Primo Levi Books

Setting aside its profound Jewish interest, the book is an outstanding chronicle of WWII, rich with detail concerning the hardships, the cold, the Russian-Polish landscape, the polyglot bands of homeless partisans and refugees, their ruthless tactics for survival,and the ugliness and arbitrariness of death. My favorite book by one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

While the book isn't a true story, the characters are based on real people Primo Levi met during the holocaust. It surprises, inspires and humbles the reader to know that humanity can exist in the midst of such horrible chaos.

I liked the fact that there is not happily ever after, that the characters must fight to produce their own future. But, it is good to know that along their journey, they met many who would help them.

Primo Levi is a wonderful writer. He stays true to character, winds the subplots into the main plot without jerky interruptions and allows the characters to be real, not stereotypes.

Primo Levi, from what I know was a very gifted and sensitive man. Levi never forgave himself for surviving the holocaust, he felt guilty because his own life was spared, eventually he committed suicide. A very little known fact of World War II, was the work of the Jewish Resistance. Millions of European Jews perished in the holocaust, some managed to get away, a few managed to hide, and there also were the Jewish Partisans; those who fought. If not now .. when? is an absolutely beautiful story of those souls who fought the oppression. This is not a graphic book of the suffering of the holocaust; this is a great novel about a group of people who in spite of all the suffering keep moving forward. They do hold it together, they make friends, love, sing, and cry, celebrate and mourn. This is not a war glory story, it is a people story, and how they changed and adapted, how they kept going. Yes, the overused expression of "triumph of the human spirit" so appropriately describes the theme of the book, but not always; Levi was realistic enough to see to that. I was profoundly touched by this book and thoroughly enjoyed it as a non-Jew. However, I never saw this book as a journey to Palestine, as suggested by some. These were people rising up to fight injustice and to stay alive, they largely moved aimlessly. To interpret this book as a part of the Zionist ovement would in my opinion be wrong. This is translated book, it is excellent in English, and it must have been even better in Italian. I wish I could read it in its original language.

This fictional account of Jewish partisans fighting their way through war ravaged eastern Europe is incredibly moving. The characters are so realistically human in their reactions to the chaotic conditions that they encounter. The book explores a chapter of WWII history that is not very well known and does so from the perspectives of ordinary people caught up in the swirling events and joined together by a desire to survive as well as by a common hatred of the Nazis. There is an incredible life affirming wedding scene in the midst of countless grim episodes that demonstrates the human capacity of endurance. The translation is excellent and the narrative is crisp and fast moving. One of the best literary works dealing with the European war.Unforgettable!.

This is one of Levi's last works, the story is about a fictional group of Jewish partisans operating behind German lines in Russia and Poland from July, 1943 to the end of World War II. Levi himself joined a partisan band in 1943, although it was in Italy, not Russia, and he was soon captured and sent to Auschwitz. Although the plot and characters are fictional, Levi has gone to great lengths to make his story as authentic as possible. This novel is based not only on his own personal experiences, but on conversations he had with others, and on other published accounts of the experiences of Jewish partisans operating behind enemy lines on the Eastern Front (Levi even provides a bibliography at the end). This is a book of hope, not of despair. Levi explicitly eschews accounts of the death camps in this work; it is not a work of "Holocaust Literature". It is a story of the Jewish resistance with universal overtones.

What makes this book more than just another "war story" is the rich cast of characters, drawn with sympathy, humor, and without a trace of sentimentality. Typical of these is the leader of the partisan band, a man of great charisma, and a brilliant decision-maker, who understands that in the forest, surrounded by enemies, with the life-sustaining morale of his small force hanging in the balance, his violin is almost as essential for the group's survival as his weapon. What gives this book such great authenticity is that none of the characters are paragons of virtue; they are ordinary, flawed people forced to draw upon every last ounce of courage and resourcefulness within just to survive to fight another day. Front and center to the survival of the group is the fierce loyalty its members have to each other. Even as the war ends and they are no longer in deadly peril, the members of the band share a common destiny in which the fate of one is the fate of all.

I found this book very difficult to put down once I started it. It would be hard to find a more vivid, well-told tale of what it was like for the partisans along the Eastern front of World War II.