Primo Levi Biography and List of Works

Italian-Jewish writer and chemist, who gained fame with his autobiographical story, SE QUESTO È UN UOMO (If This is a Man, 1947), of survival in Nazi concentration camps. Levi devoted the last forty years of his life attempting to deal with the fact that he was not killed in Auschwitz. "The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died." Levi also published poetry, science fiction, essays, and short stories.

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
(from 'Shemá' in Collected Poems)

Levi was born in Turin. Just before the Fascist racial law of 1938 forbade Jews access to academic status, Levi started his chemistry studies at the University of Turin. He graduated first in his class in 1941, the year after Italy had entered World War II as an ally of Germany. During the war Levi wrote for the resistance magazine Giustizia e Libertà. When he tried to contact a partisan group in the north of Italy, he was captured in December 1943, and interned in a transit camp in Fòssoli. Two months later he was deported to the camp of Moniwitz-Auschwitz. From the transport of 650 people, fifteen men and nine women survived. Liberated by the Soviets in January 1945, Levi returned to Turin, after an eight-month odyssey. Levi took up his work as a chemist, living in a stately old building that his family had occupied for three generations. In 1961 Levi became the general manager of a factory producing paints. He retired in 1977 to become a full-time writer.

Levi wrote his prison recollections in the form of a memoir, Se questo è un uomo. It was reprinted in an enlarged edition ten years later. The book sold over half a million copies in Italy, was translated into eight languages and adapted for the theatre and radio. It documented how the camp deprived each individual of his and her identity and dignity, and brought about annihilation of the internees. Levi's alert moral consciousness blocked any hate for the oppressors, in spite of the brutality to which he was subjected. Part of the book's impact was based on Levi's objectivity - he described the terrible events with the detached view of an observing scientist. Its sequel, LA TREGUA (1963), portrayed Levi's and his companion's wanderings through the devastated Eastern Europe.

"It is not at all an idle matter trying to define what a human being is."

Among Levi's other works is IL SISTEMA PERIODICO (The Periodic Table, 1975). The work uses the Russian chemist Mendeleyev's periodical table of elements as the base of autobiographical meditations, each named after a chemical element. SE NON ORA, QUANDO? (1989) Combined the emergence of Jewish consciousness and pride with the historical documentation of action taken on the Russian front by partisan Jewish groups against retreating Nazi forces.

"Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting."

Levi died in Turin on April 11, 1987. His death was apparently a suicide - in his home building Levi hurled himself down the central stairwell. The last work he completed was the essay collection I SOMMERSI E I SALVATI (1986). In it Levi made one last attempt to clarify his belief in the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust, while not separating it from the horrors in Cambodia or South Africa. The central question is according to Levi, how much of the camp is alive and well in our time, and how long it will remain in our memories.

For further reading: Primo Levi, Tragedy of an Optimist by Myriam Anissimov (1999); Understanding Primo Levi by Nicholas Patruno (1995); Tra Giobbe e i buchi veri by Vania De Luca (1991); At an Uncertain Hour: Primo Levi's War Against Oblivion by Anthony Rudolf (1990); A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz by Risa Sodi (1990); Conversations with Primo Levi by Ferdinando Camon (1989); An Artifical Wilderness by Sven Birkerts (1987); Invito alla lettura di Primo Levi by Fiora Vincenti (1973)

SE QUESTO È UN UOMO, (1947)