New Reflections on Primo Levi / Italian and Italian American Studies (PDF)

RISA SODI is Director of Undergraduate Studies and Senior Lector in Italian Language and Literature at Yale University, USA.
 
MILLICENT MARCUS is Professor of Italian at Yale University, USA.

"Critical study of Levi has surged recently, and this is a fine addition to that literature. Sodi and Marcus (both, Italian,

Yale) have assembled an international group of prominent and emerging scholars of Italian, Holocaust, and Levi

literary studies. The primary obstacles to early dissemination of Levi's Survival in Auschwitz were the belief, on the

part of leading publishers, that the Holocaust could not be assimilated into conventional literary genre studies and the

early postwar repression of Italian Holocaust history to pursue the anti-Fascist narrative. Levi is credited with the

eventual Italian escalation of interest in Holocaust literary production and scholarship. Among the collection's best

essays are those that treat Levi's politics and involvement in anti-Fascist groups; his predeportation identity based on a

theory of "parallel nationalization," whereby Italianization was privileged over Jewish identity; and shifting Italian

Holocaust memory from 1958 (with the republication of Survival in Auschwitz) to 1963 (publication of The

Reawakening) and its subsequent decline. Other essays explore Freudian trauma theory in The Reawakening, Levi

and Italo Calvino, literariness of the Survival in Auschwitz canto section, and Levi's attitude toward Muselmänner.

One essay provides a questionable reading of If Not Now, When? through the lens of the American Western film

genre." - Choice

"It is usually said that the life of a writer is a life of the mind. Primo Levi is an exception: he wrote his masterpieces because he was acquainted with grief. The essays in this volume grasp this essential trait of his writings and acknowledge that they cannot be simply classified as contributions to the intellectual history of recent times. With extraordinary precision, all of them, together, open the door to the moral center of the writer's lived experience, to