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Primo Levi
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Fast Forward Italian Jewish leader condemns pro-Palestinian protest flyers for use of Primo Levi quote
Levi, an Italian Jewish Holocaust survivor, repeatedly spoke out against Israel's treatment of Palestinians
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Culture Q & A: On Primo Levi’s Centenary, Reflecting On A Writer Who Was ‘The Perfect Scientist’
Primo Levi was, by any measure, a remarkable man. The chemist and writer, born in Turin, Italy on July 31, 1919, is most famous in America for his memoirs of his experience during the Holocaust. And those memoirs, foremost among them “If This is a Man,” which surveys Levi’s time in the Italian resistance and…
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Culture The 27 Poems You Have To Read For National Poetry Month
“In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode,” wrote Adrienne Rich in her 1993 essay “Someone is Writing a Poem.” Later, in the same essay, she tried to explain just how: “In the wash of poetry the old, beaten, worn stones…
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Culture Geeking Out on Primo Levi — and Elena Ferrante — With a Master Translator
The great Italian writer Primo Levi is primarily known in this country for memoirs detailing his experiences in Auschwitz, his long journey home after the end of the war and his life as a chemist of Jewish descent in the quiet precincts of Piedmont. These books, published in America as “Survival in Auschwitz,” “The Reawakening”…
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Culture Primo Levi and the Italian Resistance
Primo Levi’s Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy By Sergio Luzzatto; translated by Frederika Randall Metropolitan Books, 284 pages, $30 Poet, memoirist, essayist, novelist and chemist Primo Levi (1919-1987) is best known as a cool-eyed survivor and chronicler of Auschwitz. But he was also briefly a Resistance fighter in the mountains of northwest Italy,…
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Breaking News Italian Politician Beppe Grillo Parodies Primo Levi Poem About Holocaust
Beppe Grillo, an Italian comic turned politician, refused to apologize for his parody of a Primo Levi poem about the Holocaust to criticize Italy’s government and political system. Italian-Jewish leader Renzo Gattegna called the parody on Grillo’s blog an “obscenity.” Grillo, who heads the anti-establishment Five Stars movement, paraphrased “If this Is a Man,” which…
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Opinion Primo Levi Was No Saint — But We Already Knew That
Prisoner 174517 had a recurrent nightmare at Auschwitz. He dreamed that he had survived, returned home and told his family about his experience —yet nobody listened. That same prisoner, Primo Levi, who died a little more than 25 years ago, probably by his own hand, has now been subjected to a different nightmare: someone who…
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