The Death Of Levi

The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew. It recounts, in clear, precise, unfailingly beautiful prose, the story of the Piedmontese Jewish community from which Levi came, of his years as a student and young chemist at the inception of the Second World War, and of his investigations into the nature of the material world. As such, it provides crucial links and backgrounds, both personal and intellectual, in the tremendous project of remembrance that is Levi’s gift to posterity. But far from being a prologue to his experience of the Holocaust, Levi’s masterpiece represents his most impassioned response to the events that engulfed him. The Periodic Table celebrates the pleasures of love and friendship and the search for meaning, and stands as a monument to those things in us that are capable of resisting and enduring in the face of tyranny.

2015 Washington Post Notable Book The Complete Works of Primo Levi, which includes seminal works like If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table, finally gathers all fourteen of Levi’s books—memoirs, essays, poetry, commentary, and fiction—into three slipcased volumes. Primo Levi, the Italian-born chemist once described by Philip Roth as that “quicksilver little woodland creature enlivened by the forest’s most astute intelligence,” has largely been considered a heroic figure in the annals of twentieth-century literature for If This Is a Man, his haunting account of Auschwitz. Yet Levi’s body of work extends considerably beyond his experience as a survivor. Now, the transformation of Levi from Holocaust memoirist to one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers culminates in this publication of The Complete Works of Primo Levi. This magisterial collection finally gathers all of Levi’s fourteen books—memoirs, essays, poetry, and fiction—into three slip-cased volumes. Thirteen of the books feature new translations, and the other is newly revised by the original translator. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison introduces Levi’s writing as a “triumph of human identity and worth over the pathology of human destruction.” The appearance of this historic publication will occasion a major reappraisal of “one of the most valuable writers of our time” (Alfred Kazin). The Complete Works of Primo Levi features all new translations of: The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved, The Truce, Natural Histories, Flaw of Form, The Wrench, Lilith, Other People’s Trades, and If Not Now, When?—as well as all of Levi’s poems, essays, and other nonfiction work, some of which have never appeared before in English.

In his final book before his death, Primo Levi returns once more to his time at Auschwitz in a moving meditation on memory, resiliency, and the struggle to comprehend unimaginable tragedy. Drawing on history, philosophy, and his own personal experiences, Levi asks if we have already begun to forget about the Holocaust. His last book before his death, Levi returns to the subject that would define his reputation as a writer and a witness. Levi breaks his book into eight essays, ranging from topics like the unreliability of memory to how violence twists both the victim and the victimizer. He shares how difficult it is for him to tell his experiences with his children and friends. He also debunks the myth that most of the Germans were in the dark about the Final Solution or that Jews never attempted to escape the camps. As the Holocaust recedes into the past and fewer and fewer survivors are left to tell their stories, The Drowned and the Saved is a vital first-person testament. Along with Elie Wiesel and Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi is remembered as one of the most powerful and perceptive writers on the Holocaust and the Jewish experience during World War II. This is an essential book both for students and literary readers. Reading Primo Levi is a lesson in the resiliency of the human spirit.

A work by the Italian-Jewish writer, Primo Levi. It describes his arrest as a member of the Italian anti-fascist resistance during the Second World War, and his incarceration in the Auschwitz concentration camp from February 1944 until the camp was liberated on 27 January 1945.

Two millennia ago, a thief named Levi finds himself crucified alongside his companion and a holy man. As he endures the agonizing crucifixion, he resigns himself to the imminent embrace of death. Yet, the unknown realm beyond life remains a mystery he’s unprepared for. Venture into the afterlife with Levi as he embarks on an astonishing odyssey through the fabric of space and time, venturing into dimensions attainable only in a bodiless existence. Unravel the enigmatic journey of Levi in a world where death is just the beginning.

Primo Levi has been identified in the public mind as the supreme witness to the barbarism that was the Nazi Holocaust but he was ambivalent about having that role thrust upon him. He also wished to be judged as a writer who, in addition to the autobiographical works on his experiences in the death camps, wrote poetry, produced volumes of sci-fi stories, authored novels and contributed critical essays to newspapers on a range of topics and writers. No one has the right to ignore or downplay the 'testimony' Primo Levi offered, but it is time to examine the wider vision inherent in his work and to explore the tradition in which he operated. Levi was one of the great wisdom writers of his age, whose ethical authority, somewhat to his own embarrassment, was accepted in many fields. Several contributors to this collection of essays see him as a proponent of Enlightenment values, or as heir to a longer Humanist tradition. Even after enduring Auschwitz, he held fast to a notion of the dignity of the human person, and no man did more to re-establish, however quizzically, the secular basis for such beliefs. His overall standing as writer is the subject of this book.

Primo Levi (1919-1987) is one of Italy's most distinguished writers. A survivor of the Holocaust, his memoirs on the Nazi death camps (If This Is a Man and The Truce) are internationally recognized as among the most powerful and profound testimonies to have come out of the extermination of European Jewry. This book is the first comprehensive introduction to Levi and his writing for English-speaking readers. The author draws attention to the literary worth of Levi's entire output - not just the Holocaust testimonies for which he is primarily known - and situates his works in the context of Italian culture and society from the 1920s to the 1980s. A man with many identities - chemist, industrial manager and writer - he tried, through his writing, to build bridges between different cultures and fields of enquiry.

Motherhood, Fatherland and Primo Levi: The Hidden Groundwork of Agency in his Auschwitz Writings offers major new insights into the political dimensions of Levi’s thought by using those texts conventionally thought to be marginal to his oeuvre (i.e., his short works of science fiction and fantasy and his World War Two partisan novel) to deepen our understanding of the lessons he offered in his more well-known and celebrated texts, Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved. Typically cast as one of the most profound theorists of what human beings at their worst can do to one another, Levi appears in this book as (in addition) a theorist who affirms a politics of active and broad participation in republican institutions as an important means of achieving a fulfilled human life. This book reinterprets Levi’s political significance by bringing to bear two literatures that have been previously missing from scholarly considerations of Levi’s legacy: psychologically-informed analyses of how infantile and toddler experience of, and relationship to, a primary caretaker shape later perceptions of self and relationship and studies of Machiavelli’s variant of republican thought in which major emphasis is placed on founding institutions of civic participation that develop responsible political leaders and foster good citizenship. In the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring, which has given rise to people acting on their worst impulses (ethnic cleansing, genocide) as well as on their best (revolution, democratic constitutionalism), Levi’s legacy, considered more comprehensively, can be a valuable touchstone for understanding the democratic possibilities of a world undergoing rapid political change. Avoiding academic jargon and entanglement in hyper-specialized academic debates, Motherhood, Fatherland and Primo Levi offers that comprehensive understanding to scholars across many fields (Italian studies, political theory, cultural studies, women’s studies, Holocaust studies, history) as well as to general interest readers of a humanistic bent and citizens concerned to make sense of this revolutionary age.