Introduction

Abstract

This volume offers a host of interdisciplinary responses to the multilayered work of the Turinese Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919–87). Levi is now viewed not only as one of the most important survivor-writers of the Holocaust but also as a key literary figure of the twentieth century, an ethical thinker of great complexity, a scientist, an educator, and a political philosopher. The chrysanthemum on the cover of this volume, Jane Joseph’s closing illustration to Levi’s second book The Truce (La tregua, 1963), is intended to suggest some of the complexity of Levi’s extensive body of work. As the artist explains in the conversation that closes this collection, the image serves as an “accompaniment” to Levi’s nightmare of waking up from a seemingly peaceful postwar existence to a realization that he has not really escaped Auschwitz after all but is back inside the camp. Joseph’s drypoint of the complex, multilayered flower evokes Levi’s sinister dream within a dream, a shared nightmare among Holocaust survivors and a recurring theme within Levi’s significant and diverse body of work. “It happened, therefore it can happen again,” Levi reminds us near the end of his final book, The Drowned and the Saved (I sommersi e i salvati, 1986); the witnesses “must be listened to.”¹