Volume 46, Number 9 · May 20, 1999
The Courage of the Elementary
By Tony Judt
Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist
by Myriam Anissimov, Translated from the French by Steve Cox
Overlook, 452 pp., $37.95
Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1919, in the apartment where he would live for most of his life and where he killed himself in April 1987. [1] Like many Jewish families in the region, the Levis had moved from the Piedmontese countryside to Turin in the previous generation, and were culturally assimilated. Primo grew up under Fascism, but it was only with the imposition of the Race Laws, in 1938, that this had any direct impact upon him. He studied chemistry at the university in Turin, with the help of a sympathetic professor who took him on notwithstanding the regulations excluding Jews, and afterward found work of a sort in various establishments willing to take on a Jewish chemist in spite of his 'race.'
Review, 6325 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |