Volume 31, Number 21 & 22 · January 17, 1985
The Alchemist
By Neal Ascherson
The Periodic Table
by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal
Schocken, 233 pp., $16.95
'Just as among the Italian Jews this shock [of fascist persecution] came with redoubled force because they had felt themselves little different from their neighbors, so its literary repercussions resonated on a corresponding level of universality. When an Italian Jew wrote of the sufferings he or she had endured, it was not simply as a Jew: it was as someone giving testimony on behalf of all the victims of oppression, wherever and of whatever religious origin they might be.'
Review, 2168 words
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