In Levi's Wake: Adaptation, Simulacrum, Postmemory (Levi Primo, Post-Survivor Representations of the Holocaust) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Introduction/Adaptation This essay will explore a range of what I will call post-survivor representations of the Holocaust, and attempt to plot out the adaptive practices being deployed by contemporary creative artists interested in engaging with the primary texts of Holocaust testimony. First and foremost, I hope to develop the double meaning that emerges from my understanding of the notion of adaptation. As I discuss a number of recent texts generated by, inspired by, or mapped onto Primo Levi's testimonial work, I'll be focusing on matters of adaptation, both as a practice for the (re)interpretation of texts across artistic genres, (1) and as a mechanism within the dynamics of collective postmemory. As we adapt our ways of knowing and experiencing the Holocaust in response to the death of survivor-witnesses like Levi, how do we adapt--and adapt our relationship to--their works? In what way does our adaptation of their works mark our changed and changing relationship to the survivors, themselves, and to their testimonial legacy? How does the passage of time--and the passing of the survivor--bear on the cultural mediation of canonical texts of testimony? Does the perceived fixity of the survivor's testimonial text, heightened in the wake of the survivor-author's death, challenge us to adapt those texts generically as a means of adapting the survivors' testimony to contemporary exigencies? To these ends, this essay will focus on the case of Italian documentary filmmaker Davide Ferrario's 2007 La strada di Levi (Primo Levi's Journey), a cinematic work of postmemory inspired by Levi's second book, La tregua (1963). Ferrario's film allows us to explore many of the issues at stake as we situate ourselves and the artists of our time at the intersection of generic and historical forces: to wit, the artistic adaptation of Levi's oeuvre and our collective (psychological) adaptation to a changing testimonial landscape over which Primo Levi's now disembodied voice still looms quite large. I am aided in my reading of Ferrario's La strada di Levi by Marco Belpoliti's recently published (Einaudi, 2007) "road journal" of the film, La prova. My examination of this book, in which he documents the entire project from genesis--it was Belpoliti who approached Ferrario with the idea to film Levi's second book in this way--through execution, all the way to postproduction, (2) reveals that Belpoliti does not merely illuminate the documentary text in his published travel diary, but rather forges his own brand of post-survivor adaptation. By way of contrast, I'll be placing La strada di Levi in dialogue with another contemporary adaptation of Levi's testimonial work, Sir Antony Sher's one-man play "abridged" (3) from Se questo e un uomo.