The Periodic Table Read online

  T h e

  P e r i o d i c

  T a b l e

  P r i m o L e v i

  Translated from the Italian by

  Raymond Rosenthal

  NEW YORK

  SCHOCKEN BOOKS

  English translation copyright © 1984 by Schocken Books Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocke n Books Inc., New York. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Italy as Il Sistema Periodico by Giulio Einaudi editore, s. p. a., Turin, Italian text copyright © 1975 by Giulio Einaudi editore, s. p. a. Originally published in hardcover by Schocken Books in 1984.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levi, Primo

  The periodic table

  Translation of: Il sistema periodico. I. Title.

  PQ4872. E8S51 3 198 4 854’. 914 84-545 3

  ISBN 0-8052-1041-5

  Manufactured in the United States of America [‘95] 19 18 17 16

  C O N T E N T S

  Argon

  Hydrogen

  Zinc

  Iron

  Potassium

  Nickel

  Lead

  Mercury

  Phosphorus

  Gold

  Cerium

  Chromium

  Sulfur

  Titanium

  Arsenic

  Nitrogen

  Tin

  Uranium

  Silver

  Vanadium

  Carbon

  Ibergekumene tsores iz gut tsu dertsejlin.

  Troubles overcome are good to tell.

  —Yiddish Proverb

  T h e

  P e r i o d i c

  T a b l e

  ARGON

  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, and for precisely this reason have gone undetected for centuries. As late as 1962 a diligent chemist after long and ingenious efforts succeeded in forcing the Alien (xenon) to combine fleetingly with extremely avid and lively fluorine, and the feat seemed so extraordinary that he was given a Nobel prize. 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 are also called rare gases, even though one of them, argon (the Inactive), is present in the air in the considerable proportion of 1 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. Noble, inert, and rare: their history is quite poor when compared to that of other illustrious Jewish communities in Italy and Europe. It appears that they arrived in Piedmont about 1500, from Spain by way of Provence, as seems proven by certain typical toponymic surnames, such as Bedarida-Bédarrides, Momigliano-Montmélian, Segre (this is a tributary of the Ebro which flows past Lérida in northeastern Spain), Foà-Foix, Cavaglion-Cavaillon, Migliau-Millau; the name of the town Lunel near the mouth of the Rhone between Montpellier and Nîmes was translated into the Hebrew yareakh (“moon”; luna in Italian), and from this derived the Jewish-Piedmontese surname Jarach.

  Rejected or given a less than warm welcome in Turin, they settled in various agricultural localities in southern Piedmont, introducing there the technology of making silk, though without ever getting beyond, even in their most flourishing periods, the status of an extremely tiny minority. They were never much loved or much hated; stories of unusual persecutions have not been handed down. Nevertheless, a wall of suspicion, of undefined hostility and mockery, must have kept them substantially separated from the rest of the population, even several decades after the emancipation of 1848 and the consequent flow into the cities, if what my father told me of his childhood in Bene Vagienna is true. His contemporaries, he said, on coming out of school used to mock him without malice, greeting him with the corner of their jackets gathered in their fists to resemble a donkey’s ear and chanting, “Pig’s ear, donkey’s ear, give ‘em to the Jew that’s here.” The allusion to the ear is arbitrary, and the gesture was originally the sacrilegious parody of the greeting that pious Jews would exchange in synagogue when called up to read the Torah, showing each other the hem of the prayer shawl whose tassels, minutely prescribed by ritual as to number, length, and form, are replete with mystical and religious significance. But by now those kids were unaware of the origin of their gesture. I remember here, in passing, that the vilification of the prayer shawl is as old as anti-Semitism—from those shawls, taken from deportees, the SS would make underwear which then was distributed to the Jews imprisoned in the Lager.

  As is always the case, the rejection was mutual. The minority erected a symmetrical barrier against all of Christianity (gojim, narelim, “Gentiles”, the “uncircumcised”), reproducing on a provincial scale and against a pacifically bucolic background the epic and Biblical situation of the chosen people. This fundamental dislocation fed the good-natured wit of our uncles (barbe in the dialect of Piedmont) and our aunts (magne, also in the dialect): wise, tobacco-smelling patriarchs and domestic household queens, who would still proudly describe themselves as “the people of Israel.”

  As for this term “uncle,” it is appropriate here to warn the reader immediately that it must be understood in a very broad sense. It is the custom among us to call any old relation uncle, even if he is a distant relation, and since all or almost all of the old persons in the community are in the long run relations, the result is that the number of uncles is very large. And then in the case of the uncles and aunts who reach an extremely old age (a frequent event: we are a long-lived people, since the time of Noah), the attribute barba (“uncle”), or, respectively, magna (“aunt”) tends gradually to merge with the name, and, with the concurrence of ingenious diminutives and an unsuspected phonetic analogy between Hebrew and the Piedmontese dialect, become fixed in complex, strange-sounding appellations, which are handed down unchanged from generation to generation along with the events, memories, and sayings of those who had borne them for many long years. Thus came into existence Barbaiòtô (Uncle Elijah), Barbasachín (Uncle Isaac), Magnaiéta (Aunt Maria), Barbamôisín (Uncle Moses, about whom it is said that he had the quack pull his two lower incisors so as to hold the stem of his pipe more comfortably), Barbasmelín (Uncle Samuel), Magnavigaia (Aunt Abigail, who as a bride had entered Saluzzo mounted on a white mule, coming up the ice-covered Po River from Carmagnola), Magnafôriña (Aunt Zepora, from the Hebrew Tsippora which means “bird”: a splendid name). Uncle Jacob must have belonged to an even remoter period. He had been to England to purchase cloth and so “wore a checked suit”; his brother Barbapartin (Uncle Bonaparte, a name still common among the Jews, in memory of the first ephemeral emancipation bestowed by Napoleon), had fallen from his rank as uncle be
cause the Lord, blessed be He, had given him so unbearable a wife that he had had himself baptized, became a monk, and left to work as a missionary in China, so as to be as far away from her as possible.

  Grandmother Bimba was very beautiful, wore a boa of ostrich feathers, and was a baroness. She and her entire family had been made barons by Napoleon, because they had lent him money (manòd).

  Barbabarônín (Uncle Aaron) was tall, robust, and had radical ideas; he had run away from Fossano to Turin and had worked at many trades. He had been signed up by the Carignano Theater as an extra in Don Carlos and had written to his family to come for the opening. Uncle Nathan and Aunt Allegra came and sat in the gallery; when the curtain went up and Aunt Allegra saw her son armed like a Philistine, she shouted at the top of her lungs: “Aaron, what are you doing! Put that sword down!”

  Barbamiclín was simple; in Acqui he was respected and protected because the simple are the children of God and no one should call them fools. But they called him “turkey planter” since the time a rashan (an unbeliever) had made a fool of him by leading him to believe that turkeys (bibini) are sowed like peach trees, by planting the feathers in furrows, and that then they grow on the branches. In any event, the turkey had a curiously important place in this witty, mild, and orderly family world, perhaps because, being presumptuous, clumsy, and wrathful, it expresses the opposite qualities and lends itself to being an object of ridicule; or perhaps, more simply, because at its expense a famous, semi-ritual turkey meatball was confected at Passover. For example, Uncle Pacifico also raised a turkey-hen and had become very attached to her. Across the way from him lived Signor Lattes, who was a musician. The turkey clucked and disturbed Signor Lattes; he begged Uncle Pacifico to silence his turkey. My uncle replied, “Your orders will be carried out; Signora Turkey keep quiet.”

  Uncle Gabriele was a rabbi and therefore he was known as Barba Moréno, that is, “Uncle Our Teacher.” Old and nearly blind, he would return on foot, under the blazing sun, from Verzuolo to Saluzzo. He saw a cart come by, stopped it, and asked for a ride; but then, while talking to the driver, it gradually dawned on him that this was a hearse, which was carrying a dead Christian to the cemetery: an abominable thing, since, as it is written in Ezekiel 44:25, a priest who touches a dead man, or even simply enters the room in which a dead person is lying, is contaminated and impure for seven days. He leaped to his feet and cried: “I’m traveling with a pegartà, with a dead woman! Driver, stop the cart!”

  Gnôr Grassiadiô and Gnôr Côlômbô were two friendly enemies who, according to the legend, had lived from time immemorial face to face on the two sides of an alleyway in the town of Moncalvo. Gnôr Grassiadiô was a Mason and very rich. He was a bit ashamed of being a Jew and had married a goyà, that is, a Christian, with blond hair so long it touched the ground, who cuckolded him. This goyà, although really a goyà, was called Magna Ausilia, which indicates a certain degree of acceptance on the part of the epigones; she was the daughter of a sea captain who had presented Gnôr Grassiadiô with a large, varicolored parrot which came from Guyana and would say in Latin, “Know thyself.” Gnôr Côlômbô was poor and a Mazzinian. When the parrot arrived he bought a crow without a feather on its back and taught it to speak. When the parrot croaked, “Nosce te ipsum,” the crow answered, “Wise up.”

  But as for Uncle Gabriele’s pegarta, Gnôr Grassiadiô’s goyà, Nona Bimba’s manòd, and the havertà of which we will speak, an explanation is required. Havertà is a Hebrew word, crippled in both its form and meaning and quite suggestive. Actually it is an arbitrary feminine form of haver, which equals “companion” and means “maid,” but it contains the accessory notion of a woman of low extraction and of different customs and beliefs that one is forced to harbor under one’s roof; by inclination a havertà is not very clean and is ill-mannered, and by definition she is malevolently curious about the customs and conversations of the masters of the house, so much so as to force them to use a particular jargon in her presence, to which, besides all the others mentioned above, the term havertà itself obviously belongs. This jargon has now almost disappeared; a few generations back it still numbered a few hundred words and locutions, consisting for the most part of Hebrew roots with Piedmontese endings and inflections. Even a hasty examination points to its dissimulative and underground function, a crafty language meant to be employed when speaking about goyim in the presence of goyim; or also, to reply boldly with insults and curses that are not to be understood, against the regime of restriction and oppression which they (the goyim) had established.

  Its historical interest is meager, since it was never spoken by more than a few thousand people; but its human interest is great, as are all languages on the frontier and in transition. In fact it contains an admirable comic force, which springs from the contrast between the texture of the discourse, which is the rugged, sober, and laconic Piedmontese dialect, never written except on a bet, and the Hebrew inlay, snatched from the language of the fathers, sacred and solemn, geologic, polished smooth by the millennia like the bed of a glacier. But this contrast reflects another, the essential conflict of the Judaism of the Diaspora, scattered among the Gentiles, that is, the goyim, torn between their divine vocation and the daily misery of existence; and still another, even more general, which is inherent in the human condition, since man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. The Jewish people, after the dispersion, have lived this conflict for a long time and dolorously, and have drawn from it, side by side with its wisdom, also its laughter, which in fact is missing in the Bible and the Prophets. It pervades Yiddish, and, within its modest limits, it also pervades the bizarre speech of our fathers of this earth,{1} which I want to set down here before it disappears: a skeptical, good-natured speech, which only to a careless examination could appear blasphemous, whereas it is rich with an affectionate and dignified intimacy with God—Nôssgnôr (“Our Lord”), Adonai Eloenó (“Praise be the Lord”), Cadòss Barôkhu (“Dear Lord”).

  Its humiliated roots are evident. For example, there are missing, because useless, words for “sun,” “man,” and “city,” while words are present for “night,” “to hide,” “money,” “prison,” “dream” (the last, though, used almost exclusively in the locution bahalom, “in a dream,” to be added jokingly to an affirmation, and to be understood by one’s interlocutor, and by him alone, as its contrary), “to steal,” “to hang,” and suchlike. Besides this, there exist a good number of disparaging words, used sometimes to judge persons but more typically employed, for example, between wife and husband in front of a Christian shopkeeper’s counter when uncertain about the purchase. We mention: n saròd, the royal plural, no longer understood as such, of the Hebrew tsara, which means “misfortune” and is used to describe a piece of goods or a person of scant value; there also exists its graceful diminutive, sarôdĭnn, and at the same time I would not want forgotten the ferocious linkage sarôd e senssa manòd used by the marriage broker (marosav) to describe ugly girls without dowries; hasirud, an abstract collective from hasir, which means “pig” and therefore is more or less equivalent to “filth, piggishness.” It should be noted that the sound “u” (French) does not exist in Hebrew; instead there is the ending “ut” (with the Italian “u”), which serves to coin abstract terms (for example, malkhut, “kingdom”), but it lacks the strongly disparaging connotation it had in jargon usage. Another use, typical and obvious, of these and similar terms was in the store, between the owner and the clerks and against the customers. In the Piedmont of the last century the trade in cloth was often in Jewish hands, and from it was born a kind of specialized sub-jargon which, transmitted by the clerks become owners in their turn, and not necessarily Jews, has spread to many stores in the field and still lives, spoken by people who are quite surprised if by chance they happen to find out that they are using Hebrew words. Some, for example, still use the expression na vesta a kinim to describe a polka-dot dress: now, kinim are lice, the third of the ten scou
rges of Egypt, enumerated and chanted in the ritual of the Jewish Passover.

  There is also a rather large assortment of not very decent terms, to be used not only with their real meaning in front of children but also instead of curses, in which case, compared to the corresponding Italian and Piedmontese terms, they offer, besides the already mentioned advantage of not being understood, also that of relieving the heart without abrading the mouth.

  Certainly more interesting for the student of customs are the few terms that allude to things pertaining to the Catholic faith. In this case, the originally Hebraic form is corrupted much more profoundly, and this for two reasons: in the first place, secrecy was rigorously necessary here because their comprehension by Gentiles could have entailed the danger of being charged with sacrilege; in the second place, the distortion in this case acquires the precise aim of denying, obliterating the sacral content of the word, and thus divesting it of all supernatural virtue. For the same reason, in all languages the Devil is named with many appellations of an allusive and euphemistic character, which make it possible to refer to him without proffering his name. The church (Catholic) was called tôneuà, a word whose origins I have not been able to reconstruct, and which probably takes from Hebrew only its sound; while the synagogue, with proud modesty, was simply called the scola (“school”), the place where one learns and is brought up. In a parallel instance, the rabbi is not described with the word rabbi or rabbenu (“our rabbi”) but as morénô (“our teacher”), or kbakhàm (“the wise man”). In fact in “school” one is not afflicted by the hateful khaltrúm of the Gentiles: khaltrúm, or khantrúm, is the ritual and bigotry of the Catholics, intolerable because polytheistic and above all because swarming with images (“Thou shalt have no other gods before me; Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image... and shalt not bow down thyself to them,” Exodus 20:3) and therefore idolatrous. For this term too, steeped in execration, the origin is obscure, almost certainly not Hebraic; but in other Jewish-Italian jargons there is the adjective khalto, in the sense precisely of “bigot” and used chiefly to describe the Christian worshiper of images.