"La tugua" by Primo Levi, a kairòs before returning to everyday life
Reflections by Constance Luzzati* published on the Protestants dans la Ville website (France) on September 10, 2019, freely translated by Giacomo Tessaro
Primo Levi is known above all for If this is a man, book that testifies with great precision of his experience of lager, without making a reader a voyeur. It is the duty of memory that requires the reading of this work, which tells the ability of the human being to dehumanading by dehumanizing his neighbor.
Next to this book, which reveals our immense ability to destroy, we find The truce, which tells the incredible resilience (resurrection) to which the human being knows how to appeal in a particularly happy way.
Some Italian Jews, together with other misfortune companions, come out of the fields, captain in the hands of an unlikely "red army" and organized, then wandering for several months through Eastern Europe before returning to Italy.
With a talent of the first levi breed narrator animates an intense life of each of the characters he encounters. Everything is oscillating, precarious, improbable, absurd, but from every detail of the narrative transpires life and inventivity - not always completely honest, but truculent - necessary to find eggs or a chicken, or to make artisanal pots in the heart of the Belarusian forest.
It is a sort of exodus devoid of driving, in which the promised land is expected, in which the path is long and chaotic, but in which it is actually the journey, rather than the return to the family, to be a place of life. The necessary to survive falls more or less from the sky, from the pocket of a stranger, or from the random of a barracks, like a manna: nothing is foreseen, nor predictable.
The few months described in the book constitute a parenthesis in which life is lively and free, whose intensity is linked to the fact that it is once suspended between that of the field and that of the Turin everyday life, which will then be poisoned by the memory of the rhythm of the time in Auschwitz.
The truce it is therefore a good example of what in theological language could be defined kairos, once whose quality escapes the chronos.
* Constance Luzzati is Arpista, professor of musical culture in Paris and student of theology in Geneva. He has achieved a doctorate in music and several prizes, both by the Paris and international Conservatory.
