If This Is a Man/the Truce

Name: If This Is a Man/the Truce
Rating: 4.454545454545454 (33 reviews)
Author: Primo Levi
ISBN: 9780349144009

by Primo Levi, Paul Bailey

4.5

(33 ratings)

392 pages1947Little, Brown Book Group LimitedISBN 9780349144009

ClassicsWarHistoryTranslationBiographyHolocaust Jewish (1939-1945)Holocaust survivors

About this book

From a major contender for the Nobel Prize, this volume of Survival in Auschwitz, the Reawakening and Moments of Reprieve, contain some of the most unforgettable chronicles of our times, tells of Primo Levi's ten months in the hell of a Nazi death camp and the confused, frightening months after liberation. Without self-pity, but with passion, intensity and even humor, Levi recounts being thrust in 1944, at the age of 25, from ordinary life into a world of systematic cruelty, where survival depended on unspoken, illogical rules, where pain and death were a daily presence. Equally fascinating are all his portraits of the unusual companions, prisoners and guards, who fought to survive--and to hold on to the memory of what it felt like to be human.

Publication Details

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group Limited
Published: 1947
Pages: 392
ISBN: 9780349144009
Language: en

About Primo Levi

Primo Michele Levi (Turin, 31 July 1919- 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist, writer, and Holocaust survivor. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. He graduated in Chemistry from the University of Turin in 1941 and two years later joined the anti-fascist resistance. He was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where he worked as a slave in an industrial plant. After the camp was liberated by the Red Army in 1945 and after an odyssey through several Eastern European countries, he returned to Turin and published his first account of the extermination camps, *Se questo è un uomo* (*If This Is a Man* / US: *The Reawakening*). His later biographical writings *La tregua* (*The Truce*, 1963) and *I sommersi e i salvati* (*The Drowned and the Saved*, 1986) are reflections on the experience of horror. His other works include *Il sistema periodico* (*The Periodic Table*), *Se non ora, quando?* (*If Not Now, When?*), *Storie naturali* (as Damiano Malabaila), *La chiave a stella* (*The Wrench*, 1978), *Lilit e altri racconti* (1978), *La ricerca delle radici* (*The Search for Roots*, 1981), and *L' ultimo Natale di guerra* (1984).