12. Exile As Dehumanization: Primo Levi
12. Exile as Dehumanization: Primo Levi Among those bearing witness, the Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi (b. 1919 in Turin, d. 1987 in Turin) stands out due to his thorough, sober, and analytical approach to the Holocaust. He was the author of many books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This is a Man (1947; US title, Survival in Auschwitz, 1959), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp, The Truce (1963), The Periodic Table (1975), which linked Holocaust stories to the elements, and The Drowned and the Saved (1986). Levi became “the other” prominent voice in American Holocaust discourse during the 1980s. There is a huge body of literature comparing Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Of all Holocaust survivors, these two have become the most important voices, especially in the US, as their works were frequently written about in the New York Times Book Review, Publishers Weekly, the Hudson Review, World Literature Today, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, Time, The Nation, the New Republic, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times Book Review, Atlantic Monthly, the LA Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, and other influential media. They have also been widely discussed by American academics and featured in Jewish and Holocaust courses. Paradoxically, they are not so well known in Central and Eastern Europe due to those areas’ cultural insulation during the Communist period. Levi had an urgent concern to communicate his experiences during the Holocaust to a broader public, as well as to future generations, and judging from his reception both in his native Italy and particularly in the US, we can say he succeeded.
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