Abstract
Primo Levi died on 11 April 1987 at 10:05 in Torino, in the house where he was born and lived nearly his entire life. Although there is no absolute proof that it was suicide, few scholars doubt that Levi indeed killed himself. We should therefore say that Primo Levi committed suicide on 11 April 1987 at 10:05 in Torino, in the house where he was born and lived his entire life—except for ‘that time’. Most Levi scholars have contemplated the link between Levi’s suicide and his time as a prisoner at Auschwitz. This chapter explores some of the ways in which they have sought to establish such a link (or a lack thereof).
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Notes
- 1.
As it is termed by Lyotard, in Heidegger and “the Jews” (1990).
- 2.
This sentence does not appear in the English edition of Zertal’s Death and the Nation (English title: Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood).
- 3.
Thus, for example, Thomson’s (2003) biography of Levi begins with his suicide, as does Lang’s Primo Levi: The Matter of a Life (2013). The decision to begin a book about Levi with his suicide is undeniably significant, even if the author’s intention is to object to the reduction of Levi to his suicide—a position clearly taken by Lang.
- 4.
Borowski was a non-Jewish Polish prisoner at Auschwitz, member of the Kanada Kommando, whose best-known story, ‘This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen’ (1976) was first published in 1946, soon after his liberation.
- 5.
A conference on Levi at the Israel Academy of Sciences opened with this superficial statement.
- 6.
A careful reading of Levi’s interviews offers numerous indications that Levi himself recognized this.
- 7.
What an odd use of the word ‘disease’, as if it were some sort of angina. In this context, it is worth recalling an ironic remark made by Levi in 1961: ‘And for critical diseases, and also for those that are not critical but incurable—such as hunger oedema, which is universal—there is a single but radical medicine, and everyone knows it. This is “the chimney”, as it is simply called: it is the oven at Birkenau’ (Levi 2018, 98).
References
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Ataria, Y. (2021). Levi’s Suicide as a Scandal. In: Primo Levi and Ka-Tzetnik. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76743-3_7
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