A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz

This paper discusses Primo Levi’s memoir If This is a Man, and his use of Dante’s Inferno as representative of the Holocaust ordeal; including the deconstruction of identity in Auschwitz. ‘The Canto of Ulysses’ represents Levi’s experience: the journey to, and imagery of the Inferno as Levi’s own hell. This chapter also represents Levi’s Italian identity and the communication crisis it presented in camp. The literature of Dante not only reminds Levi of home, and an identity taken from him in the Lager, it also represents Auschwitz; it is the link which holds the two parts of his life together.

Modern Language Review, 2022

This article examines Primo Levi’s engagement with the work of Dante, focusing on Levi’s meditation on language in describing his confinement at Auschwitz and reflecting upon its later representation. Firstly, it establishes the importance of Dante as an ‘infernal’ model for Levi. It then identifies some suggestive parallels between the linguistic and auditory dimensions of Levi’s Se questo è un uomo and Dante’s Inferno, and the degradation of language associated with these two infernal realms. The essay then highlights each writer’s concern with the limitations of human language in describing a place that it is understood as sub-linguistic. The article contends, by highlighting a number of precise textual parallels, that Levi’s reflections on this sub-linguistic essence of the Lager are substantially informed by the closing cantos of the Inferno. The essay concludes by considering how Dante represents a productive communicative model for Levi as well as carrying associations with unattainable notions of justice and salvation.

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 2015

Primo Levi’s If Not Now, When? is a work of historical fiction describing the small triumphs and sufferings of a band of Jewish partisans who fight against the Nazis. They are also Holocaust survivors whose families and communities died in the pits of the Einsatzgruppen. This article reinterprets the novel through the combined lens of trauma theory and historian Saul Friedlander’s notion that, in the case of collective catastrophe, genuine historical consciousness may be achieved only through the uneasy juxtaposition of objective historical narrative with the victims’ anguished voices. While most other readings of the novel focus on the path Levi’s partisans take toward renewed dignity and reconciliation, the principal claim of this article is that the novel succeeds as a work of Holocaust historical fiction because it subverts it own narrative flow—its path—by constantly invoking the pit, the site of trauma that threatens to block the partisans’ access to the future. In support of this claim, the article not only analyzes the literary strategies Levi uses to engage his fictional characters in the documented history of World War II, but also uncovers his techniques for representing their memories of the Holocaust, a collective trauma that violently interrupted history’s course.

In The New Italy and the Jews: From Massimo D’Azeglio to Primo Levi , 2018

Although brutal, the definitive 1958 edition of Primo Levi's canonical Holocaust memoir, Se questo è un uomo, is less uniformly bleak than the story told in the first edition, published in 1947. This article argues that the later version's most significant additions introduce notes of optimism which affect how this essential book has been interpreted. Furthermore, the 1958 edition registers a shift in Levi's previous focus, from a nearly exclusive interest in documenting Nazi crimes against humanity, to a bifurcated approach that incorporates more autobiographical elements and commemorations of individual victims. The added passages, amounting to thousands of words, include several humane encounters and instances of altruistic friendship that stand in marked contrast to the Darwinian aspects of Auschwitz strongly emphasized in the 1947 edition. These positive elements, each resulting from empathy and successful acts of communication, constitute important exceptions to the rules governing human behavior in the camps, which Levi himself described.

Nemla Italian Studies, Journal of Italian Studies, Italian Section, Northeast Modern Language Association Special Issue: The Jewish Experience in Contemporary Italy, Balma Philip, Simona Wright, eds. Pp. 196 - 199, 2015

Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 1994

This paper seeks to lay bare Primo Levi's perceptions of and correctives to the shape that Holocaust memory was assuming in Italy in the first postwar decades.

2019

I have to observe that really my deepest and most lasting loves are the least explicable. 1 Resumen Primo Levi señaló que su experiencia de un año de duración, desde su deportación en febrero de 1944 hasta su liberación de Auschwitz en enero de 1945, fue el motivo principal de su necesidad de escribir. Levi llegó a decir que su experiencia en el campo de trabajo había sido una especie de universidad para él. Más allá de sus narrativas autobiográficas sobre los campos, principalmente en Si esto es un hombre (Se questo è un uomo) y La tregua, Levi escribió dos novelas, varios cuentos, poemas y ensayos. Estos trabajos demuestran el alcance de lo que el escritor exploró mientras ponía por escrito su relación con el mundo y con la naturaleza humana tras su liberación de Auschwitz. En este artículo, tengo en cuenta qué conocimiento extrajo Levi de los campos, algo que desarrolló durante las cuatro décadas restantes de su vida, al igual que cómo esas apreciaciones se reflejaron en su escritura. En concreto, este análisis se centra en las relaciones en la obra de Levi-entre la gente y en la respuesta de uno mismo frente al mundo-y su conocimiento y observación relativa a la intimidad y al conflicto durante y después de la guerra.

2016

The scientific training of Primo Levi, his clarity of language, the character –so hostile and far removed from “the language of the heart”- and the moral tension of his writing all creating a unique combination of psychological, stylistic and formal elements to give form to the most significant personal testimony ever written about experience in a Nazi concentration camp. Primo Levi builds his text using a Dantesque model; for instance, he describes the experience in the camp of Fossoli employing Dante’s image of the limbo. When Dante’s words don’t come to help him, he turns to the language of the Bible to imbue his style with fire. Levi’s marmoreal language, his dry, clear prose style, turned a moral duty into a literary strategy. Placing him on the borderline between a writer of tru literature and a producer of written testimony only contributes to concealing and removing the question of writer’s responsibility when dealing with the most disturbing problems of our most recent past...

Italica, 2006

This article reads Levi’s testimony from the perspective of Emmanuel Levinas, who argues that Western philosophy, as continued in modern humanism, privileges the “Greek” narrative of being—which violently absorbs difference into ontological self-identification—over the “Hebrew” narrative, which embraces ethical responsibility for the other. The dilemma at the heart of Levi’s testimony resides in the simultaneous entwinement of, and opposition between, the “Greek” and “Hebrew” modes that course through the text. The ontological position is repeatedly interrupted by the sight of the Muselmanner, the dehumanized victims of Auschwitz whose alterity is beyond assimilation. My reading accounts for Levi’s subtextual ambivalence toward universality as a basis for ethics.