Primo Levi emerged from the Holocaust as one of the most powerful
voices to bear witness to the atrocities of the Nazi concentration
camps. Italian by birth and Jewish by ancestry, this young chemist
survived Auschwitz and later, with his sober retelling of this
horrific experience, consecrated the memory of the millions who
perished there.
Among the most widely read contemporary Italian writers in the
United States, his books have been translated into several languages,
and all of his major works are available in English. In
Understanding Primo Levi, Nicholas Patruno analyzes Levi's
novels, short stories, and essays to reveal a writer who eloquently
evoked the soul of the persecuted Jew but who never came to terms
with the guilt of his own survival.
Patruno contends that while Jewish themes recur throughout Levi's
work, labeling him narrowly as an ethnic writer would be inaccurate.
Rather, Patruno echoes Italo Calvino in defining Levi as a writer of
"encyclopedic vein" and argues that Levi's significance as an artist
and as a communicator lies in the fusion of his scientific
sensibilities and literary creativity. Patruno describes Levi's
desire to combine art and science, along with his compulsion to
record the nightmare of the Shoah, as the driving force behind his
literary endeavors.
Patruno examines the synthesis of science and art in The
Periodic Table, considered by many to be Levi's greatest work. He
also critiques The Monkey's Wrench, Levi's short stories and
essays, the four books created directly from his Holocaust
experience, and If Not Now, When?, perhaps Levi's only true
novel in the conventional sense. Patruno shows that while Levi wrote
absorbingly about a variety of topics, he was never able to stray far
from the theme of the Holocaust.
"A valuable introduction to one of the great witnesses and
writers of the twentieth century. It is scholarly but not stuffy;
clear and profound at the same time. An estimable work, indeed."
-Chaim Potok
"Exemplifies the kind of ideal reception that Levi himself so
desperately sought and despaired of ever finding."
-Millicent Marcus
