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Writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jew, did not come to the wide attention of the English-reading audience until the last years of his life. A survivor of the Holocaust and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Levi is considered to be one of the century's most compelling voices, and The Periodic Table is his most famous book. Springboarding from his training as a chemist, Levi uses the elements as metaphors to create a cycle of linked, somewhat autobiographical tales, including stories of the Piedmontese Jewish community he came from, and of his response to the Holocaust.
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The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
Collection of memoirs by Primo Levi, published in Italian as Il sistema periodico in 1975. Regarded as his masterwork, it is a cycle of 21 autobiographical stories, each named after and inspired by a chemical element. To Levi, a chemist as well as a writer, each element had an associative value--its properties symbolizing certain thoughts and triggering specific memories. In "Argon" he draws an analogy between the nonreactivity of this inert gas and the refusal of his Jewish ancestors to assimilate into the Gentile majority of their native Italian Piedmont. "Hydrogen" is an anecdote about his boyhood experiments with this explosive gas. "Vanadium" recounts his unexpected encounter with a former official of Auschwitz, where Levi was imprisoned during World War II. Attacking the fascist myth of racial purity in "Zinc," the author reveals his preference for the "boring metal" when it is in an active state of impurity.
