Primo Levi
Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and Holocaust survivor, renowned for his poignant writings that chronicle the horrors of his experiences during World War II. Born in Turin in 1919 to secular, middle-class parents, Levi pursued a successful academic career in chemistry, graduating from the University of Turin in 1941. His life took a tragic turn when he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where he endured a year of extreme dehumanization and suffering. Levi's survival, attributed to his skills as a chemist and sheer willpower, fueled his commitment to bear witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust.
His seminal work, *If This Is a Man*, published in 1947, explores themes of humanity amidst inhumanity, detailing not just the horrors of concentration camps but also the small acts of kindness that helped him retain his identity. Levi continued to write extensively, with notable works including *The Periodic Table*, a collection of autobiographical reflections, and *The Reawakening*, which recounts his liberation and journey home. His writings, characterized by scientific clarity and philosophical insight, have earned him lasting recognition and respect as a vital chronicler of the Holocaust. Despite his literary success, Levi struggled with the weight of his experiences, ultimately taking his own life in 1987. Today, he is celebrated not only as a survivor but also as a voice of moral clarity and human resilience in the face of overwhelming darkness.
Primo Levi
Italian author and chemist
- Born: July 31, 1919
- Birthplace: Turin, Italy
- Died: April 11, 1987
- Place of death: Turin, Italy
Biography
Primo Levi, an Italian survivor of the Holocaust, is among the most significant of its chroniclers. Beyond his testifying of mass dehumanization, murder, and liberation, Levi achieved in his writings a scientific clarity and a serene philosophical insight which—late in his life—won for him a distinguished international group of admirers. Except for the enforced separation caused by World War II, Levi always lived in the same apartment where he was born to secular middle-class Jewish parents in Turin, Italy.
After completing a classical high school education, Levi enrolled at the University of Turin, from which, despite Benito Mussolini’s anti-Jewish laws, he graduated, July, 1941, with highest honors in chemistry. Levi was attracted to physics and chemistry because he found verifiable scientific truth to be a noble “antidote” to the “stench” of lying Fascist dogmas. After graduation, with considerable difficulty because of the racial laws, he found employment—first as an analyst of rock residue from a mine and then as a researcher for a diabetes cure at a pharmaceutical factory in Milan.
In the fall of 1943, the Fascist government having collapsed, Italy declared war on Germany. Levi joined a small partisan unit to fight the Germans and Italian Fascists who still occupied northern Italy. His group of outnumbered amateurs was betrayed and captured by Fascists on December 13, 1943. When he identified himself as a Jew to his interrogators, “partly out of an irrational digging in of pride,” he was transferred to German custody. In February, 1944, he was among 650 Italian Jews sent in sealed railway freight cars to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. Only about twenty of them returned home. Because he was judged physically fit for work and because his training as a chemist seemed useful to the camp authorities, Levi was able to survive for a year in that systematic hell. Falling ill of scarlet fever in January, 1945, he was left to die in the infirmary by the panicky Germans who led the “healthy” prisoners on a march through the snows toward Germany. Levi, however, lived for the ten days it took the advancing Russians to arrive at the camp. By an unusually roundabout railway journey, lasting from mid-June to mid-October, 1945, he traveled through Russia, Romania, Hungary, and Austria, finally returning to Turin to find his home still standing and his family alive. He found work as a chemist in a paint factory, where he eventually became the manager.
Levi’s memories burned so intensely within him that within a few months of his return he completed If This Is a Man. In fact, his need to bear witness was so strong that he had begun scribbling notes while in the rubber factory laboratory at Auschwitz, but he had to throw them away since discovery would have meant death. The manuscript was accepted by a small publishing house which printed only about two thousand copies in 1947 before its business failed. In 1958, when a major publisher in Turin decided to republish the book, it attracted international acclaim. Continually in print since 1958, If This Is a Man has been translated into at least eight languages. Its title clearly indicates its underlying theme and the theme of much of Levi’s later work: the struggle to retain one’s civilizing humanity under the most dehumanizing conditions. This contest is shown in his description of Lorenzo, an Italian civilian bricklayer at Auschwitz who daily brought food to Levi at great risk, without any thought of reward, out of his own natural goodness. “Thanks to Lorenzo, I managed not to forget that I myself was a man,” wrote Levi.
The Reawakening, Levi’s second memoir, tells the story of his liberation by the Russians and his lengthy odyssey homeward. It was written fourteen years after If This Is a Man. Levi has said that it is a “more literary” work with many “strange, exotic, cheerful episodes.” Unlike the earlier book, a mood of mourning and despair appears only in its opening and closing passages. The Periodic Table is mainly a collection of autobiographical reflections. The titles of the twenty-one chapters are taken from Dmitry Mendeleyev’s “Periodic Table of the Elements,” with a character or event in each chapter evoking a reference to one of the elements.
A completely different mood is created in The Monkey’s Wrench. Labeled a novel, it is really a collection of tales unified by the adventurous personality of their primary narrator, Libertini Faussone. Faussone is a highly skilled rigger of cables for complex construction projects around the world. As a manual laborer, he works with his hands and heart, just as Levi, the chemist and secondary narrator, works with his head. To Faussone, an irrepressible fun-loving spirit, the unity of life and work are essential for happiness. Levi approvingly concurs: “Loving your work . . . represents the best, most concrete approximation of happiness on earth.”
Retired from his position at the Turin paint factory in 1977, Levi turned back to his Auschwitz memories for his first “full-time” literary project. Moments of Reprieve recalls those “few, the different, the ones in whom . . . I had recognized the will and capacity to react.” In fifteen vignettes he focuses on fifteen who survived—at least briefly—as individuals, “even if the virtue that allows them to survive and makes them unique is not always one approved of by common morality.” Because of their spirit, these men, some of whom had been mentioned in Levi’s earlier memoirs, provide “moments of reprieve, in which the compressed identity can reacquire for a moment its lineaments.”
Throughout the postwar years, Levi was also writing short poems, usually of somber mood, exploring the meaning of suffering to human identity. Two volumes of essays were published in the mid-1980s, The Drowned and the Saved and Other People’s Trades. They are mainly meditations, growing out of his wartime experiences, about the nature of humanity.
Levi married Lucia Morpurgo, a teacher, in 1947; they reared a daughter, Lisa, and a son, Lorenzo, named for the man who had risked his life for Levi at Auschwitz. Levi committed suicide on April 11, 1987, in the home where he was born. He was ranked among Italy’s most distinguished writers and received some of its highest literary awards.
In several of his books Levi compares himself to the Ancient Mariner, who felt compelled to retell constantly his ghastly tale. Through his clarity and objectivity—assuming the “calm, sober language of the witness,” even when dealing with genocide—Levi has helped many to become whole again.
Author Works
Long Fiction:
La chiave a stella, 1978 (The Monkey’s Wrench, 1986)
Se non ora, quando?, 1982 (If Not Now, When?, 1985)
Short Fiction:
Storie naturali, 1966
Vizio di forma, 1971
Lilit e altri racconti, 1981
Moments of Reprieve, 1986
The Sixth Day, and Other Tales, 1990 (translation of Storie naturali and Vizio di forma)
L’ultimo Natale di guerra, 2000
A Tranquil Star: Unpublished Stories of Primo Levi, 2007
Poetry:
L’osteria di Brema, 1975
Shema: Collected Poems, 1976
Ad ora incerta, 1984 (Collected Poems, 1988)
Nonfiction:
Se questo è un uomo, 1947 (memoir; If This Is a Man, 1959; revised as Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, 1961)
La tregua, 1963 (memoir; The Reawakening, 1965)
Il sistema periodico, 1975 (memoir; The Periodic Table, 1984)
La ricerca della radici, 1981 (The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, 2001)
I sommersi e i salvati, 1986 (The Drowned and the Saved, 1988)
L’altrui mestiere, 1985 (Other People’s Trades, 1989)
Conversazioni e interviste: 1963–1987, 1997 (The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961–1987, 2001)
The Black Hole of Auschwitz, 2005
Auschwitz Report, 2006 (with Leonardo de Benedetti)
Miscellaneous:
The Mirror Maker, 1989 (stories and essays)
Bibliography
Anissimov, Myriam. Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist. Translated by Steve Cox. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1999. An extensive study on Levi. Includes bibliography and index.
Cicioni, Mirna. Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge. Oxford, England: Berg, 1995. This is a good general introduction to Levi’s work. Because of Levi’s family’s reluctance to release biographical information about the writer, Cicioni has few biographical details to work with, but she does a fine job of outlining his life. An inclusive bibliography lists primary and secondary materials written in English as well as foreign-language publications.
Gordon, Robert S. C. Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Addresses Levi’s transition from survivor to philosopher and ethicist. Bibliography and index.
Homer, Frederic D. Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Addresses Levi’s philosophy, social and political views, and his place in Holocaust history. Includes bibliography and index.
Langer, Lawrence. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975. Contains a discussion of Levi in the context of Holocaust literature, by one of the subject’s principal authorities.
Magavern, Sam. Primo Levi’s Universe: A Writer’s Journey. New York: Macmillan, 2009. The details of Levi’s personal life are divulged here, including his imprisonment in Auschwitz, his marriage, his love affairs, and his depression. This multi-faceted portrait reveals how his writing and his personal life were inseparable.
Patruno, Nicholas. Understanding Primo Levi. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995. A good, introductory full-length study. Includes biographical and critical analysis, bibliography, and index.
Rudolf, Anthony. At an Uncertain Hour: Primo Levi’s War Against Oblivion. Berkeley, Calif.: The Menard Press, 1990. This brief (fifty-six-page) homage to Levi by one of his publishers recycles some of Rudolf’s earlier reviews and articles on Levi and includes a short bibliography.
Sodi, Risa B. A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. Sodi’s book is an academic exercise detailing the influence of Dante on Levi’s If This Is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved. Sodi makes liberal use of interviews in which Levi addresses the ethical concerns of other contemporary figures such as Sigmund Freud and Rudolf Hess.
Tarrow, Susan R., ed. Reason and Light: Essays on Primo Levi. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Contains several essays on Levi’s fiction and on his relationship to the Holocaust and its literature.
Thomson, Ian. Primo Levi: A Life. New York: Holt, 2003. A close examination of Levi, largely achieved through interviews with contemporaries of Levi. Valuable for its historical sensitivity.