A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Primo Michele Levi was a Jewish Italian chemist, Holocaust survivor and author of memoirs, short stories, poems, and novels. His works were greatly influenced by his imprisonment at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in Southern Poland. He was considered one of the foremost writers of concentration camp literature. He recounted with objective, scientific precision and detail the horrors of his year spent in Auschwitz, the infamous death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. His focus, in life and in literature, was to promote understanding through memory and testimony, to respond to the "greatest crime of the century" with intelligence and humanity. For the last forty years of his life Levi devoted himself to attempting to deal with the fact that he was not killed in Auschwitz. "The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died," he said. If This Is a Man (published in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz) has been described as one of the most important works of the twentieth century. Levi was born in the Crocetta in Turin on July 31, 1919 at Corso Re Umberto 75 into a liberal Jewish family. His grandmother Bimba was a baroness. She and her entire family had been made barons by Napoleon, because they had supported him economically. His father Cesare worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based. Levi's grandfather was an engineer, as was his father, Cesare Levi, who encouraged his son's interests in a wide variety of cultural pursuits, giving him access to a well furnished home library. The father-son relationship was complex in that Levi's introverted personality often contrasted with his father's more extroverted, exuberant nature. In any case, Levi recognized in his father the man responsible for his great interest in the arts, literature, and particularly the sciences. Levi’s mother Ester, known to everyone as Rina, was also well educated, having attended the Instituto Maria Letizia. She too was an avid reader, played the piano and spoke fluent French. In September 1930 he entered the Massimo d'Azeglio Royal Gymnasium a year ahead of normal entrance requirements. In class he was the youngest, the shortest and the cleverest as well as being the only Jew. His Jewish origins often set him apart from the other students, and he frequently found himself the victim of aggression, targeted also because of his slight physical constitution. In August 1932, following two years at the Talmud Torah school in Turin, he sang in synagogue for his Bar Mitzvah. In 1933, as was expected of all young Italian schoolboys, he joined the Avanguardisti movement for young Fascists. In July 1934 at the age of 14, he sat his exams for the Massimo d'Azeglio liceo classico, a Lyceum (sixth form) specialising in the classics and was admitted in the autumn. The school was noted for its well-known anti-Fascist teachers, amongst them Norberto Bobbio, and for a few months Cesare Pavese, also an anti-Fascist and later to become one of Italy's best-known novelists. Levi continued to be bullied during his time at the Lyceum although he was now in a class with six other Jews. On reading Concerning the Nature of Things by Sir William Bragg it was during this time that Levi decided that he wanted to be a chemist. He was an enthusiastic reader throughout his life. Two important influences on his later scientific works were Jack London and Jules Verne. During high school, in addition to the classics and Dante, for whom Levi had a passion, he read Mann, Flaubert, Hugo, Conrad, Kafka, and others. After his concentration camp experience, he found Mann to have been a sign of Germany's positive value, a reason to refrain from passing universal judgment on the German people. He also enjoyed North American writers and contemporary Italian narrative, particularly Alberto Moravia's Gli indifferenti (The Indifferent Ones) for its comment on the degradation of the Italian bourgeoisie during fascism. He studied chemistry at the University of Turin from 1939 to 1941. Although Italy was a Fascist country, and antisemitism took place, there was little real discrimination towards Jews in the 1930’s. Historically one of the most assimilated Jewish societies, the gentile Italians, up until the outbreak of hostilities, either ignored or subverted any racial laws which they saw as being imposed by the Germans. This all changed in July 1938 when the Fascist government introduced racial laws which, amongst other things, prohibited Jewish citizens from attending state schools. Jewish students who had begun their course of study were permitted to continue it, but new Jewish students were barred from entering university. It was therefore fortuitous that Levi had matriculated a year early, otherwise he would not have been permitted to take a degree. As a result, he had difficulty finding a supervisor for his thesis, but nevertheless graduated in 1941 with full marks and merit, having submitted a thesis in physics. His degree certificate bore the remark, "of Jewish race". During the war he wrote for the resistance magazine Giustizia e Libertà. In December 1941 Levi was approached and clandestinely offered a job at an asbestos mine at San Vittore. The project he was given was to extract nickel from the mine spoil, a challenge he accepted with pleasure. It was not lost on Levi that should he be successful he would be aiding the German war effort which was suffering nickel shortages in the production of armaments. The job required Levi to work under a false name with false papers. In March 1942 whilst he was working at the mine Levi’s father died. In June 1942, due to the deteriorating situation in Turin, Levi left the mine and went to work in Milan. He had been recruited through a fellow student at Turin University who was now working for the Swiss firm of A Wander Ltd on a project to extract an anti-diabetic from vegetable matter. He could take the job because the racial laws did not apply to Swiss companies. It soon became clear that the project had no chance of succeeding, but it was in no one's interest to say so. In September 1943, after the Italian government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio signed an armistice with the Allies, the former leader Benito Mussolini was rescued from imprisonment by the Germans and installed as head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy. The Italian resistance movement became increasingly active in the German-occupied zone. Levi and a number of comrades took to the foothills of the Alps and attempted to join the liberal "Giustizia e Libertà" partisan movement. Completely untrained for such a venture, he and his companions were quickly arrested by the fascist militia. When told he would be shot as a partisan or arrested as a Jew he confessed to being Jewish because the Italians had promised not to turn any Jews over to the Germans, and was then sent to an internment camp for Jews at Fossoli near Modena. On February 11, 1944, the inmates of the camp were transported to Auschwitz in twelve cramped cattle trucks. As he was leaving Italy, he managed to toss a postcard from the train. It reached his family, alerting them to the fact that he had been deported to Auschwitz. He spent eleven months there before the camp was liberated by the Red Army. From the railroad convoy of 650 people, fifteen men and nine women survived. The average life expectancy of a new entrant was three months. Levi survived because of a conjunction of circumstances. He knew some German from reading German publications on chemistry; he quickly oriented himself to life in the camp without attracting the attention of the privileged inmates; he used bread to pay a more experienced Italian prisoner for German lessons and orientation in Auschwitz; and he received a smuggled soup ration each day from Lorenzo Perrone, an Italian civilian bricklayer. His professional qualifications were also useful: in mid-November 1944 he was able to secure a position as an assistant in the Buna laboratory that was intended to produce synthetic rubber, and therefore avoided hard labour in freezing temperatures outdoors. As a chemist he knew he could safely eat cotton wool and drink paraffin. A non-Jewish guest worker secretly gave him extra helpings of soup. To his friend Jean Samuel he taught Italian by quoting Dante. From the Ulysses episode of Inferno he chose a passage, which dealt with the crucial question "What is a man?" Levi's superior in the laboratory, Dr. Ferdinand Mayer, gave him a pair of leather shoes. He corresponded with Meyer after the war. Shortly before the camp was liberated, he fell ill with scarlet fever and was placed in the camp's sanatorium. This was a fortuitous development: in mid-January 1945 the SS hurriedly evacuated the camp as the Red Army approached, forcing all but the gravely ill on a long death march that led to the death of the vast majority of the remaining prisoners. Levi's illness spared him this fate. Although liberated on 27 January 1945, Levi did not reach Turin until 19 October of that year. After spending some time in a Soviet camp for former concentration camp inmates, he embarked on a long and arduous journey home in the company of former Italian prisoners of war from the Italian Army in Russia. His long railway journey home to Turin took him on a circuitous route from Poland, through Russia, Romania, Hungary, Austria and Germany. On January 21, 1946 he started work at DUCO, a Du Pont Company paint factory, outside Turin. As the train service out to the factory was so limited Levi stayed in the factory dormitory during the week, which gave him the opportunity to write undisturbed. It was here that he started to write down the first draft of If This Is a Man. Every day he would scribble down notes on train tickets and scraps of paper as memories came to him. At the end of February he had ten pages detailing the last ten days between the German evacuation and the arrival of the Red Army. For the next ten months the book took shape in his dormitory as he typed up his recollections each night. On December 22, 1946 the manuscript was complete. In September 1947 Primo married Lucia Morpurgo and a month later If This Is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz) was finished. He sent the manuscript to Einaudi Publishing Company, where Natalia Ginzburg rejected it. The book was then published by a small house with a print run of 2000 copies. Despite a positive review by Italo Calvino in L'Unità, only 1,500 copies were sold. Ten years later it was reprinted in an enlarged edition. In Italy the book sold over half a million copies, was translated into eight languages and adapted for the theater and radio. Part of the book's impact was based on Levi's sober and precise style. In spite of the brutality to which he was subjected Levi described the terrible events objectively like an observing scientist, but also noted with compassion the heroism in the suffering. In 1964 Survival in Auschwitz was adapted for and performed on radio, directed by Giorgio Bandini, followed by a theatrical version in November 1966 at the Carignano Theater of Turin, directed by Gianfranco DeBosio. In April 1948, with Lucia pregnant with their first child, Primo decided that the life of an independent chemist was too precarious and agreed to go and work for Federico Accatti in the family paint business which traded under the name SIVA. In October 1948 Levi’s first child, his daughter Lisa, was born. Other books from Levi were La tregua (1958, originally published as The Truce, also published under the title The Reawakening, 1963) and II sistema periodico (1975, The Periodic Table, 1984). La tregua portrayed Levi's wanderings in war-torn eastern Europe in Poland, Belorussia, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Romania. During the journey Levi meets a gallery of colorful, rootless companions in misfortune, among them Mordo Nahum, a Greek, from whom Levi learns that in war you must first think of shoes, then the food. Without shoes you can't go after food. Levi returns home on the last pages of his story, but he has a continual nightmare in which his present life turns out to be a mere illusion and he wakes up with Auschwitz's morning call: "Wstawac". The book was adapted to a film in 1997, starring John Turturro. In 1966 Levi's collection of short stories called Storie naturali (The Sixth Day) was published, including works from 1952 to 1964, as well as a story from 1946. It was published under a pseudonym, Damiano Malabaila, as Levi felt that these stories didn't coincide with the serious tone of his concentration camp works. They are, in fact, of a science fiction nature, and won the Bagutta Prize in 1967. In 1974 he arranged to go into semi-retirement from SIVA in order to allow him more time to write, as well as removing the burden of responsibility for managing the paint plant. In 1975 a collection of Levi’s poetry was published under the title L’osteria di Brema (Collected Poems). He also wrote two other highly praised memoirs, Lilit e altri racconti (Moments of Reprieve) was published in 1978 and II sistema periodico (The Periodic Table) in 1975. Moments of Reprievedeals with characters he observed during imprisonment. The Periodic Table uses the Russian chemist Mendeleyev's periodical table of elements as the basis of autobiographical meditations. Its 21 pieces are each named after a chemical element. "Every element brings a kind of 'click' for me," Levi wrote. "It triggers a memory." 'Argon' is a homage to the author's Jewish ancestors'. Vanadium' represents Levi's uncanny encounter with a former official in Auschwitz, Dr. Müller, who was the chief of the laboratory, and 'Zinc', a boring metal, explorers the fascist myth of racial purity.. At London's Royal Institution on 19 October 2006 it was voted “the best science book ever written”. In 1984 his only novel, If Not Now, When? (in Italian, Se non ora, quando?) was published. It traces the fortunes of a group of Jewish partisans behind German lines during World War II as they seek to continue their fight against the occupier and survive. With the idea of reaching Palestine to take part in the construction of the Jewish national home clearly their ultimate objective, the partisan band reaches Poland and then German territory before the surviving members are officially received in territory held by the Western allies as displaced persons. Finally, they succeed in reaching Italy, on their way to Palestine. The novel won both the Premio Campiello and the Premio Viareggio. The book had its origin in Levi’s train journey home, narrated in The Truce. At one point in the journey a band of Zionists hitch their own wagon to the refugee train. He was impressed by their strength, resolve, organisation and sense of purpose. Levi became a major literary figure in Italy. The Truce became a set text in Italian schools. His books were regularly translated into many other languages. He visited over 130 schools to talk about his experiences in Auschwitz. He was shocked by revisionist attitudes that tried to rewrite the history of the camps as less horrific, what is now referred to as Holocaust denial. His view was that the Nazi death camps and the attempted annihilation of the Jews was a horror unique in history because the aim was the complete destruction of a race by one that saw itself as superior; it was highly organized and mechanized; it entailed the degradation of Jews even to the point of using their ashes as materials for paths. Later works include The Monkey's Wrench (1978), winner of the Strega Prize in 1979; La ricerca delle radici (The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, 1981); Ad ora incerta (1984), poetry translated in Collected Poems, Other People's Trades (1985); and The Mirror Maker (1986). His happiest book is The Monkey's Wrench, a celebration of the Piedmontese rigger Faussone, who travels the world as an expert in erecting cranes and bridges. It also celebrates the positive side of work; doing a good job and solving difficult problems. This work aroused criticism from left wing critics, because he did not write about the working conditions on the assembly lines at FIAT. However, it brought him a wider audience in Italy and The Monkey's Wrench won the Strega Prize in 1979. The last work he completed was the essay collection I Sommersi e i Salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1986). In it Levi returned to his belief in the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust and asked how much of the camp is alive and well in our time, and how long it will remain in our memories. He points out that anti-Semitism was part of German culture, not merely a Nazi invention, and sees a paradoxical analogy between victim and oppressor. In the camp system also the oppressed unconsciously strove to identify with their oppressor. Useless violence dehumanises both guards and prisoners. "Before dying the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less burdened by guilt," he stated. It also contains a series of letters from German readers and Levi's responses to them. Levi died on April 11, 1987, when he fell from the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin to the ground floor below, leading to speculation that he had killed himself. Elie Wiesel said at the time that "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later." Principal biographers (Angier, Thomson) agree with the coroner's verdict that he committed suicide. In his later life Levi indicated he was suffering from depression: factors may have included responsibility for his elderly mother and mother-in-law, living in the same apartment, concerns for his own health and memory, and genetic disposition. In a lecture in 1979 Levi had expressed his deeply pessimistic view of humanity, seeing life as terrible. However, Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta has made a detailed case that the conventional assumption of Levi's death by 'suicide' is not well justified by either factual or inferred evidence. Levi left no suicide note, and no other clear indication of an intended attempt on his own life; documents and testimony, rather, indicate immediate and ongoing plans at the time of his death. The likelihood of an accident is itself bolstered by clear circumstantial evidence. Levi was an extraordinary figure in that he maintained his humanity inside the concentration camp and succeeded in resisting the temptation of hate and bitterness. He used his literary talents to "bear witness" to the inhuman experiences undergone in Auschwitz and sought to simply tell his story rather than pass judgment. The circumstances of his death remain fascinating to literary critics, fans, and biographers, as perhaps a final meditation on the mixture of darkness and optimism that characterised his life and work. |
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