Jump to Introduction + Chronology
Jump back to Previous: Doctor Faustus - Epilogue
Devi’s Dream is a weird and wonderful thing. And it says so much about me that it manifests itself for me almost exclusively in books... almost but not entirely.
I picked up The Periodic Table to read for my book club and as a break from my “serious” reading relating to The Magic Mountain and now Faust. This is, again, a rereading, but I read it so long ago that I recall almost nothing. In the first chapter (Argon) I discovered that it is set in Piedmont -- more about that later. In the third chapter (Zinc) The Magic Mountain is invoked. There is no index so I don’t know if more will be said about Mann’s, then recent, book -- he is writing about his youth in Fascist Piedmont. Maybe there will be nothing more of relevance, but I am going to take these two signs as my marching orders and add this book to my list of books to cover, starting from the beginning.
Unrelated to all that, I found the previous posts in this blog less interesting to write than the ones in my previous blog because I was not contributing my own original material. So I will attempt to add something Ryecroftian to my posts as before.
The Periodic Table
By Primo Levi - Translated by Raymond Rosenthal
- Schocken Books 1984 (Italian edition 1975)
chapter 1 - Argon
p3 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. [Neil Bartlett] 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, [.04 for CO2 and 1.0 for Ar] without which there would not be a trace of life on this planet.
A couple particularly interesting quotes for those of you not following my links:
"The properties of the noble gases can be well explained by modern theories of atomic structure: their outer shell of valence electrons is considered to be "full", giving them little tendency to participate in chemical reactions..." and "Unlike noble gases, an inert gas is not necessarily elemental and is often a compound gas." That last sentence probably explains why Levi preferred the term "inert" since, over time, populations are never really elemental but become more and more compound.
p4 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... [Expulsion of Jews from Spain - I’m skipping the bit about names and place names that Proust would have been all over]
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 origins of their gesture. [this is an interesting example of the cultural memory of children that I've written about before -- rules of games that are passed on based on age from slightly older kids to slightly younger kids to form a kind of standing wave] 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. [a concentration camp - It’s interesting how members of one cult are so aware of the silliness of the rituals and talismans of other cults while being blind to the silliness of their own cultish ways.]
p5 As is always the case, the rejection was mutual. The minority erected a symmetrical barrier against all of Christianity (goyim, narelim, “Gentiles,” the “uncircumcised”), reproducing on a provincial scale and against a 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 Barbioto (Uncle Elijah)... Magnaieta (Aunt Maria)... Barbapartin (Uncle Bonaparte, a name still common among 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment