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"Speak, you also," Paul Celan wrote: "speak as the last, / have your say."(1) The English translation of Paul Steinberg's Auschwitz autobiography, which came out in 2000, borrows Celan's line, and is called Speak You Also.(2) Celan's line makes very particular sense for Steinberg's work because Steinberg is responding, fifty years after his experience of Auschwitz, to Primo Levi's characterization of him as "Henri" in If This Is A Man.(3) Since Levi died in 1987, and Steinberg in 1999, we are in the curious situation today of reading what is in effect a dialogue between two dead men who knew each other at Auschwitz and seem to have reacted rather differently to the intense and testing experience of the Lager, or death camp. Levi included the brilliant and beautiful character Henri in his own autobiographical work as an example of some of the profound corruption of human nature that the Lager produced or developed. Steinberg spent decades avoiding Holocaust writing but recognized himself in Levi's rendition when a friend, many years after, persuaded him to read If This Is A Man. Speak You Also is Steinberg's story, the book he was unable to write until fifty years after the events recorded in it, and a book that was prompted at least in part by Levi's characterization of him. It is not clear that the two men ever wrote or spoke to each other after the war. Reviewing Steinberg's book for the New York Times in October 2000, Martin Arnold cites Steinberg's editor's uncertainty on this matter: Riva Hocherman said "that Steinberg's family believes that finally there was correspondence between Levi and Steinberg. Either the family could not find it or has declined to make it public."(4)
Whether or not Steinberg and Levi did in fact enter into personal dialogue, the public domain includes only these two texts published some forty years apart and dealing with their parallel experiences of the Holocaust and their time together at Auschwitz. Myram Anissimov compares Steinberg's original, French text, Chronique d'ailleurs, with Levi's If This Is a Man both for corroboration of particular incidents and to demonstrate the differences between their responses.(5) However, I would like to bring these two texts more precisely into conversation with each other. Their relationship...