Primo Levi's Universe

Primo Levi is best known for his memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, but he was also a scientist, fiction writer, and poet: in short, a Renaissance man, who did not want to be known exclusively as a Holocaust writer. Using Levi's own words as a springboard, Sam Magavern offers here for the first time a multi-faceted portrait of the man - as a writer. By exploring all of Levi's writings—including his short stories, poems, his delightful novels about blue-collar workers—Magavern introduces us to a talented writer who had a profound love of humanity, a sharp wit, a passion for his profession as a chemist—a man inspired by variety of things beyond his Holocaust experience. Magavern brings a fresh, personal sensibility to the way we think about Levi and produces a hybrid book—part life story and part literary biography, finally doing justice to the man's calm rationality and essential beliefs.

Primo Levi is best known for his memoir, Survival in Auschwitz, but he was also a scientist, fiction writer, and poet: in short, a Renaissance man, who did not want to be known exclusively as a Holocaust writer. Using Levi's own words as a springboard, Sam Magavern offers here for the first time a multi-faceted portrait of the man - as a writer. By exploring all of Levi's writings—including his short stories, poems, his delightful novels about blue-collar workers—Magavern introduces us to a talented writer who had a profound love of humanity, a sharp wit, a passion for his profession as a chemist—a man inspired by variety of things beyond his Holocaust experience. Magavern brings a fresh, personal sensibility to the way we think about Levi and produces a hybrid book—part life story and part literary biography, finally doing justice to the man's calm rationality and essential beliefs.

Publishers Weekly

Commemorating the late Primo Levi's 90th birthday, this extended essay interweaves the writer's tragic life with his work. Small of stature, unpopular and a Jew in Fascist Italy, Levi was no model for success. Denied a career as an astrophysicist, he worked as a chemist and later as more of a company paper-pusher. Yet to paraphrase University of Buffalo Law School professor Magavern, though denied the chance to study the stars, Levi became the master chronicler of hell on earth in brilliant works like If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table. Aside from his imprisonment in Auschwitz, Levi was inspired by an eclectic group of authors from Dante to Melville, Paul Celan and, above all, Rabelais. Although Levi had two children and was quietly married for many years, an acquaintance once described him as a prisoner at home-living with both his mother and mother-in-law. Two longstanding affairs did little to relieve his battle with depression, and he died in 1987, falling down a stairwell. This is a measured and sensitive academic exploration of a complicated and tortured soul who desperately sought freedom throughout his lifetime. (July 7)

Sam Magavern has written for Poetry, The Partisan Review, and The Paris Review, among others.  He is a professor at the University at Buffalo Law School and serves on the city's Living Wage Commission. He lives in Buffalo, New York.

Jonathan Rosen (introduction) is the author of Eve’s Apple and The Talmud and the Internet. His essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker among others. He is editorial director of Nextbook, where he edits the “Jewish Encounters” series.   

Risa Sodi (afterword) is the director of undergraduate study, senior lector II, and language program director at Yale University. She is the author of Narrative and Imperative: The First Fifty Years of Italian Holocaust Writing, 1944-1994  and A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz. She was the last person to interview Levi before his death.