Primo Levi’s Complete Works at the 16th National Book Festival in Washington D.C.

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Panel
An extraordinary roster of writers, poets and artists will participate in the 2016 Library of Congress National Book Festival, which will take place on Saturday, Sept. 24, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in the U.S. capital. Many of America’s – and the world’s – most distinguished and best known authors will discuss and sign their works in the nation’s largest free book festival. For the second consecutive year, the festival will offer an International stage, featuring writers from many nations. This stage will open with a special tribute to author Primo Levi, the Italian scientist and Auschwitz survivor who became an exemplary voice of conscience after World War II. The panel, which begins at noon, will feature Primo Levi’s translator, Ann Goldstein of the New Yorker, as well as New Yorker cultural critic Adam Gopnik, and will be moderated by Michael Abramowitz of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. With the participation of Alessandro Cassin of Centro Primo Levi. A Q & A session with the audience will follow the presentation.

Film
The panel will be introduced by a short film on Primo Levi by multimedia artist Cynthia Madansky, using little know archival images and footage provided by the Digital Library of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi, Archivio Patrizia Antonicelli, Archivio Ebraico Terracini, Leo Levi Family, Archivio Serafino, Fabrizio Salmoni, La Stampa, Fondazione Fossoli, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and RAI Teche. The production of the short was made possible through the generous support of the Viterbi Family, Dr. Claude Ghez and the the American Initiative for Italian Culture (www.aific.org)

About the filmmaker and the panelists

Cynthia Madansky’s films integrate hybrid forms including autobiography, experimental tropes, cinema verité, literature, anthropological observation and dance, engaging with cultural and political themes, such as identity, nationalism, displacement and war and foregrounding the human experience and personal testimony. The most recent works include 1+8, a video installation on the eight borders of Turkey and two films produced as fellow at the American Academy in Rome, Anna Pina Teresa, exploring one of Anna Magnani’s legendary gestures in Roma Città Aperta and E42 a cinematic exploration of Fascism’s urban space.

The New Yorker’s editor Ann Goldstein published her first translation from Italian in 1992. Since then, she has become one of the most appreciated translators of Italian literature having brought to the international public the works of some of Italy’s most prominent writers, including Elena Ferrante, Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi, Aldo Buzzi, and Alessandro Piperno. Ann Goldstein co-authored with Domenico Scarpa the “Lezione Primo Levi 2015” entitled In Another Language published by Einaudi and Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin (www.primolevi.it) and aimed at high-school students. She discussed her translation of Levi’s work in an interview published in Public Books.

Adam Gopnik has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. During his tenure at the magazine, he has written fiction, humor, book reviews, profiles, and reported pieces from abroad. He was the magazine’s art critic from 1987-1995, and the Paris correspondent from 1995-2000. Gopnik has three National Magazine awards, for essays and for criticism, and also the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March of 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. He lectures widely, and, in 2011, delivered the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Massey Lectures.

Michael Abramowitz is Director of the Committee on Conscience which conducts the genocide prevention efforts of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Prior to his appointment, he worked as a reporter and editor for The Washington Post since 1985. Among the subjects he covered were local and national politics, foreign policy, health care, and business. Between 2006 and 2009, Abramowitz was White House correspondent for the Post. Abramowitz is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a non-resident fellow of the German Marshall Fund and was a media fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

Alessandro Cassin is the director of Centro Primo Levi’s online magazine, Printed Matter and CPL Editions which published over 10 books since its debut in 2015. Coming from a tradition of publishing —his father published the first edition of If This Is A Man in English—Cassin began working in experimental theater and was awarded the Premio Ruggero Rimini 1989 for Il Presidente Schreiber. He has been a cultural reporter for publications including L’Espresso and Diario. He is a contributor of The Brooklyn Rail. His book Whispers: Ulay on Ulay co-authored with Maria Rus Bojan received the 2015 AICA Netherlands Award.

The National Book Festival
The Library of Congress National Book Festival, of which President and Mrs. Obama have served as honorary co-chairs from 2009 to the present, is an annual literary event that brings together best-selling authors and thousands of book fans for author talks, panel discussions, book signings and other activities. Over its 16-year history, the National Book Festival has become one of the pre-eminent literary events in the United States.

Co-presented and supported by the Italian Embassy in Washington D.C. Centro Primo Levi’s programs are made possible by the Viterbi Family Foundation and the Cahnman Foundation. Centro Primo Levi thanks Robert Weil of W.W. Norton and Robert Raben for their help in bringing this program to the public.

Resources

Primo Levi International Study Center, Turin

Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation, Milan

Links for the study of Italian Jewish history

A Brief Guide to the History of the Shoah in Italy

Primo Levi’s chronology curated by his editor, writer and public intellectual Ernesto Ferrero

Primo Levi was born in Turin on July 31 in the same house that he was to live his whole life long. His ancestors were Piedmontese Jews who had come from Spain and Provence. Levi described their customs, lifestyles, and ways of speaking in the first chapter of The Periodic Table, but he did not have any personal memories of anyone before his grandparents. His paternal grandfather was a civil engineer who lived in Bene Vagienna in Cuneo Province, where he owned a house and a little farm. He died in 1885. His maternal grandfather was a cloth merchant who died in 1941. His father Cesare (born in 1875) graduated in electrical engineering in 1901. He made long business trips abroad to Belgium, France, and Hungary. He married Ester Luzzati (1895-1991) in 1918. Levi recalled his father as an outgoing person, someone modern for his times and a lover of good living and good reading who paid scarce attention to family affairs. Read more

CPL EDITIONS

Browse books, articles, stories about Primo Levi and the Italian Jewish world. Visit CPL Editions.

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Centro Primo Levi is a New York based organization inspired by the humanistic legacy of writer and chemist Primo Levi. The Center offers public and academic programs and publications on the history of Italian Jews and Judaism. Its main focus on 20th century totalitarianism expands to a history of over two thousand years in an ongoing effort to present the experience and perspective of a minority and its relation with mainstream culture in ancient and modern societies.

ANTHOLOGY

Quaestio De Centauris, A short story by Primo Levi

Those were the days when the earth itself fornicated with the sky, when everything germinated and everything was fruitful. Not only every marriage but every union, every contact, every encounter, even fleeting, even between different species, even between beasts and stones, even between plants and stones, was fertile, and produced offspring not in a few months but in a few days. The sea of warm mud, which concealed the earth’s cold, prudish face, was one boundless nuptial bed, all its recesses boiling over with desire and teeming with jubilant germs.

This second creation was the true creation, because, according to what is passed down among the centaurs, there is no other way to explain certain similarities, certain convergences observed by all. Why is the dolphin similar to the fish, and yet gives birth and nurses its offspring? Because it’s the child of a tuna and a cow. Where do butterflies get their delicate colors and their ability to fly? They are the children of a flower and a fly. Tortoises are the children of a frog and a rock. Read more

Primo Levi, Anthropologist of Normality, Ernesto Ferrero, 2009

Within the catastrophe of the Shoah, humanity was fortunate that the train leaving Italy for Auschwitz in February 1944 was transporting a very special envoy: an anthropologist not yet aware of his talent; a young chemist who would later become a writer and who had already written short stories and poems. One of them, set in a Milanese suburb among factories, describes a morning siren, announcing the start of the workday – that seems to prefigure the chilling sirens of the camps. Levi is capable of elaborating an articulate interpretation of the facts because his approach is rational (not impressionistic, not rhetorical) and comprises a wide range of disciplines, from the sciences to linguistics and ethology. Of course, knowledge in and of itself is not enough: it needs to be transmitted, as Galileo, Darwin, and Freud, all excellent writers, were able to do. Read more

The Grey Zone, Anna Bravo, Working paper for the Lezione Primo Levi: Raccontare per la storia, Einaudi, 2014

Levi writes about Rumkowski “we are all mirrored in Rumkowski, his ambiguity is ours, it is our second nature, we hybrids molded from clay and spirit.” Certainly he was a literary character, a resource that the narrative of these events cannot do without, whether the narrative is considered as testimony or it is interwoven with analytical writing. Nevertheless, he also seemed to be a concrete individual in If This is a Man. If so, he seemed most believable as a shrewd prostitute who can convince clients that they are having love affairs. There is one basic difference. A prostitute sells his or her body. Henri sells his soul. From Levi’s point of view, selling one’s soul is worse than losing it like so many prisoners who did. The reason is that the word sell alludes to a relationship, a range of choices, a pact. It is a point of view that falsifies the relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor down to the roots and turns one of Levi’s most treasured words into a parody, friendship.

I do not know if The Drowned and the Saved was in harmony with the climate of Italy of those years, as Alberto Cavaglion thinks. This was a climate that tended towards half tones and towards self-absolution to the point of self-complacency. Eraldo Affinati thinks differently. For him there is no writer aside from Levi who had the courage “before the fall of the Berlin wall to reflect beyond ideological categories on the feelings of extreme fragility, present in all of us like harmful sirens capable of unhinging our defenses and leading us to the most terrible of abstentions – the abstention from judgment.” Read more

Primo Levi’s Love, Uri Cohen (University of Tel Aviv)

In the chapter Phosphorus in the Periodic Table Levi tells us of a love story that took place in 1942, when he was employed in futile research after an oral cure for diabetes. Beatrice and Virgil in one, Giulia Vineis was responsible for the job offer and becomes his guide, in the factory as well as in life and love. They knew each other from school she was strong, passionate, and catholic and above all engaged. Phosphorus, the luminous burning noxious element is all about life under Fascism and the racial rules, about the way a regime insinuates itself in human intimacy and its language.

Brave and honest Giulia thinks that “Racial laws are a bunch of stories, what importance could they have anyway?” Read more

Primo Levi at the United Nations, Roger Cohen (The New York Times)

The core responsibility of the journalist, unchanging through all the rapid transformations of my profession, is to bear witness. If This is a Man is, among other things, journalism raised through observation and distillation to the level of literature. For any journalist it is as good a holy grail as any. This, then, is how it was day after day: the thirst, the hunger, the cold, the pain, the drudgery, the violence, the scavenging, the stealing, the filth, the lice, the selections, the executions, the hopelessness, the dreaming, the fear, the glimmerings and the humiliations. “Hier ist kein warum,” – “There is no why here” – Levi learns early on from a guard, who snatches from him, with gratuitous sadism, an icicle he has grabbed to quench his thirst. On page after page, with a chemist’s precision, Levi assembles detail by detail his account of the Nazi exercise in barbarism, a program of senseless mass murder embraced by the nation whose civilization produced Beethoven. He wants historians to know, he wants the whole world to know, lest anyone forget. But who will believe him or care? Read more

Primo Levi at the United Nations, Maaza Mengiste (writer)

In the chapter, “The Gray Zone”, from The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi questions if survivors of Nazi terror have succeeded in understanding and making others understand their experience. He goes on to define what he means by the verb “to understand”. It coincides, he says, with “to simplify”. The world is so complex and so tangled, he asserts, that we simplify in order to find our footing and figure out what action we must take. We reduce the knowable down to words and concepts that will allow us to embrace what is incomprehensible. We narrow our vision, set aside the lingering questions, and stand in front of what can be contained. Here is a little boy who has drowned. Look at him and understand the numbers he represents, consider the desperation that put him on that boat. We mourn for him, this boy who symbolizes the very best in human nature, that aspect of ourselves that has fallen victim to the recent waves of terrorist attacks and ongoing violence. Read more

A Primo Levi Atlas: Conversation with Marco Belpoliti. Alessandro Cassin

Today, one of Levi’s most interesting contributions is his investigation of the “grey zone”. Here we hear clearly his voice as a scholar of power relations, in both their extreme manifestation inside the camp, but also in their less oppressive manifestations in the outside world. His book for the twenty-first century and beyond is The Drowned and the Saved. He still needs to be studied and understood, he is an important author for our future. I find his anthropological and ethological perspectives to be decisive. This is the new frontier, without forgetting the Nazi extermination and concentration camps. There are still similar situations in the world, and I fear that it will occur again. In different forms, but this kind of horror will occur again. We see it every day. And again there is the theme of the “foreigner”, xenophobia. Unfortunately [for these reasons] Levi continues to be topical and relevant. Read more

Calvino, Manzoni and the Gray Zone. Carlo Ginzburg

First of all, there is a memory, an image. Primo Levi and Calvino are walking side by side at dusk in the summertime, talking animatedly (Calvino is taller), along the road that goes towards the village of Rhêmes Notre-Dame. It was at Rhêmes, a little side valley of the Aosta Valley, that the co-workers and friends of the Einaudi publishing house used to meet each summer. The discussions would go on for about a week. That was the only time when, at least when I was there, that Primo Levi participated. It must have been 1980 or 1981. The meaning of that image imprinted in my memory became evident in retrospect when Sergio Solmi’s translation into Italian of Raymond Queneau’s Petite cosmogonie portative was published by Einaudi in 1982. Calvino wrote an afterword for it, entitled Piccola guida alla Piccola Cosmogonia *little guide to the little cosmogony+, where he thanked Primo Levi, “who with his professional knowledge as a chemist and the agility of his sense of humor managed to get a handle on many of the passages that had remained inaccessible to me.” In an enthusiastic review dedicated to the Petite cosmogonie portative, Levi referred to Calvino’s Piccola guida as “very sharp.” In 1986 he evoked his recollections of the work he did on Queneau “with happiness and amusement” at Rhêmes Notre-Dame as the “happiest hour” of his friendship with Calvino, who had died the year before.4

The chemist who had helped Calvino decipher Queneau’s arcane allusions to Mendeleev’s periodic table was also the author of The Periodic Table (1975), that very fine book where the table of the elements was used as a metaphor for the various and sundry way of impersonating the human condition. However, can we really detect a non-metaphoric equivalent of Mendeleev’s table in the sphere of human relationships? In his exploration of the “transversal bonds which link the world of nature to that of culture,” Primo Levi implicitly asked this kind of question and sought an answer.” Read more

Primo Levi at Fossoli – The functioning of the camp proves to be a link between the RSI (the Italian Social Republic) and the Nazis in their collaboration.

Primo Levi was dismissed from the camp at Fossoli and put aboard the train that was to take him from the station at Carpi to Auschwitz on February 22, 1944. Right before he left, he clearly saw a RSI gendarme on the platform who was guarding the prisoners, a living proof that the Italian Fascists were participating and cooperating fully in the deportation of Jews to Nazi Germany. Massimo Dini and Stefano Jesurum recount the exchange of words that took place then on that day in Primo Levi. Le opere e i giorni (1992) [Primo Levi: Works and Days]. This episode comes back to our attention in Liliana Picciotto’s new book L’alba ci colse come un tradimento (Mondadori, Milan 2010). The title – meaning “the dawn struck us like a betrayal” – is a quotation from Levi. The book is dedicated to the «Jews in the camp at Fossoli, 1943-44». Picciotto presents the readers with a wealth of newly discovered information that shows the daily working relationship between the Italian and German authorities in the management of the camp in precise and concrete details. Read more

Primo Levi, Mountain Rebel. Gavin Jacobson reviews Sergio Luzzatto’s Primo Levi’s Resistance.

In September 1943, Primo Levi took to the mountains in northwest Italy to escape the Nazis. A keen mountaineer since the age of 14, for Levi the Alps had long been a sanctuary for physical release and spiritual recovery. High up in the alpine tundra, he exulted in hard battle with the elements, the same “Mother-Matter” he confronted at the Chemical Institute in Turin, where he worked as a chemist on the molecular structure of carbon. The mountain’s geological morphologies, the combined sense of its instant creation and eternal presence, the fellowship amongst climbers roped together across pleated terrains: these had been Levi’s greatest pleasures. Read more

Primo Levi’s Resistance. Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy. Sergio Luzzatto; Translated by Frederika Randall

Like most of his Jewish friends, the twenty-four-year-old Levi had not gone up into the hills for any pressing military or intrinsically political purpose. He was not evading an army call-up, since adult males “of the Jewish race” had been banned from military service in 1938 and were even less welcome in the collaborationist Italy of Salò. He wasn’t there to hide out and pursue guerrilla action, since he wouldn’t have taken along his sister and fifty-year-old mother. Nor was he there in response to a great call to take up the anti-Fascist resistance, for there had been no such call in the days just after the eighth of September; the resistance scattered here and there did not immediately become the Resistance with a capital R. Certainly Primo Levi stood with the anti-Fascists, and he had taken sides at least a year before Mussolini fell. Pressed by his charismatic cousin, Ada Della Torre, he and his friends—half a dozen Turinese Jews working in Milan—had already approached the anti-Fascist Partito d’Azione and even carried out some clandestine activities.20 But when Il Duce was ousted they were unable to translate that determination into concrete military or political action. The German occupation hit them more as endangered Jews than as rebels of the first hour. Read excerpts from the book

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