Galileo Versus Primo

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

‘It doesn’t matter how many Holocaust museums you put up, it will happen again,” says writer-director Jonathan Levi of the idea that genocide on a mass scale will recur throughout human history. Levi’s new work, a music-theater piece titled “Falling Bodies,” imagines a fictionalized meeting between the scientist, writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, and Galileo Galilei, the father of modern science.
“Falling Bodies,” which debuts at the Rubin Museum of Art on Jan. 11, is not a screed against Holocaust oversaturation, but is instead a carefully-wrought investigation of the question: how unique was the Holocaust?

“Galileo is saying that there’s nothing that’s unique,” Levi (of no relation to Primo) said during a recent interview in his Manhattan apartment. “If you do enough

experiments, everything will adhere to the same natural laws.”

In the new work, Galileo’s basic line of reasoning (known as the theory of induction) leads Primo Levi to conclude that human history will inevitably repeat itself. After citing the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Hutus in Rwanda, among others, the character of Primo Levi says: “No matter how many statues of victims or abstract symbols or piles of discarded shoes and eyeglasses and dolls [are memorialized] ... [genocide] will happen again and it will be unique.”

“Unique,” as well as repeated, Levi explained, in the sense that those who are persecuted might differ, along with the reasons, but the fact of persecution will remain.

The idea to play Primo Levi against Galileo came to Levi on a whim, he said, but then he realized the two figures share similar backgrounds. Both were Italian scientists persecuted for their beliefs: Levi for being a Jew; Galileo for endorsing Copernicanism, or the idea that the earth revolved around the sun, which was heresy to the 16th century Catholic Church.

“I just thought, ‘Huh?’” Levi said, pondering. “If I have that as an image and go from there, what might happen?”

This: Primo Levi’s survival in Auschwitz became its own kind of challenge to Galileo’s theory of induction. “All the laws say that [Primo Levi] should not have survived,” Levi said, “but he did.”
So Levi, and the play’s co-director, Gil Morgenstern, set out on their own experiment. Their play is both a philosophical inquiry into the limits of human reason, as well as an artistic experiment. Their music-theater work, in which two stage actors are joined by a chamber ensemble, whose scored notes occasionally take the place of words, tests the limits of traditional drama.

“We’re asking our audience to contemplate whether or not we can communicate something unique between the interdisciplinary work between words and music,” Morgenstern said.

So far it has worked. Levi and Morgenstern began collaborating in 1997, creating a dramatized version of Dante’s “Inferno,” with the help of Robert Pinsky, a former U.S. poet laureate, among others. After a national tour and a Peabody nomination for the filmed adaptation of that work, which aired on PBS, Levi and Morgenstern founded Nine Circles Chamber Theatre. The company, which is putting on “Falling Bodies,” specializes in music-theater synthesis, and this will be its fourth production in a similar style.
The first was “Scrimshaw Violin,” debuting in 2001, and it also grappled with the relationship of Jewish identity to the Holocaust. It was based on a short story Levi published in Granta, a prominent literary magazine he co-founded while a graduate student at Cambridge University.

The central character in the story, an ordained rabbi and medical examiner named Sandy Lincoln, is very much like Levi: a highly assimilated Jew who struggles to distance himself from the destruction of Europe’s Jews.

“For Sandy,” Levi wrote in the original story, “the Holocaust, the fires, the teeth, the bones — these were human tragedies, human triumphs. There was nothing particularly Jewish about them.”
The story hinges, however, on Sandy’s ability to confront the specificity — the Jewishness — of the event. Sandy at first chides his Jewish assistant Selwyn for his constant references to Auschwitz; “For Selwyn, this is what it meant to be a Jew,” Levi wrote.

But after being asked to play a violin by non-Jewish hosts who’ve invited Sandy to Nantucket, he is shaken to his core. As Sandy plays, the violin, said to have been made from whalebones, transforms into the human remains of the Holocaust’s dead. The Bach sonata Sandy plays turns “into a Polish melody, a kaddish, a song for the dead.”

How does it end? “Sandy won’t play the violin again,” Levi said in his drawing room, where a violin that inspired the story hangs on the wall. “But he’s made that connection with the Holocaust.” The point of the story is that each Jew must face the Holocaust on his own terms, Levi said, “when you’re in the right place.”
As an English major at Yale who went to Cambridge on a graduate fellowship, Levi wasn’t always in that proper place himself. His paternal grandfather was a rabbi in the United States, but his father balked at a similar path. He enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary but then “became fed up with it,” Levi said of his father. “He became a philosopher instead.”

Levi’s father ended up a tenured philosophy professor at Columbia, while his mother earned her master’s degree and did social work. All the while Levi was defining his own identity. “What’s striking about him is his polymathic interests,” said Ric Burns, now a prominent documentary filmmaker, who met Jonathan at Cambridge in the late-1970s. “Many of us dabble, but he’s actually a master of many tasks.”

Burns remembers seeing Levi play jazz violin at a pub one night, then, days later, seeing him stage a play by Eugene O’Neill. After their friendship took root, Levi asked Burns for help editing a journal he was starting up with Bill Buford, now a best-selling author and writer for The New Yorker.

That journal was Granta, one of the first magazines to publish American writers like Joyce Carol Oates and Susan Sontag in England. “It was swinging for the fences,” Burns said. “But essentially, it was being done out of their dorm room.”

An ocean separated Levi from American Jews, however, and his opinions remained considerably removed from theirs. Levi remembers visiting the United States in the early 1980s and being asked by his Jewish friends about his opinion of Israel’s war with Lebanon, in 1982. “I said, ‘Why should I think anything? I’m not Israeli.’” Levi recalled. “I’m not a nationalist of any sort.”

Nonetheless, the question stuck with him, and after visiting extended family in Israel, he began to rethink his own Jewish identity. Ultimately, it was neither the Holocaust nor Israel that affirmed Levi’s Jewishness, he said. “It was by telling stories. That was my road into examining Jewish identity.”

In the Jewish folktales of Louis Ginzberg, an eminent rabbi and scholar, Levi found a culture rich in tradition, imagination and intellectual heft. Ginzberg’s writing enamored him, and after leaving Granta in 1987, Levi’s first novel made the modern Jewish experience its central focus. “A Guide for the Perplexed,” published by Random House in 1992, was heralded by a critic in The Washington Post as: “a seriously funny, beguiling ambitious first novel that calls to mind ... Cynthia Ozick and John Barth.”

Today, we might say Michael Chabon, with his majestic syncretism of pop culture and Jewish history.
“Jonathan sees Jewishness as something larger than the Holocaust or Israeli politics,” said Melvin Bukiet, a Jewish author and critic. Bukiet’s book, “Stories of An Imaginary Childhood,” competed with Levi’s for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, given annually to a promising American Jewish writer, in 1992. Since then, Bukiet has become a friend and fan of Levi’s, and lives nearby: “the twin pillars of West 113th Street,” he jokes about the two of them.

“He connects to the Holocaust in a sensitive way, but he also parodies contemporary American social mores,” which tend to over-identify with the event, Bukiet said. “He hits all the right registers.”
There’s a similar sensitivity to the Holocaust in “Falling Bodies,” too. Primo Levi’s survival in Auschwitz challenges Galileo’s logic, which suggests that anyone who entered the camp should have died. Inspired, Galileo points out to the improbability of Primo Levi’s own existence, in an attempt wrest him from his grief.
Galileo’s words don’t work, though, so Galileo thinks he might reach him through science. He takes the Holocaust survivor up the Tower of Pisa and gives him a small ball to drop, while Galileo will drop a heavier one. Despite their different masses, both balls will hit the ground at the same time, according to Galileo’s famous experiment on gravity. Levi, a scientist too, knows this. Now that Galileo has Levi’s attention, he turns to Levi, stops, and asks: “which do you believe will hit the ground first, your ball or your skepticism?” n

“Falling Bodies” plays for one night only on Sunday, Jan. 11, 6 p.m., at the Rubin Museum of Art, at 150 W. 17th St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues. (212) 620-5000. $20.

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