Abstract
Primo Levi is remembered as a memoirist, novelist, moral philosopher, and increasingly, as the Italian symbol of the Holocaust. When, in the 1990s, Italy witnessed its first major attempt to create a shared public Holocaust memory culture, Levi became Italy’s most well-known Holocaust survivor. The last decade has seen an explosion of interest in Levi’s work and life. Indeed, one need only to look at a wave of new editions of his work, two new biographies, documentaries, and Francesco Rosi’s film adaptation of La tregua to see the material fallout of this phenomenon.
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Notes
Giovanni Leoni (ed.), Trentacinque progetti per Fossoli (Venice: Electa, 1990).
See, e.g.: Il Museo monumento al deportato a Carpi, a cura di Roberta Gibertoni and Annalisa Melodi, (Venice: Electa, 1997); Un silenzio della storia: La liberazione dai campi e il ritorno dei deportati, a cura di Associazione Nazionale ex deportati—sezione di Roma and Biblioteca di storia moderna e contempo-ranea (Rome: Sabbadini Grafiche Sud, 1997); Giorgio Fabre, L’Elenco: Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei (Turin: Silvio Zamorani, 1998)
Francesco Maria Feltri, Per discutere di Auschwitz (Florence: Giuntina, 1998)
Anna Rossi-Doria, Memoria e storia: il caso della deportazione (Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 1998)
Michele Sarfatti (ed.), Il ritorno alla vita: vicende e diritti degli ebrei in Italia dopo la seconda guerra mondiale (Florence: Giuntina, 1998)
Michele Sarfatti (ed.), La persecuzione degli ebrei durante il fascismo: Le leggi razziale del 1938 (Rome: Camera dei deputati, 1998)
Michele Sarfatti, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista: Vicende, identità, persecuzione (Turin: Einaudi, 2000).
On the debate over Holocaust representation, see Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Yosefa Loshitsky (ed.), Spielberg’s Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), 112–113.
Enzo Traverso, “La vita è bella? Roberto Benigni e Auschwitz,” Passato e presente, xvii, 48 (1999): 15.
Millicent Marcus, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 268.
Maurizio Viano, “Life is Beautiful: Reception, Allegory and Holocaust Laughter,” Jewish Social Studies, 5, 3 (1999): 47–66; Millicent Marcus, After Fellini 268–284.
Pamel Kroll, “Games of Disappearance and Return: War and the Child in Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 30, 1, (2002). 29–45.
Enzo Natta, “C’è posto per il sorriso nel lager di Benigni,” Famiglia Cristiana, 52 (1997): 131.
For example, Myriam Anissimov, Primo Levi: The Tragedy of an Optimist; Carole Angier, The Double Bond (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002)
Ian Thomson, Primo Levi: A Life (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003).
Lawrence Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), xv.
Brian Cheyette, “The Ethical Uncertainty of Primo Levi,” Judaism, 48 (Winter 1999): 60.
Primo Levi, La tregua (Turin: Einaudi 1963).
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© 2005 Stanislao G. Pugliese
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Stone, M. (2005). Primo Levi, Roberto Benigni, and the Politics of Holocaust Representation. In: Pugliese, S.G. (eds) The Legacy of Primo Levi. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981592_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981592_13
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