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Primo Levi[prE´mO lA´vE] Pronunciation Key, 1919–87, Italian writer. A chemist of Jewish descent, Levi was sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz during World War II. Levi's first novel, If This Is a Man (1947), is a restrained yet poignant testimony of the atrocities he witnessed. His dry and sober narrative is devoid of rancor or protest. In The Truce (1963) and The Drowned and the Saved (1986), he relates how physical torture and annihilation were accompanied by a process of moral degradation. He stresses that survival was as much a spiritual quest to maintain human dignity as a physical struggle. The Periodic Table (1975), a collection of 21 meditations, each named for a chemical element, draws analogies between a young man's moral formation and the physical and chemical properties that circumscribe our humanity. He died in a fall that was widely thought a suicide.
See his The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987 (2001), ed. by M. Belpoliti and R. Gordon; biographies by M. Anissimov (1996, tr. 1998) and C. Angier (2002).
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