Primo Michele Levi ( Italian: Ã, ['pri: mo' l ?: vi] ; July 31, 1919 - April 11, 1987) was a Jewish chemist, author, and victim of the Italian Holocaust. He is the author of several books, novels, short story collections, essays, and poems. His most famous works include If This Is Human (1947) (US: Survive in Auschwitz ), his report of the year he spent as a prisoner in concentration Auschwitz camped in Poland occupied by the Nazis; and The Periodic Table (1975), related to the quality of the elements, which the Royal United Kingdom called the best science books ever written.
Levi died in 1987 because of a wound he suffered from falling from the landing of a third floor apartment. His death officially decides to commit suicide, but some say that the fall was unintentional.
Video Primo Levi
Biography
Early life
Levi was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, on the Corso Re Umberto 75, into a liberal Jewish family. His father, Cesare, works in Ganz's manufacturing company and spends most of his time working overseas in Hungary, where Ganz is headquartered. Cesare is a diligent and self-taught reader. Levi's mother, Esther, known to everyone as Rina, was highly educated, attending Istituto Maria Letizia's . He is also a diligent reader, playing piano, and speaks French fluently. The wedding between Rina and Cesare has been arranged by Rina's father. On their wedding day, Rina's father, Cesare Luzzati, gave Rina an apartment in Corso Re Umberto's , where Primo Levi lived for almost his entire life.
In 1921 Anna Maria, Levi's sister, was born; he stayed close to him all his life. In 1925 he entered the Turin school Felice Rignon . A skinny and gentle boy, he's shy and thinks he's ugly; he excelled academically. His school records cover a long period of absence where he was taught at home, initially by Emilia Glauda and later by Marisa Zini, daughter of the Zino Zini philosopher. The children spent the summer with their mother in the Waldensian valley southwest of Turin, where Rina rented a farmhouse. His father remained in the city, partly because of his dislike for rural life, but also because of his affair.
In September 1930 Levi entered the Royal Gymnasium Massimo d'Azeglio a year before the normal entry requirement. In class he is the youngest, the shortest and the smartest, and being the only Jew. For this reason, he was bullied. In August 1932, after two years at the Talmud Torah school in Turin, he sang in the local synagogue for his Bar Mitzvah. In 1933, as expected of all the young Italian schoolchildren, he joined the Avanguardisti movement for the Fascist youth. He avoids rifle training by joining the skiing division, and spends every Saturday during the season on the slopes above Turin. When the little boy Levi is plagued by the disease, especially chest infection, but he is interested in participating in physical activity. In his teenage years, Levi and some friends will sneak into unused sports stadiums and perform athletic competitions.
In July 1934 at the age of 14, he took the test for Liceo Classico D'Azeglio, the Lyceum (sixth form or high school) specializing in classical lessons, and was accepted that year. The school was renowned for its famous anti-Fascist teachers, among them the philosophers Norberto Bobbio, and Cesare Pavese, who later became one of Italy's most famous novelists. Levi continued to be harassed during his time on the Lyceum, even though six other Jews were in his class. After reading Sir William Bragg's Nature of Nature, Levi decided that he wanted to become a chemist.
In 1937, he was summoned to the Ministry of War and accused of ignoring the draft notice of the Royal Italian Navy - one day before he wrote the final exam on Italy's participation in the Spanish Civil War, based on a quote from Thucydides: "We have the single ability to be brave until the highest level. " Disturbed and frightened by the draft allegations, he failed the test - the first poor class of his life - and was devastated. His father was able to distance him from the Navy by enlisting him in the Fascist militia ( Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale ). He remained a member through his first year at university, until the passing of the Italian Racial Act of 1938 forced his expulsion. Levi then recounts the series of events in the short story "Fra Diavolo on the Po".
He took back and passed the final exam, and in October enrolled at the University of Turin to study chemistry. As one of 80 candidates, he spent three months taking college, and in February, after graduating colloquio (oral examination), he was selected as one of 20 to switch to a full-time chemistry curriculum.
In the liberal period as well as in the first decade of the Fascist regime, Jews hold many public positions, and stand out in literature, science, and politics. In 1929 Mussolini signed an agreement with the Catholic Church, the Lateran Treaty, which established Catholicism as the religion of the State, enabling the Church to influence many sectors of education and public life, and alienate other religions to the "tolerant cult" status. In 1936, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia and the expansion of what the regime considered as the Italian "colonial kingdom" brought the "race" problem to the forefront. In the context set by these events, and the 1940 federation with Germany Hitler, the situation of the Italian Jews changed radically.
In July 1938 a group of prominent Italian scientists and intellectuals published the "Manifesto of Race," a mixture of racial and ideological antisemitism theory from ancient and modern sources. This treatise formed the basis for Italian Racial Law in October 1938. After the enactment of Italian Jews lost their basic civil rights, positions in public offices, and their assets. Their books are forbidden: Jewish authors can no longer publish in magazines owned by Aryan. Jewish students who had started their course were allowed to continue, but new Jewish students were barred from entering the university. Levi has gone through matriculation a year earlier than scheduled so he can take a degree.
In 1939 Levi started a love affair with hiking in the mountains. A friend, Sandro Delmastro, taught him how to climb, and they spent many weekends in the mountains above Turin. Physical exertion, risk, and combat with the elements all gave him an exit for his disappointment, as Levi writes in the "Iron" chapter of the Periodic Table (1975). In June 1940, Italy declared war as a German ally against England and France, and the first Allied air attack in Turin began two days later. The Levi study continues during bombardment. The family suffered extra strain when his father lay in bed with bowel cancer.
Chemistry
Because of the new racial laws and the increasing intensity of common fascism, Levi had a hard time finding a supervisor for his graduation thesis, which was on the subject of Walden's inversion, a study of asymmetry of carbon atoms. Finally taken by Dr. NicolÃÆ'² Dallaporta, he graduated in mid-1941 with full marks and achievements, having submitted an additional thesis on x-rays and electrostatic energy. The degree certificate contains the statement, "Jewish race". The racial laws prevent Levi from finding a suitable permanent job after graduation.
In December 1941, Levi accepted a clandestine job offer at an asbestos mine in San Vittore. The project is to extract nickel from a damaged mine, a challenge he receives with pleasure. Levi understood that, if successful, he would assist the German war effort, which suffers from a shortage of nickel in the production of weapons. The job requires that Levi work under a false name with false documents. In March 1942 when he worked at the mine, his father died. Levi left the mine in June to work in Milan. Recruited through a student at the University of Turin, working for the Swiss company A Wander Ltd on a project to extract the anti-diabetic from plant-based ingredients, he took a job at a Swiss company to avoid a race law. It soon became clear that the project had no chance of success, but no one was interested in saying it.
In July 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III overthrew Mussolini and appointed a new government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who was ready to sign the Armistice from Cassibile with the Allies. When a ceasefire was announced on September 8, Germany occupied northern and central Italy, freeing Mussolini from prison and appointing him as head of the Social Republic of Italy, a puppet state in northern Germany occupied by Germany. Levi returned to Turin to find his mother and sister taking refuge in their holiday home La Saccarello in the hills outside the city. All three went to Saint-Vincent in the Aosta Valley, where they could be hidden. Suited as Jews, many of whom had been interned by authorities, they moved to the hillside to Amay di Colle di Joux. Amay is on the way for prisoners of war and fugitive refugees who are trying to flee Germany.
The Italian resistance movement became more active in the German-occupied zone. Levi and some friends descended into the foothills of the Alps, and in October formed a partisan group in the hope of being affiliated with the liberal Giustizia e LibertÃÆ' . Untrained for such attempts, he and his friends were arrested by the Fascist militia on 13 December 1943. When told that he would be shot as partisans of Italy, Levi claimed to be Jewish. He was sent to an internment camp in Fossoli near Modena. He recalled that as long as Fossoli was under the control of the Italian Social Republic, rather than Nazi Germany, he was not harmed.
We were given, regularly, allotted food for soldiers, "said Levi's testimony," and by the end of January 1944 we were taken to Fossoli by passenger train. Our conditions at the camp are pretty good. There was no talk of execution and the atmosphere was calm. We are allowed to keep the money we bring and receive money from outside. We work in the kitchen alternately and do other services at the camp. We even prepared the dining room, which is rather rare, I have to admit.
Auschwitz
Fossoli was later taken over by the Nazis, who began organizing the deportation of Jews into concentration camps and eastern deaths. On both these transportations, on February 21, 1944, Levi and other inmates were transported with twelve overcrowded livestock trucks to Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. Levi (note number 174517) spent eleven months there before the camp was liberated by the Red Army on January 18, 1945. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, Levi was one of the twenty who left live camps. The average life expectancy of new participants in the camp is three to four months.
Levi knew some Germans from reading German publications on chemistry; he worked quickly to live in the camp without attracting the attention of special prisoners. He used bread to pay more experienced Italian prisoners for German lessons and orientation at Auschwitz. He was given a share of soup smuggled every day by Lorenzo Perrone, an Italian civilian stone mason who worked there as a forced laborer. Levi's professional qualifications are useful: in mid-November 1944 he was appointed as assistant at the laboratory of Buna Werke IG Farben intended to produce synthetic rubber. By avoiding hard work in freezing temperatures, he was able to survive; also, by stealing material from the laboratory and exchanging it with additional food. Shortly before the camp was released by the Red Army, he fell ill with dengue fever and was placed in a camp sanatorium (camp hospital). On January 18, 1945, the SS rushed to evacuate the camp as the Red Army approached, forcing everyone except the severely ill on the long journey of death to a site farther ahead, resulting in the death of most of the remaining prisoners in the parade. Levi's disease saved him from this destiny.
Despite being released on January 27, 1945, Levi did not reach Turin until 19 October 1945. After spending some time in a Soviet camp for a former concentration camp prisoner, he embarked on a difficult journey home in a company of former Italian prisoners of war who had been part of the Italian Army in Russia. His long train journey home to Turin took him on a circuitous route from Poland, through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. In later writings, he recorded millions of displaced people on the streets and trains throughout Europe during that period.
Writing career
1946-1960
Levi is almost unrecognizable when he returns to Turin. Malnutrition edema has swelled in his face. Wearing a thin beard and wearing a Red Army uniform, he returned to Corso Re Umberto. The next few months gave him a chance to recover physically, rebuild relationships with surviving friends and family, and start looking for work. Levi suffers from the psychological trauma of his experience. Unable to find a job in Turin, he started looking for a job in Milan. On his journey by train, he begins to tell people that he met the story of his time at Auschwitz.
At the Jewish New Year party in 1946, he met Lucia Morpurgo, who offered to teach him dance. Levi is in love with Lucia. At around this time, he began writing poetry about his experiences at Auschwitz.
On January 21, 1946 he started working at DUCO, a Du Pont Company paint factory outside Turin. Due to the very limited train service, Levi stayed in the factory dorm for a week. This gave him the opportunity to write without being distracted. He started writing the first draft If This Is a Man . Every day he wrote notes about train tickets and a piece of paper because memories came to him. By the end of February, he had ten pages detailing the last ten days between the German evacuation and the arrival of the Red Army. Over the next ten months, the book began to form in the dorm as she typed her memories every night.
On December 22, 1946, the manuscript was completed. Lucia, who now replied to Levi's love, helped her to edit it, to make the narrative flow more natural. In January 1947, Levi took the completed manuscript for the publisher. It was rejected by Einaudi on the suggestion of Natalia Ginzburg. The social wounds of the war years are still too new, and he has no literary experience to give him a reputation as a writer.
Eventually Levi found the publisher, Franco Antonicelli, through a friend of his sister. Antonicelli is an amateur publisher, but as an active anti-fascist, he supports the idea of ​​the book.
At the end of June 1947, Levi suddenly left DUCO and worked with an old friend Alberto Salmoni to run a chemical consultation from the upper floors of Salmoni's parents' house. Many of the current Levi experiences find their way into his writing later. They make the most of their money from making and supplying stannous chloride to mirror makers, sending unstable chemicals with bicycles across town. Attempts to make the lipstick of the reptile's excretion and colored enamel to coat the teeth are transformed into short stories. Accidents in their labs filled Salmoni's house with unpleasant odors and corrosive gases.
In September 1947, Levi married Lucia and a month later, on October 11, If It Is Human was published with a print of 2,000 copies. In April 1948, with Lucia pregnant with their first child, Levi decided that the life of an independent chemist was too precarious. He agreed to work for Accatti in the family paint business that was traded under the name SIVA. In October 1948, his daughter, Lisa, was born.
During this period, his friend's physical and psychological health, Lorenzo Perrone, declined. Lorenzo was a civilian forced laborer at Auschwitz, who for six months had provided some of his quota and a piece of bread to Levi without asking for anything in return. The movement saved Levi's life. In his memoirs, Levi compares Lorenzo with everyone in the camp, the prisoners and guards, as someone who managed to preserve his humanity. After the war, Lorenzo could not overcome the memory of what he had seen, and descended into alcoholism. Levi made several trips to save his old friend from the street, but in 1952 Lorenzo died.
In 1950, after showing his chemistry talents to Accatti, Levi was promoted to Technical Director at SIVA. As a chemist and SIA problem shooter, Levi travels abroad. He made several trips to Germany and carefully engineered his contacts with German businessmen and senior scientists. Wearing a short-sleeved shirt, he made sure they saw the prison camp number in his arm.
He became involved in an organization that promised to remember and record the horror of the camps. In 1954, he visited Buchenwald to mark the ninth anniversary of the camp's liberation from the Nazis. Levi obediently attended many such memorial events over the years and recounted his own experiences. In July 1957, his son Renzo was born, almost certainly named after his savior Lorenzo Perrone.
Despite a positive review by Italo Calvino in L'Ivanovic , , only 1,500 copies If This Is Human > sold. In 1958 Einaudi, the major publisher, published it in a revised form and promoted it.
In 1958 Stuart Woolf, in close collaboration with Levi, was translated It Is Human into English, and it was published in England in 1959 by Orion Press. Also in 1959 Heinz Riedt, also under strict supervision by Levi, translated it into German. As one of the main reasons Levi wrote the book is to get Germans to realize what has been done on their behalf, and to accept at least some responsibility, this translation is probably the most important to him.
1961-1974
Levi began writing The Truce early in 1961; it was published in 1963, nearly 16 years after his first book. That year won the first annual Premio Campiello literary award. It is often published in a single volume with If It Is Human, as it covers the return of its length through Eastern Europe from Auschwitz. Levi's reputation is growing. He regularly contributed articles for the Turin La Stampa . He works to earn a reputation as a writer on subjects other than Auschwitz who are still alive.
In 1963, he experienced his first major depression. When he has two small children, responsible work in a factory where the accident can and does have dire consequences, he travels and becomes a public figure. But the memory of what happened less than twenty years earlier still burned his mind. Today the relationship between such trauma and depression is better understood. Doctors prescribe several different drugs over the years, but these have varying efficacy and side effects.
In 1964, Levi collaborated in a radio drama based on If It Was Human with the RAI state broadcasters, and in 1966 with theater production.
He published two volumes of science fiction under the pen name Damiano Malabaila, which explores ethical and philosophical questions. This envisioned an effect on many discovery societies that would be considered beneficial, but which, he saw, would have serious implications. Many stories from two books Storie naturali ( Natural Histories , 1966) and The vizio in forma ( Structural Defects , 1971) was then collected and published in English as The Sixth Day and other Tales .
In 1974 Levi arranged for a semi-retirement entry from SIVA in order to have more time to write. He also wants to get out of responsibility for managing the paint factory.
1975-1987
In 1975, Levi's poetry collection was published under the title L'osteria di Brema ). It is published in English as Shema: Collected Poems .
He wrote two other highly praised memoirs, Lilit e altri racconti ( Rejection Moments , 1978) and Il sistema periodico ( The Periodic Table , 1975). Moments of Suspension deals with the characters he/she observes during the prison. The Periodic Table is a collection of short pieces, based on the episodes of his life but includes two short stories that he wrote before his time at Auschwitz. Each story is related in several ways to one of the chemical elements. At the Royal Institution London on October 19, 2006, the The Periodic Table was selected into the shortlist for the best science books ever written.
In 1977 at the age of 58, Levi retired as a part-time consultant at SIVA's paint factory to devote himself full-time to writing. Like all his books, La chiave stella (1978), published in the US in 1986 as The Monkey Wrench and in Britain in 1987 as The Wrench, difficult to categorize. Some reviews describe it as a collection of stories about work and workers narrated by a Levi-like narrator. Others call it a novel, created by related stories and characters. Housed in a company town run by Fiat in Russia called Togliattigrad, he describes the engineer as a hero who relied upon others. The underlying philosophy is that pride in one's work is necessary for fulfillment. The Piedmontese Faussone engineers traveled the world as experts in building cranes and bridges. Left-wing critics say he does not describe the harsh working conditions on the assembly line at Fiat. This brought Levi to a wider audience in Italy. The Wrench won the Strega Prize in 1979. Most of the stories involved solutions to industrial problems with the use of problem solving skills; many stories come from the author's personal experience.
In 1984 Levi published his only novel, If Not Now, When? - or a second novel, if The Monkey Wrench is calculated. It traces the fate of a group of Jewish parties behind the German line during World War II as they seek to survive and continue their fight against the invaders. With the ultimate goal of reaching Palestine to take part in the development of a Jewish national home, the partisan band reached Poland and then the German territory. There the survivors are officially accepted as displaced persons in the territory held by the Western allies. Eventually, they managed to reach Italy, on their way to Palestine. This novel won Premio Campiello and Premio Viareggio .
The book was inspired by events during Levi's train journey after returning from the camp, â €
Levi became the main literary figure in Italy, and his books were translated into many other languages. The Truce became the standard text in Italian schools. In 1985, he flew to the United States for a 20-day speaking tour. Although he was accompanied by Lucia, the trip was very draining for him.
In the Soviet Union, his early works were not accepted by censorship because he described the Soviet army as slovenly and disorganized rather than heroic. In Israel, a state formed partly by surviving Jews living through a horror similar to that portrayed by Levi, many of his works were not translated and published until after his death.
In March 1985, he wrote an introduction to the publication of the autobiography of Rudolf HÃÆ'¶ss, who was the commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940 to 1943. In it he wrote, "The book is full of evil... and reading it is a profound suffering."
Also in 1985 some of his essays, previously published in La Stampa L'altrui mestiere ( Trafficking Others ). Levi used to write these stories and hoard them, releasing them into La Stampa at a rate of about a week. The essays range from reviews and book libraries of strange things in nature, to fictional short stories.
In 1986 his book I sommersi ei salvati ( The Drowned and the Saved ), is published. In it he tried to analyze why people behave like they are at Auschwitz, and why some survive while others die. In his typical style, he does not make judgments but presents evidence and asks questions. For example, one essay examines what he calls "The Gray Area", the Jews who do the dirty work of the Germans for them and keep the rest of the prisoners in line. He asks, what makes a concert violinist behave as an unfeeling giver?
Also in 1986 another short story collection, previously published in La Stampa < span lang = "it" title = "Italian text"> Racconti e saggi (some of which are published in English volume The Mirror Maker ).
At the time of his death in April 1987, Levi was working on another essay selection called The Double Bond, which took the form of letters for "La Signorina" . This essay is very personal. About five or six chapters of this text exist. Carole Angier, in her Levi biography, explains how she traced some of these essays. He wrote that the others were kept out of view by a close friend of Levi, to whom he gave them, and they might have been destroyed.
In March 2007 Harper's Magazine publishes an English translation of Levi's "Knall" , about fictitious weapons that are fatal at close range but harmlessly over a meter away. It originally appeared in his 1971 Italian Vizio in forma, but was published in English for the first time by Harper's .
A Tranquil Star , a collection of seventeen stories translated into English by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli [2] [3] published in April 2007.
In 2015, Penguin publishes The Complete Works of Primo Levi, ed. Ann Goldstein. This is the first time the entire Levi oeuvre has been translated into English.
Death
Levi died on April 11, 1987 after falling from the landing of his three-story apartment interior in Turin to the ground floor below. The coroner decides his death as a suicide. Three of his biographers (Angier, Thomson and Anissimov) agree. In later life, Levi showed that he was suffering from depression; factors that may include the responsibility for the elderly mother and her mother-in-law, with whom she lives, and the traumatic memories linger from her experience. Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said at the time, "Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later".
Some friends and colleagues of Levi think otherwise. Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta noted that Levi did not leave a suicide note, or any other indication that he was considering suicide. Documents and testimony suggest that he has a plan for the short and long term at the time. After visiting the apartment complex, Gambetta suggests that Levi lose his balance and fall unintentionally, as he complained to his doctor about dizziness in the days before his death. Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini, a close friend of Levi, agrees. "As a chemical engineer," he said, "he might have picked a better way [out of the world] than jumping onto a narrow staircase with a lame risk." Display
Maps Primo Levi
on Nazism, USSR and antisemitism
Levi wrote If It Is a Man to be a witness to the horrors of Nazi efforts to exterminate the Jews and others. In turn, he read many reports by witnesses and survivors, and attended the meetings of the survivors, becoming a prominent symbolic figure for anti-fascists in Italy.
Levi visited over 130 schools to talk about his experience at Auschwitz. He was struck by the revisionist attitude of trying to rewrite the history of the camps as less terrible, now called the Holocaust denial. His view is that the Nazi death camps and the extermination efforts of the Jews are a unique horror in history because the goal is total racial destruction by people who see themselves as superior. He noted that it was very organized and mechanical; it entails the degradation of the Jews to the point of using their ashes as material for the road.
With the publication of the works of Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, above all Gulag Archipelago (1974), the world finally admits that the Soviet regime has used camp (gulag) from the early 1920s onwards, to imprison criminals and political, that is. those convicted of "counter-revolutionary" crimes. Similarities with Lager include hard physical work and poor rations. In this case the camps established in Nazi Germany after 1933 to isolate the Third Reich's political opponents, religious dissidents, homosexuals and other target groups were comparable to those in the Soviet Union. The main difference is that the wartime Nazi massacre camps (Vernichtungslager) exist primarily to engage in mass killing of individuals of all ages. They also existed for three years (1941-1944).
Levi rejected the idea that the system was depicted in The Gulag Archipelago and that of the Nazi Italian language Lager : konzentrationslager ; see Nazi concentration camp) equivalent. The death rate in Stalin GULag (Glavnoe upravlenie lagerei) was 30% at worst, he wrote, while in extermination camps he estimated it to be 90-98%. Levi did not provide a source for these figures, and now Soviet secret documents are available, suggesting that mortality rates vary widely by region (eg Far North and Magadan) and years (war years from 1941-1945, for example).
Different destination of annihilation camp
The goal of the Lager is the destruction of the Jewish race in Europe. Nothing excluded. No one can leave Judaism; The Nazis treated the Jews as a racial group rather than as a religious group. Of the many children deported to the camp, almost all died. The purpose of the Nazi camp is not the same as that of Stalin's 'gulags', Levi writes in the appendix for If It's Human, , even though it is an "exhilarating comparison between two hell models".
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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