Primo Levi

At the age of twenty-five, Primo Levi was sent to Hell. Levi, an Italian chemist and resistance writer in Turin, was one of many swept up in the Holocaust and sent to Auschwitz. Of the 650 people transported to the camp in his group, only 15 men and 9 women survived. After Soviet liberation of the camp in 1945, Levi wrote books in which he painted a vivid picture of the horrors of his experience at Auschwitz. He also spent the rest of his life struggling with the fact that he was not among those who were killed.

In Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, Frederic D. Homer looks at Primo Levi's life but, more important, shows him to be a significant political philosopher. In the course of his writings, Levi asked and answered his most haunting question: can someone be brutalized by a terrifying experience and, upon return to "ordinary life", recover from the physical and moral destruction he has suffered? Levi developed his question into a philosophy positing that man is no match for life, though he can become better prepared to contend with the tragedies in life.

According to Levi, the horrors of the world occur because of the strength of human tendencies, which make relationships between human beings exceedingly fragile. He believed that we are ill-constituted beings who have tendencies toward violence and domination, dividing ourselves into Us and Them, with very shallow loyalties. Our only refuge is in education and responsibility, which may counter these tendencies. He called this philosophy "optimistic pessimism".

As Homer demonstrates, Levi took his past experiences into account to determine that goodwill and democratic institutions do not come easily to people. To achievethem we must counter some of our most stubborn tendencies. Liberal society is to be earned through discipline and responsibility toward our weaknesses. Levi's answer is "civilized liberalism".

Homer also explores the impac

In this book, Ruf tries to understand how the concepts of "voice" and "genre" function in texts, especially religious texts. To this end, he joins literary theorists in the discussion about "narrative." Ruf rejects the idea of genre as a fixed historical form that serves as a template for readers and writers; instead, he suggests that we imagine different genres, whether narrative, lyric, or dramatic, as the expression of different voices. Each voice, he asserts, possesses different key qualities: embodiment, sociality, contextuality, and opacity in the dramatic voice; intimacy, limitation, urgency in lyric; and a "magisterial" quality of comprehensiveness and cohesiveness in narrative. These voices are models for our selves, composing an unruly and unstable multiplicity of selves. Ruf applies his theory of "voice" and "genre" to five texts: Dineson's Out of Africa, Donne's Holy Sonnets, Primo Levi's The Periodic Table, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Through these literary works, he discerns the detailed ways in which a text constructs a voice and, in the process, a self. More importantly, Ruf demonstrates that this process is a religious one, fulfilling the function that religions traditionally assume: that of defining the self and its world.

This resource guide will help readers locate over 800 first-person accounts, fiction, poetry, art interpretations, and music by Holocaust victims and survivors, as well as videos relating the testimony and experiences of Holocaust survivors. In addition to the few well-known writers, artists, and musicians whose work so eloquently captures their experience during the Holocaust, this guide will introduce the reader to the lives and work of more than 250 lesser known or unrecognized writers, artists, and musicians from many countries who documented their experience of persecution at the hands of the Nazis. This guide will help students gain firsthand knowledge of what it was like to experience the Holocaust and how ordinary people coped and created art and meaning from the ashes of their lives.