Primo Levi
Primo Michele Levi was a Jewish Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer. 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, his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and The Periodic Table, a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories, each named after a chemical element which plays a role in each story, which the Royal Institution named the best science book ever written.
Levi died in 1987 from injuries sustained in a fall from a third-storey apartment landing. His death was officially ruled a suicide, although that has been disputed by some of his friends and associates and attributed to an accident.
Biography
Early life
Levi was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, at Corso Re Umberto 75, into a liberal Jewish family. His father, Cesare Levi, worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based. Cesare was an avid reader and autodidact. Levi's mother, Esterina, known to everyone as Rina, was well educated, having attended the Istituto Maria Letizia. She too was an avid reader, played the piano, and spoke fluent French. The marriage between Rina and Cesare had been arranged by Rina's father. On their wedding day, Rina's father, Cesare Luzzati, gave Rina the apartment at Corso Re Umberto, where Primo Levi lived for almost his entire life.In 1921, Anna Maria, Levi's sister, was born, and he remained close to her all her life. In 1925, he entered the Felice Rignon primary school in Turin. A thin and delicate child, he was shy and considered himself ugly, but excelled academically. His school record includes long periods of absence during which he was tutored at home, at first by Emilia Glauda and then by Marisa Zini, daughter of philosopher Zino Zini. The children spent summers with their mother in the Waldensian valleys south-west of Turin, where Rina rented a farmhouse. His father remained in the city, partly because of his dislike of the rural life, but also because of his infidelities.
In September 1930, Levi entered the Massimo d'Azeglio Royal Gymnasium a year ahead of normal entrance requirements. In class, he was the youngest, the shortest and the cleverest, as well as being the only Jew. Only two boys there bullied him for being Jewish, but their animosity was traumatic. In August 1932, following two years attendance at the Talmud Torah school in Turin to pick up the elements of doctrine and culture, he sang in the local synagogue for his Bar Mitzvah. In 1933, as was expected of all young Italian schoolboys, he joined the Avanguardisti movement for young Fascists. He avoided rifle drill by joining the ski division, and spent every Saturday during the season on the slopes above Turin. As a young boy, Levi was plagued by illness, particularly chest infections, but he was keen to participate in physical activity. In his teens, Levi and a few friends would sneak into a disused sports stadium and conduct athletic competitions.
In July 1934, at the age of 15, he sat the exams for the Liceo Classico D'Azeglio, a lyceum specializing in the classics, and was admitted that year. The school was noted for its anti-Fascist teachers, among them the philosopher Norberto Bobbio, and Cesare Pavese, who later became one of Italy's best-known novelists. Levi continued to be bullied during his time at the Lyceum, although six other Jews were in his class. Upon reading Concerning the Nature of Things by English scientist Sir William Bragg, Levi decided that he wanted to be a chemist.
In 1937, he was summoned before the War Ministry and accused of ignoring a draft notice from the Italian Royal Navy. It was one day before he was to write a final examination on Italy's participation in the Spanish Civil War, based on a quote from Thucydides: "We have the singular merit of being brave to the utmost degree." Distracted and terrified by the draft accusation, he failed the exam—the first poor grade of his life—and was devastated. His father was able to keep him out of the Navy by enrolling him in the Fascist militia. He remained a member through his first year of university, until the passage of the Italian Racial Laws of 1938 forced his expulsion. Levi later recounted that series of events in the short story Fra Diavolo on the Po.
He retook and passed his final examinations and, in October, enrolled at the University of Turin to study chemistry. As one of 80 candidates, he spent three months taking lectures, and in February, after passing his colloquio, he was selected as one of 20 to move on to the full-time chemistry curriculum.
During the liberal period in Italy, as well as in the first decade of the Fascist regime, Jews held many public positions, and were prominent in literature, science and politics. In 1929, Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty with the Catholic Church, which established Catholicism as the State religion, allowed the Church to influence many sectors of education and public life, and relegated other religions to the status of "tolerated cults". In 1936, Italy's conquest of Ethiopia, and the expansion of what the regime regarded as the Italian "colonial empire", brought the question of "race" to the forefront. In the context set by those events, and the 1939 alliance with Hitler's Germany, the situation of the Jews of Italy changed radically.
In July 1938, a group of prominent Italian scientists and intellectuals published the "Manifesto of Race", a mixture of racial and ideological antisemitic theories from ancient and modern sources. The treatise formed the basis of the Italian Racial Laws of October 1938. After their enactment, Italian Jews lost their basic civil rights, positions in public offices, and their assets. Their books were prohibited, and Jewish writers could no longer publish in magazines owned by Aryans. Jewish students who had begun their course of study were permitted to continue, but new Jewish students were barred from entering university. Levi had matriculated a year earlier than scheduled, enabling him to take a degree.
In 1939, Levi discovered a passion for mountain hiking. A friend, Sandro Delmastro, taught him how to hike, and they spent many weekends in the mountains above Turin. Levi later wrote about that time in the chapter "Iron" in The Periodic Table: “To see Sandro in the mountains reconciled you with the world and made you forget the nightmare weighing on Europe He stirred in me a new communion with earth and sky, in which my need for freedom, the fullness of my powers, and the hunger to understand things that had driven me to chemistry converged.”
In June 1940, as an ally of Germany, Italy declared war against Britain and France, and the first Allied air raids on Turin began two days later. Levi's studies continued during the bombardments. The family suffered additional strain as his father became bedridden with bowel cancer.
Chemistry
Because of the new racial laws and the increasing intensity of Fascist action, Levi had difficulty finding an advisor for his Ph.D. dissertation, which was on the subject of the Walden inversion, a study of the asymmetry of the carbon atom. Eventually taken on by Dr. Nicolò Dallaporta, Levi graduated in mid-1941 with full marks and merit, having submitted additional theses on x-rays and electrostatic energy. His degree certificate bore the remark: "of Jewish race". The racial laws prevented Levi from finding a suitable permanent job after graduation.In December 1941, he received an informal job offer from an Italian officer to work as a chemist at an asbestos mine in San Vittore. The project was to extract nickel from the mine spoil, a challenge he accepted with pleasure. Levi later understood that, if successful, he would be aiding the German war effort, which was suffering nickel shortages in the production of armaments. The job required Levi to work under a false name with false papers. Three months later, in March 1942, his father died. Levi left the mine in June to work in Milan for the Swiss pharmaceutical manufacturer Wander AG, on a project to extract an anti-diabetic from vegetable matter. Recruited through a fellow student at Turin University, he took the job in a Swiss company to escape the Italian race laws. It soon became clear that the project had no chance of succeeding, but it was in no-one's interest to say so.
In July 1943, King Victor Emmanuel III deposed Mussolini and appointed a new government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio, which prepared to sign the Armistice of Cassibile with the Allies. When the armistice was made public on 8 September, the Germans occupied northern and central Italy, liberated Mussolini from imprisonment, and appointed him as head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy. Levi returned to Turin to find his mother and sister in refuge in their holiday home called 'Lo Saccarello' in the village of Chieri in the hills outside Turin. The three moved to Saint-Vincent in the Aosta Valley, where they could be hidden. Being pursued as Jews, many of whom had already been interned by the authorities, they moved up the hillside to Amay in the, a rebellious area highly suitable for guerrilla activities.
Italian resistance movement
The Italian resistance movement became increasingly active in the German-occupied zone. Levi and some comrades took to the foothills of the Alps and, in October, formed a partisan group in the hope of being affiliated with the liberal Giustizia e Libertà. Untrained for such a venture, he and his companions were arrested by the Fascist militia on 13 December 1943. Believing he would be shot as an Italian partisan, Levi confessed to being Jewish. He was sent to the internment camp at Fossoli near Modena.Levi later wrote the following about the conditions at Fossoli: