The Early Years
Primo Michele Levi (July 31, 1919- April 11, 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was born in Turin, Italy, at Corso Re Umberto 75, on the fourth floor of an undistinguished apartment block in Turin. His father, Cesare, worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based. Primo’s family was a liberal Jewish family in an assimilated, educated Jewish-Italian world. (Primo would write, in If This Is a Man, that when he first learned the name of his fateful destination later in his life, “Auschwitz” meant nothing to him. He only vaguely knew about the existence of Yiddish, “based on a few quotes or jokes that my father, who worked for a few years in Hungary, had picked up”). There were around 50 thousand Italian Jews, and most of them were supporters of the Fascist government (at least until the race legislation of 1938 [see below] that announced a newly aggressive anti-Semitism). A cousin of Primo’s, Eucardio Momigliano, had been one of the founders of the Fascist Party, in 1919. Cesare was a member, though more out of convenience than commitment.
Cesare was an avid reader and self-taught. Levi recalls that when he was a boy, his father would take him to visit his grandmother every Sunday. The two would walk along Via Po, Cesare stopping to pet the cats, sniff the mushrooms, and look at the used books:
“My father was l’Ingegnè, the Engineer, his pockets always bursting with books, known to all the salami makers because he checked the multiplication on the bill for the prosciutto with a slide rule. Not that he bought it with a light heart: rather superstitious than religious, he felt uneasy about breaking the rules of kashruth, but he liked prosciutto so much that, before the temptation of the shop windows, he yielded every time, sighing, cursing under his breath, and looking at me furtively, as if he feared my judgment or hoped for my complicity.”
Levi’s mother, Ester, known to everyone as Rina, was well educated, having attended the Istituto Maria Letizia. She, too, was an avid reader, played the piano, and spoke fluent French. The marriage between Rina and Cesare had been arranged by Rina’s father. On their wedding day, Rina’s father, Cesare Luzzati, gave Rina the apartment at Corso Re Umberto, where Primo Levi was raised and lived for almost his entire life.
In 1921 Anna Maria, Levi’s sister, was born. She was someone that he was to remain close to all his life. In 1925, at the age of 6, Levi entered the Felice Rignon primary school in Turin. In class he was the youngest, the shortest and the cleverest, as well as being the only Jew. For these reasons, he was often bullied and his health deteriorated. He was a thin and delicate child, shy, and thought he was ugly. While at school during these years, he excelled academically; he was top of his class (his schoolmates cheered him on with a play on his name: “Primo Levi Primo!”).
From this early age, he appears to have possessed many of the qualities that would appear in his later prose—meticulousness, curiosity, furious discretion, and orderliness to the point of priggishness. Because of his poor health, he was often absent from school for long periods of time. During these absences, he was fortunate to be tutored at home, at first by Emilia Glauda and then by Marisa Zini, daughter of the philosopher Zino Zini.
Primo and his sister spent summers with their mother in the Waldensian valleys southwest of Turin, where Rina usually rented a farmhouse. He enjoyed the outdoors, engaging in strenuous play and activity that helped him build up his strength and stamina. His father remained in the city, partly because of his dislike of rural life, but also because of the romantic affairs he was engaged in.
In August 1932, following two years at the Talmud Torah school in Turin, he sang in the local synagogue for his Bar Mitzvah. In 1933, as was expected of all young Italian schoolboys, he joined the Avanguardisti movement for young Fascists. He avoided rifle drilling by joining the ski division and spent every Saturday during the season on the ski slopes above Turin. As mentioned above, Levi was plagued by illness, especially by chest infections so he was keen on participating in strenuous physical activity. In his teens, Levi and a few friends would sneak into a disused sports stadium and conduct athletic competitions, which he thoroughly enjoyed and excelled in.
In July 1934, just before his 15th birthday, he took the exams for the Massimo d’Azeglio liceo classico (Turin’s leading academy specializing in the classics) and that autumn, he was admitted to the school, a year ahead of normal entrance. The school was noted for its well-known anti-Fascist teachers, among them the philosopher Norberto Bobbio and Cesare Pavese, who would later become one of Italy’s best-known novelists. Levi continued to be bullied during his time at the Lyceum, although six other Jewish boys were in his class. It was while he was at the Lyceum that he read Sir William Bragg’s Concerning the Nature of Things, and decided he wanted to be a chemist.
Early Signs of a Changing World
In 1937, Levi was summoned before the War Ministry and accused of ignoring a draft notice from the Italian Royal Navy—one day before he was to write a final examination essay on Italy’s participation in the Spanish Civil War, based on a quote from Thucydides: “We have the singular merit of being brave to the utmost degree.” Distracted and terrified by the draft accusation, he failed the exam—the first poor grade of his life—and was devastated. His father was able to keep him out of the Navy, however, by enrolling him in the Fascist militia (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale). He remained a member through his first year of university, until the passage of the Italian Racial Laws of 1938 that forced his expulsion from the Militia. Levi later recounted this series of events in the short story Fra Diavolo sul Po (Fra Diavolo on the Po).
At the end of the summer, he retook and passed his final examinations, and in October 1937 he enrolled at the University of Turin to study chemistry. As one of 80 candidates, he spent three months attending lectures, and in February, after passing his oral examination, he was selected as one of 20 students to advance to the full-time chemistry curriculum.
In the liberal period following World War I as well as in the first decade of the Fascist regime, Jews held many public positions and were prominent in literature, science, and politics. In 1929 Mussolini signed an agreement with the Catholic Church, the Lateran Treaty, which recognized the Vatican as a separate sovereign state outside of Italian sovereignty. In addition, it also established Catholicism as the State religion in Italy, allowed the Church to influence many sectors of education and public life, and relegated other religions to the status of “tolerated cults.” A year later, based on the new restrictions imposed on Italian public life by the Lateran Treaty, Mussolini’s regime promulgated legislation that defined the relations between the State and the Italian Jewish communities. In 1936 Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia and the expansion of what the regime regarded as the Italian “colonial empire” brought the question of “race” to the forefront for the first time in the post-unification political narrative. Within the context set by these two events, and the 1940 alliance with Hitler’s Germany, the situation of the Jews in Italy changed dramatically.
In July 1938 a group of prominent Italian scientists and intellectuals published the “Manifesto of Race,” a mixture of racial and ideological anti-Semitic theories from ancient and modern sources. This treatise formed the basis for the Italian Racial Laws of October 1938. Before the Racial Laws, Levi had not felt that Jewishness was central to his identity. Although he had suffered being bullied in school, he had simply thought that this was from being a physically small and sickly child. Like most Italian Jews, his family had long been assimilated with little to distinguish them from other Italians. After the enactment of the Italian anti-Jewish legislation, Italian Jews lost their basic civil rights, their positions in public offices, and their assets. Their books were prohibited, and Jewish writers could not publish in magazines owned by Aryans. Jewish students who had begun their courses of study were permitted to continue, but new Jewish students were barred from entering university. Since Primo had matriculated a year earlier (1937), he was able to continue his studies and to ultimately earn a degree in chemistry.
It was in 1939 that Levi began his life-long love affair with hiking in the mountains. His friend Sandro Delmastro taught him how to hike, and they spent many weekends in the mountains above Turin. Physical exertion, the risk, and the battle with the elements supplied him with an outlet for all the frustrations of his life, as Levi later wrote in the chapter “Iron” of The Periodic Table (1975). In June 1940, Italy declared war on Britain and France as an ally of Germany, and the first Allied air raids on Turin began two days later. Levi’s studies continued during the bombardments, although the family suffered additional strain because his father became bedridden with bowel cancer.
Because of the new Racial Laws and the increasing intensity of prevalent Fascism, Levi had difficulty finding a supervisor for his graduation thesis, which was on the subject of Walden inversion, a study of the asymmetry of the carbon atom. Dr. Nicolò Dallaporta eventually accepted him as his student and he became Levi’s thesis advisor. Levi graduated in the summer of 1941 with full marks and merit, having submitted additional theses on x-rays and electrostatic energy. His degree certificate, however, bore the remark: “of Jewish race”. This, combined with the racial laws then in effect, prevented Levi from finding a suitable permanent job after he graduated.
In December 1941, Levi was clandestinely offered a job at an asbestos mine at San Vittore. The project was to extract nickel from the mine spoilage, a challenge he accepted with pleasure. Levi understood that, if successful, he would be aiding the German war effort, which was suffering nickel shortages in the production of armaments. The job required Levi to work under a false name with false papers because he was a Jew.
In June 1942, due to the deteriorating situation in Turin, Levi left the mine and went to work in Milan. He had been recruited through a fellow student he had known at Turin University, who was then working for the Swiss firm of A Wander Ltd on a project to extract an anti-diabetic serum from vegetable matter. He could take the job because the Italian racial laws did not apply to Swiss companies. However, it soon became clear to him that the project had no chance of success, but it was not in his self-interest to say so.
In July 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III deposed Mussolini and appointed a new government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio as premier, who signed the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies. When the armistice was made public on September 8, the Germans were occupying Northern and Central Italy. They liberated Mussolini from imprisonment and appointed him as head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy.
Primo Levi Ponders His Place in the Changing World Order
However, Levi still had a more intense personal problem. The introduction of the Race Laws had created a predicament for him that went far beyond the problem of completing his degree in chemistry and finding a job. The Race Laws were a threat to his identity. Who was he if not an ordinary Italian like his fellow students? The question “What is a man?” that would echo throughout his literary works was never an abstract consideration for him but a matter of personal urgency.
Until September 1943, it had been possible for Levi to live in “willful blindness” to his Jewishness. He was able to get around the rules, graduate, and find work unofficially, but with the Italian capitulation to the Allies and the German occupation of Italy, this was no longer an option. Jews were being rounded up. Many were fleeing to the Americas. Levi’s insecurity at this time was compounded by the death of his father in March 1942, which made him, at twenty-three, responsible for the well-being of his mother and younger sister.
He nursed his self-esteem with adventurous chemistry experiments and arduous mountain climbing in the Alps above Turin. It was to the mountains that he fled with his mother and sister in September 1943. When he returned to Turin, he found his mother and sister had taken refuge in their holiday home, “La Saccarello,” in the hills outside the city. The three left for Saint-Vincent in the Aosta Valley, where they could hide. Since they were pursued as Jews, many of whom had already been interned by the authorities, the three moved up the hillside to Aosta in the Colle di Joux. Aosta was on the route to Switzerland, which was also followed by Allied prisoners of war and refugees trying to escape the Germans. Here, they rented rooms in a small resort hotel near the Swiss border.
Levi was still haunted by the question of whether he was a Jew on the run or a partisan. The Swiss border was closed; German forces were approaching. The Italian resistance movement became increasingly active in the German-occupied zone. Levi and a number of comrades took to the foothills of the Alps, and in October formed a partisan group in the hope of being affiliated with the liberal “Giustizia e Libertà” resistance movement. These would-be rebels were poorly organized and were quickly infiltrated by a Fascist spy; they put forward no real resistance to the Germans. The only shots fired in anger by the group were those that served to execute two younger members of the band on December 9, who had gone on a drinking and looting spree that put the safety of the others at risk. How far Levi was involved in this killing is mainly conjectural. In addition to all of this intrigue within the partisan band, to Levi’s dismay, his sister had taken his mother from the hotel on December 1 to find refuge back in Piedmont. By the time Levi and his companions were arrested on December 13, 1943, he was utterly demoralized and disoriented. Warned that to confess to being a partisan would mean certain death, he opted for the lesser evil of admitting his Jewishness. He was sent to the internment camp at Fossoli near Modena. He recalled later that as long as Fossoli was under the control of the Italian Social Republic, and not Nazi Germany, he was not harmed.
“We were given, regularly, a food ration destined for the soldiers,” Levi’s testimony stated, “and at the end of January 1944, we were taken to Fossoli on a passenger train. Our conditions in the camp were quite good. There was no talk of executions, and the atmosphere was quite calm. We were allowed to keep the money we had brought and receive money from the outside. We worked in the kitchen in turn and performed other services in the camp. We even prepared a dining room, a rather sparse one, I must admit.”
Levi Enters Auschwitz
Fossoli was soon taken over by the Germans, who started arranging the deportations of the Jews to eastern European concentration and death camps. On the second of these transports, on February 21, 1944, Levi and other inmates were transported in twelve cramped cattle trucks to Monowitz, one of the three main camps in the Auschwitz concentration camp complex. Levi (record number 174517) spent eleven months there before the Red Army liberated the camp on January 18, 1945. The average life expectancy of a new entrant at the camp was three months. Of the 650 Italian Jews in his transport, Levi was one of twenty who left the camps alive.
Levi knew some German from reading German publications on chemistry; he worked to orient quickly to life in the camp without attracting the attention of the privileged inmates. He used bread to pay a more experienced Italian prisoner for German lessons and orientation in Auschwitz. He was given a smuggled soup ration each day by Lorenzo Perrone, an Italian civilian bricklayer working there as a forced laborer. Levi’s professional qualifications were useful: in mid-November 1944, he secured a position as an assistant in IG Farben’s Buna Werke laboratory that was intended to produce synthetic rubber. His avoiding hard labor in freezing outdoor temperatures enabled him to survive. He was also able to steal materials from the laboratory and trade them for extra food. Shortly before the Red Army liberated the camp, he fell ill with scarlet fever and was placed in the camp’s hospital. On January 18, 1945, the SS hurriedly evacuated the camp as the Red Army approached, forcing all but the gravely ill on a long death march to a site further from the front, which resulted in the deaths of the vast majority of the remaining prisoners on the march. Levi’s illness spared him this fate.
Liberation
Liberation for Levi came on January 27, 1945. After spending some time in a Soviet camp for former concentration camp inmates, he embarked on an arduous journey back to Turin in the company of former Italian prisoners of war who had been part of the Italian Army fighting in Russia. His long railway journey home took him on a circuitous route from Poland, through Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. In later writing, he noted the millions of displaced people on the roads and trains throughout Europe that he saw during that trip. Levi finally reached Turin on October 19, 1945.
Levi was almost unrecognizable when he arrived in Turin. Malnutrition edema had bloated his face. Sporting a scrawny beard and wearing an old Red Army uniform, he returned to Corso Re Umberto. The next few months allowed him to recover physically, re-establish contact with surviving friends and family, and start looking for work. Levi suffered from the psychological trauma of his experiences. Having been unable to find work in Turin, he started to look for work in Milan. On his train journeys, he began to tell people he met stories about his time at Auschwitz.
At a Jewish New Year party in 1946, he met Lucia Morpurgo, who offered to teach him to dance. Levi fell in love with Lucia. Also, at about this time, he started writing poetry about his experiences in Auschwitz. On January 21, 1946, he started work at DUCO, a Du Pont Company paint factory outside Turin. Because of the extremely limited train service, Levi stayed in the factory dormitory during the week. This allowed him to write undisturbed. He started to write the first draft of If This Is a Man. Every day, he scribbled notes on train tickets and scraps of paper as memories came to him. At the end of February, he had ten pages detailing the last ten days between the German evacuation and the arrival of the Red Army. For the next ten months, the book took shape in his dormitory as he typed up his recollections each night.
On December 22, 1946, the manuscript was complete. Lucia, who now reciprocated Levi’s love, helped him to edit it and to make the narrative flow more naturally. In January 1947, Levi took the finished manuscript to publishers. Eventually, Levi found a publisher, Franco Antonicelli, through a friend of his sister. Antonicelli was an amateur publisher, but as an active anti-Fascist, he supported the idea of the book.
At the end of June 1947, Levi suddenly left DUCO and teamed up with an old friend, Alberto Salmoni, to run a chemical consultancy from the top floor of Salmoni’s parents’ house. The two made most of their money from making and supplying stannous chloride for mirror makers, delivering the unstable chemical by bicycle across the city.
Levi married Lucia in September 1947 and a month later, on October 11, If This Is a Man was published. In April 1948, with Lucia pregnant with their first child, Levi decided that the life of an independent chemist was too precarious. He agreed to work for Accatti in the family paint business, which traded under the name SIVA. In October 1948, his daughter Lisa was born.
During this period, his friend Lorenzo Perrone died. Lorenzo had been a civilian forced worker in Auschwitz, who for six months had given part of his rations and a piece of bread to Levi without asking anything in return. In his memoir, Levi contrasted Lorenzo with everyone else in the camp, prisoners and guards alike, as someone who managed to preserve his humanity. After the war, Lorenzo could not cope with the memories of what he had seen and descended into alcoholism. Levi made several trips to rescue his old friend from the streets, but in 1952, Lorenzo died.
His Writing Begins to Mature and He Finds His Audience
In 1950, having demonstrated his chemical talents to Accatti, Levi was promoted to Technical Director at SIVA. As SIVA’s principal chemist and troubleshooter, Levi traveled abroad. He made several trips to Germany and carefully engineered his contacts with senior German businessmen and scientists. Wearing short-sleeved shirts, he made sure they saw his prison camp number tattooed on his arm. He engaged them in talking about the depravity of the Nazis and the lack of redemption sought by most Germans, many of whom had been involved in the exploitation of slave labor from occupied countries during the war.
He became involved in organizations pledged to remembering and recording the horror of the camps. In 1954 he visited Buchenwald to mark the ninth anniversary of the camp’s liberation from the Nazis. Levi dutifully attended many such anniversary events over the years and recounted his own experiences. In July 1957, his son Renzo was born, almost certainly named after his savior, Lorenzo Perrone.
In 1958, Stuart Woolf, in close collaboration with Levi, translated If This Is a Man into English, and it was published in the UK in 1959 by Orion Press. Also in 1959 Heinz Riedt, also under close supervision by Levi, translated it into German. As one of Levi’s primary reasons for writing the book was to get the German people to realize what had been done in their name and to accept at least partial responsibility, this translation was perhaps the most significant to him.
Levi began writing The Truce early in 1961; it was published in 1963, almost 16 years after his first book. That year it won the first annual Premio Campiello literary award. It is often published in one volume with If This Is a Man, as it covers his long return through Eastern Europe from Auschwitz. Levi’s reputation was growing. He regularly contributed articles to La Stampa, the Turin newspaper. He also worked to gain a reputation as a writer about subjects other than the survival of Auschwitz.
In 1963, he suffered his first major bout of depression. At the time, he had two young children, a responsible job at a factory where accidents could and did have terrible consequences, he travelled, and had become a public figure. But the memory of what happened less than twenty years earlier still burned in his mind. Doctors prescribed several different drugs over the years, but these had variable efficacy and side effects.
In 1964, Levi collaborated on a radio play based upon If This Is a Man with the state broadcaster RAI, and in 1966, with a theatre production. He also published two volumes of science fiction short stories under the pen name of Damiano Malabaila, which explored ethical and philosophical questions. These imagined the effects of inventions on society, which many would consider beneficial, but which, he saw, would have serious implications. Many of the stories from the two books Storie naturali (Natural Histories,1966) and Vizio di forma(Structural Defect,1971) were later collected and published in English as The Sixth Day and other Tales.
In 1974, Levi arranged to go into semi-retirement from SIVA in order to have more time to write. He also wanted to escape the burden of responsibility for managing the paint plant. In 1975, a collection of Levi’s poetry was published under the title L’osteria di Brema (The Bremen Beer Hall), published in English as ‘Shema: Collected Poems.
He wrote two other highly praised memoirs, Lilit e altri racconti (Moments of Reprieve,1978) and Il sistema periodico(The Periodic Table,1975). Moments of Reprieve deals with characters he observed during imprisonment. The Periodic Table is a collection of short pieces, based in episodes from his life but including two short stories that he wrote before his time in Auschwitz. Each story was related in some way to one of the chemical elements in the Periodic Table. (At London’s Royal Institution on October 19, 2006, The Periodic Table was voted onto the shortlist for the best science book ever written.
Later Years
In 1977, at the age of 58, Levi retired as a part-time consultant at the SIVA paint factory to devote himself full-time to writing. Like all his books, La chiave a stella (1978), published in the US in 1986 as The Monkey Wrench, is difficult to categorize. Some reviews describe it as a collection of stories about work and workers told by a narrator who resembles Levi. Others have called it a novel, created by the linked stories and characters. Set in a FIAT-run company town in Russia called Togliattigrad, it portrays the engineer as a hero on whom others depend. The underlying philosophy is that pride in one’s work is necessary for fulfillment. The Piedmontese engineer Faussone travels the world as an expert in erecting cranes and bridges. Most of the stories involve the solution of industrial problems by the use of troubleshooting skills; many came from Levi’s personal experience. Left-wing critics said Levi did not describe the harsh working conditions on the assembly lines at FIAT. However, it brought Levi a wider audience in Italy. The Wrench won the Strega Prize in 1979.
In 1984, Levi published his only novel, If Not Now, When? — or his second novel, if The Monkey Wrench is counted as a novel. It traces the fortunes of a group of Jewish partisans behind German lines during World War II as they seek to survive and continue their fight against the Nazis. With the ultimate goal of reaching Palestine to take part in the development of a Jewish national home, the partisan band reaches Poland and then German territory. There, the surviving members are officially received as displaced persons in territory held by the Western allies. Finally, they succeeded in reaching Italy on their way to Palestine. The novel won both the Premio Campiello and the Premio Viareggio.
The book was inspired by events during Levi’s train journey home after his release from the camp, narrated in The Truce. At one point in the journey, a band of Zionists hitched their wagon to the refugee train, which impressed Levi by their strength, resolve, organization, and sense of purpose.
Levi died on April 11, 1987 after a fall from the interior landing of his third-story apartment in Turin to the ground floor below. The coroner ruled his death a suicide. Three of his biographers agreed. In his later life, Levi indicated that he was suffering from depression, likely caused by responsibility for his elderly mother and mother-in-law, with whom he was living, and lingering traumatic memories of his experiences. (The Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, at the time of his death, “Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years later”).
The Oxford sociologist Diego Gambetta has argued, however, that the suicide conclusion is not justified by either factual or inferred evidence. Levi left no suicide note, nor any other indication that he was considering suicide. Documents and testimony suggested that he had short and longer plans for his life at the time of his death. After visiting the apartment complex, Gambetta concluded that a more plausible explanation is that Levi lost his balance and fell accidentally, as he had complained to his physician of dizziness in the days preceding his death. The Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini, a close friend of Levi, agreed. “As a chemical engineer, he might have chosen a better way of [exiting the world] than jumping into a narrow stairwell with the risk of remaining paralyzed.”
Levi became a major literary figure in Italy, and his books were translated into many other languages. The Truce became a standard text in Italian schools. In 1985, he flew to the United States for a 20-day speaking tour. Although he was accompanied by Lucia, the trip was very draining on him. In Israel, a country that was formed partly by Jewish survivors who lived through horrors similar to those Levi described, his works were not translated and published until after his death.
Adapted by James J. Boitano, PhD from:
Tim Parks, “The Mystery of Primo Levi,” The New York Review of Books (November 5, 2015) (nybooks.com)
James Wood, “The Art of Witness: How Primo Levi Survived,” The New Yorker (September 28, 2015) (newyorker.com)
Adam Kirsch, “Primo Levi’s Unlikely Suicide Haunts His Lasting Work,” The Tablet Magazine (September 21, 2015) (tabletmag.com)
Encyclopedia Britannica (britannica.com)
Wikipedia (wikipedia.com)
