Sebastian Faulks ~ The official website of the award-winning and best-selling novelist. Primo levi. Primo Levi. Biography[edit] Early life[edit] Levi was born in 1919 in Turin, Italy, at Corso Re Umberto 75, into a liberal Jewish family.
His father Cesare worked for the manufacturing firm Ganz and spent much of his time working abroad in Hungary, where Ganz was based. Cesare was an avid reader and autodidact. Levi's mother Ester, known to everyone as Rina, was well educated, having attended the Istituto Maria Letizia. In 1921 Anna Maria, Levi's sister was born; he was to remain close to her all his life. In September 1930 Levi entered the Massimo d'Azeglio Royal Gymnasium a year ahead of normal entrance requirements.[5] In class he was the youngest, the shortest and the cleverest, as well as being the only Jew.
In July 1934 at the age of 14, he sat the exams for the Massimo d'Azeglio liceo classico, a Lyceum (sixth form) specialising in the classics, and was admitted that autumn. Chemistry[edit] In December 1941 Levi was clandestinely offered a job at an asbestos mine at San Vittore. The Periodic Table: Primo Levi's elementals of life, suffering and death. It was awarded – in a very informal vote – the title of the best science book ever written, but what makes it a science book at all?
Levi was a working chemist, but the title is a metaphor and even this figure of speech is sometimes a little strained to comply with the book's scheme. Some of it is personal memoir, and chapter headings such as Argon, and Iron, seem barely justified by the reflections that follow. Some stories are overtly fiction, which is surely the antithesis of science writing.
One or two are attempts to address the process of industrial science from, so to speak, the floor: Sulphur is a compelling account of a wartime factory hand's hours on the night shift, but what is he making, and why does he need such temperatures, such vacuum readings? Some of it is about etymology, about the nature of words and their casual links with the elements around us. This realisation (once again, for me) came as Levi describes the laboratory preparation of zinc sulphate. Ian Thomson on Primo Levi's Journey. On the morning of October 19 1945, nine months after his rescue from Auschwitz, Primo Levi reached his home in northern Italy.
Of the 650 Jews who had been deported with him, Levi was just one of 24 returning. The first to see him at 75 Corso Re Umberto, the address where he had lived in Turin, was the concierge. She had known Levi since his teens but did not recognise the bearded stranger, and brusquely asked him what business he had. There was a silence before she began shouting up the stairwell to Primo's mother: "Madame Levi! Madame Levi! " Many years later, the chaos of Levi's homeward journey across eastern Europe became the subject of his book The Truce. With its mock-heroic misadventure, Levi's chronicle has long tempted Italian film directors. Davide Ferrario, the latest Italian director to take an interest in The Truce, has chosen to trace the course of Levi's journey in the form of a documentary. Nevertheless, the frustration of enforced containment bit keenly.
List of Holocaust survivors. There are many Holocaust survivors who achieved a measure of objective from 1933-1945 notability.
Those listed here were, at the very least, residents of the parts of Europe occupied by the Axis powers during World War II, who survived until the end of the Holocaust (and the war). The majority of the survivors on this list lived through the war in Nazi concentration camps. Names by category[edit] Actors, actresses, and directors[edit] Living[edit] Deceased[edit] Arts, painters[edit] Living[edit] Deceased[edit] Humanities[edit] Living[edit] Deceased[edit] Literature, memoirs and publishing[edit]
DH Lawrence.