Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index

Primo Levi

Primo Levi (31st July 1919 - 11th April 1987) was an Italian author of memoirs, short stories, poems and novels. He is best known for his writings about the Nazi Holocaust, in particular his accounts of the year he spent as a prisoner at Auschwitz.

Table of contents
1 Biography
2 Bibliography
3 External Links

Biography

Levi was born in Turin in 1919 into a liberal Jewish family. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Turin in 1941.

In 1943 he and a number of comrades took to the countryside and attempted to join the Italian anti-Fascist resistance. Completely untrained for such a venture, he was arrested as a partisan by the occupying German army. When it was discovered that he was Jewish, he was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and spent ten months there before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his "shipment", Levi was one of the 20 who left the camps alive.

On returning to Italy, Levi became an industrial chemist at the SIVA chemical factory in Turin. He soon started to write about his experiences in the camp and in his subsequent return home through Eastern Europe in what would become his two classic memoirs, If This Is a Man and The Truce (republished in the US as Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening).

He also wrote two other highly praised memoirs, Moments of Reprieve and The Periodic Table. The first of these deals with characters he observed during imprisonment, while the latter is a collection of episodes from his life, each related in some way to one of the chemical elements. The ambitious novel If Not Now, When?, which tells the story of a band of Jewish WWII partisans wandering through Russia and Poland, won the distinguished Viareggio and Campiello prizes when it was published in Italy, and made Levi's name internationally known.

His best-known short stories are found in The Monkey's Wrench (1978), a collection of stories about work and workers told by a narrator resembling Levi himself.

Levi retired from his position as manager of SIVA in 1977 to devote himself full-time to writing. The most important of his later works was his final book, The Drowned and the Saved, an analysis of the Holocaust in which Levi explained that though he did not hate the German people for what had happened, nor had he forgiven them.

He committed suicide on 11th April, 1987.

Bibliography

Memoirs and essays

Novel

Short stories

Other works translated into English include:

At least three biographies of Primo Levi in English are now in print:

External Links