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Primo Levi

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Primo Levi’s life and work through archives and research institutions, a short film and an anthology of essays.

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SUPPORTERS

Viterbi Family
Lily Safra z'l
Jeffrey Keil & Danielle Pinet
Sarah Wolf Hallac
Peter S. and Mary Kalikow
Claude Ghez
Alan and Caryn Viterbi
Andrew and Joan Milano
Lice Ghilardi
Bruce Slovin and Francesca Slovin z'l
Georgette Bennett and Leonard Polonsky

INTERNATIONAL RESOURCES

Centro Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea
Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi
Italy at the Hebrew University

CONTACT

Centro Primo Levi
15 W 16 Street, New York, NY 10011
917-606-8202
info@primolevicenter.org

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*JOIN US* FEB 17TH, 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm 📖⁠ ⁠

*JOIN US* FEB 17TH, 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm 📖⁠
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Centro Primo Levi’s book talks at the Mitchell Algus Gallery, 132 Delancey Street, 2nd fl. (⁠
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RSVP: info@primolevicenter.org⁠
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In Regarding The Pain of Others, Susan Sontag reevaluates the interaction between spectators and the spectacles of war. Her last book, published in 2003, reads like a history of the Western gaze on war, punctuated by unanswered questions. What do we make of the act of looking, of the implications of looking at and consuming war? Is the criticism that photography may distort, denounce, create complicity, compassion, or indifference to reality, truly relevant to our ethics and actions? Or does it rather stand in for reality? Does it assuage our shame for not being able to understand it and our fear that we may one day do? Twenty years after its publication, Sontag’s poignant insights and her reckoning with her own righteousness and that of others offer material for an open conversation.⁠
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Centro Primo Levi invites you to consider this essay with us. We will pause and pay attention to what and how we witness every day.

🖊️ Of variable rhyme scheme and meter, sonnet

🖊️ Of variable rhyme scheme and meter, sonnets are sometimes structured into stanzas of an octet and a sestet or of three quartets and a concluding couplet. They are normally fourteen lines long, though always with a concluding volta, the rhetorical turn that gives the sonnet its reputation for surprise, rigor, and elegance. In lyric intensity, in density of imagery and turn of phrase, a sonnet is instantly recognizable. The professor of comparative medieval literature Paul Oppenheimer, writing in Comparative Literature, explains that sonnets are highly dialectical, whereby an issue (often concerning romantic love) is posed, but the “form of the poem will solve the problem,” a form somewhere between a poem and a syllogism.⁠
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There are structural variations: the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet; the English or Shakespearean sonnet; Edmund Spenser and Alexander Pushkin both invented their own types, and there are any number of deviations, a flexibility that proves their enduring appeal. Oppenheimer argues that the “invention of the sonnet was a momentous event,” as “no major poet… in Italian, German, French, Spanish, and English has failed to write sonnets.” And as Christopher Kleinhenz notes in the edited collection Francis Petrarch, Six Centuries Later: A Symposium: “750 years after its appearance, the sonnet still has the same basic form.⁠
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Kleinhenz writes: “For centuries the sonnet has remained the most popular and the most difficult poetic form in Western literature,” with few canonical poets since the Renaissance completely avoiding them. The endurance of the fourteen lines is startling, though a return to its complex origins almost a millennium ago provides a fuller understanding of its appeal. The sonnet, as it turns out, is many things; not least of which is a lesson in the complexity of societies and souls.⁠
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This essay by Ed Simon was published in: Daily JStor, April 21, 2021⁠
Read full article at our link in bio...⁠

Art After War: Paola and Lorenza Mazzetti⁠ A pro

Art After War: Paola and Lorenza Mazzetti⁠
A program spotlighting the resilient legacy of the Mazzetti sisters, for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 📹️⁠
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Magazzino Italian Art, in collaboration with the Centro Primo Levi in New York, presented Art After War, a program spotlighting the resilient legacy of the Mazzetti sisters. Born in Rome in 1927, Paola and Lorenza Mazzetti witnessed the murder of their adoptive family—the Jewish cousins of scientist Albert Einstein— in August 1944, an event that profoundly shaped their artistic journey. Their lives became a testament to resilience and an exploration of trauma through a diverse range of creative expressions encompassing painting, filmmaking, writing, and psychoanalysis.⁠
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The event was in commemoration of the Giornata della Memoria—the International Holocaust Remembrance Day—observed every year on January 27th and was part of a joint project with other Italian institutions in N.Y. The program at Magazzino serves as a tribute to the twin sisters’ profound artistic impact. Speakers Alessandro Cassin and Davide Spagnoletto provided insight into the parallel artistic practices of Paola and Lorenza and how art became a means of navigating a society still influenced by the traumatic events of war and persecution.⁠
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A key element of the program delves into the concept of the double image, a prominent trope in 20th-century art. Paola and Lorenza’s artworks offer a nuanced perspective on memory, inviting viewers to explore the interplay between sameness and difference, both in their art and in their reflections on memory itself.⁠
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More about our event at the link in bio...

La mostra fotografica “After Images – L’ecci

La mostra fotografica “After Images – L’eccidio della famiglia Einstein Mazzetti: risonanze visive⁠
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Inaugura al Memoriale della Shoah di Milano la mostra After Images, un ambizioso progetto in collaborazione con il Centro Primo Levi di New York. La mostra trasporta il visitatore in un altro momento nella storia, al 3 agosto 1944, quando la storia della famiglia Einstein Mazzetti entra nella Grande Storia, e le vicende del popolo ebraico, dei gruppi valdesi, dei partigiani, si ritrovano in un piccolo angolo di Toscana.⁠
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Le fotografie di Eva Krampen Kosloski, grazie alla curatela di Alessandro Cassin e al progetto di allestimento di Andrè Benaim (Benaim Studio), tracciano i profili di un racconto, tra sogno e realtà, che ci parla di una famiglia, ma in realtà di molte altre, segnate dalle vicende della Shoah e della Seconda Guerra Mondiale. La mostra verrà inaugurata il 19 gennaio e sarà ospitata al Memoriale fino al 25 febbraio 2024 in anteprima assoluta, per essere poi portata a New York. Il 18 gennaio, 18.30, la mostra verrà inaugurata attraverso al racconto che ne farà in quell’occasione Tommaso Montanari. Per partecipare all’inaugurazione si richiede la prenotazione a eventi@memorialeshoah.it⁠
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“La memoria di fatti tragici è innanzitutto dolore sempre rinnovato, talvolta così acuto da dover essere nascosto a se stessi. Ma nel caso delle due sorelle Mazzetti – testimoni dell’eccidio nazista dei loro famigliari –questa memoria si è tramutata nel tempo nel substrato della loro ispirazione artistica. È questo piccolo miracolo, dalla morte alla vita, che la mostra vuole testimoniare” – Marco Vigevani, Presidente Comitato Eventi Fondazione Memoriale della Shoah di Milano.⁠
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After Images, Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, 19 gennaio – 25 febbraio 2024. La visita alla mostra è inclusa all’interno del biglietto di ingresso al Memoriale. La mostra e un progetto di Fondazione Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, Centro Primo Levi New York, Fondazione Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò NYU.

In 1956, in a central London café, Lindsay Anders

In 1956, in a central London café, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and Lorenza Mazzetti wrote a manifesto for what they termed the “Free Cinema” movement. Among the aims of these four young, avant-garde filmmakers was a belief in “the importance of people and the significance of the everyday.” They eschewed traditional box office appeal in favor of authentic depictions of the quotidian, particularly that of the ordinary working man and woman. Mazzetti, who died this past weekend at the age of ninety-two, was then only twenty-eight years old—she’d recently moved to England from her native Italy, and first gotten work as a potato picker. Later that year, her second film, Together—which follows two deaf-mutes through the bomb-wrecked streets of London’s East End, or as Mazzetti described it, “fields of ruins overrun by children”—would win the Prix de Recherche at Cannes Film Festival. Her first film, K (1954), “suggested by” Kafka’s Metamorphosis and made on the most shoestring of budgets while she was a student at the Slade School of Art, anticipated the Free Cinema movement, and her signature appears first on the manifesto. And yet today she’s the least commemorated of the four, and her name is often little more than a footnote to the group’s history.She’s even less well known as an author, especially beyond the borders of her native Italy. Although her first novel, Il cielo cade (1961)—translated into English, by Marguerite Waldman, as The Sky Falls (1962)—was awarded Italy’s prestigious Premio Viareggio Prize, and is still considered something of a contemporary classic there, the English translation has been out of print for years. Told from the point of view of her child narrator, Penny, the author’s fictional alter-ego, it details the tragic events of Mazzetti’s own childhood during the Second World War: namely the murder by the Germans of her aunt and her cousins, followed by the suicide of her distraught uncle.⁠
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Continue reading... at our link in bio.⁠
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Re-Covered: The Sky Falls by Lorenza Mazzetti⁠
By Lucy Scholes, The Paris Review, 2020

Thank you to everybody who joined us for Art After

Thank you to everybody who joined us for Art After War: Paola and Lorenza Mazzetti. Here are a couple of snaps from the event. 🖼️ Subscribe to our newsletter for more events like this at primolevicenter.org⁠
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(Photos by Alexa Hoyer.)

*REMINDER*⁠ ⁠ Join us TOMORROW for our CEREMON

*REMINDER*⁠
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Join us TOMORROW for our CEREMONY OF THE READING OF THE NAMES 📝 8:30 am - 2:30 pm at the Consulate General of Italy. 690 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10065⁠
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Song of Dead in Vain, Primo Levi, 1984⁠
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Sit down and negotiate⁠
All you like, grizzled old foxes.⁠
We’ll wall you up in a splendid palace⁠
With food, wine, good beds and a fire⁠
As long as you bargain and negotiate⁠
Your children’s lives and your own.⁠
May all the wisdom of the universe⁠
Converge to bless your minds⁠
And guide you in the labyrinth.⁠
But out in the cold we’ll wait for you,⁠
The army of the dead in vain.⁠
We of the Marne, of Montecassino,⁠
Treblinka, Dresden and Hiroshima.⁠
And with us will be⁠
The lepers and the trachomatoses,⁠
The disappeared of Buenos Aires,⁠
The dead of Cambodia and the dying of Ethiopia,⁠
The plea bargains of Prague,⁠
The bloodless of Calcutta,⁠
The innocent mangled in Bologna.⁠
Woe to you if you come out disagreeing:⁠
You’ll be clutched tight in our embrace.⁠
We are invincible because we are the vanquished,⁠
Invulnerable because already silent; We laugh at your missiles.⁠
Sit down and bargain Until your tongues are dry.⁠
If the havoc and the shame continue⁠
We’ll drown you in our rottenness.⁠
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@italyinny #primolevicenternyc #primolevicenter #giornodellamemoria

In 1937, Corrado Cagli, a little-known Italian art

In 1937, Corrado Cagli, a little-known Italian artist, showed a painting at the Comet Gallery in New York and instantly became the talk of the town.⁠
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Inspired by the celebrated series of cardplayers by Cézanne, who earlier that year had an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Cagli’s work veered far from the French master’s Provençal laborers of the 1890s, with their pipes and tradesmen jackets: Unlike those gruff, rustic subjects, Cagli’s are young men in different stages of undress, homoerotically glancing at each other while making encircling gestures.⁠
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Immediately recognizable to the public, the Cagli painting also caught the attention of major publications that featured it, including Art Digest and The New York Times, which published a photo.⁠
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Cagli, who was gay and Jewish, visited the exhibition at Comet, never expecting that he would return to New York two years later, seeking refuge from Benito Mussolini’s antisemitic racial laws of 1938, which excluded him from public exhibitions and state patronage.⁠
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JOIN US for CORRADO CAGLI'S TRIUMPH OF BACCO AND ARIADNE⁠
January 30th ⁠
7:30 pm - 9:00 pm ⁠
111 Amsterdam Avenue at 65th Street⁠
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The score of The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne will be presented in its entirety for the first time since 1948. Cantori New York directed by Mark Shapiro will perform Vittorio Rieti’s music for the Magnifico. In 1948, the New York City Ballet presented The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne, a Renaissance poem by Lorenzo de’ Medici whose refrain “del doman non v’è certezza” (future holds no certainty) resonated with the experience of displacement in the immediate aftermath of World War II.⁠
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Behind the project was the painter, set designer and cultural organizer, Corrado Cagli. Echoed in this performance are his reckoning with his life in fascist Italy, the catastrophe of the war, and the mass murder of the Jews. Cagli’s first exhibition in New York since 1937 is on view at CIMA through January 26. The exhibition’s curator Raffaele Bedarida will give a brief overview on the history of the piece and Cagli’s work.⁠
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#primolevicenter #corradocagli #primolevi

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