My Encounter with Primo Levi

I really enjoyed researching Primo Levi and gathering information about his life to get a better understanding of the man through his literature. I feel as if I have formed a bond with him just through researching his life, his experiences and reading his poems and literature.

For my life personally I think it has been really important for me to observe and study someone who has survived a horrific event and come out okay on the other side of it. Some people may debate whether Primo Levi really was okay after the concentration camps. I do not doubt that he was a completely transformed man from when he entered the camps, but it was important for me to know that he SURVIVED. It was also important for me to learn that instead of blocking out what he has gone through, however painful it was, he brought his experiences to the surface and shared them with people like me. As humans, it is a natural thing to want to bottle up our emotions and experiences and not share thing that have caused us pain or a horrific event. I think Primo Levi serves as the ultimate example of revisiting a dark past to shed life on more important matters, like never forgetting those who suffered and died in the camps or moving on with your life after coming out on the other side of a trauma.
Primo Levi's life not only applied to me personally, but the world as a whole on a larger scale. I have already tried to express how important it is not to EVER forget those who suffered and died in the concentration camps, but I cannot reiterate it enough. I think history is one of the most powerful tools for a better future. Yes, this sounds clique but I think it hold truth.

I think Primo Levi's life, message and literature will always be relevant to the world. Even though we continue to move further and further in history from the Holocaust, it is important never to forget.

Engages Readers From a Standpoint of....

I think that since Primo Levi's writing style in itself engages and attracts readers that may normally enjoy reading poetry or books. Since he writes in a style that is like an evaluation of a experiment or theory, he attracts a very wide variety of readers. He may attract other scientists or mathematicians that think in a very logical and dynamically.

Another device Primo Levi employs throughout his writing to engage readers is by commanding his readers to listen to what he has to say, and never forget it. He wants the world to understand and acknowledge the horrors he and millions of other Jews went through. After the horrors and sufferings are acknowledged, he wants his readers not to forget those who were killed and to never let anything like the holocaust ever happen again. No people group should have to suffer and be killed for their ethnicity or religious views. Primo Levi's writing would call out the audience in saying that it is their, and population in general, responsibility to ensure that a horrific event, such as the holocaust, never happen again. He makes a case for this through the moral obligation that the human race has to each other.

Reveille

Reveille

In the brutal nights we used to dream
Dense violent dreams,
Dreamed with soul and body:
To return; to eat; to tell the story.
Until the dawn command
Sounded brief, low
'Wstawac'
And the heart cracked in the breast.

Now we have found our homes again,
Our bellies are full,
We're through telling the story.
It's time. Soon we'll hear again
The strange command:
'Wstawac'

-Primo Levi

The Survivor

The Survivor

Once more he sees his companions' faces
Livid in the first faint light,
Gray with cement dust,
Nebulous in the mist,
Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep.
At night, under the heavy burden
Of their dreams, their jaws move,
Chewing a non-existant turnip.
'Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people,
Go away. I haven't dispossessed anyone,
Haven't usurped anyone's bread.
No one died in my place. No one.
Go back into your mist.
It's not my fault if I live and breathe,
Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.

-Primo Levi

To My Friends

To My Friends

Dear friends, and here I say friends
the broad sense of the word:
Wife, sister, associates, relatives,
Schoolmates of both sexes,
People seen only once
Or frequented all my life;
Provided that between us, for at least a moment,
A line has been stretched,
A well-defined bond.
I speak for you, companions of a crowded
Road, not without its difficulties,
And for you too, who have lost
Soul, courage, the desire to live;
Or no one, or someone, or perhaps only one person, or you
Who are reading me: remember the time
Before the wax hardened,
When everyone was like a seal.
Each of us bears the imprint
Of a friend met along the way;
In each the trace of each.
For good or evil
In wisdom or in folly
Everyone stamped by everyone.
Now that the time crowds in
And the undertakings are finished,
To all of you the humble wish
That autumn will be long and mild.

-Primo levi

Shema

Shema

You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:

Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.

-Primo Levi

Formal Elements of Poetry (Writings)

As far as the formal elements of Primo Levi's writing and poetry are concerned there are many different aspects to cover.
First off we should talk about the main bulk of his writing which consisted of books and short stories. In these books and short stories Primo Levi had a very scientific approach to writing. He would examined a situation, take in all of the factors of the situation or experience, and then evaluate it and come to a conclusion. Primo Levi defiantly approached his writing as if approaching a chemistry experiment.

Levi even has a book named, "The Period Table". In this book, he does through even element in the Periodic Table and relates it to an experience, place, or person in his life. This book exemplifies the fact that Primo Levi went through his everyday life and experiences in a scientific manner or thinking. Therefore, his writing follows the same pattern.

The poems I studied by Primo Levi are mainly written in free verse and without a rhyme scheme. They do use a strong sense of language with harsh words that help to convey a strong sense of imagery. The imagery portrayed throughout his poems are mostly of suffering, hunger, pain and loneliness. However, Primo Levi does this is a way so that his readers will not forget what they have read, or what the prisoners at the concentration camps went though. Primo Levi's poems perfectly accomplish the task they were set out to do, make the readers never forget.

Fabric of Thoughts: Auchwitz

What consumed much of Primo Levi's thought after he was released from the Nazi concentration camps was the experiences he had and the time he spent in Monowitz and Auschwitz.

“I am constantly amazed by man's inhumanity to man."”

The people closest to him said that he was never the same man he was before he went into the concentration camps. He was forever scarred from the experiences he has in Monowitz and Auschwitz and never forgave himself for being one of the few that survived.
One of the main points of Primo Levi's writings was not to make people pity him for what he went through, but he wanted people all over the world and for many centuries to come to realize what the Jewish people went through and never to forget the people who died in the camps.

He tells his readers, "Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent."
"The aims of life are the best defense against death."

Fabric of Thoughts: Philosophy/ Political Ideas

From an early age, even before WW II, Primo Levi was very interested in Philosophy. He was attracted to it because he has a very logical and dynamic approach to life in general, like most scientists do. The most common theme I saw throughout Primo Levi's writing were how he related to those idea of Descartes. He especially like to study and think about what the Cartesian theory had to offer. A play on philosophy that I noticed that Primo Levi uses is in the title of his book If This Is a Man. This is obviously a play on the philosophical question what is a man? Protagoras would answer that "man is the measure of all things", but in his book, Primo Levi works through his thoughts about experiences of his sufferings in the Nazi concentration camps and comes up with his own conclusion on what is a man.

As far as politics are concerned, we know that Primo Levi was most defiantly not a fascists. He even apart of the anti-fascists movement, before his capture and sentence to the death camps. We know that Primo Levi was not a coward. He took a stand and put into action what he believed, instead of just trying to lay low and escape imprisonment. Primo Levi believed that,
“In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you're not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.”

Of course, he does not think that the Jewish people are "detestable", however with the thinking that caused WW II, the Jews were "detestable" and "an inferior race". Like states earlier, Levi does not personally believe this, but he is giving a defense for the Jews to people who believe that Jews are, "an inferior race". Another powerful quote that I found of Primo Levi's thoughts was that, "Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions."

Fabric of Thoughts: Chemistry

One of the things that helped to make up the fabric of Primo Levi's thoughts was his education, career and love of Chemistry. From an early age Levi excelled in academics and he most strongly excelled in Chemistry. His education and knowledge is what helped him stay alive in the concentration camps as well. In a way, he owes his life to Chemistry. In the concentration camps, he was one of the Chemists, who helped produce rubber at Monowitz. He explains his own thoughts about his relationship with chemistry as: “For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: 'I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.'”.

To Primo Levi, chemistry was what he lives for and we can see this through him paralleling Mount Sinai and Moses to Chemistry and Himself. To Primo Levi, chemistry is his religion, it is the law that he lives by. He also says this, “The bond between a man and his profession is similar to that which ties him to his country; it is just as complex, often ambivalent, and in general it is understood completely only when it is broken: by exile or emigration in the case of one's country, by retirement in the case of a trade or profession.”

Primo Levi's readers and observers can see that Primo Levi defined himself as a CHEMIST, it was not just his profession or hobby, but it was everything to him.