by Primo Levi
In the rich panorama of these writings, four points of reference in particular might be noted. The first, which goes back to 1982, is the tortured but fully convinced polemic against the Israeli government’s military conduct in Lebanon (“Who Has Courage in Jerusalem?”), also documented in many interviews and public statements that year. The second, which confirms Levi’s belonging to a people (or, rather, to an ethical ideal of being in the world) is “The Path of a Jewish Writer” (1984). The two should be read together in order for us to grasp entirely Levi’s moral energy and his awareness of his asymmetrical identity.
The other two are in the areas of science and history. The essay “Asymmetry and Life” is a complex reflection (published in Prometeo, a scientific monthly with a popular approach) on the chemical-physical structures of living matter and its behavior at the molecular level. The subject is directly connected to that of Levi’s doctoral thesis in experimental physics at the University of Turin. The final reference point here is “The Black Hole of Auschwitz,” in which, forty years after the events—as in The Drowned and the Saved, which preceded it by a few months—Levi reflected on the Shoah, in an argument against the historical revisionism that was beginning to invade Europe. This could be called Levi’s true moral testament; it appeared on January 22, 1987, as an editorial on the first page of La Stampa. It’s one of the last essays that Levi signed, and though its tone may seem wearier than usual, the logic is as inflexible as ever.
The pages of this section are translated and collected for the first time as a unit based on the Italian edition of Levi’s complete works, Opere, published in 1997 by Einaudi and edited by Marco Belpoliti.
DOMENICO SCARPA
The list of sources for the citations and part of the information in this
essay—writings and interviews by Primo Levi, critical literature on him
and on his work—can be consulted at the websites of Liveright/W. W. Norton (http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=4294988470) and the International Center for Primo Levi Studies in Turin (http://www.primolevi.it/Web/English).
Select Bibliography
These three volumes of Primo Levi’s Complete Works make available to the Anglophone reader the essential information on the author and his writings. This bibliography is intended to serve as a guide for further study, so, in addition to works in English, it includes critical literature in other languages, principally in Italian.
There is another reason to put texts in different languages side by side. Apart from the origin of an author, scholars tend to cite works in their own languages: on Levi, in particular, Italian studies almost exclusively cite critical literature in Italian, while English and American scholars cite mainly texts in English, and so on. These are barriers that this bibliography intends to help remove.
The richest bibliography in the world can be found online, in Italian and English, on the website of the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi (International Center for Primo Levi Studies), www.primolevi.it. It contains more than six thousand entries, including both the primary literature (Levi’s individual writings and works in Italian and in translation) and the secondary literature in various languages (after Italian, the most well represented are English, French, German, and Spanish). This tool, which is updated monthly, is easy to use and can be consulted in many different ways. One can search on the basis of the works (for instance, what has been written on The Truce or on Other People’s Trades, or on the theater version of If This Is a Man) or on the basis of several dozen key words that allow the user to discover, for example, everything that has been published on Levi as an anthropologist, on his ordeal during the Resistance, or on his literary style. With some exceptions, the works cited in this essay are monographs or collections entirely or largely devoted to Levi; only occasionally are individual articles published in a review or a book noted.
The most immediately useful books are the editions of Levi’s works that the author himself undertook to edit and to annotate for readers in the Italian middle schools. They are all published by Einaudi, in Turin: The Truce (1965), If This Is a Man (1973), and The Periodic Table (1979, with an introduction by Natalia Ginzburg); a school edition of The Wrench (1983), similarly annotated, was entrusted to the linguist Gian Luigi Beccaria. In 2012 Einaudi published, in collaboration with the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin, a new, annotated version of If This Is a Man, edited by Alberto Cavaglion.
In addition, Levi commented on his work in many of his uncollected essays and in interviews; the former have now been collected in The Complete Works, while dozens of interviews remain scattered in various journals and newspapers. However, numerous excerpts from the uncollected interviews can be read in the extensive notes put together by Marco Belpoliti in the Italian edition of Levi’s Opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1997, with a fine introductory essay by the writer Daniele Del Giudice) and also in certain sections of Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987 (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987 (New York: The New Press, 2001), an English-language version of the latter book, edited by Robert S. C. Gordon together with Belpoliti, has a different structure from the Italian. A volume that contains a substantial number of scattered texts on Levi, along with useful biographical information, is Echi di una voce perduta: Incontri, interviste e conversazioni con Primo Levi (Milan: Mursia, 1992), edited by Gabriella Poli and Giorgio Calcagno. Other important conversations with Levi that have been published in book form are Primo Levi and Tullio Regge, Dialogo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989; revised Italian edition, 1984); Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi (Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1989; original Italian edition, 1987); and Milvia Spadi, Le parole di un uomo: Incontro con Primo Levi (Rome: Di Renzo, 1997); Intervista a Primo Levi, ex deportato, edited by Anna Bravo and Federico Cereja (Turin: Einaudi, 2011; original edition, 1983). Levi’s conversation with Philip Roth deserves a place of its own: it appears in Roth’s essay collection Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (1986; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).
Finally, five long conversations can be found in the issue of the journal Riga devoted to Primo Levi, again edited by Marco Belpoliti (Riga, no. 13; Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1997). This volume also contains a selection of contemporary reviews of Levi’s works, in many cases by writers, and twenty-four critical essays, by as many scholars, whose readings continue to be illuminating.
Examination of the secondary literature on Primo Levi begins necessarily with the biographies. The most concise and easy to read is that of Ernesto Ferrero (Primo Levi; Turin: Einaudi, 2007), which was used as the basis for the Chronology that can be found in volume 1 of The Complete Works. Echi di una voce perduta, the book edited by Poli and Calcagno cited above, is equivalent to a biographical profile. But the first proper biography was in French: Myriam Anissimov’s Primo Levi: The Tragedy of an Optimist appeared in 1996 (English translation, Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1999). Although superseded by the biographies that appeared later, it is recommended for some of the biographical testimony, like that of Resnyk (see the chapter “The Work,” in If This Is a Man).
The two most thorough biographies in print, the fruit of years of research and both in English, are Carole Angier’s The Double Bond: Primo Levi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) and Ian Thomson’s Primo Levi (New York: Henry Holt, 2003). It should be noted that the Italian translation of Angier’s work, Il doppio legame: Vita di Primo Levi (Milan: Mondadori, 2004), was revised by the author herself and is definitive; the book should be read with caution, however, when it ventures deeply into Levi’s private and interior life). For a discussion of both these biographies, see Alexander Stille, “Secrets of Primo Levi,” The New York Review of Books 49, no. 13 (August 15, 2002).
A shorter biography is Philippe Mesnard’s profile, Primo Levi: Una vita per immagini (Venice: Marsilio, 2008); the French version that followed is much expanded: Primo Levi: Le passage d’un témoin (Paris: F
ayard, 2011). Also concise is a recent essay by Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), which focuses mainly on Levi’s ethics, philosophy, and Jewish roots. On the subject of Levi’s Jewish background, see also Alberto Cavaglion, Notizie su Argon: Gli antenati di Primo Levi da Francesco Petrarca a Cesare Lombroso (Turin: Instar Libri, 2006), which is one of the best works on Levi, along with two other books by the same author: Ebrei senza saperlo (Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2002) and Il senso dell’arca (Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2006). Another good monograph on the subject is Sophie Nezri-Dufour’s Primo Levi: Una memoria ebraica del Novecento (Florence: Giuntina, 2002); and for a detailed essay on the Jewish element in contemporary Italian literature, see Luca De Angelis, Qualcosa di più intimo: Aspetti della cultura ebraica del Novecento italiano; da Svevo a Bassani (Florence: Giuntina, 2006). See also the pages on Levi in Sergio Parussa, Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony: Four Italian Writers and Judaism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008).
Finally, there are the meticulously documented Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924–1974 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), by H. Stuart Hughes, and Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). (For a reconstruction of the opinions that Levi expressed in 1982 on the politics of the government of Israel, see “Le vere parole di Levi,” Il Sole 24 Ore [April 8, 2012]; “Le parole di Levi: The New Yorker e Il Sole,” Il Sole 24 Ore [June 9, 2013]; and Arturo Marzano and Guri Schwarz, Attentato alla sinagoga: Roma, 9 ottobre 1982; il conflitto israelo-palestinese e l’Italia [Rome: Viella, 2013]). Two indispensable tools on Jewish themes are Gli ebrei in Italia, edited by Corrado Vivanti, in the series Storia d’Italia: Annali 11 (Turin: Einaudi, 1996); and The Holocaust Encyclopedia, edited by Walter Laqueur and Judith Tydor Baumel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
Biographical material on Levi’s adolescence and youth can be found in I luoghi di Levi tra letteratura e memoria, edited by Giorgio Brandone and Tiziana Cerrato (Turin: Liceo Classico D’Azeglio, 2008) and in Eugenio Gentili Tedeschi, I giochi della paura: Immagini di una microstoria; libri segreti, cronache, resistenza tra Milano e Valle d’Aosta 1942–1944 (Aosta: Le Château, 1999). On Levi’s brief partisan experience, see Sergio Luzzatto, Partigia: Una storia della Resistenza (Milan: Mondadori, 2013), and Frediano Sessi, Il lungo viaggio di Primo Levi: La scelta della Resistenza, il tradimento, l’arresto (Venice: Marsilio, 2013). Levi is included in the anthology Writers on World War II, edited by Mordecai Richler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992). Bianca Guidetti Serra, a friend of Levi from youth, wrote, with the help of Santina Mobiglia, an autobiography, Bianca la rossa (Turin: Einaudi, 2009). Nicola Dallaporta, the “assistant” of the chapter “Potassium” in The Periodic Table, has written an affectionate account of Levi’s university years: “La mia esperienza di studio e di vita,” Annali di storia dell’educazione e delle istituzioni scolastiche 5 (1998).
Memoirs published by Levi’s fellow deportees are extremely useful. The most significant is by Jean Samuel, written with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Il m’appelait Pikolo: Un compagnon de Primo Levi raconte (Paris: Laffont, 2007), which contains part of his correspondence with Levi. The man who is called Henri in the chapter “The Drowned and the Saved” in If This Is a Man also published a memoir: Paul Steinberg, Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning (New York: Picador, 1999; original French edition, 1996). Luciana Nissim Momigliano, who was deported to Auschwitz in the same boxcar with Levi, in 1946 published her Ricordi della casa dei morti, which has now been reprinted in a version edited by Alessandra Chiappano (Florence: Giuntina, 2008); see also Chiappano’s Luciana Nissim Momigliano: Una vita (Florence: Giuntina, 2010). Testimony and documents are collected in Anna Segre, Un coraggio silenzioso: Leonardo De Benedetti, medico, vissuto ad Auschwitz (Turin: Zamorani, 2008). Also see the collection of trial depositions and similar texts by Primo Levi with Leonardo De Benedetti: Così fu Auschwitz: Testimonianze 1945–1986, edited by Fabio Levi and Domenico Scarpa (Turin: Einaudi, 2015), which contains extensive historical documentary material. Hermann Langbein’s People in Auschwitz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004; original German edition, 1972) is a volume that Levi greatly prized and would have liked to translate into Italian himself; it quotes him and comments on him on many of its pages. Similarly valuable is the essay by Jean Améry At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980; original German edition, 1966); a second edition, with an introduction by Alexander Stille, was published in 1990 by Schocken Books, New York. On the Levi-Améry relationship see also W. G. Sebald, “Jean Améry und Primo Levi,” in Über Jean Améry, edited by Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990).
On matters relating to the publication of Levi’s works, see Marco Belpoliti, “Levi: Il falso scandalo,” Rivista dei Libri 10, no. 1 (January 2000); Giulia Boringhieri, Per un umanesimo scientifico: Storia di libri, di mio padre e di noi (Turin: Einaudi, 2010); Italo Calvino, Letters, 1941–1985, edited by Michael Wood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014); Severino Cesari, Colloquio con Giulio Einaudi, 2nd edition (Turin: Einaudi, 2007; original, 1991); Guido Davico Bonino, Incontri con uomini di qualità: Editori e scrittori di un’epoca che non c’è più (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2013); Ernesto Ferrero, I migliori anni della nostra vita (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005); I verbali del mercoledì: Riunioni editoriali Einaudi, 1943–1952, edited by Tommaso Munari (Turin: Einaudi, 2011); and I verbali del mercoledì: Riunioni editoriali Einaudi, 1953–1963, edited by Tommaso Munari (Turin: Einaudi, 2013). On the relationship between Levi and Italo Calvino, see Giorgio Bertone, Italo Calvino: Il castello della scrittura (Turin: Einaudi, 1994).
On Levi’s work as a paint technician, the most detailed record is that of his colleague Renato Portesi: “Primo Levi. Un chimico, un impiantista . . . un uomo,” an interview by Ferruccio Trifirò in La Chimica e l’Industria 83, no. 5 (June 2001). The best works on Levi and science are, in addition to Massimo Bucciantini’s Primo Levi Lecture (see below), the pages devoted to the science fiction stories in Enrico Mattioda, Levi (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2011); Mario Porro’s essay collection Letteratura come filosofia naturale (Milan: Medusa, 2009); and these three monographs: Antonio De Meo, Primo Levi e la scienza come metafora (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2011); Charlotte Ross, Primo Levi’s Narratives of Embodiment: Containing the Human (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Angela Di Fazio, Altri simulacri: Automi, vampiri e mostri della storia nei racconti di Primo Levi (Pisa: ETS, 2012). Pierpaolo Antonello provides a wide-ranging analysis in Contro il materialism: Le “due culture” in Italia; bilancio di un secolo (Turin: Aragno, 2012). The story “Carbon” (from The Periodic Table) is included in The Faber Book of Science, edited by John Carey (London: Faber & Faber, 1995). Finally, there is Pietro Scarnera’s graphic novel Una stella tranquilla: Ritratto sentimentale di Primo Levi (Bologna: Comma 22, 2013), which is not only an imaginative translation of a life into images but a careful reading of Levi through his own words.
The vast secondary literature on Levi is increasing every year, not only in Italian but in other languages. Yet until Levi’s death, only a few short, popular works were available (and only in Italian), and there was very little of an academic nature. Writing about Levi consisted mainly of reviews, in Italy as elsewhere. Groundbreaking works have appeared in America, including Risa B. Sodi’s A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); a short essay by Anthony Rudolf, At an Uncertain Hour: Primo Levi’s War Against Oblivion (London: Menard Press, 1990); the pages on Levi in an early work by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), and Rosenfeld’s more recent The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); the essays by Irving Howe, Lawrence L. Langer, and Cynthia Ozick in Writing and th
e Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988); and the two volumes containing the proceedings of conferences held in 1989 at Cornell (Reason and Light: Essays on Primo Levi, edited by Susan Tarrow [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990]) and at Princeton (Primo Levi as Witness, edited by Pietro Frassica [Fiesole: Casalini, 1990]), both of which contain brilliant contributions by a scholar who died prematurely, Gian Paolo Biasin. Among the works just cited, the most widely read has been Irving Howe’s essay, which originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, March 28, 1985, introducing the first American edition of If Not Now, When? There are also influential articles by Victor Brombert, “Primo Levi: The Flawed Design” (1996), available in Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), and by Clive James, “Last Will and Testament” (1988), now in As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968–2002 (New York: Norton, 2003).
In 1997 Einaudi published the volume Primo Levi: Un’Antologia della Critica, edited by Ernesto Ferrero, which contains much of the best writing on Levi up until then. A section devoted to contemporary reviews of the individual works includes, among others, Italo Calvino’s 1948 review of the first edition of If This Is a Man. This anthology reprints the essays that introduced the three volumes of the first, pioneering Einaudi edition of Levi’s complete works (1987–1990): the essay by Cesare Cases, a scholar of German who had been a friend of Levi since Levi lived in Milan (1942–43), offers a comprehensive, acute, and idiosyncratic reading of the works; the essay by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo remains the most attentive analysis of Levi’s style; and, finally, there is Cesare Segre’s essay on the novels and the poems. The anthology also contains an analytic reading by Segre of If This Is a Man, and brief but illuminating critical portraits by Norberto Bobbio, Giulio Einaudi, Claudio Magris, Massimo Mila (a profile of Levi the humorist), and Franco Fortini, who offers an extremely subtle reading of the poetry. Three other highlights are essays by Stefano Levi della Torre on Levi’s ethics; Paola Valabrega on the Eastern European Jewish inheritance; and Alberto Cavaglion on the “termite nest” of characters in If This Is a Man. Finally, it contains Cynthia Ozick’s “The Suicide Note,” which can also be found in Metaphor and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1989).