Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

Edward Mendelson. Primo Levi studied chemistry at Turin and worked as a chemist until, at 24, he joined the Italian “partisans” resisting the Nazi occupation of northern Italy in 1943. He was arrested by Italian Fascists and turned over to the…

Gavin Jacobson. Levi's experience as a partisan—and the execution of two teenage boys—showed him humans' capacity for extreme violence. In September 1943, Primo Levi took to the mountains in northwest Italy to escape the Nazis. A keen mountaineer since the…

James Wood. Primo Levi did not consider it heroic to have survived eleven months in Auschwitz. Like other witnesses of the concentration camps, he lamented that the best had perished and the worst had survived. But we who have survived…

Steven G. Kellman What would Primo Levi say? Though he died in 1987, the question persists. Last year, in a New York Times column recounting shock and revulsion over ISIS’s beheading American journalists and a British aid worker, Roger Cohen recalled a passage…

Parla Alessandro Cassin, che riapre la storica libreria fondata nel 1884 da un immigrato siciliano. Il successivo proprietario ebbe l’intuizione di vendere per corrispondenza i volumi fatti arrivare dal nostro Paese Giuseppe Culicchia. C’era una volta una piccola libreria italiana…

Alek Wilkinson. “Countless times I walked past these windows with the curtains drawn,” Alessandro Cassin said. “It seemed so unlikely that there would be anything behind them anymore.” Cassin is the director of publishing for Centro Primo Levi, which promotes…

Andrey Slivka I've always had an affinity for the Italian language (even if I don't understand Italians themselves, who represent a culture so different from ours as to be from a planet that whips around a lonely sun a million…

Anneliese Cooper. Anyone who spent much time in the West Village in the last decade probably walked by the storefront at 30 West 12th Street, and wondered at its display of sun-faded books with Italian titles gathering dust against a…