The Periodic Table     by Primo Levi, Translated by R Rosenthal Original title: Il sistema periodico Original language: Italian Published by Schocken Books, Incorporated Pub. Date: 1986 Format: Paperback, 240 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.69 x 7.99 x 5.18 ISBN: 0805210415 List Price: $12.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $9.60 Published by Abacus Pub. Date: 1985 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 240 pages List Price: £5.99 Not available for ordering

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The Periodic Table is an unusual and intriguing book in which Primo Levi’s double vocation of industrial chemist and writer find themselves in happy alliance. In its twenty-one short pieces named after different elements of the periodic table (Argon, Zinc, Carbon etc.) he recreates both a personal and a collective story via the celebration of a particular craft — chemistry, the transformation of substances — which he sees as a special case of, a more strenuous version of, the profession of living.

Primo Levi was a Jew who only came to understand his Jewishness through the experience of persecution and, later found it hard to accept being defined as ’a Jewish writer’. His family in Turin only observed the most important Jewish holidays. In this they were fairly typical of Italian Jews — at least from the time of the Risorgimento (the struggle for Italian unity in the nineteenth century) until Mussolini’s imposition of the anti-Semitic ’Racial Laws’ in 1938. Italian Jews tended to be highly assimilated and secular in outlook.

Three stories in particular; Argon, Zinc and Gold describe the heyday of the Jews in Piedmont, Levi’s region in North West Italy, and the limbo into which they were relegated under Fascism. From the lyrical evocation of the tiny Jewish communities, comparable to Argon — a ’noble’ gas present in the air in tiny quantities and which doesn’t react with other elements — we go in Zinc to a portrayal of Italy on the eve of the Racial Laws and the anti-Semitic campaign in which the Jews were castigated as an ’impurity’ in Italian society. However, as he writes;

’In order for the wheel to turn, for 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.’

With Gold we move on a few years to 1943; Levi, captured as an anti-Fascist partisan, meets a fellow-prisoner, a common criminal, who is about to be released. He is a smuggler who is also a gold-panner. Levi on the other hand has lost his freedom and he senses the horor of an inescapable destiny to come.

Apart from the narrative, historical and psychological qualities it shares with other of Primo Levi’s books, The Periodic Table is interesting for its transfer of a scientific discourse into a humanistic literary work and its unusual combination of personal recall with analytical lucidity, for all this and for its marvellous conciseness, it is a contemporary classic.

’There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names of erudite derivation which mean "the New", "the Hidden", "the Inactive", and "the Alien." They are indeed so inert, so satisfied with their condition, that they do not interfere in any chemical reaction, do not combine with any other element ... They are also called the noble gases — and here there’s room for discussion as to whether all noble gases are really inert and all inert gases are noble. And, finally, they’re also called rare gases, even though one of them, argon (the Inactive), is present in the air in the considerable proportion of one percent, that is, twenty or thirty times more abundant than carbon dioxide, without which there would not be a trace of life on this planet.

The little that I know about my ancestors presents many similarities to these gases. Not all of them were materially inert, for that was not granted them. On the contrary, they were — or had to be — quite active, in order to earn a living and because of a reigning morality that held that "he who does not work shall not eat." But there is no doubt that they were inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous discussion. It can hardly be by chance that all the deeds attributed to them, though quite various, have in common a touch of the static, an attitude of dignified abstention, of voluntary (or accepted) relegation to the margins of the great river of life.’ (p3-4 from Argon)