The Periodic Table

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

A
RGON

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 because 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.