A Secular Alternative: Primo Levi's Place in American Holocaust Discourse

This essay sketches Primo Levi's emergence from obscurity to near-universal acclaim in the United States, where he is now considered one of the most important witnesses of the Nazi genocide and a significant twentieth-century writer. As he emerged into the American public sphere, Levi came to occupy a particular discursive place as a representative bearer of Enlightenment values. Among intellectuals across the political spectrum his reputation for sobriety and secular reason stands against other, more dominant tendencies in American Holocaust culture, such as the sacralization of the genocide often associated with another survivor-writer, Elie Wiesel.