Primo Levi


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Levi, Primo

(prē`mō lā`vē), 1919–87, Italian writer. A chemist of Jewish descent, Levi was sent to the concentration campconcentration camp,
a detention site outside the normal prison system created for military or political purposes to confine, terrorize, and, in some cases, kill civilians.
..... Click the link for more information.  at Auschwitz during World War II. His first memoir, If This Is a Man (1947; also tr. as Survival in Auschwitz) is a restrained yet poignant testimony, precisely observed and devoid of rancor or protest, of the atrocities he witnessed. In his other autobiographical books, The Reawakening (1963; film, 1996) and the dark, posthumously published The Drowned and the Saved (1988), Levi relates the manner in which physical torture and annihilation were accompanied by a process of moral degradation. He stresses that survival was as much a spiritual quest to maintain human dignity as a physical struggle. The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of 21 autobiographical meditations, each named for a chemical element, draws analogies between a young man's moral formation and the physical and chemical properties that circumscribe our humanity. He also wrote the novels The Monkey's Wrench (1978) and If Not Now, When? (1986), short stories, essays, and poetry. He died in a fall that was widely thought a suicide.

Bibliography

See his complete works, ed. by A. Goldstein (2015); interviews ed. by M. Belpoliti and R. Gordon (2001); biographies by M. Anissimov (1996, tr. 1998), C. Angier (2002), I. Thomson (2003), and B. Lang (2013).

References in periodicals archive ?
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Primo Levi presents thus a series thematic analyses of Levi's works, a discussion on the use of Levi's works in language teaching and translation, and a group of targeted readings devoted to singular texts of the author.
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Primo Levi
Thanks to this excellent anthology in English, Levi becomes global, and his unique experience as a survivor, witness, and translator of the horrors of the Holocaust becomes a universal testimony of the tragedy and the resistance of Primo Levi the man and the writer whose lesson our times must learn and remember.
THE COMPLETE WOUKS OF PRIMO LEVI
Following the screening of a film clip on Primo Levis life, produced by RAI Teche, influential passages from Primo Levi's work will be read by Ramu Damodaran, Chief of United Nations Academic Impact, Department of Public Information; Carla Esperanza Rivera Snchez, Minister Counsellor, Permanent Mission of El Salvador to the United Nations and Vice-Chairperson of the United Nations General Assembly Committee on Information; and special guest John Turturro, actor and director.
United States : United Nations Celebrates Contributions of Auschwitz Survivor, Humanist Author Primo Levi at Holocaust Event, 4 May
The Complete Works of Primo Levi, some 15 years in the making, testifies to that deathlessness.
Here there is no why
Asi lo expresa Primo Levi en el prefacio a su libro Los hundidos y los salvados (24):
Los limites de la representacion y la reflexion en torno al problema de la ficcionalizacion y estatizacion en la literatura de posguerra, el caso de los sobrevivientes
No hay una denuncia clara y valiente, como la realizada por Primo Levi, Imre Kertesz, Jorge Semprun y Victor Frankl, entre otros.
Auschwitz
Desde la perspectiva de Walter Benjamin y sus reflexiones sobre la narracion, se podria aventurar que Primo Levi y los demas relatores de los campos, al haber encontrado la manera de convertir en escritura la ruptura mas atroz en la continuidad de la conciencia humana, se convirtieron en los creadores de una tradicion imposible: la tradicion que narra el quiebre de la experiencia.
Primo Levi, testigo de los limites
Deve-se a Primo Levi a introducao do tema de mais um impasse: somente a testemunha "integral" poderia dizer de maneira completa a descida ate o fundo do inferno nazista e esta testemunha nao voltou:
Silence and literature: the witness paradoxes/Silencio e literatura: as aporias da testemunha
This installment features works that are considered dark and subversive, with pieces by such authors as Primo Levi, Cesar Aira, and Sigizmund Krhizhanovsky.
Counterfeits: Two Lines World Writing in Translation
Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi's Science and Humanism After the Fall" is a series of essays discussing the work of Primo Levi, who after his own endeavor in the concentration camps, became a prolific man of art, science, and writing.
The Holocaust Studies Shelf
the title of a famous novel by Italian writer Primo Levi about a group of Jewish partisans behind German lines during World War II.
Italian prime minister protested
Primo Levi begins "La zona grigia" by restating his claim that the Nazi concentrationary system, with its confusion of boundaries and limits, was incomprehensible:
The exemplary Chaim Rumkowski in Primo Levi's "La Zona Grigia"
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