These three volumes of Primo Levi’s Complete Works make available to the Anglophone reader the essential information on the author and his writings. This bibliography is intended to serve as a guide for further study, so, in addition to works in English, it includes critical literature in other languages, principally in Italian.
There is another reason to put texts in different languages side by side. Apart from the origin of an author, scholars tend to cite works in their own languages: on Levi, in particular, Italian studies almost exclusively cite critical literature in Italian, while English and American scholars cite mainly texts in English, and so on. These are barriers that this bibliography intends to help remove.
The richest bibliography in the world can be found online, in Italian and English, on the website of the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi (International Center for Primo Levi Studies), www.primolevi.it. It contains more than six thousand entries, including both the primary literature (Levi’s individual writings and works in Italian and in translation) and the secondary literature in various languages (after Italian, the most well represented are English, French, German, and Spanish). This tool, which is updated monthly, is easy to use and can be consulted in many different ways. One can search on the basis of the works (for instance, what has been written on The Truce or on Other People’s Trades, or on the theater version of If This Is a Man) or on the basis of several dozen key words that allow the user to discover, for example, everything that has been published on Levi as an anthropologist, on his ordeal during the Resistance, or on his literary style. With some exceptions, the works cited in this essay are monographs or collections entirely or largely devoted to Levi; only occasionally are individual articles published in a review or a book noted.
The most immediately useful books are the editions of Levi’s works that the author himself undertook to edit and to annotate for readers in the Italian middle schools. They are all published by Einaudi, in Turin: The Truce (1965), If This Is a Man (1973), and The Periodic Table (1979, with an introduction by Natalia Ginzburg); a school edition of The Wrench (1983), similarly annotated, was entrusted to the linguist Gian Luigi Beccaria. In 2012 Einaudi published, in collaboration with the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin, a new, annotated version of If This Is a Man, edited by Alberto Cavaglion.
In addition, Levi commented on his work in many of his uncollected essays and in interviews; the former have now been collected in The Complete Works, while dozens of interviews remain scattered in various journals and newspapers. However, numerous excerpts from the uncollected interviews can be read in the extensive notes put together by Marco Belpoliti in the Italian edition of Levi’s Opere (Turin: Einaudi, 1997, with a fine introductory essay by the writer Daniele Del Giudice) and also in certain sections of Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987 (Turin: Einaudi, 1997). The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987 (New York: The New Press, 2001), an English-language version of the latter book, edited by Robert S. C. Gordon together with Belpoliti, has a different structure from the Italian. A volume that contains a substantial number of scattered texts on Levi, along with useful biographical information, is Echi di una voce perduta: Incontri, interviste e conversazioni con Primo Levi (Milan: Mursia, 1992), edited by Gabriella Poli and Giorgio Calcagno. Other important conversations with Levi that have been published in book form are Primo Levi and Tullio Regge, Dialogo (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989; revised Italian edition, 1984); Ferdinando Camon, Conversations with Primo Levi (Marlboro, Vt.: Marlboro Press, 1989; original Italian edition, 1987); and Milvia Spadi, Le parole di un uomo: Incontro con Primo Levi (Rome: Di Renzo, 1997); Intervista a Primo Levi, ex deportato, edited by Anna Bravo and Federico Cereja (Turin: Einaudi, 2011; original edition, 1983). Levi’s conversation with Philip Roth deserves a place of its own: it appears in Roth’s essay collection Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work (1986; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001).
Finally, five long conversations can be found in the issue of the journal Riga devoted to Primo Levi, again edited by Marco Belpoliti (Riga, no. 13; Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1997). This volume also contains a selection of contemporary reviews of Levi’s works, in many cases by writers, and twenty-four critical essays, by as many scholars, whose readings continue to be illuminating.
Examination of the secondary literature on Primo Levi begins necessarily with the biographies. The most concise and easy to read is that of Ernesto Ferrero (Primo Levi; Turin: Einaudi, 2007), which was used as the basis for the Chronology that can be found in volume 1 of The Complete Works. Echi di una voce perduta, the book edited by Poli and Calcagno cited above, is equivalent to a biographical profile. But the first proper biography was in French: Myriam Anissimov’s Primo Levi: The Tragedy of an Optimist appeared in 1996 (English translation, Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1999). Although superseded by the biographies that appeared later, it is recommended for some of the biographical testimony, like that of Resnyk (see the chapter “The Work,” in If This Is a Man).
The two most thorough biographies in print, the fruit of years of research and both in English, are Carole Angier’s The Double Bond: Primo Levi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) and Ian Thomson’s Primo Levi (New York: Henry Holt, 2003). It should be noted that the Italian translation of Angier’s work, Il doppio legame: Vita di Primo Levi (Milan: Mondadori, 2004), was revised by the author herself and is definitive; the book should be read with caution, however, when it ventures deeply into Levi’s private and interior life). For a discussion of both these biographies, see Alexander Stille, “Secrets of Primo Levi,” The New York Review of Books 49, no. 13 (August 15, 2002).
A shorter biography is Philippe Mesnard’s profile, Primo Levi: Una vita per immagini (Venice: Marsilio, 2008); the French version that followed is much expanded: Primo Levi: Le passage d’un témoin (Paris: Fayard, 2011). Also concise is a recent essay by Berel Lang, Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), which focuses mainly on Levi’s ethics, philosophy, and Jewish roots. On the subject of Levi’s Jewish background, see also Alberto Cavaglion, Notizie su Argon: Gli antenati di Primo Levi da Francesco Petrarca a Cesare Lombroso (Turin: Instar Libri, 2006), which is one of the best works on Levi, along with two other books by the same author: Ebrei senza saperlo (Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2002) and Il senso dell’arca (Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2006). Another good monograph on the subject is Sophie Nezri-Dufour’s Primo Levi: Una memoria ebraica del Novecento (Florence: Giuntina, 2002); and for a detailed essay on the Jewish element in contemporary Italian literature, see Luca De Angelis, Qualcosa di più intimo: Aspetti della cultura ebraica del Novecento italiano; da Svevo a Bassani (Florence: Giuntina, 2006). See also the pages on Levi in Sergio Parussa, Writing as Freedom, Writing as Testimony: Four Italian Writers and Judaism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2008).
Finally, there are the meticulously documented Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924–1974 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), by H. Stuart Hughes, and Judith Butler’s Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). (For a reconstruction of the opinions that Levi expressed in 1982 on the politics of the government of Israel, see “Le vere parole di Levi,” Il Sole 24 Ore [April 8, 2012]; “Le parole di Levi: The New Yorker e Il Sole,” Il Sole 24 Ore [June 9, 2013]; and Arturo Marzano and Guri Schwarz, Attentato alla sinagoga: Roma, 9 ottobre 1982; il conflitto israelo-palestinese e l’Italia [Rome: Viella, 2013]). Two indispensable tools on Jewish themes are Gli ebrei in Italia, edited by Corrado Vivanti, in the series Storia d’Italia: Annali 11 (Turin: Einaudi, 1996); and The Holocaust Encyclopedia, edited by Walter Laqueur and Judith Tydor Baumel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
Biographical material on Levi’s adolescence and youth can be found in I luoghi di Levi tra letteratura e memoria, edited by Giorgio Brandone and Tiziana Cerrato (Turin: Liceo Classico D’Azeglio, 2008) and in Eugenio Gentili Tedeschi, I giochi della paura: Immagini di una microstoria; libri segreti, cronache, resistenza tra Milano e Valle d’Aosta 1942–1944 (Aosta: Le Château, 1999). On Levi’s brief partisan experience, see Sergio Luzzatto, Partigia: Una storia della Resistenza (Milan: Mondadori, 2013), and Frediano Sessi, Il lungo viaggio di Primo Levi: La scelta della Resistenza, il tradimento, l’arresto (Venice: Marsilio, 2013). Levi is included in the anthology Writers on World War II, edited by Mordecai Richler (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992). Bianca Guidetti Serra, a friend of Levi from youth, wrote, with the help of Santina Mobiglia, an autobiography, Bianca la rossa (Turin: Einaudi, 2009). Nicola Dallaporta, the “assistant” of the chapter “Potassium” in The Periodic Table, has written an affectionate account of Levi’s university years: “La mia esperienza di studio e di vita,” Annali di storia dell’educazione e delle istituzioni scolastiche 5 (1998).
Memoirs published by Levi’s fellow deportees are extremely useful. The most significant is by Jean Samuel, written with Jean-Marc Dreyfus, Il m’appelait Pikolo: Un compagnon de Primo Levi raconte (Paris: Laffont, 2007), which contains part of his correspondence with Levi. The man who is called Henri in the chapter “The Drowned and the Saved” in If This Is a Man also published a memoir: Paul Steinberg, Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning (New York: Picador, 1999; original French edition, 1996). Luciana Nissim Momigliano, who was deported to Auschwitz in the same boxcar with Levi, in 1946 published her Ricordi della casa dei morti, which has now been reprinted in a version edited by Alessandra Chiappano (Florence: Giuntina, 2008); see also Chiappano’s Luciana Nissim Momigliano: Una vita (Florence: Giuntina, 2010). Testimony and documents are collected in Anna Segre, Un coraggio silenzioso: Leonardo De Benedetti, medico, vissuto ad Auschwitz (Turin: Zamorani, 2008). Also see the collection of trial depositions and similar texts by Primo Levi with Leonardo De Benedetti: Così fu Auschwitz: Testimonianze 1945–1986, edited by Fabio Levi and Domenico Scarpa (Turin: Einaudi, 2015), which contains extensive historical documentary material. Hermann Langbein’s People in Auschwitz (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004; original German edition, 1972) is a volume that Levi greatly prized and would have liked to translate into Italian himself; it quotes him and comments on him on many of its pages. Similarly valuable is the essay by Jean Améry At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980; original German edition, 1966); a second edition, with an introduction by Alexander Stille, was published in 1990 by Schocken Books, New York. On the Levi-Améry relationship see also W. G. Sebald, “Jean Améry und Primo Levi,” in Über Jean Améry, edited by Irene Heidelberger-Leonard (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1990).
On matters relating to the publication of Levi’s works, see Marco Belpoliti, “Levi: Il falso scandalo,” Rivista dei Libri 10, no. 1 (January 2000); Giulia Boringhieri, Per un umanesimo scientifico: Storia di libri, di mio padre e di noi (Turin: Einaudi, 2010); Italo Calvino, Letters, 1941–1985, edited by Michael Wood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014); Severino Cesari, Colloquio con Giulio Einaudi, 2nd edition (Turin: Einaudi, 2007; original, 1991); Guido Davico Bonino, Incontri con uomini di qualità: Editori e scrittori di un’epoca che non c’è più (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2013); Ernesto Ferrero, I migliori anni della nostra vita (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2005); I verbali del mercoledì: Riunioni editoriali Einaudi, 1943–1952, edited by Tommaso Munari (Turin: Einaudi, 2011); and I verbali del mercoledì: Riunioni editoriali Einaudi, 1953–1963, edited by Tommaso Munari (Turin: Einaudi, 2013). On the relationship between Levi and Italo Calvino, see Giorgio Bertone, Italo Calvino: Il castello della scrittura (Turin: Einaudi, 1994).
On Levi’s work as a paint technician, the most detailed record is that of his colleague Renato Portesi: “Primo Levi. Un chimico, un impiantista . . . un uomo,” an interview by Ferruccio Trifirò in La Chimica e l’Industria 83, no. 5 (June 2001). The best works on Levi and science are, in addition to Massimo Bucciantini’s Primo Levi Lecture (see below), the pages devoted to the science fiction stories in Enrico Mattioda, Levi (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2011); Mario Porro’s essay collection Letteratura come filosofia naturale (Milan: Medusa, 2009); and these three monographs: Antonio De Meo, Primo Levi e la scienza come metafora (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2011); Charlotte Ross, Primo Levi’s Narratives of Embodiment: Containing the Human (New York: Routledge, 2011); and Angela Di Fazio, Altri simulacri: Automi, vampiri e mostri della storia nei racconti di Primo Levi (Pisa: ETS, 2012). Pierpaolo Antonello provides a wide-ranging analysis in Contro il materialism: Le “due culture” in Italia; bilancio di un secolo (Turin: Aragno, 2012). The story “Carbon” (from The Periodic Table) is included in The Faber Book of Science, edited by John Carey (London: Faber & Faber, 1995). Finally, there is Pietro Scarnera’s graphic novel Una stella tranquilla: Ritratto sentimentale di Primo Levi (Bologna: Comma 22, 2013), which is not only an imaginative translation of a life into images but a careful reading of Levi through his own words.
The vast secondary literature on Levi is increasing every year, not only in Italian but in other languages. Yet until Levi’s death, only a few short, popular works were available (and only in Italian), and there was very little of an academic nature. Writing about Levi consisted mainly of reviews, in Italy as elsewhere. Groundbreaking works have appeared in America, including Risa B. Sodi’s A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); a short essay by Anthony Rudolf, At an Uncertain Hour: Primo Levi’s War Against Oblivion (London: Menard Press, 1990); the pages on Levi in an early work by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Reflections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), and Rosenfeld’s more recent The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); the essays by Irving Howe, Lawrence L. Langer, and Cynthia Ozick in Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988); and the two volumes containing the proceedings of conferences held in 1989 at Cornell (Reason and Light: Essays on Primo Levi, edited by Susan Tarrow [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990]) and at Princeton (Primo Levi as Witness, edited by Pietro Frassica [Fiesole: Casalini, 1990]), both of which contain brilliant contributions by a scholar who died prematurely, Gian Paolo Biasin. Among the works just cited, the most widely read has been Irving Howe’s essay, which originally appeared in The New York Review of Books, March 28, 1985, introducing the first American edition of If Not Now, When? There are also influential articles by Victor Brombert, “Primo Levi: The Flawed Design” (1996), available in Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), and by Clive James, “Last Will and Testament” (1988), now in As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968–2002 (New York: Norton, 2003).
In 1997 Einaudi published the volume Primo Levi: Un’Antologia della Critica, edited by Ernesto Ferrero, which contains much of the best writing on Levi up until then. A section devoted to contemporary reviews of the individual works includes, among others, Italo Calvino’s 1948 review of the first edition of If This Is a Man. This anthology reprints the essays that introduced the three volumes of the first, pioneering Einaudi edition of Levi’s complete works (1987–1990): the essay by Cesare Cases, a scholar of German who had been a friend of Levi since Levi lived in Milan (1942–43), offers a comprehensive, acute, and idiosyncratic reading of the works; the essay by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo remains the most attentive analysis of Levi’s style; and, finally, there is Cesare Segre’s essay on the novels and the poems. The anthology also contains an analytic reading by Segre of If This Is a Man, and brief but illuminating critical portraits by Norberto Bobbio, Giulio Einaudi, Claudio Magris, Massimo Mila (a profile of Levi the humorist), and Franco Fortini, who offers an extremely subtle reading of the poetry. Three other highlights are essays by Stefano Levi della Torre on Levi’s ethics; Paola Valabrega on the Eastern European Jewish inheritance; and Alberto Cavaglion on the “termite nest” of characters in If This Is a Man. Finally, it contains Cynthia Ozick’s “The Suicide Note,” which can also be found in Metaphor and Memory (New York: Knopf, 1989).
In addition to the works of Alberto Cavaglion, Ernesto Ferrero, and Marco Belpoliti—among Belpoliti’s many contributions are a Levian dictionary, Primo Levi (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1998), and the narrative La prova (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), in which he retraces the route of The Truce—another fine monograph is Robert S. C. Gordon’s Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Another work available in English is Tzvetan Todorov’s discussion of ethics in Levi, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (New York: Henry Holt, 1997; original French edition, 1991). A basic tool for every Anglophone reader of Levi is The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, edited by Robert Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), which includes essays by Anna Laura and Giulio Lepschy on language, by Charlotte Ross on Levi’s science fiction, by David Ward on Turin, by Mirna Cicioni on humor (Cicioni is also the author of Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge [Oxford: Berg, 1995]), and by Nancy Harrowitz on Jewish identity. Gordon is the author of the most wide-ranging and up-to-date volume on reception studies and the memory of the Shoah in Italy: The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010 (Redwood City, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012); on the same subject, see Risa Sodi, Narrative and Imperative: The First Fifty Years of Italian Holocaust Writing, 1944–1994 (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).
In the fall of 2009, Gordon gave the first annual Primo Levi Lecture, organized by the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi in Turin and published the following spring by Einaudi in a bilingual Italian-
English edition. The subject chosen by Gordon was “Sfacciata fortuna”: Luck and the Holocaust (Turin: Einaudi, 2010). This lecture was followed in subsequent years by Massimo Bucciantini, Auschwitz Experiment (2011); Stefano Bartezzaghi, A Phone Conversation with Primo Levi (2012); Mario Barenghi, Why Do We Believe Primo Levi? (2013); Anna Bravo, Narratives for History (2014); and Ann Goldstein and Domenico Scarpa, In Another Language (2015). Each volume contains an appendix of texts for students. Another book by Bartezzaghi, Scrittori giocatori (Turin: Einaudi, 2010), also has a brilliant essay on Levi.
On the connections between Levi and historiography, see the anthology Primo Levi testimone e scrittore di storia, edited by Paolo Momigliano Levi and Rosanna Gorris (Florence: Giuntina, 1999). Many essays with a historiographic approach, entirely or partly about Levi, can be read in the two volumes of Storia della Shoah in Italia: Vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni (volume 1, Le premesse, le persecuzioni, lo sterminio; volume 2, Memorie, rappresentazioni, eredità), edited by Marcello Flores, Simon Levis Sullam, Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, and Enzo Traverso (Turin: UTET, 2010). Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), an anthology edited by Saul Friedlander and based on a symposium held at UCLA in the spring of 1990, contains essays relevant to Levi by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, John Felstiner, Carlo Ginzburg, and Hayden White. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992) was published soon afterward.
On questions of historical method relative to testimonies, these two volumes are noteworthy: Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012; original French edition, 2003), and Carlo Ginzburg, Threads and Traces: True False Fictive (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012; original Italian edition, 2006). Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Ausch-
witz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books, 1999; original Italian edition, 1998) has had an enduring international influence; Stefano Levi della Torre counters Agamben in “Il sopravvissuto, il musulmano e il testimone” (2000), an essay published as an appendix to a new Italian edition of The Drowned and the Saved (Turin: Einaudi, 2003).
The critical literature on themes related to bearing witness is extremely rich. Notable works in English include Lawrence L. Langer’s survey “The Literature of Auschwitz” (1991), in Admitting the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), and the works of Dominick LaCapra: Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); and History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004). There are interesting contributions by Berel Lang and Robert Gordon in the anthology The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable, edited by Andrew Leak and George Paizis (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000). The same year, Gillian Banner published the essay collection Holocaust Literature: Schulz, Levi, Spiegelman and the Memory of Offence (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2000).
Among the most recent monographs in English are Jonathan Druker, Primo Levi and Humanism After Auschwitz: Posthumanist Reflections (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Lina N. Insana, Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009); Ruth Franklin, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Carole J. Lambert, Ethics After Auschwitz? Primo Levi’s and Elie Wiesel’s Response (New York: Peter Lang, 2011).
Works in French include Alain Parrau, Écrire les camps (Paris: Belin, 1995); Enzo Traverso, L’histoire déchirée: Essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels (Paris: Cerf, 1997); Renaud Dulong, Le témoin oculaire: Les conditions sociales de l’attestation personnelle (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1998); and Jean-François Chianta-
retto, Le témoin interne (Paris: Aubier, 2005). In Italian: David Meghnagi, Ricomporre l’infranto: L’esperienza dei sopravvissuti alla Shoah (Venice: Marsilio, 2005); Elisabetta Ruffini, Un lapsus di Primo Levi: Il testimone e la ragazzina (Bergamo: Assessorato alla Cultura Comune di Bergamo, 2006); Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, La vendetta è il racconto: Testimonianze e riflessioni sulla Shoah (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007); and Raffaella Di Castro, Testimoni del non-provato: Ricordare, pensare, immaginare la Shoah nella terza generazione (Rome: Carocci, 2008).
In German, a notable work on the subject of memory is Harald Weinrich, Lethe: Kunst und Kritik des Vergessens (Munich: Beck, 1997).
On Levi’s language and style, in addition to the works by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo already cited and those by Giovanna Massariello Merzagora on the Jewish-Piedmontese dialect, there are stylistic analyses anthologized by Giovanni Tesio in Piemonte letterario dell’
Otto-Novecento: Da Giovanni Faldella a Primo Levi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1991); the quantitative analyses of Jane Nystedt, Le opere di Primo Levi viste al computer: Osservazioni stilolinguistiche (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993); a detailed analysis by Enrico Testa in Lo stile semplice: Discorso e romanzo (Turin: Einaudi, 1997); and an essay by Paolo Febbraro in Primo Levi e i totem della poesia (Lucca: Zona Franca, 2013). A recent monograph devoted to Levi as a newspaper columnist is Andrea Rondini’s Anche il cielo brucia: Primo Levi e il giornalismo (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012). There are numerous studies of Levian intertextuality and the best tool, again, is the online bibliography on the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi website.
The following works should also be mentioned: Thomas Taterka, Dante Deutsch: Studien zur Lagerliteratur (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1999); Anne Henry, Shoah et témoignage: Levi face à Améry et Bettelheim (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005); C. Fred Alford, After the Holocaust: The Book of Job, Primo Levi, and the Path to Affliction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Lisa Regazzoni, Selezione e catalogo: La costruzione narrativa del passato in Omero, Dante e Primo Levi (Bologna: Clueb, 2010); Giuliana Cacciola, I generi della memoria e la memoria di genere: Primo Levi, Ruth Klüger e la Shoah (Rome-Acireale: Bonanno, 2013); and Hannah Arendt e Primo Levi: Narrazione e pensiero, edited by Natascia Mattucci and Andrea Rondini (Lecce: Pensa Multimedia, 2013).
For the international reputation and history of Primo Levi’s works, translations of them, and the relevant critical works, see the essay by Monica Quirico in this volume (page 2805). In addition, one of the best comprehensive essays in English is Tony Judt’s 1999 “The Elementary Truths of Primo Levi,” in Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). Among the valuable introductions to editions of Levi’s books, two are in French: À une heure incertaine, preface by Jorge Semprún (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) and Œuvres, introduction by Catherine Coquio (Paris: Laffont, 2005); and one is in Spanish: Trilogía de Auschwitz: Si esto es un hombre; La tregua; Los hundidos y los salvados, foreword by Antonio Muñoz Molina (Barcelona: El Aleph, 2005).
The following is a list, in chronological order of publication, of other important collections of essays on Levi: “Scritti in memoria di Primo Levi,” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 56, no. 2–3, May–December 1989; Primo Levi: Il presente del passato; giornate internazionali di studio, edited by Alberto Cavaglion (Milan: Angeli, 1991); Primo Levi, a collection of papers from a January 1993 conference, edited by Marie-Hélène Caspar (Nanterre: Université Paris X–Nanterre, 1993); Primo Levi: Memoria e invenzione, edited by Giovanna Ioli (San Salvatore Monferrato: Edizioni della Biennale Piemonte e Letteratura, 1995); Insegnare Auschwitz: Questioni etiche, storiografiche, educative della deportazione e dello sterminio, edited by Enzo Traverso (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995); Primo Levi: La dignità dell’uomo, edited by Rosa Brambilla and Giuseppe Cacciatore (Assisi: Cittadella, 1995); Shoah, mémoire et écriture: Primo Levi et le dialogue des savoirs, edited by Giuseppina Santagostino (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997); Primo Levi, il mestiere di raccontare, il dovere di ricordare, edited by Ada Neiger (Fossombrone: Metauro, 1998); Al di qua del bene e del male: La visione del mondo di Primo Levi, edited by Enrico Mattioda (Milan: Angeli, 2001); Memory and Mastery: Primo Levi as Writer and Witness, edited by Roberta S. Kremer (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2001); Primo Levi, le double lien: Science et littérature, edited by Walter Geerts and Jean Samuel (Paris: Ramsay, 2002); Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist, edited by Joseph Farrell (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004); The Legacy of Primo Levi, edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2005); Primo Levi: Scrittura e testimonianza, edited by David Meghnagi (Florence: LibriLiberi, 2006); Voci dal mondo per Primo Levi: In memoria, per la memoria, edited by Luigi Dei (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2007); Scrittori italiani di origine ebrea ieri e oggi: Un approccio generazionale, edited by Reinier Speelman, Monica Jansen, and Silvia Gaiga (Utrecht: Igitur, Utrecht Publishing and Archiving, 2007); Tra storia e immaginazione: Gli scrittori ebrei di lingua italiana si raccontano, edited by Hanna Serkowska (Kraków: Rabid, 2008); Mémoire oblige: Riflessioni sull’opera di Primo Levi, edited by Ada Neiger (Trento: Università degli Studi di Trento, 2009); “Special Issue: Primo Levi,” NEMLA Italian Studies 32 (2009–2010), edited by Francesco Ciabattoni and Simona Wright; Answering Auschwitz: Primo Levi’s Science and Humanism After the Fall, edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); and Approaches to Teaching the Works of Primo Levi, edited by Nicholas Patruno and Roberta Ricci (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2014). A collection of essays from Universiteit Utrecht, published online in November 2014 (www
.italianisticaultraiectina.org), should also be noted: Primo Levi lettore—Lettori di Primo Levi: Nuovi studi su Primo Levi, edited by Raniero Speelman, Elisabetta Tonello, and Silvia Gaiga.
Other important monographs are Nicholas Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995); Françoise Carasso, Primo Levi: Le parti pris de la clarté (Paris: Belin, 1997); Anne Sizaire, Primo Levi: L’humanité après Auschwitz (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997); Jean-Philippe Bareil, Exil et voyage littéraire dans l’œuvre de Primo Levi (Paris: Messene, 1998); Wolfgang Beutin, Die Revolution tritt in die Literatur: Beiträge zur Literatur- und Ideengeschichte von Thomas Müntzer bis Primo Levi (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999); Sylvia Tschörner, “Il binocolo aristotelico”: Naturwissenschaft, Philosophie und Intertextualität im Werk von Primo Levi (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999); Daniela Amsallem, Primo Levi au miroir de son œuvre: Le témoin; l’écrivain; le chimiste (Lyon: Éditions du Cosmogone, 2001); Frederic D. Homer, Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001); Judith Woolf, The Memory of the Offence: Primo Levi’s “If This Is a Man” (Market Harborough, U.K.: Troubador, 2001); Hélène van Camp, Auschwitz oblige encore: Tentative pour penser le mal absolu à partir du bien toujours relatif (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003); Massimo Giuliani, A Centaur in Auschwitz: Reflections on Primo Levi’s Thinking (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2003); Claire Quilliot, Primo Levi revisité (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004); Giuseppina Santago-
stino, Primo Levi: Metamorfosi letterarie del corpo (Moncalieri: C.I.R.V.I., 2004); Lucie Benchouiha, Primo Levi: Rewriting the Holocaust (Leicester, U.K.: Troubador, 2006); Sam Magavern, Primo Levi’s Universe: A Writer’s Journey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Enrico Palandri, Primo Levi (Florence: Le Monnier, 2011); and Rivkah Zim, The Consolations of Writing: Literary Strategies of Resistance from Boethius to Primo Levi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014).
This bibliography would not be complete without a brief mention of the gray zone, a theme that has had a resonance beyond the literary. Levi’s term has been adopted by philosophers, historians, and anthropologists, and has now entered the language of journalism and ordinary speech. In addition to the works already cited and the writings on the subject in many monographs and anthologies, there are two collections of essays devoted entirely to the subject: Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, edited by Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), and La zone grise entre accomodation et collaboration, edited by Philippe Mesnard and Yannis Thanassekos (Paris: Kimé, 2010). Furthermore, the “Auschwitz” section of the website of the Centro Internazionale di Studi Primo Levi has a subsection called “On the ‘Gray Zone,’” in progress. So far, there are essays, in Italian and in English translation, by Marco Belpoliti, Anna Bravo, Carlo Ginzburg, and Martina Mengoni.
DOMENICO SCARPA