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If This Is a Man and The Truce by Primo Levi
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If This Is a Man and The Truce (original 1947; edition 1991)

by Primo Levi

MembersReviewsPopularityAverage ratingMentions
2,292326,739 (4.47)157
With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a "magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known" - PHILIP ROTH… (more)
Member:bredasdorp
Title:If This Is a Man and The Truce
Authors:Primo Levi
Info:Abacus (1991), Paperback, 400 pages
Collections:Your library
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Work Information

If This Is a Man / The Truce by Primo Levi (1947)

  1. 20
    One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (hazzabamboo)
  2. 00
    If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi (Booksloth)
  3. 00
    Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (sombrio)
  4. 00
    Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist by Myriam Anissimov (Polaris-)
  5. 00
    Over kampliteratuur by Jacq Vogelaar (gust)
  6. 00
    Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (WendyRobyn)
    WendyRobyn: Both personal accounts by Holocaust survivors. I feel the tone is similar. Frankl's book goes on to explore psychological implications of his experiences.
  7. 00
    The Complete Works of Primo Levi by Primo Levi (jigarpatel)
    jigarpatel: Ann Goldstein's translation of "The Truce" in The Complete Works is arguably more readable. Of course, in addition, you will have access to all of Levi's writings in this volume.
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» See also 157 mentions

English (27)  Italian (4)  All languages (31)
Showing 1-5 of 27 (next | show all)
The second or third or fourth time I have read it. One of the most important works of the 20th century. Still stunned by how people keep on going, in the face of a bottomless abyss. Exhilarating, inspirational, full of an unfathomable spirit. ( )
  fmclellan | Jan 23, 2024 |
It's difficult to say anything about these two books, the first shorter than the second, which were published together being the story of the author's experience in one of the workcamps attached to Auschwitz and the subsequent liberation and tale of how he eventually got back to his home in Italy. Despite the grim subject matter, they contain passages of lyricism, philosophy and the endurance of the human spirit against a regime of the utmost brutality which aimed not only to murder millions, but to pulverise their individuality in the process. The second volume also makes it clear how difficult it was to return home in a situation of total chaos just before the Cold War started, when there was a constant struggle just to find food. The author was more fortunate in most in having living family to go home to when so many had lost theirs (and I know from other books and from TV documentaries, returned to find their homes stolen by people who would not give them up, and even to those who would murder them for being Jews). However, he had no guarantee that he would ever reach them.

In the afterword it was sad to hear that he apparently had committed suicide many years later, but I've read online that this is controversial - an article from the Boston Review (https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/diego-gambetta-primo-levi-last-moments/) makes it clear that he could just as easily have had a dizzy spell following a recent operation which resulted in him falling over the low balcony on the staircase in his apartment building. A sad ending in any case for a man who had overcome so much and left a lasting legacy in the shape of this amazing memoir, for which I can only give 5 stars. ( )
  kitsune_reader | Nov 23, 2023 |
This book was brutal, brutal.... But one of the most thought and emotion provoking books I’ve read, a masterpiece.

Remember Hurbinek... ( )
  Alfador | Jan 7, 2023 |
Would give it six, seven or eight stars it poss. The translation is superb, I just wish I could read the original Italian. I cried. I laughed. Had to put it down from time to time to let the material sink in and get absorbed. Should be on Eng Lit reading lists, even though a translation. ( )
  NaggedMan | Nov 9, 2022 |
Wstawać.

Why did the last page of Truce shatter me? Years after Levi died, many decades after he survived Auschwitz, I read it and still felt the enormous haunt of what the Nazis did. After what seemed like an entire book that rejected the idea that the Holocaust represented something inherently wicked in human nature -- hundreds of pages celebrating the triumph over Auschwitz, the escape, community and chutzpah and character over the gray decimation of persons -- Levi writes in the last pages of a "truce". A truce -- it is unclear really what it is a truce of -- seemingly between the survivors of the Holocaust and the perpetrators of it, or perhaps the memory of their actions. Quite the reversal.

Everything we do as humans is tarnished by the Nazis; we live in a dream that is corrupt in its core, that is drained from its color when you look at it close enough. Esther Perel says that the "erotic is the antidote to death", and perhaps Levi says here that eroticism has been ruined, wasted, invalidated. That there is no redemption. ( )
  Gadi_Cohen | Sep 22, 2021 |
Showing 1-5 of 27 (next | show all)
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Author nameRoleType of authorWork?Status
Primo Leviprimary authorall editionscalculated
Bailey, PaulIntroductionsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Bench, CarolineCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Chagall, MarcCover artistsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
Woolf, StuartTranslatorsecondary authorsome editionsconfirmed
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Epigraph
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find, returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.

Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,

Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
Dedication
First words
I was captured by the Fascist Militia on 13 December 1943. (If This Is a Man)
In the first days of January 1945, hard pressed by the Red Army, the Germans hastily evacuated the Silesian mining region. (The Truce)
The danger, as time goes by, is that we will tire of hearing about the Holocaust, grow not only weary but disbelieving, and that out of fatigue and ignorance more than cynicism, we will belittle and by stages finally deny - actively or by default - the horror of the extermination camps and the witness, by then so many fading memories, of those who experienced them. (Introduction)
It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German Government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labour, to lengthen the average lifespan of the prisoners destined for elimination; it conceded noticeable improvements in the camp routine and temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals. (Preface)
Someone a long time ago wrote that books too, like human beings, have their destiny: unpredictable, different from what is desired and expected. (Postscript)
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Disambiguation notice
Includes two works: If This Is a Man (US: Survival in Auschwitz) and The Truce (US: The Reawakening).
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Wikipedia in English (2)

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan, this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contempible. What has survived in Levi's writing isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was himself a "magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I've ever known" - PHILIP ROTH

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Book description
Testimonianza sconvolgente sull'inferno dei Lager, libro della dignità e dell'abiezione dell'uomo di fronte allo sterminio di massa, "Se questo è un uomo" è un capolavoro letterario di una misura, di una compostezza già classiche. Levi, ne "La tregua", ha voluto raccontare anche il lungo viaggio di ritorno attraverso l'Europa dai campi di sterminio: una narrazione che contempera il senso di una libertà ritrovata con i segni lasciati dagli orrori sofferti.
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