A New Text by Primo Levi

By Staff
Published on November 5, 2007

In a recent post on Commentary magazine’s arts blog, the Horizon, Benjamin Ivry reports that a scholar at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Israel, has uncovered a new text by the Italian writer Primo Levi.

Levi, a holocaust survivor and chemist who died in 1987, is best known for his memoir, Survival in Auschwitz. Ivry reports that this new essay, which was discovered in the archives at Yad Vashem and first reported on by the Israeli daily Haaretz, is a deposition solicited in 1960 for the prosecution of the German SS officer Adolf Eichmann.

The text, however, was never brought forth during the trial and had since gone unnoticed. The 850-word statement has yet to be translated, but the Italian magazine, L’Espresso has published it in the original.

Eric Kelsey

UTNE
UTNE
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