982): 3. The 1982 Campiello prize was known as the Supercampiello, since the September 1982 award was the twentieth award. Alberto Cavaglion, “La scelta di Gedeone: appunti su Primo Levi e l’ebraismo,” Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 4 (1966): 194.
Roberto Vacca, “Un western dalla Russia a Milano,” Il Giorno, May 18, 1982, 3.
Gabriella Poli and Giorgio Calcagno, Echi di una voce perduta: Incontri, interviste, e conversazioni con Primo Levi (Milan: Mursia, 1992), 257.
Romano Luperini, La città (Milano: Einaudi, 1999).
Stefano Jesurum, “Si è offuscata la luce della stella d’Israele,” Oggi, July 14, 1982, 82. See also the interview with Philip Roth in Belpoliti and Gordon, The Voice of Memory, 20.
Vittorio Spinazzola, Il romanzo antistorico (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990).
Margherita Ganeri, Il romanzo storico in Italia: Il dibattito critico dalle origini al postmoderno (Lecce: Piero Manni, 1999), 101–24.
Cristina Della Coletta, Plotting the Past: Metamorphoses of Historical Narrative in Modern Italian Fiction (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996), 15.
See Patrick McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), xiv–xvii.
See Patrick McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), xiv–xvii, and Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3.
See André Glucksmann, “Le avventure della tragedia,” trans. Gianni Volpi, in Il Western: Fonti forme miti registi attori filmografia, ed. Raymond Bellour (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1973).
Adapted from Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 113.
For in-depth analyses of all three films, see Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Atheneum, 1992), 474–86, 567–74, and 598–603.
Jim Kitses, Horizons West, 2nd ed. (London: BFI, 2004), 217–23.
For a lucid discussion of Levi’s ethics of work, see chapter 6, “Practice, or Trial and Error,” in Robert Gordon, Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Jane Tompkins, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) argues that Westerns “exist in order to provide a justification for violence” (227–28).
See Thomson, Primo Levi, 427–36, and Mirna Cicioni, Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge (Oxford: Berg, 1995), 127–30.
Filippo Gentiloni, “Quando la stella di David era la bandiera dei perseguitati,” Il manifesto (June 29, 1982): 6.
For a discussion of Line, see Enzo Neppi, “Sopravvivenza e vergogna in Primo Levi,”, Appartenenza e differenza: Ebrei d’Italia e letteratura, ed. Juliette Hassine, Jacques Misan-Montefiore, and Sandra Debenedetti-Stow (Florence: La Giuntina, 1997), 123–24.
Alessandro Manzoni, I Promessi Sposi, ed. Gilda Sbrilli (1841–1842; Florence: Bulgarini, 2000), 2.
Alessandro Manzoni, Adelchi (Milan: Garzanti, 2007), 354–55 (my translation).
Fiona Diwan, “Sono un ebreo ma non sono mai stato sionista,” Corriere Medico 3–4 (September 1982): 15.
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© 2011 Risa Sodi and Millicent Marcus
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Cicioni, M. (2011). Levi’s Western. In: Sodi, R., Marcus, M. (eds) New Reflections on Primo Levi. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119673_12
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