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accessible to scholars across the boundaries ofdiscipline and language the editors hope to break down. $fc Roberta S. Kremer, ed. Memory andMastery. Primo Levi as Writer and Witness. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001. 249p. Ilona Klein Brigham Young University Primo Levi (1919-1987) is a well-known Italian contemporarywriterwhose works by now have been widely translated in almost all of the Western European languages with great editorial and critical success. Levi held a doctorate in chemistry from the University ofTurin (Summa cum Laude, 1941). Levi, a secularJew from Turin, was a concentration camp survivor who became, upon returning to Italy after his Auschwitz imprisonment at the age of24, a successful chemist, a paint factory manager, a poet, a science fiction writer, an essayist, and a prolificwitness to one of the most atrocious historical events of the 20th century. This volume edited by Roberta Kremer successfully emphasizes all these multi-faceted aspects ofLevi as a writer, without attempting to corner him into the sole role ofShoah (Holocaust) survivor. The authors ofthe essays collected inMemoryandMastery. Primo Levias Writer andWitnesscomprise thefinest contemporaryworld specialists on Primo Levi. The broad topics treated in the articles span from "Levi as a Writer, Levi as aWitness" (part I), to "Levi and Science" (part II), from "Levi's Poetry" (part III), to "Levi and Language" (part IV), and finally "Levi's Legacy" (part V). The volume ends with an ample bibliography of useful and important references. The late Gian Paolo Biasin, Yaffa Eliach, and Risa Sodi wrote the studies that form the first part. AU essays emphasize Levi's role as a humanist: Biasin brilliantly analyzes Levi's journey back home after the liberation, and compares it to a Homeric moment in which exile in the concentration camp and the great nostalgia for the return become integral milestone tassels ofhis humanistic profile. Eliach considers Levi's various temporal frames against his spatial parameters which spanned from Poland to Italy. Sodi examines with great exactitude a number of stylistic and linguistic important peculiarities ofLevi's works, to draw conclusions about Levi's use oflanguage and the readers' reception ofhis prose. The essays in the second part ofthe volume are written by Nancy Harrowitz and Mirna Cicioni—theyboth treat Levi's connection to science. Morespecifically, they both successfully demystify the purported gap between science and literature . Among other points, Harrowitz acutely highlights some commonalities be112 + ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * SPRING 2002 Reviews tween Shakespeare'sMacbeth and Levi's more pessimistic science fiction short stories . Cicioni looks at Levi's works and skillfully uncovers a Midrashic undertone. The notable third part ofthe book treats Levi's poetry. Nicholas Patruno is, in fact, one of a small handful of Levi scholars to analyze this seminal genre of his writings, and Patruno's article is broad and thoughtful. The two essays written by Brian Cliff, and by Patricia Sayre and Linnea Vacca (part IV) treat in precise detail the importance oflanguage in Primo Levi. Cliff's study analyses not only the violent use oflanguage in the camps, but, just as importantly, how violence was committed against the ordinary language ofcivilians once deported to the camps, how the civilian language was violated in the camps, and how a new semantic universe was born ofthe German lagers. This theme remains central also to the studyby Sayre andVaccawho carefully lookat pre- and post-Auschwitz idioms in Levi's autobiographical narratives. The last part ofthe volume is devoted to visual representations ofPrimo Levi in various artists. Here, Shephen Feinstein meticulously describes and assesses works by the contemporary artists Larry Rivers, Joyce Lyon, MindyWeisel, Pearl Hirschfield, Susan Erony, Ted Hirsch, and JackWolsky. Feinstein correctly concludes that Primo Levi's works have been seminal for the intellectual make up of these artists and for their visual renditions ofthe Shoah. The penultimate article in the book is by Franca Molino Signorini who treats in depth Levi's role as a witness, and as a repository of historical, collective, and individual memory. Lawrence Langer's excellent essay "Legacy in Grey" concludes the studies. Readers probablywill be familiarwith his article, as it has alreadyappeared as a chapter in Lawrence Langer's Preeemptingthe Holocaust (New Haven: Yale, 1998: 23-42). Langer states that Levi...

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