During his initiation into what one survivor labeled the “Holocaust Kingdom”¹ and others would describe as the “Anus Mundi,”² the young and naïve Auschwitz prisoner Primo Levi reached outside a window for an icicle to quench his thirst. A guard patrolling outside rudely slapped it away, prompting Primo to ask, “Warum?” Why? The reply was, “Hier ist kein warum.” Here there is no why. In Levi’s words: “The explanation is repugnant but simple: in this place everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons, but because the camp has been created for that purpose.”³

Indeed, more than sixty years later, the...

Primo Levi’s corpus of writings has become an important part of a larger discussion in trauma, emotion, guilt, and shame theories. Because he is the Holocaust survivor who most articulately, poignantly, and openly discusses his own experiences during the Holocaust and his own relationship to survivor guilt and shame, many have used his writings to promote their own interpretations of these theories. Ruth Leys has outlined recent trends in these fields in her 2007 bookFrom Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After. As the title suggests, this book claims that the past twenty years has seen a change from a...

After World War II, which wreaked havoc on a Europe still in shock and bleeding from the great war before it, a distrust and rejection of “historicism”—skepticism toward any abstract, imposing generalization about the character and trajectory of society and history except in defense of individual liberty and personal responsibility—sank deep intoWestern thought.¹ Intellectuals in Europe and America professed a loss of faith in formulaic, allembracing theories; they sensed danger in the sort of anonymous, collective identification that had guided the philosophy of Georg Hegel.² This zeal for individual matters and wariness of grandiose doctrines liable to demonize...

Any appreciative reading of Primo Levi’sThe Reawakeningis experienced, at least in part, as an avid cheering on of Levi and his assorted companions as they wend their way homeward to Italy (via Russia) in a circuitous meandering that is somewhat reminiscent of a picaresque adventure. Indeed, to read of his safe arrival in Turin fills one with a special satisfaction born of the sense that justice is sometimes permitted to prevail against even the worst of odds. ButThe Reawakeningdoes not end there, as is well known. It ends with a dream, or rather “a dream within...

Suicide brings on many changes. A life ends abruptly and the suicide is interpreted differently depending on circumstances and opinion. Sometimes it is seen as profoundly irrational, absurd and tragic, other times, as a heroic last act of an individual taking action to determine their fate. Often we aestheticize another’s suicide with heroism or capitulations. But no matter how we view suicide, a person’s death necessarily becomes the capstone that “backshadows” the entire existence of the deceased.

It comes as no surprise that suicide among Holocaust survivors is high. A few of the most recognizable figures are Bruno Bettelheim, Paul...

In a wide-ranging, polemical lecture in Turin in 1979, Primo Levi discussed the roots and variations of racial prejudice in history, finding early traces of the phenomenon even in the seemingly innocuous biblical verse in the Canticle of Canticles, “Nigra sum sed formosa” (I am black but beautiful). Levi’s objection was to the use of the conjunction “but” rather than the more neutral “and,” something he judged to be “an important clue” to a racist frame of mind.¹ He agreed that certain civilizations, such as the Roman, seemed to have been free of racism, but asserted that the phenomenon had...

Primo Levi stresses and even exaggerates the importance of “hybridity” in his works and in his authorial persona.¹ He tells his readers more than once that he was both an Italian and a Jew, both a chemist and a man of letters who was formed intellectually by scientific texts and humanistic ones, too. Examples of both kinds of writing share the pages ofThe Search for Roots, his personal anthology of favorite passages by favorite authors.² Thinly veiled as the narrator ofThe Monkey’s Wrench, Levi describes himself as a sort of Tiresias, the male seer who according to Greek...

Published in 1982,Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?) is Primo Levi’s first novel proper. Perhaps Primo Levi so regretted not fully living life as an Italian Jewish partisan that he re-created his lost dream through its pages, and had his partisan brigade not been captured, perhaps Levi’s underground fighting might have continued until the end of the war.If Not Now, When?thus might reflect Levi’s need to explore that sought-after life as a partisan, which he had been denied after only three months of activity.¹ Did Levi writeIf Not Now, When?as a mental antidote...

This essay focuses on three extraliterary facets of Primo Levi: his public associations with Auschwitz and Holocaust commemoration, his leadership role in the Jewish community of Turin, and his contribution to the intellectual debates over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many of Levi’s nonliterary pronouncements appeared in low-circulation publications, on Italian radio and television, in unexpected venues or were about subjects—like the crisis in the Middle East—with which Levi is not usually associated. A review of these facets sheds light on the man that was Primo Levi and also on the literary projects that occupied him at the same time....

It has already been shown that Primo Levi’s science-fiction stories are a kind of modernmidrashim.¹ In the Jewish tradition, this term refers to an exercise of pedagogical hermeneutics that creates imaginary stories and dialogues about biblical figures and that intentionally forces the original texts or interprets the silence—the “not said”—of the tales with the goal of deducing a moral teaching, a psychological detail, adavar acher(that is, a new interpretation) of the text or figure to which themidrashrefers. These stories use the science-fiction register to exorcise the fear generated by a technological world that...

Any reader of Primo Levi’s work will be struck by its degree of sensory detail: the reader is provided with precise information about the appearance, sound, scent, taste, and feel of people and objects. The most obvious explanation for Levi’s attention to such sensorial aspects has been cited by many a critic: Levi, it would seem, was blessed with a special—scientific, even—“observer’s eye.”

Today, the distance in time since the work was first published and the effect Levi’s writing continues to have on his readers twenty years after his death can offer new insights into the functioning of...

At first glance, Primo Levi’sLilìtappears to be a loosely connected collection of stories divided into three unequal parts. The first section contains autobiographical material from Auschwitz and descriptions of other Shoah victims that Levi discovered in literature. The next two sections are a hodgepodge of fictional stories that range from fantasy tales and science fiction to musings on literature and stories about apparently everyday people. The tendency to view these stories as merely a heterogeneous assembly of material is reinforced by the fact that the tales themselves were written at different times and often published in newspapers such...

Today, it is imperative that reception history be put in the context of a reception ethics.¹ The old historicist regimen regulating our relation to the past no longer is adequate to guide us in comprehending our historical situation and moral universe. In a previous paper, “Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben, and the New Ethics of Reading,” presented at the first Hofstra Conference on Levi and published inThe Legacy of Primo Levi, I concluded that we need to develop a new reading model to account for the way the unprecedented event called the Holocaust has changed our relation not only to...

In the last chapter ofThe Periodic Table, entitled “Carbon,” Primo Levi traces the itinerary of an atom of carbon as it moves from limestone to air to leaf. The energy of the carbon eventually emerges in the hand of the writer as he places the last dot of the essay upon the piece of paper, thus concluding the text:

This cell belongs to a brain, and it is my brain, the brain of themethat is writing; and the cell in question, and within it the atom in question, is in charge of my writing, in a gigantic...

Pro Archia, Cicero’s important speech urging Roman citizenship for a Greek poet, famously defends poetry because it is one of the arts that “civilize and humanize men.” He argues that literature provides important models of virtue for men of action, exemplary language for speeches by lawyers and politicians, and, perhaps most important, spiritual “food” for youth, “delight” for old age, comfort in adversity, and “companionship by night and in travel.” When, in 1333, Francesco Petrarca, known to readers in English as Petrarch, discovered the speech among a group of manuscripts in Liege, his translation and publication of it reinvigorated the...

For Primo Levi, to communicate was of the utmost importance. In Auschwitz he quickly learned that to communicate increased one’s slim chances of survival, and as a man of science, whose inclination it was to observe with patience, to analyze, and to understand, he was able to absorb and then to communicate the Shoah as a didactic as well as a personal experience.

In both his full-length books and his essays, both related and not related to the camp experience, Levi’s style is consistently sober, lean, and reflective of a mind guided by reason and civility. He is clear, dispassionate,...

On April 11 , 1987, more than forty years after his rescue from Auschwitz, Primo Levi fell to his death in the block of flats where he lived in Turin. The authorities pronounced a verdict of suicide. Levi had pitched himself three flights down the stairwell. Not since Pasolini was found murdered on the outskirts of Rome had there been such clamorous coverage in Italy of a writer’s death. “Italy Mourns the Maestro,” ran a representative frontpage headline.

Twenty years on, it remains hard for friends and admirers of Levi to reconcile the calm reasonableness of his literary intention—to...

Although Primo Levi is known for his writings about the Holocaust and for the autobiographical bookThe Periodic Table, he also wrote poems, stories, essays, and reviews. He began writing poems and stories when he returned from Auschwitz, even as he was writing about his experiences there, and he continued to write throughout his life. Of his stories, Levi once said in a letter to his publisher, “I wrote them mostly straight off, trying to give narrative form to a pointlike intuition.” The stories convey that “point” or intuition—an emotion, a moment, a thought—in a few concise pages....

The heuristic value of Primo Levi’s approach to living and writing is evident by the different ways scholars in various disciplines are using his writings. Increasingly, the study of Primo Levi is not only the purview of literary critics and historians. Through an exploration of Levi’s work, some psychologists, philosophers, and chemists are starting to gain new insights in their own fields of study. The ready availability of Levi’s works in English, and the enormous scholarly attention given to his life and work by English language scholars contributes to what appears to be a worldwide “Levi phenomenon” whereby Levi speaks...