Primo Levi (1919-87) was an industrial chemist, a writer and an Auschwitz survivor. His first book, "If This Is a Man", which came out in the United States as "Survival in Auschwitz", and his last, "The Drowned and the Saved", are among the best books of witness. Aside from the year in the camps-his first experience of foreign travel―another adventurous year returning to Italy by way of Russia (described in his book "The Truce") and a year he was forced by Italy's fascist government to find work in Milan, he spent his entire life in his birthplace, Turin; his study was the room he was bom in. He had one employer for 30 years, one wife, two children. It is-always excepting Auschwitz-one of the calmest, least rackety lives of a 20th-century writer. It gave the appearance of being completely, almost bizarrely, well-adjusted: Levi visited post-war German factories for his work, took courses at the Turin Goethe Institute and translated Franz Kafka and Gottfried Benn. And then, on a Saturday morning, his wife out of the house shopping, his infirm mother with her nurse, the (apparently harmless) post just delivered, he threw himself over the third floor banister into the stairwell and was instantly dead.
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