Primo Levi Books

The book comprises the former editions 'Shema' and 'At an Uncertain Hour' as well as eighteen previously uncollected poems. The poems combine a sometimes distanced stance with a very intimate and poignant emotion. Levi manages to capture a sense of the futility of life in the face of evil; the fact that he survived the Holocaust when so many others did not haunts him throughout the collection. 'Unfinished Business', written a few years before his sudden death, describes a man preparing his boss for a note of resignation. He leaves unfinished business - a kiss, a neglected client, an unwritten book that would alleviate all fear and doubts. The innumerable duties and joys of life that can never be completed because this is a man encompassed by the guilt of survival. 'Monday'(1946)moves from the image of a train with only one route and one direction, to the horse whose vision is blocked by shafts on wither side, to the man who lives in solitude, believing time has run its course. The stanzas are short and bleak. But there is profound depth to the brevity. I haven't read them all - I only bought the book today and read it on the train home, but so far, it looks like an important volume and I recommend it.

The book comprises the former editions 'Shema' and 'At an Uncertain Hour' as well as eighteen previously uncollected poems. The poems combine a sometimes distanced stance with a very intimate and poignant emotion. Levi manages to capture a sense of the futility of life in the face of evil; the fact that he survived the Holocaust when so many others did not haunts him throughout the collection. 'Unfinished Business', written a few years before his sudden death, describes a man preparing his boss for a note of resignation. He leaves unfinished business - a kiss, a neglected client, an unwritten book that would alleviate all fear and doubts. The innumerable duties and joys of life that can never be completed because this is a man encompassed by the guilt of survival. 'Monday'(1946)moves from the image of a train with only one route and one direction, to the horse whose vision is blocked by shafts on wither side, to the man who lives in solitude, believing time has run its course. The stanzas are short and bleak. But there is profound depth to the brevity. I haven't read them all - I only bought the book today and read it on the train home, but so far, it looks like an important volume and I recommend it.

As you may already know, Primo Levi on the Holocaust can be seriously depressing.
The brief Auschwitz Report is an uemotional report of some of the events and practices
Levi witnessed there. Perhaps the lack of obvious emotion brings our horror into sharp relief.

It is really unfortunate that this book is out of print now, it deserves to be reissued and widely read. Those who know of Primo Levi only know, for the most part, that he was a partisan, was a survivior of Auschwitz, a chemist, and died, a likely suicide. All of these are true. However, there is more to Primo Levi than those stark facts, and this book makes them abundantly clear. Levi had many interests, a lively curiosity, and was an excellent writer. Think Stephen Jay Gould or Lewis Thomas as a passionate Italian, and you're close.He does not mention his time at Auschwitz in this book. He writes about his youth, the apartment building in Turin he always lived in, about his experiences with primitive personal computers/word preocessors, his trip upon a submarine, and so much more.

Professor Homer breaks down many of Primo Levi's works and makes it quite simple to understand each work's significance to Primo Levi's views on survival in "real-life". Definitely the proper choice for anybody interested in previewing or reviewing Primo Levi's work; however, also significant for those looking for more insight into their already well developed understanding of Levi.

After Dachau was liberated, Army intelligence interviewed a woman at the camp who claimed to have been Rudolf Hoess' mistress while at Auschwitz. What details they could check were confirmed, and her interview became part of a Seventh Army report issued a few weeks later, a report that has been republished as Dachau Liberated: The Official Report (ISBN: 1587420031). For those who want to understand the infamous Hoess, that interview of "E.H." provides a background to his obviously self-serving autobiography. Here's a short passage from her interview:

"According to my recollection, on December 16, 1942, about 11 p.m. I was already asleep, suddenly the C.O. appeared before me. I hadn't heard the opening of my cell and was such frightened. It was dark in the cell. I believed at first it was an SS man or a prisoner and said, "What is this tomfoolery, I forbid you." Then I heard "Pst," and a pocket lamp was lighted and lit the face of the C.O. I broke out "Herr Kommandant."

Hoess didn't mention this clandestine affair in his autobiography, but details she gave fit with his account and with conditions at Auschwitz.

This book was very disturbing on so many levels. Yet it was also fascinating to see the progression of this semi-average person, into a person who was responsible for the deaths of millions. Read the intro by Primo Levi first to get yourself in the right frame of mind.

This is an eerie book. I suppose I expected to find a monster leering at me from page one, but the book has more layers to the story than that. It was creepy to start off by feeling drawn into the story of his childhood.

I had a sense that Hoess enjoyed the process of writing. After everything he had perpetrated - after all the suffering he'd witnessed - to sit in a prison cell and write the story is a rather remarkable process, no matter how repugnant we may find it. Perhaps pride in his work was his motivator. (Merely being ordered to write it by the judges would not guarantee pleasure in the task.)

The author does not rant in the horrific yet charismatic manner of Hitler in the film clips of the rallies. A detached monster rather than a hot-blooded one, Hoess was an administrator at heart. Would he have conceived of mass extermination for the Jews of his own accord? Doubtful. But when given the task he was exceptionally good at it. He was even good at documenting it for the Allies.

This book tends to activate or deepen some of your biggest questions in life. While lucidly written, it's not an easy book to read emotionally. I gave this book five stars because everyone should read it and feel their own responses to it.

For the other side of the coin, read ELLI: COMING OF AGE IN THE HOLOCAUST.

This so-called "autobiography" is fiction, written, coached, and co-authored under the extreme duress of a Stalinist prison, and it shows in it's shoddy attention to the detail of the lies.

For example, the book is chronologically unsound.

According to his book, Hoess is ordered to come to Berlin "in the summer of 1941". The book then contains a glaring impossibility in that Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler allegedly tells him; "The existing annihilation sites in the East (Belzec, Sobibor, and Trblinka), are not in a position to handle the major actions envisaged."
The problem is that according to standard holocaust mythology, the alleged killing activities of these camps only got started "exterminating" in the summer of 1942. In 1941, there were no "existing extermination sites in the East".
For that reason, Jean-Claude Pressac claims the meeting must have been 1942. That, however, creates further contadictions in chronology.

Firstly, Himmler's 1942 appointment book survived the war, and it contains no such entry. Once the attack on the Soviet Union began, Himmler was hardly ever even in Berlin.

Secondly, by the summer of 1942, Hoess is supposedly already "gassing" Jews.

Further contradictions with factual detail abound.

Rudolf Hoess was the Allies' most important witness to the "Holocaust." His affidavit
and his testimony were quoted extensively both by the prosecution and in the judgment
of the IMT at Nuremberg, as well as by the press. Hoess's "confession" is heavily
relied upon by historians like Raul Hilberg and others as a primary documentary
source to this day.

It is true that Hoess witnessed at Nuremberg to horrendous "atrocities," and he also
confirmed the "truth" under oath of an affidavit which he agreed to sign for the
prosecution. In it, he confessed to having given orders for the gassing of millions of
victims. The affidavit, by the way, was in English, a language he did not speak or
understand, and was not translated to him.

We now know from the book "Legions of Death: The Nazi Enslavement of Europe" that
Rudolf Hoess was beaten almost to death by Jewish members of the British Field Police
Force upon capture and badly mistreated thereafter until he gave this very devastating
"testimony" and "affidavit" used by the Allies propagandists ever since. You be the judge.
Here is an excerpt from this book by Rupert Butler, published by Hamlyn Paperbacks, page 235:

At 5 PM on 11 March 1946, Frau H?ss opened her front door to six intelligence
specialists in British uniform, most of them tall and menacing and all of them
practiced in the more sophisticated techniques of sustained and merciless investigation.
No physical violence was used on the family: it was scarcely necessary. Wife and
children were separated and guarded. Clarke's tone was deliberately low-key and
conversational.

He began mildly: "I understand your husband came to see you as recently as last night."
Frau Hoess merely replied: "I haven't seen him since he absconded months ago"

Clarke tried once more, saying gently but with a tone of reproach: "You know that
isn't true." Then all at once his manner had changed and he was shouting: "If you
don't tell us, we'll turn you over to the Russians and they'll put you before a firing
squad. Your son will go to Siberia."It proved more than enough. Eventually, a broken Frau
H?ss betrayed the whereabouts of the former Auschwitz Kommandant, the man who now called
himself Franz Lang. Suitable intimidation of the son and daughter produced precisely
identical information.

When they found Hoess, here is how the capture played out. Clarke, one of the
participants, recalls it vividly:

"He was lying on top of a three-tier bunker wearing a new pair of silk pajamas. We
discovered later that he had lost the cyanide pill most of them carried. Not that he
would have had much chance to use it because we had rammed a torch (flashlight) into
his mouth." Hoess screamed in terror.

Clarke yelled: "What is your name?" With each answer of "Franz Lang," Clarke's hand
crashed into the face of the prisoner. The fourth time that happened, Hoess broke and
admitted who he was. The admission suddenly unleashed the loathing of the Jewish
sergeants in the arresting party whose parents had died in Auschwitz following an order
signed by Hoess.

The prisoner was torn from the top bunk, the pajama ripped from his body. He was then
dragged naked to one of the slaughter tables, where it seemed to Clarke the blows and
screams were endless.Eventually, the Medical Officer urged the Captain: "Call them off,
unless you want to take back a corpse."

A blanket was thrown over Hoess and he was dragged to Clarke's car, where the sergeant
poured a substantial slug of whiskey down his throat. Then Hoess tried to sleep.

Clarke thrust his service stick under the man's eyelids and ordered in German: "Keep your
pig eyes open, you swine." . . .

The party arrived back at Heide around three in the morning. The snow was swirling still,
but the blanket was torn from Hoess and he was made to walk completely nude through the
prison yard to his cell. It took three days to get a coherent statement out of him.

This statement, tortured and terrorized out of him, was the one we are all familiar
with--the "proof" for the so-called "gassing of millions of Jews."

Historians today are finally admitting that Hoess is a totally unreliable witness--and
is it any wonder? He spoke of a concentration camp "Wolzek" which does not even exist.
He swore that 2,500,000 people were gassed and burned at Auschwitz and a further half
million died of disease, for a total dead of three million. The Auschwitz Memorial Museum
itself puts the death toll at 1.5 million. It is very clear that Hoess only said what his
torturers wanted him to say when he signed a statement in a foreign language that he did
not understand. it is also known that these same tactics, and even more forms of mental
torture including mock hangings, were used the secure the "evidence" for the Malmedy trial
at Dachau.

Judging from the wildly differing reviews that have appeared in newspapers in the past few weeks, this book seems to inspire either passionate admiration or something akin to personal rage. It isn't hard to understand why: Angier has written a highly unconventional, imaginative biography, in which she is herself a character at times, and tells us almost as much about what it's like to write a biography as about the life of Primo Levi. She has also dared to use her own intuition -coupled with, and informed by, her scrupulous research and reflection -- to deduce things that Levi, a very private man, did not himself talk about. Finally, she has clearly angered the people who do not want to believe that Levi killed himself; it is impossible to believe, after one has read her, that his fall from the landing of his apartment building in Turin was accidental. Perhaps even more disturbing to those who saw him as some kind of radiantly sane figure is her sorrowful conclusion that he did not do it because, or primarily because, of what he had suffered in Auschwitz.
The portrait of him that emerges is of a man who was not the secular saint, the avatar of reason, that his readers have supposed, but something greater: a tragically repressed man who struggled with overwhelming depression all his life (except, ironically, as Angier tells us, when he was in Auschwitz), triumphing not so much in his person as in the great books in which he refused to give way to it. It seems a more amazing accomplishment that a deeply troubled, self-doubting, conflicted man should have produced those masterful works of illumination and sanity than if he had simply been the serene figure of his readers' imaginings. And it should come as no surprise to anyone that literature of the high order of Levi's does not come out of an effortlessly serene mind. Angier makes it clear what a conscious artist he really was.

Though she sometimes hammers her point home rather than allowing the reader to arrive at his own conclusions about the conflicts that lay at the heart of Levi, it seems impossible that anyone will ever come closer to penetrating the mystery of the man.

If I were to take you on a tour of my home town and tell you the life story of everyone we met (going back several hundred years in instances) you would quickly overload. "Now who is this again?" you would say. Or "why exactly does that matter?"
So will you find yourself in Ms. Angier's sprawling parade of peripheral characters, all dredged up, it seems, in apology for the blaring fact that all those whose testament would really matter here aren't talking, for whatever reason.
Imagine your own life story told from the fragments of those who really only knew you in passing - a girl you dated once, a bully, a high school teacher, a distant cousin. All called upon to comment on your reasoning, your justification in certain actions. All treated as expert witnesses. Some, you might be forced to admit, will come painfully close to the truth. Others way off the mark - only laughable speculations. But who, in your absence, could sort out the one from the other.
A good biographer, you would hope.
Ms. Angier is quite capable of writing beautifully, as witnessed in her preface to this book. She has a blazing passion for all things Levi. And she is obviously capable of extensive research. Which leaves us with mountains of detail, oh so much detail. And some convincing passages.
But actually, after several hundred dry, dry pages, I find myself looking, again and again, for Primo. That vitality of soul demonstrated in his own writings.
And that is, alas, where I am returning. The horses's mouth. With the wheat already separated from the chaff.

As awful as current events seem to be, with unsettled questions about who is most likely to die next dominating much of the news, this book takes a look at how a great writer managed, as best he could, for a time. Applying political psychology to figures who assumed some importance in our evaluation of the most catastrophic events in the twentieth century can still be disconcerting, as I myself might be the worst example. Part of the joke of MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK was that a 19-year-old G.I. grunt in Nam might say things that you would never expect to hear from the kind of genius who survived Auschwitz and wrote about it in the manner of Primo Levi in THE PERIODIC TABLE, which was an American best-seller when it was translated into English.

Carole Angier seems very English and aiming for an audience at a university level of views, far removed from the concerns of those Americans who need a little more control over what is happening in the world, as expressed in an article in The New York Times of March 31, 2003, of a situation which is assumed to be temporary:

Eleven days into the American-led war here, the narrow, once fertile crescent of territory that gives Iraq its only outlet to the sea remains a land of insecurity and ambivalence, devoid of the euphoria that American and British soldiers hoped to encounter in southern Iraq.

People who experienced a sense of euphoria in reading Primo Levi's reflections on life as an understanding of chemical elements are sure to find THE DOUBLE BOND by Carole Angier dismal evidence that Primo Levi's life remained "a land of insecurity and ambivalence," and that the inability to write which marked his final days was primarily a lack of the sense of euphoria that newspaper reporters Marc Santora and Craig S. Smith, writing for the Times, had assumed that Americans would expect for those encountered in great historical events.

This is a big book with a tremendous index, but most people will find that few of the people listed in the index are familiar to them, though two lines are required for the pages on "Americans," as distinct from the three lines for "America/United States." There are also listings for "Britain" and "England," but no extended discussion of the controversy there, in which David Irving is listed for a single page, on the book, HITLER'S WAR. American and England are such outlying areas in the scope of Levi's concerns that the description of his "barrage of articles" (p. 603) trying to counter Holocaust denial seems obsessed with the French. THE DOUBLE BOND is hardly neutral, but mentions such disconcerting facts as that Louis Darquier de Pellepoix was Vichy's commissioner of Jewish affairs. "Darquier was eighty-five years old and clearly senile, he said; since he himself had sent 70,000 French Jews to their deaths, he was hardly a disinterested party." (p. 603). The word "disinterested" here must primarily mean disinterested in the truth. I just received news that a newsman, Peter Arnett, (I am the face), was fired by an American network for talking in Baghdad on Iraqi TV. The standard applied in his case was hardly whether he was still capable of thinking of interesting things to say, but more along the lines of whether other people ought to be given the opportunity to believe what he was thinking.

In these interesting times, MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK is the worst possible point of view because its interest is primarily in laughing. Primo Levi could never have written MY VIETNAM WAR JOKE BOOK, because he did not have the personal interest in pursuing that situation past its most absurd conclusion, that geopolitics could be responsible for the deaths of 3,000,000 Vietnamese without ultimately accepting any responsibility for the fate of the survivors. Levi had math for Europe: "There had been 17 million Jews in Europe in 1939, and 11 million in 1945: where were the missing 6 million?" (p. 603). There might be fewer people in Iraq in a few months than there were a month ago, but Levi is a poor candidate (he's dead, you know) for thinking that anyone could be more disinterested in that than he is.

On the question of therapeutic value of trying to provide attention to those who need it most, the tangled web in this book is tied to older lives: "from 1978 onwards his depressions were triggered very largely by his mother's decline, and by its consequences. But it was also not true, because neither was natural or external. The truth is that his own relationship with his mother was pathological; and so was the level of care Lucia required them both to give. These together were quite enough to depress him on their own." (p. 602). This is entirely like his relationship to "those who denied the crimes he had devoted his life to recording. They, and they alone, brought out in him absolute intolerance; and a violence of language (`senile', `stupid', `mad') which was to him the essence of the Lager, and normally beyond the pale. The appearance of Faurisson and his ilk was the deepest shock to him: perhaps as deep as the shock of Auschwitz itself. These new Nazis lived in peace and safety, unlike the original ones." (p. 604). Having experienced a bit of shock ourselves, it is not too surprising that some governments have an interest in bringing a bit of shock to Iraq, but hardly like the shock Levi brought when he died in the house where he had been born, Corso Re Umberto 75, "built in the good middle-class areas of Turin around the turn of the century." (p. xxiv). This book honors his life, and is a profound appreciation of the nature and meaning of his death, too.

Carole Angier deserves the thanks of anyone seriously interested in the life of this strange and amazing man who helped and continues to help mankind to deal with the massive trauma of World War II and, further, with all attempts since then to kill the soul. She has spent years in attempting to discover him, in assessing what is factual, what can be conjectured, and what is unlikely about this man who was so reticent and whose family and friends are devoted to respecting his privacy and that of his family. However, it is true that a great man belongs to the world too.

Unfortunately the world will not tolerate the fact that he was human and seems not to want to forgive him for taking his own life, as appears likely, especially in view of his call for help to Rabbi Toaf shortly before his death. Myth does not grow well in the presence of fact, and the facts that Carole Angier has tirelessly gathered will enrich our understanding immeasurably but have disappointed some. This seems true too regarding her altogether modest and to my mind reasonable and well-founded speculations as to his motivations and of the emotional flow of his life. Levi himself saw this coming, said that he was not a "guru" and could not bear the weight of such a role.

She seems to me to have come to central and moving understandings of his surroundings. One can only stand in awe of the amount of information she has absorbed in her attempt to make the most accurate portrayal of the influences impinging upon him. Her depiction of the Auschwitz environment is as complete as I have ever seen; her understanding of how there could be non-shameful fellowship there which would turn to shame when viewed by the outside world; her understanding of the sad fate of the Samaritan Lorenzo, who could not tolerate his life after Auschwitz, that this is how heroism is, "a historical glory but a personal burden." True for Lorenzo and for Primo Levi as well.

It has become fashionable in Primo Levi circles to reject absolutely studies of him, as the previous biography by Anissimov, which are in any way flawed. But the truth is we owe a debt of gratitude to her as well; she roughed in the picture and indicated areas that need to be understood. Primo Levi induces in his readers a protective possessiveness; everyone who reads and loves him wants to rescue him from the imperfect perception that has just been promulgated. This is sainthood in formation. But he was not a saint; he was an imperfect and therefore all the more amazing human being.

Carole Angier has given us a relentlessly factual, moving, and gracefully written portrayal of this complex man. This is the best of biography. She deserves our thanks also for rendering him as we feel he would have liked, in shades of gray, but gray composed of flashes of brilliance mixed with the most horrifying black. Levi was a true Perseus, able to look at the face, see down the throat, of the terrifying Gorgon, able to return and to summon up the courage to tell us the revolting horror. Carole Angier in her remarkable book has helped us to understand the formation of the man who did it, how he could stand it, and what it cost him and those around him.

I thought the concept of writing psychobabble books had gone out of style in the 1970s -- that is the concept of a biographer who did not know his/her subject personally, did not interview most of the subject's contemporaries (especially family members) and did not have access to any psychoanalytic records, writing an utterly speculative, fiction-laden account of a "great man's (or woman's)" life. This book by Angier is just such a pile of speculative junk. And poorly written and poorly organized to boot.

Mind you, I am a fan of "analytical" biography & history. Where the author does not just narrate but attempts to interpret the facts & to tease out conclusions. Angier has gone so much farther than that. Since she speculates without facts and ignores existing facts (which is to say, the material in Primo Levi's own wonderful writings). She turns an interesting man, a fascinating man into a pathological man, who is no more than her (made up) aggregation of psychological complexes.

I am so disappointed in the NY Times Review of Books for having featured this volume on the cover of their publication this weekend. Angier should pay me for having read it. Instead, I paid her.

Instead of wasting your money on this junk, buy a complete set of Primo Levi's works [...]. And if you own them already. There is nothing better, I think, than reading the Periodic Table again.

Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist, apparently committed suicide in 1987, after writing several books about his life and his experiences at Auschwitz. Why would Levi, who was like the Italian Elie Wiesel, commit suicide after a life of bearing witness and surviving a death camp? Did he feel survivor's guilt? Did he feel that only the good died, and the bad were allowed to survive? This major biography by Anissimov, the French journalist, delves deeply into the life and mind of the controversial Levi. Why did he feel guilt? Why did he feel misunderstood? Did people die and suffer for nothing? Did he continue to suffer in Turin after the war by caring for his blind and senile mother and mother-in-law? Was he right in thinking that the Holocaust will become just a forgotten footnote in history? This book begins to answer some of these questions, and paints the first of many portraits of the post-Holocaust philosopher.

I bought this book with great expecations--partly on the strength of Victor Brombert's NYT review and partly because I was midway through the wonderful Periodic Table when the biography came out. My hopes were disappointed--big time. The problem is, the writer has collected a lot of details, only to be confronted with the necessity of doing something with the details. She was not up to the task. In many cases, information is put forth without any attempt to integrate it into Levi's life story. The reader asks, What does this have to do with Levi? How did it have an impact? How should we interpret the information--should we interpret it at all? Alas, one senses that the author dug up some fact or other and said, well, now I'm going to cram it into my book. You figure it out, reader. Another problem with the author's treatment of detail is her very annoying repetition of facts. Sometimes the language is close to verbatim in different places throughout the book. Levi's books are constantly being published and then, a few pages later, published again (and I'm not talking about different translations). A third problem is that much of the information seems to have been gleaned from Levi's published books. And yet there are no new interpretive glosses that add anything to what Levi himself wrote. Finally, as the Amazon review notes, Levi the man does not emerge from the pages. If you want to know about Levi, stick with Survival in Auschwitz, the Periodic Table, and his other works. Wait for a better biography than this one.

Primo Levi: Tragedy Of An Optimist is a major biography which delves deeply into the life, mind and work of an influential writer, philosopher, and Holocaust witness. Drawing from exhaustive research, interviews with friends and relatives, as well as numerous unpublished texts and testimonies, biographer Myriam Anissimov explores the complex nature of a most singular, shy, intelligent, and diffident man who was both a strong-spirited survivor and a sufferer of depression, a man who felt misunderstood, certain that future generations would inevitably forget, and even deny, that the Holocaust happened. Indeed, on April 11, 1987, his self-deprecating depression was to lead him to suicide by throwing himself down the staircase of the building in which he was born. Primo Levi is a superbly presented biography and an important, singular contribution to Holocaust studies.

Until Myriam Anissimov published this comprehensive biography of Primo Levi in 1998, the world knew him primarily through his own writings. He was born into an assimilated middle-class Jewish family in Turin, Italy, in 1919. His people were not observant Jews, and Levi, apparently, knew little about "Jewishness" until Mussolini's anti-Semitic policy taught him something about his heritage. His father, Casare, was an electrical engineer and an avid reader. Primo learned from him that the humanities and the sciences need not be separate worlds.

Trained as a chemist, he was arrested during the Second World War as a member of the anti-Fascist resistance and deported to the Monowitz concentration camp, part of the Auschwitz complex in 1944. Badly beaten and half-starved, Levi was determined to spend his time mentally recording his irrational world "with the curiosity of the naturalist." His background in chemistry actually saved his life, Levi was to acknowledge later. After being transferred to work in the camp laboratory his situation improved dramatically. Anissimov's account of the final days at Auschwitz - when Levi, suffering from scarlet fever, managed to forage, with a few comrades, through a semi-dismantled concentration camp in the freezing cold - is the focal point of her book. Her research is meticulous. Levi survived 11 months as slave laborer 174517 until the liberation of what he called "that hideous distortion of humanity." Seven months after the war, he was still a refugee in Russia, trying to make his way home.

When he returned to Turin, to the same apartment where he had always lived, he felt a terrible need to bear witness. He had watched as fellow inmates were stripped of their essential selves before they died in the flesh. His powerful memoirs, works of fiction and poetry describe his experience in the death camp and his later travels in Eastern Europe. Levi wrote. "And I felt like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, who waylays on the street the wedding guests going to the feast, inflicting on them the story of his misfortune." The civilized world did not seem to care what he had to say, however. No large publisher would accept his powerful manuscript, "Survival in Auschwitz." Anissimov reports that the book received a few positive reviews but was "distributed rather than sold."

For the last forty years of his life Levi devoted himself to understanding why he was not killed in the concentration camp. "The worst survived, that is, the fittest; the best all died," he said. He spent much of his time writing about literature, astronomy, philosophy, the wonders of the natural life and the dignity of manual labor. Married with two children, he was a lifelong agnostic, and was described by some coreligionists as a stranger to Jewish culture. He worked at his profession, as a research chemist and factory manager, until his retirement. Plagued by survivor's guilt, and inner wounds, as well as the coverage the media was giving to Holocaust deniers, Levi, the most gentle of men, died in Turin in April 1987, an apparent suicide.

This biography delves deeply into the life and mind of the man who was a philosophical student of life. Ms. Anissimov, a French journalist and novelist, explores the complex nature of the man, who was at once such a vital force, a real survivor in many senses, and the man prone to dark moods, disillusionment and bouts of severe depression. She writes, with riveting detail, about Levi's year in Auschwitz, drawing on his autobiographical accounts and those of other survivors. Hers was the supremely difficult task of attempting to do what Levi himself said he could not. He was not able to show how the survivor and the scientist, separately and together, perceived the world. "Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist" is based primarily on Ms. Anissimov's reading of Levi's work, her correspondence or interviews with men and women associated with him, and interviews and essays on him by others. This painstaking journalistic endeavor is concise and clear, which is what Mr. Levi believed his own work should be - "avoiding embellishments and convolutions." She has accomplished all this and more. I have read that many are disappointed that this biography did not delve more into Levi's personality, his psyche. I understand that his wife would not be interviewed. Nor would she release intimate personal papers. When close family members do not cooperate, and first-hand information is not available, it is almost impossible to form an accurate analysis of someone's inner complexities.

I was deeply moved by this biography. There are flaws here, but overall it presents an extraordinary portrait of a great man. His writings were fundamental in shaping many people's understanding of what the Holocaust meant when he originally wrote about it, and what it means today, in the context of the 21st century. Some people, devastated by the manner in which he died, say that the Holocaust finally killed him. I do not believe this. Primo Levi fought almost all his life to live. He struggled to enjoy life and the world around him, and to bear witness, an enormous responsibility for anyone. He fought courageously for forty plus years. I respect him greatly for that, and for allowing us all to know him a little bit.
JANA

As many reviewers have noted, this English translation whittles down the original French two-volume work, so perhaps an English-language reader's perspective is likewise narrowed; perhaps the publisher and translator of the English version are also responsible for the admittedly scattershot coverage given by Anissimov to Primo Levi's inner complexity. Again, Levi was certainly not the most forthcoming of men, even as he was a writer most famous for his autobiographical accounts. His wife and children receive little more than fleeting mention in the hundreds of closely-printed pages, and inevitably her treatment serves sometimes more as a commentary on the works of Levi himself than a fresh work. How difficult it must be, after all, to write the biography of an autobiographer! Yet, having pointed out some faults, this biography is worthwhile for its picture of the Piedmontese Jewish community into which Levi was born and returned to; its explanations of how Fascist Italy differed from Nazi Germany in its anti-Semitic actions; and most of all how the inner workings of the lager--Auschwitz-Birkenau--played out in Levi's classic accounts as well as the larger context of the privations endured by many of his fellow inmates. Here, the two lengthy chapters on the camp are astoundingly detailed and intimately rendered, and would make an ideal follow-up to readers who have read Levi's own descriptions, for Anissimov is alert to what Levi says and what he leaves out. Apparently the child of refugees herself, the sensitivity and acumen with which Anissimov describes how and why Levi gave the famous accounts for which he is justly famed makes her biography--especially in these two long chapters which themselves comprise almost a monograph--necessary for those who have first read Levi's own works. Her book will not tell you much new about the content of these works, but you will understand better why they were written when in his career, and why such a reticent man remained so in his own life while his books spoke for--only some part--of the pain and hope he carried within and guarded carefully.