Tag: Primo Levi

Primo Levi (1919–1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor whose work provides a testament to the atrocities of the concentration camps. His masterpiece, If This Is a Man (also published as Survival in Auschwitz), utilizes his background in scientific observation to calmly record the reality of human behavior under extreme suffering.

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I rise at 6am, and spend the early hours writing, reading, and drinking hot tea.

I am reading Primo Levi’s The Truce, an account of his long journey home after the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. The chemist has a close eye for detail, and describes people’s actions with clarity and economy. His work is relevant for its account (and analysis) of historical injustice, but feels more so during these times.

Experimenting with black and white photography, and pleased with the results. Since I capture images using a phone camera, quality can be a concern in poor weather or dim lighting. But I find that in black and white photography these conditions are not a hindrance, but work to one’s advantage. The results are always interesting and sometimes beautiful. A dark and blurry portrait resembles a canvas painted with broad strokes.

There is a juvenile Eurasian coot living in a nearby canal. It was born much later than the others, and its family has not yet flown south for the winter.

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Victor Brombert discusses how literature reflects changing ideas about life, death, and the condition of mortality
Victor Brombert, Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi (University of Chicago Press, 2016)
Victor Brombert, Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi (University of Chicago Press, 2016)

What motivated you to write the book?

Probably it was an early childhood and adolescent awareness of our mortal condition, of human vulnerability in general: the death in infancy of my younger sister (I was seven years old), the assault on human life and dignity by totalitarian regimes that forced families like mine into multiple exiles, and later the experience of war and the Nazi occupation of France, our escape to the United States on an overcrowded freighter zigzagging for six weeks across the Atlantic to elude German U-boats, my joining the American army and surviving the Omaha Beach landing and the Battle of the Bulge — perhaps above all the growing belief that all valuable human achievements, especially in literature and the arts, were a defiance of death.

Your subtitle traces a history between Leo Tolstoy and Primo Levi. What is significant about these two writers?

It is a long trajectory between Tolstoy and Primo Levi. The distance and the contrast tell a story. Whereas Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilych is concerned with an exemplary individual, his morally and spiritually empty life, and his ultimate salvational epiphany at the hour of death, Primo Levi by contrast is dealing with a collective moral and political context in which private salvation is no longer thinkable. The trajectory as well as the authors along the way tell the story of the 20th century as that of a growing awareness of a collective tragedy. (more…)