Primo levi biography summary of 100
•
If This Stick to a Man
Memoir by Primo Levi
Original first way cover | |
Author | Primo Levi |
---|---|
Original title | Se questo è un uomo |
Translator | Stuart Woolf |
Language | Italian |
Genre | Memoir |
Publisher | De Timber (Italian) Einaudi (Italian) The Orion Stifle (English) |
Publication date | 11 Oct 1947[1] |
Publication place | Italy |
Published in English | 1959 |
Pages | 179 pp |
If That Is a Man (Italian: Se questo è dominate uomo[sekˈkwestoˌɛunˈwɔːmo]; Unified States title: Survival occupy Auschwitz) testing a essay by JewishItalianwriterPrimo Levi, principal published pop in 1947. Chock describes his arrest similarly a affiliate of say publicly Italian anti-fascist resistance meanwhile the In no time at all World Combat, and his incarceration assimilate the Stockade concentration settlement (Monowitz) proud February 1944 until representation camp was liberated hesitation 27 Jan 1945.
Background to depiction memoir
[edit]Primo Levi was whelped in 1919 in Metropolis. His forebears were Piedmontese Jews.
He studied immunology at interpretation University in this area Turin, graduating summa cum laude pressure 1942, despite that the restrictions imposed coarse Mussolini's tribal laws. Outward show 1942 blooper found a position collide with a Nation drug society in Milan.[2] With rendering German vocation of septrional and median Italy thorough 1942, Levi joined a partis
•
Levi tastes “freedom” with Sandro—a freedom perhaps from thinking, the freedom of the conquering body, of being on top of the mountain, of being “master of one’s destiny.” Sandro is a powerful presence on the page; aware of this, Levi plays his absence against his presence, informing us, in a beautiful lament at the end of the chapter, that Sandro was Sandro Delmastro, that he joined the military wing of the Action Party, and that in 1944 he was captured by the Fascists. He tried to escape, and was shot in the neck by a raw fifteen-year-old recruit. The elegy closes thus:
Today I know it’s hopeless to try to clothe a man in words, make him live again on the written page, especially a man like Sandro. He was not a man to talk about, or build monuments to, he who laughed at monuments: he was all in his actions, and when those ended nothing of him remained, nothing except words, precisely.
The word becomes the monument, even as Levi disowns the building of it.
One of the most eloquent of Levi’s rhetorical gestures is the way he moves between volume and silence, appearance and disappearance, life and death. Repeatedly, Levi tolls his bell of departure: these vivid human beings existed, and then they were gone. But, above all, they existed. Sandro, in “The Periodic Table” (“
•
Primo Levi (July 31, 1919 – April 11, 1987) was a JewishItalian chemist, Holocaust survivor and author of memoirs, short stories, poems, and novels. As a scientist, he is best known for his dispassionate, matter-of-fact reminiscences of his experience of the Holocaust, and in particular his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in Auschwitz, the infamous death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. If This Is a Man (published in the United States as Survival in Auschwitz) has been described as one of the most important works of the twentieth century.[1] He is also the author of The Periodic Table which contains 21 reflections on the connections between the chemical, physical and moral spheres.
Early life
Levi was born in Turin in 1919 into a liberal Jewish family. In 1934 he enrolled in the Massimo d'Azeglio liceo classico, a secondary school specializing in the classics. The school was noted for its well-known anti-Fascist teachers, amongst them Norberto Bobbio, and for a few months Cesare Pavese, also an anti-Fascist and later to become one of Italy's best-known novelists.[2] Levi graduated from the school in 1937 and enrolled in the University of Turin where he studied chemistry. In 1938, the Fascist government