Non-Fiction Books

Primo Levi''s account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. IF THIS IS A MAN describes his deportation to Poland and the twenty months he spend working in Auschwitz. THE TRUCE covers his long journey to Italy at the end of the war through Russia and Central Europe. Levi never raises his voice, complains or attributes blame. By telling his story quietly, objectively and in plain language he renders both the horror and the hope of the situation with absolute clarity. Probing the themes which preoccupy all his writing - work love, power, the nature of things, what it is to be human - he leaves the reader drained, elated, apprehensive.

In this collection of essays based on his time as a Jewish prisoner in the Nazi camps, Primo Levi creates a series of sketches of the people he met who retained their humanity even in the most inhumane circumstances. Having already written two memoirs of his survival at Auschwitz, Levi knew there was still more left untold. Collected in this book are stray vignettes of fifteen individuals Levi met during his imprisonment. Whether it was the young Romani man who smuggled a creased photo of his bride past the camp guards or the starving prisoner who still insisted on fasting on Yom Kippur, the memory of these individuals stayed with Levi for long after. They represent for him “bizarre, marginal moments of reprieve.” Neither simple heroes nor victims, but people who never lost sight of their humanity in the face of unimaginable suffering. Written with the author’s signature humility and intelligence, Moments of Reprieve shines with lyricism and insight. Nearly forty years after their publication, Levi’s words remain as beautiful as they are necessary. Along with Elie Wiesel and Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi is remembered as one of the most powerful and perceptive writers on the Holocaust and the Jewish experience during World War II. This is an essential book both for students and literary readers. Reading Primo Levi is a lesson in the resiliency of the human spirit.

The Search for Roots is an anthology of writings that Primo Levi considered to be essential reading. Beginning with the Book of Job, that drama of the just oppressed by injustice, these thirty pieces, with introductions by Levi, reflect his profound knowledge of science and deep passion for literature, and his survival of Auschwitz, making it a collection that is both universal and poignantly autobiographical. The book demonstrates the breadth of Levi's interests and sympathies, from miniature science-fiction narratives to poetry and technical papers. The title suggests a rather strenuous endeavor, but everything here is marked by a quiet authority.

The renowned novelist and chronicler of the Nazi concentration camps, Primo Levi together with Tullio Regge, a leading physicist in the development of quantum mechanics, engage in a conversation that will enlighten and amuse the reader.

The renowned novelist and chronicler of the Nazi concentration camps, Primo Levi, who was also a chemist, and Tullio Regge, a leading physicist in the development of quantum mechanics, shared roots in Italy's Piedmont and a passionate interest in all things natural and human. This is a priceless record of an engaging conversation that will enlighten and amuse the reader on topics from the development of modern physics to the logic of science fiction. In the first few pages of this book the talk moves quickly from learning ancient Hebrew to feminism in the Talmud to Regge's boyhood chemistry experiments in an army pharmacy in Italy during World War II--"I set fire to everything"--and Levi's youthful fascination with science: "I hoped to go very far, to the point of possessing the universe, to understanding the why of things." Levi's and Regge's shared reactions to education in Italy--especially their belief as children in a school plot to conceal scientific knowledge--begin an intriguing and often humorous discussion ranging from the intellectual liberation of their university years, through the institution of Hitler's racial laws in fascist Italy, to scientific responsibility, the birth of the universe, and the future of humanity. Nothing escapes the authors' penetrating comments: space travel, music, computers, and the development of Levi's literary style. Of special interest are reminiscences of Oppenheimer, Wheeler, Gdel, and Heisenberg. Dialogo is published here with an introduction by Tullio Regge on Primo Levi and the background of this conversation. The conversation itself was originally conducted for radio broadcast.

The essays in this book include some of the subjects that fascinated Primo Levi - the house he lived in all his life, butterflies and spiders, imaginary creatures dreamed up by children, Rabelais, writing a novel, returning to school at 60 and the need for fear. Throughout the book there are glimpses of long lost childhood summers, his grandparents, adolescence and, most importantly, his writing. The book, which is near to autobiographical of Levi's post-Auschwitz years, conveys his conviction that though "we are living in an epoch rife with problems and perils, it is not boring".

Among the first written accounts of the concentration camps—a major literary and historical discovery. While in a Russian-administered holding camp in Katowice, Poland, in 1945, Primo Levi was asked to provide a report on living conditions in Auschwitz. Published the following year, it was subsequently forgotten and remained unknown to a wider public. Dating from the weeks and months immediately after the war, Auschwitz Report details the authors’ harrowing deportation to Auschwitz, and how those who disembarked from the train were selected for work or extermination. As well as being a searing narrative of everyday life in the camp, and the organization and working of the gas chambers, it constitutes Levi’s first lucid attempts to come to terms with the raw horror of events that would drive him to create some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature and testimony. Auschwitz Report is a major literary and historical discovery.

In a book John Leonard calls "remarkable" and Michael Ignatieff describes as "invaluable," The Voice of Memory collects thirty-six interviews with bestselling author Primo Levi―many of them completely new to English-speaking readers. This book reveals a varied and complex picture of the acclaimed writer, encompassing Levi the Holocaust witness, the writer, the chemist, the mountain climber, the intellectual, the political polemicist, the atheist, and the Jew. Hailed by David Denby as "one of the outstandingly beautiful and moving writers of our time," Levi emerges here in a rich, contradictory, and essentially human light. His status as perhaps the most important of the survivor-writers of the Holocaust is enhanced still further by his many voices speaking in this remarkable book.

From 1955 to 1987, the year of his suicide, Primo Levi wrote a series of articles that appeared in newspapers and journals. This volume contains a selection of these writings which shows at once the range of his interests and the skill, thoughtfulness and sensitivity he brought to his subjects, whether writing from the point of view of an eye-witness of the holocaust, of an author of novels and short stories, or of a chemist. The first part of this collection brings together Levi's articles about the holocaust and the concentration camp. In With Anne Frank history spoke, Levi rails intelligently and eloquently against what he saw as the yearly assault on the veracity and moral weight of the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. The second part contains a representative selection of Levi's essays on his own status as a writer and his profession of Chemist, and the many prefaces he wrote to others' histories and novels.

In 1945, soon after the liberation of Auschwitz, Soviet authorities in control of the Kattowitz (Katowice) camp in Poland asked Primo Levi and his fellow captive Leonardo De Benedetti to compile a detailed report on the sanitary conditions they witnessed in Auschwitz. The result was an extraordinary testimony and one of the first accounts of the extermination camps ever written. Their report, published in a medical journal in 1946, marked the beginnings of Levi’s life-long work as writer, analyst and witness. In the subsequent four decades, Levi never ceased to recount his experiences in Auschwitz in a wide variety of texts, many of which are assembled together here for the first time, alongside other testimony from De Benedetti. From early research into the fate of their companions to the deposition written for Eichmann’s trial, Auschwitz Testimonies is a rich mosaic of documents, memories and critical reflections of great historic and human value. Underpinned by his characteristically clear language, rigorous method and deep psychological insight, this collection of testimonies, reports and analyses reaffirms Primo Levi’s position as one of the most important chroniclers of the Holocaust.

At the start of 1987, Primo Levi took part in a remarkable series of conversations about his early life with a friend and fellow writer, Giovanni Tesio. This book is the result of those meetings, originally intended to be the basis for an authorized biography and published here in English for the first time. In a densely packed dialogue, Levi responds to Tesio’s tactful and never too insistent questions with a watchful readiness and candour, breaking through the reserve of his public persona to allow a more intimate self to emerge. Following the thread of memory, he lucidly discusses his family, his childhood, his education during the Fascist period, his adolescent friendships, his reading, his shyness and his passion for mountaineering, and recounts his wartime experience as a partisan and the terrible price it exacted from him and his comrades. Though we glimpse his later life as a writer, the story breaks off just before his deportation to Auschwitz owing to his sudden death. In The Last Interview , Levi the man, the witness, the chemist and the writer all unite to offer us a story which is also a window onto history. These conversations shed new light on Levi’s life and will appeal to the many readers of this most eloquent witness to the horrors of the Holocaust.