The Need to Tell our Story: Primo Levi

Presented by Charles Leavitt

Primo Levi has been called “a major, universally recognized, icon in Holocaust literature” (Geerts), indeed “the witness-writer par excellence,” because “his narrative, poetry and essays about his time in Auschwitz are among the most widely read and most widely lauded of all writings on the Holocaust” (Gordon). Levi was this and more: witness and storyteller, scientist and writer, he was among the greatest authors and moral authorities of the twentieth century. In this seminar, we will examine Levi’s first and most famous work, If This is a Man (1947), a masterpiece and milestone in the Italian tradition, in which Levi recounts his internment in Auschwitz. With Levi, we will ask what it means to live, what it means to be human, in and after the Nazi death camps. With Levi, too, we will broaden our exploration to address vital questions of faith, identity, meaning, truth, responsibility, love, friendship, freedom, diversity, survival, science, and salvation as we consider selections from such fundamental works as The Truce (1963), The Periodic Table (1975), Moments of Reprieve (1978), and The Drowned and the Saved (1986). Primo Levi insisted that the “the story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal,” and he spent the last years of his life sounding that alarm to all who would listen. Traveling to schools throughout Italy, he answered countless questions put to him by middle school and high school students, helping them to think through the lessons of the Holocaust. We will follow Levi’s lead, reflecting together on the relevance of his testimony in the present day. As we do so, we will make use of materials from the Primo Levi Collection of Notre Dame’s Hesburgh Library, one of the world’s foremost collections dedicated to the study of Primo Levi.

About Charles Leavitt

Professor Leavitt is a scholar of modern and contemporary Italy. His first book, Italian Neorealism: A Cultural History (University of Toronto Press, 2020), was awarded the 2020 Book Prize for Visual Studies, Film and Media from the American Association of Italian Studies. 

A Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy, Professor Leavitt has received an Outstanding Contribution to Teaching Excellence Award from the University of Reading, UK, and a Kaneb Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award from the University of Notre Dame.

A Faculty Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and a Research Fellow of the University of Reading, UK, Professor Leavitt serves on the editorial boards of the journals Italian Studies and the Italianist.