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commonly called) Wechsler is an
affecting star of her own memoir. Her
dramatic story conveys both cinemati-
cally and personally that war is hell.
Wechsler and her family were inadver-
tently caught up in the civil war that
devastated Zaire, then called the
Congo, in the early 1960s.
Although they were occasionally
sheltered by extended family and a
number of her father's acquaintances
along the way, Wechsler and her four
siblings, who were accompanied (and
very often protected) by Wechsler's
stepmother and grandmother, were
mostly at the mercy of nature and
strangers.
It's a journey that Wechsler presents
as both traumatic and picaresque. Her
spare prose is subtly shaded with
observations on politics, family
dynamics and a young girl's poignant
musings on growing up.
Georgette's first visit to the United
States turns into a permanent stay. She
works for the Zaire mission at the
United Nations and meets Howell
Wechsler, a young American Jew who
has spent time in Zaire as a Peace
Corps volunteer. Their.Zairian con-
nection eventually gives way to a
Jewish one.
Like her wartime journey,
Georgette and Howell's spiritual pil-
grimage begins without a particular
destination in mind, yet it becomes a
necessary and even urgent trip. With
Georgette's encouragement, Howell
slowly embraces his Judaism, coming
to realize that he wants to bring up
the couple's two children as Jews. A
lapsed Catholic, Georgette is comfort-
able with the idea and by the time her
children formally convert to Judaism,
she also is well on her way to becom-
ing a Jew herself
By the Grace of God is a story
replete with all of the prerequisite
uniqueness and drama. But it falls
short. Wechsler is too superficial
about her attraction and subsequent
acceptance of Judaism. Her book is
only the outline of a distinctive
memoir, raising more curiosity than
it satisfies.
— Reviewed by Judith Bolton-Fasman
Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist
by Myriam Anissimov (The Overlook
Press; 452pp.; $3795)
In this first full-length posthumous
biography of Primo Levi's life,
Swiss journalist Myriam Anissimov
offers plausible speculation about
Levi's suicide in April of 1987.
However, what comes across in this
M 'RT. M AN•ISS I MON'
exhaustive biography is that Primo
Levi was not defeated by his experi-
ences at Auschwitz but by the before-
and-after experiences that framed his
time there.
After reading Primo Levi, first
published in France in 1996, a reader
may come away disappointed that
Anissimov mostly concentrates on
demonstrating that Levi's acute pow-
ers of observation stem in equal parts
from his humanity and his training as
a chemist. The young Primo Levi was
for the most part able to ignore Italy's
encroaching fascism by devoting him-
self to his doctoral studies at the uni-
versity in Turin.
Despite the ensuing racial laws,
Levi earned his degree and worked
until he was forced to flee into the
Piedmont Mountains. There he
joined a ragtag band of partisans until
he was captured and deported to
Auschwitz.
Although Levi was an agnostic
throughout his life, he consistently
said that the Holocaust had made him
a Jew. The yellow Star of David on his
prisoner uniform was permanently
grafted on his heart and he never
elected to remove the number tattooed
on his arm at Auschwitz.
Anissimov similarly closes the gap
between Levi's life as a career chemist
and a weekend writer. She establishes
that his clarity of vision was shaped by
a primal need to understand life in all
of its microscopic detail.
Yet after finishing this sprawling
biography, one does not come away
knowing that much more about the
enigmatic Primo Levi. Anissimov's
extensive research is largely confined
to superficial details such as Levi's shy-
ness with women, his love of the