Sergio Luzzatto, Author
Description:
You who live safe/ In your warm houses … Meditate that this came about:/ I commend these words to you”: with unforgettable verses, of Dantesque proportions, Survival in Auschwitzopens, a text that has become over time the definitive book on Auschwitz, on the horror of the twentieth century. But what does Primo Levi mean when he says “you”? What, when he says “I”? And what, when he says “we”? The way in which the author, a master of the Italian language, has strategically employed – and bent – personal pronouns nests the tangle of good and evil, of innocence and shame in the Shoah: the idea, at once, of belonging and of distance, but also the pain of guilt, and the responsibility that derives from it. Starting from these questions, Sergio Luzzatto returns to examine the figure of Primo Levi and reconstruct the story behind his writing, following the path that from leads the characters of Survival in Auschwitzto the real identity of his deportation companions, the European Jews forced “to the bottom” with him. Who were the members of the chemical Kommando of Auschwitz-Monowitz? And who were, in particular, the companions represented by Levi as negative or even abject characters, Luciferian incarnations of evil? Perhaps Primo Levi would have become a writer even if he had not been deported to Auschwitz. Certainly he would have been a different writer, if the history of the twentieth century had not marked the life of the young chemist forever through the experience of that black hole. That is why his books today must be reread today with the tools of historians: to unravel the threads of a continuous – and problematic – fabric, between historical fact and literary transfiguration.
