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30
to offer some resistance to the Nazis.” In this book, which may be
considered a “gesture on a gesture,” Howe finds that “certain of
Levi’s strongest literary gifts reach full play.” For example, Levi s
evocation in the novel of the life of a community of Jewish parti
sans, the “Republic of the Marshes,” is, in Howe’s estimation,
“simply brilliant.”7
On the other hand, Philip Roth, no less an admirer of Primo
Levi’s opus than Howe, reveals a certain mistrust of the motiva
tions that guided the writing of
I f Not Now, When?
In an interview
he conducted with Levi, Roth remarks:
I f Not Now, When?
is like nothing else of yours that I’ve read in English.
Though pointedly drawn from actual historical events, the book is cast as a
straightforward, picaresque adventure tale about a small band ofJewish parti
sans of Russian and Polish extraction harassing the Germans behind their east
ern front lines. Your other books are perhaps less “imaginary” as to subject
matter but strike me as more imaginative in technique. The motive behind i f
NotNow, When?
seems more narrowly tendentious—and consequendy less lib
erating to the writer—than the impulses that generate the autobiographical
works. I wonder if you agree with this—if in writing about the bravery of the
Jews who fought back, you felt yourself doing something you
ought
to do, re
sponsible to moral and political claims that don’t necessarily intervene else
where, even when the subject is your own markedly Jewish fate.8
Levi’s response—that for him
I f Not Now
,
When?
was indeed a
“liberating” book—is less interesting than the fact that Roth, who
obviously has a high opinion of Levi’s literary qualities, is politely
distancing himself from the one work in which Levi seems to have
been motivated by an inclination to improve Jewish public rela
tions.
A review essay in
Commentary Magazine
is not so polite.
Fernanda Eberstadt, the author of the essay, has come to the
conclusion that
I f Not Now, When?,
whose plot is at once “stiffly
7. Irving Howe. Introduction to
I fNot Now, When?,
p. 15.
8. Philip Roth. “A Man Saved By His Skills.”
The New York Times Book
Review
(October 12, 1986), p. 41.