Primo Levi's Resistance: Rebels and Collaborators in Occupied Italy - Hardcover

Luzzatto, Sergio

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805099557 ISBN 13: 9780805099553

Publisher: Metropolitan Books, 2016

Synopsis

A pioneering examination of the Italian Resistance and the grim secret that haunted Primo Levi’s life

No other Auschwitz survivor has been as literarily powerful and historically influential as Primo Levi. Yet Levi was not only a victim or a witness. In the fall of 1943, at the very start of the Italian Resistance, he was a fighter, participating in the first attempts to launch guerrilla warfare against occupying Nazi forces. Those three months have been largely overlooked by Levi's biographers; indeed, they went strikingly unmentioned by Levi himself. For the rest of his life he barely acknowledged that autumn in the Alps. But an obscure passage in Levi’s The Periodic Table hints that his deportation to Auschwitz was linked directly to an incident from that time: “an ugly secret” that had made him give up the struggle, “extinguishing all will to resist, indeed to live.”

What did Levi mean by those dramatic lines? His small partisan band, it appears, had turned on itself, committing a brutal act against two of its own members. Using that shocking episode as a starting point, Sergio Luzzatto offers a rich examination of the early days of the Resistance, when the nascent movement struggled to define its role. Combining investigative flair with profound empathy, he traces vivid portraits of both rebels and Nazi collaborators, showing how their fates continued to be intertwined into the postwar years. And he provides startling insight into the origins of the moral complexity that runs through the work of Primo Levi himself.

About this title

About the Author

Sergio Luzzatto is the author of Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age, which won the prestigious Cundill Prize in History, and of The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy. A professor of history at the University of Turin, Luzzatto is a regular contributor to Il Sole 24 Ore.

Edition details

• Publisher: Metropolitan Books
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805099557
• ISBN 13: 9780805099553
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304