Reviewing the recently released English-language Complete Works of Primo Levi, Alvin Rosenfeld tackles the two major questions that remain about the Holocaust survivor, author, and chemist. Was his death in 1987 a suicide, as is the opinion of most biographers and the Italian authorities, or an accident? And to what extent should this assimilated and unbelieving Italian Jew, who famously declared “at Auschwitz I became a Jew,” be considered a Jewish writer? On the first question, Rosenfeld—basing himself not only on Levi’s correspondence and the accounts of his friends, but also on the literary evidence found in his final book, the haunted and guilt-ridden The Drowned and the Saved—sides with those who believe Levi’s death to have been self-inflicted. On the second, Rosenfeld writes:
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More about: Arts & Culture, Holocaust, Judaism, Literature, Primo Levi