"If Not Now, When?" Director: Bille August Co-production: Belgium- France - Italy Writer: Greg Latter Genre: Journey - Drama

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Book Synopsis

Finding himself behind German lines in July 1943, Russian Jew Mendel heads west, meets up with other partisans, and eventually joins a Jewish partisan band led by the violin-playing Gedaleh. With their families killed and their home communities destroyed, most of them have nothing left but to fight — for survival, honor, revenge, and, where they can, against German supply lines and camps. Their journey takes them across Byelorussia and Poland, into conquered Germany, and eventually to Italy.

If Not Now, When? is rooted in historical events and draws on Levi's own experiences a displaced person after the war, and stories of other partisans. It gives us a vivid feel for the broad spaces and the marshes and forests, the scattered skirmishes of a spread-out war, and the uneasy relationships between civilians and different partisan groups, with trade and exchange persisting even in desperate conditions.

Levi is a novelist, however, not a historian. It is individuals who are at the core of his work — Mendel first and foremost, but others are also given substance — and their relationships as they seek companionship, romance and fleeting happiness. Some struggle with doubt and despair, and in Mendel's more ruminative moments we see the philosophical quandary facing those who have lost everything and must find new goals, new purposes. But this doesn't dominate the story. If Not Now, When? exhibits Levi's familiar restraint, his disdain for the flamboyant or dramatized, but it is a fast-moving novel, a simple but powerful story of human endurance and struggle in a hostile world.


Summary & Notes

Novel by Primo Levi, translated by William Weaver.
Summary and Story Notes: Michael Barlow

If Not Now, When? is a work of narrative imagination, drawing upon the stories Levi heard, during the war and after, of Jewish partisans who fought and struggled against all odds not just to survive, but to make a difference.

In telling an epic, proudly episodic tale of how disparate men and women can move from absolute isolation through unimaginable hardship into forming a vital and supportive community, Levi creates a unique mythology. It is a sort of Twentieth Century Odyssey -- true to the chaos of Russia, Poland, Germany and Italy between 1943 and 1945, but also eerily timeless.

Many of the scenes have the feel of ancient chronicles or post-apocalyptic science fiction. The book is about the evils of the German war, but it is also a parable about what it takes anywhere, anytime to do more than survive in a world that no longer makes sense. Who can you trust? When do you act? When do you move on? The answer is in the song they sing and the adage that gives the book its title. You take action. If Not Now, When?

Levi’s novel is also -- and this is core to the movie to be made from this material -- an adventure story. In the midst of the bleakest despair, lost in ravaged landscape, men and women who are heroes, even though they are far from perfect, come together and form a new and effective family. In all the darkness, the overriding message of the book is one of hope. That hope is not rooted in the abstract; it is part and parcel of taking action. The characters we come to care about grow richer and deeper and more complex as they transform into a band of adventurers.

There is a whole range of indelible characters, some of whom -- like the heroic Jewish female Partisan pilot Pollina, the sophisticated and beautiful camp survivor Francine and the ambiguously curious Captain Smirnov – enter the story and leave in a matter of pages. One man, however, holds the whole story together. Mendel the watchmender from the lost village of Strelka stands at the heart of the journey. He is an extraordinarily conflicted character, philosophic and impulsive at turns. Mendel is by his very nature always brave, but when Leonid accuses of him wanting to be a hero, that is really not the truth about the man.

Rather Mendel is a man with a lost dream, a life shattered, who instead of mourning, constantly seeks a future that is hard to believe in. Mendel seems to wander but actually, he is always seeking, always moving forward, even if he himself cannot see the path.

His first companion Leonid doesn’t survive the journey. His death comes suddenly and sharply, but given the essence of his character, it is almost inevitable. Leonid wants too much, expects too much, without being able to give enough. His dark moods provide Mendel with perfect counterpoint. His aching hidden sense of never having had true roots is also a counterbalance to Mendel indestructible sense of self.

Perhaps the most charismatic character is the partisan leader Gedaleh, the trickster/warrior/musician, part child, part strategic genius, a life-force embodied, the man who keeps things together in crisis. Gedaleh can deal with anything, and then know --instinctively -- just when to move on. He is the spirit of his people, unruly and irrepressible, full of passionate inspiration.

Along with the fascinating women in the band (especially Line, Black Rokhele and White Rokhele) these three men will be central to a film adaptation. They are our anchors amid the constant waves of change that batter the band of survivors. Pavel, the master actor and Piotr, the gentile true believer Communist who finds new hope with exiled Jews, are vital in support. The
“Gedalists” are even a bit like Robin Hood’s outlaws of Sherwood Forest or Kurosawa’s Samurai – outcasts of disparate skills who incorporate a greater unit, but never lose their individuality. Gedaleh leads by letting his people discover who they truly are.

In his novel, Levi organizes the story in twelve chronological chapters, each covering a period of a few months. It is possible that the emphasis on dates stands in the way of dramatizing a world where most all the characters are so distant from the history that dictates their fate. There are moments in the story, like the discovery of the true end of the War in Europe, where historical significance comes as delayed surprise -- which feels exactly right. As Dov tells Mendel at a crucial moment: “We are fighting for three lines in the history books.”

Much of the screenwriter’s job in making the movie really flow will lie in cutting scenes that could be the centerpiece of other movies. It seems important to get to Gedeleh and his crew earlier, probably after the first thirty minutes of the movie. One conventional solution – a narration where Mendel tells up of his journey -- might be a mistake because it would mean that we know that Mendel survives. In the best version of this movie, no one’s survival can be taken for granted.

Instead of concentrating on the chronology the characters cannot know inside the tale, it might be better to let a sense of movement through space and time. (Bertolucci’s 1900 as an example.) A great deal of territory can be covered with speed and authority if you do it with a sense of flow and rhythm, and (as in films like LORD OF THE RINGS) you rely on landscape and production design to carry the sense of an epic journey.

Musical support can bolster the sense of epic, and the filmmaker fortunate enough to take on this material should look at Rossellini’s neorealist masterpieces, because he visually understood how to portray the group in the individual, the individual in the group.

This book is a bracing challenge to a filmmaker, an opportunity to tell an eternal story in a fresh and vital way, deeply visual and deeply emotional.
If Not Now, When? requires a strong and vibrant film approach, one that distill the central narrative of the book and keeps the adventure going, exploring rich character conflicts and moral issues at play: history in present tense.

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