Discover the Best Books Written by Primo Levi

Primo Michele Levi was an Italian chemist, partisan, writer, and Jewish Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, collections of short stories, essays, poems, and one novel. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947, published as Survival in Auschwitz in the United States), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, and The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.

Levi died in 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-story apartment landing. His death has officially ruled a suicide, but some, after careful consideration, have suggested that the fall was accidental because he left no suicide note, there were no witnesses, and he was on medication that could have affected his blood pressure and caused him to fall accidentally.

Levi was almost unrecognizable on his return to 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. At about this time, he started writing poetry about his experiences in Auschwitz. On 21 January 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. The book took shape in his dormitory for the next ten months as he typed up his recollections each night. On 22 December 1946, the manuscript was complete. 

Lucia, who now reciprocated Levi's love, helped him to edit it to make the narrative flow more naturally. In January 1947, Levi was taking the finished manuscript around to publishers. Einaudi rejected it on the advice of Natalia Ginzburg and, in the United States, was turned down by Little, Brown, and Company on the advice of Rabbi Joshua Liebman. This opinion contributed to the neglect of his work in that country for four decades. The social wounds of the war years were still too fresh, and he had no literary experience to give him a reputation as an author.

Eventually, Levi found a publisher, Franco Antonicelli, through a friend of his sister's. 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. Many of Levi's experiences of this time found their way into his later writing. 

They made most of their money from making and supplying stannous chloride for mirror makers, delivering the unstable chemical by bicycle across the city. The attempts to make lipsticks from reptile excreta and a colored enamel to coat teeth became short stories. Accidents in their laboratory filled the Salmoni house with unpleasant smells and corrosive gases.

In September 1947, Levi married Lucia, and a month later, on October 11, If This Is a Man was published with a print run of 2,000 copies. 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's physical and psychological health declined. 

Lorenzo had been a civilian forced worker in Auschwitz, who had given part of his ration and a piece of bread to Levi for six months without asking for anything in return. The gesture saved Levi's life. 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. 

In gratitude for his kindness in Auschwitz, Levi named both of his children, Lisa Lorenza and Renzo, after him. 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 became involved in organizations that pledged to remember and record 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. Despite a positive review by Italo Calvino in L'Unità, only 1,500 copies of If This Is a Man was sold. In 1958 Einaudi, a major publisher, published and promoted it in a revised form.

In 1958 Stuart Woolf, in close collaboration with Levi, translated If This Is a Man into English, which was published in the UK in 1959 by Orion Press. Also, in 1959, Heinz Riedt, under Levi's close supervision, 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.