Conclusion

Abstract

This book will meet with resistance. While I join the chorus of those who esteem Levi’s oeuvre as one of the most significant in the international literature of the Holocaust, I have argued here that the acute blindness of his humanism reveals nearly as much about the origins and meanings of Auschwitz as do his penetrating insights. His near inability to see the dangers within universality and instrumental reason, especially in his early texts, would not be important if this blindness were his alone. However, his humanism is also ours. This is especially evident, as I have argued in several chapters of this book, in the conventional ways he draws on the figure Ulysses and in his readers’ uncritical reception of these appropriations. In confirming Levi’s deep identification with Ulysses up to the end of his life, biographer Ian Thomson assumes, with good reason, that we secular Westerners also identify with the ancient traveler who fought to reach home and with the modern one, too, who returned from Auschwitz after great suffering. “Levi had said that he wanted as his epitaph the Greek words Homer used of his voyager Ulysses, ‘pollà plankte’. They mean ‘much erring’, or ‘driven to wander far and wide’; in his homesick exile, separated from his friends and home, the long-enduring Ulysses was a kind of Everyman. And so was Primo Levi, which is why he still feels so close to us in the twenty-first century.”¹