Author: By Stacy Schiff

Date: SUNDAY, January 10, 1999

Page: D1

Section: Books

To write is to lay oneself bare, held Primo Levi; this leaves his biographer in a bit of a bind. It does so especially if we choose to take Levi's decades of camouflaged or open autobiographism at face value. Rarely has an essayist seemed so astutely, lucidly, winningly at one with himself, his fears, his awkwardness, his inertia.

Born in 1919 into an assimilated, well-to-do, Jewish family in Turin, Italy, Levi distinguished himself in his early years more for his shyness than for any stellar academic achievement. At age 14 he determined to become a chemist, which he did, although not without his doubts, or an assist on his final exam. (Even this nugget he does not have the good grace to leave to his biographer, confessing his unearned claim to a top score in quantitative analysis in ``Other People's Trades.'')

Long before the advent of Italian racial laws, he was a man apart. After 1942 he managed to find work in a Milan laboratory, despite his religion. Gingerly he felt his way toward the Resistance. After Italy was disarmed by the Germans in 1943, he headed with friends for the valleys of the Piedmont, where he was arrested. In February 1944, Levi found himself in Auschwitz. Of the 650 Jews on his sealed convoy, 23 ultimately came home.

It was the deportation, and the year in Auschwitz, that impressed upon Levi the fact that he was a Jew. And it was the searing, sanity-enforcing need to bear witness afterward that made him a writer; among the ironies of the life were his coming to both realizations late, and courtesy of a concentration camp. In ``Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist,'' Levi's first biographer, Myriam Anissimov, treats the Auschwitz year in riveting detail, drawing on Levi's accounts and on those of fellow survivors.

As Levi acknowledged later, chemistry saved his life; his situation improved dramatically when he was transferred to the camp laboratory. By mid-January, 1945, Allied bombs began to fall perilously close to the camp, evacuated in haste by the Germans. Anissimov's account of the next 10 days -- when Levi, suffering from scarlet fever, managed with a few ingenious comrades to forage through a half-dismantled concentration camp under arctic conditions -- makes for the centerpiece of her book. She has done exhaustive research.

The next years -- those that impressed upon Levi that he was a writer, though never as prolific, as disciplined, as accomplished a writer as he would have liked -- are the most difficult for Levi and, it seems, for Anissimov as well. Levi stayed home. He worked as a chemist by day; after hours he wrote and wrote. He married, he fathered two children. As his stature grew, so did his association with the events he so evenly, luminously described, an association that brought with it grief. As Anissimov tells us no fewer than 20 times, the Italian intelligentsia refused Levi a place in its pantheon.

Nor was he entirely embraced by his coreligionists; a lifelong agnostic, he was described as a stranger to Jewish culture. The mixed reception in part explains the self-image forged by the man behind the crystalline prose. In 1986, he fretted that he had been a disastrous partisan, that his knowledge of chemistry was of a merely average standard, and that his books made him seem wiser, braver, calmer, and more collected than he really was.

Evidently this was the Levi who chose apparently to end his life by hurling himself down a staircase in 1987. Anissimov makes a good deal of that leap; it says something about her volume that Levi is born once and dies three times before Page 1 of Chapter 1, when he promptly dies again. What Anissimov makes less of is the mind of that man. She passes quickly by what may be the most telling revelation about her subject, so hugely human in both senses of the word. This steadfast, unassuming man kept a log of all his reviews. He graded the critics' assessments of him from 1 to 5.

A more troubling omission is that of Levi's family life. Relatives have a habit of appearing before they are born and then disappearing forever; Levi's marriage in 1947 occurs entirely off stage. The woman he weds is so excluded from Anissimov's narrative that it is two pages from the end of this volume before she is identified as Lucia, Levi's wife.

But the relative one most wonders about, and to whom Anissimov allows but the most glancing of references, is Levi's mother. It is not only that Levi owed his peculiar brand of house arrest to this woman, with whom he always lived, to whom he spoon-fed meals, who tyrannized him from the next room, and whom he identified as the reason he could not possibly leave Turin. It is that this same woman, as Anissimov tells it, had welcomed her son back from Auschwitz without emotion. In he walked one autumn morning, filthy, bearded, bloated, already burning with a fierce need to talk. ``It's cold, put a sweater on,'' Ester Levi advised her only son.

It may well seem senseless for a survivor to kill himself after achieving international acclaim. (It seems even more senseless for an ex-chemist to do so by plunging down a stairwell, a point Anissimov never addresses.) But to his list of the reasons writers write, Levi had, after all, added, To free oneself from anguish.

He preferred his anguish on the page to be filtered; the reader of his biography is within his rights in demanding a more distilled concentrate. Where Anissimov's volume falls short, it does partly from a problem not of its author's making; Levi's life is less than the sum of his works. If you want to enter the hellish year its subject spent as a number, read ``Primo Levi.'' But if you want to enter the mind of a man who built his own enlightened monument to the idea that work sets us free, head to the perfectly calibrated sentences of Primo Levi.