Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (Jewish Lives)

by adminWorld War 2

Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (Jewish Lives)

Berel Lang

Language: English

Pages: 192

ISBN: 0300137230

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In 1943, twenty-four-year-old Primo Levi had just begun a career in chemistry when, after joining a partisan group, he was captured by the Italian Fascist Militia and deported to Auschwitz. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, he was one of fewer than 25 who survived the eleven months before the camp’s liberation. Upon returning to his native Turin, Levi resumed work as a chemist and was employed for thirty years by a company specializing in paints and other chemical coatings. Yet soon after his return to Turin, he also began writing—memoirs, essays, novels, short stories, poetry—and it is for this work that he has won international recognition. His first book, If This Is a Man, issued in 1947 after great difficulty in finding a publisher, remains a landmark document of the twentieth century.
 
Berel Lang's groundbreaking biography shines new light on Levi’s role as a major intellectual and literary figure—an important Holocaust writer and witness but also an innovative moral thinker in whom his two roles as chemist and writer converged, providing the “matter” of his life. Levi’s writing combined a scientist’s attentiveness to structure and detail, an ironic imagination that found in all nature an ingenuity at once inviting and evasive, and a powerful and passionate moral imagination. Lang’s approach provides a philosophically acute and nuanced analysis of Levi as thinker, witness, writer, and scientific detective.

The Last Battle: When U.S. and German Soldiers Joined Forces in the Waning Hours of World War II in Europe

All Clear (Oxford Time Travel, Book 4)

To Hope and Back: The Journey of the St. Louis (Holocaust Remembrance Series)

Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account

Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Conception of what he was and what he wanted to do is unmistakable. But in its origin and early history, this change was by his own estimate not an occupational transformation, certainly not a change in professions and not even the addition of a second one to the first. His student writings, as has been suggested, were for him a phase rather than the preface to a calling (“We were all writing poetry,” he remembered). Indeed, so far as Levi came to think of writing as a profession (that is, as his.

Elements informative about the reach of personal history has few if any predecessors or competitors in the literary or scientific or historical worlds. The Periodic Table is clearly a literary work, not one primarily of either science or history: literary not only in the sense that the narrative voice has a significant presence in the exposition (as it often does even in writing that purports to block it, a common feature of standard scientific writing) but that the voice is also a subject of the.

Holocaust has remained at once an exclusive and an exclusionary subject. To place Levi in this group would be to confront the difficulty of explaining Levi’s repeated insistence that notwithstanding the darkness he often portrayed—and his own private darkness into which he periodically fell—he considered himself basically an optimist. And that in his calling as a writer, the author he would choose as his literary father, to whom he “felt closest, almost like a son,” was Rabelais. (In lectures,.

Additional months in an assembly camp at Starya Dorogi, in the Soviet Union. September 15: P.L. sets out for Italy by train. October 19: P.L. reaches Corso Re Umberto 75. 1946 January 21: P.L. begins work as chemist at Duco Avigliana. 1947 Manuscript of If This Is a Man is submitted to Einaudi and rejected. September 8: P.L. marries Lucia Morpurgo in civil and Jewish ceremonies. October 11: If This Is a Man is published in Turin by De Silva Press. 1948 P.L. begins work as chemist at.

Been made. So, for example, in the introduction to the 1997 Einaudi edition of Levi’s collected works, Daniele Del Giudice cites in a concluding section Claude Lévi-Strauss’s characterization of Levi as a “great ethnographer”—but the plausible grounds for that characterization seem lost even in the great variety of traditional literary categories. Chapter 4. The Jewish Question 1. Levi, The Search for Roots, p. 147. 2. Levi, interview with Germaine Greer (1985), in The Voice of Memory:.

Download sample

Download