Are you looking for a book to live with more awareness Memorial Day? Among the works of Primo Levi there is a hidden jewel entitled “The periodic system“.
With “The periodic table”, the Turin author creates a one-of-a-kind book. A collection of stories that brings together single experience and universal experience, finding as an intermediary the science that, metaphorically and concretely, saved him from the extermination he survived: chemistry.
“The periodic system”, the synopsis
Nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, gold, arsenic…
There are twenty-one chemical elements that give the title to the stories in this book, and twenty-one chapters of an autobiography which through affinities and combinations runs along the thread of a personal and collective history, sinking its roots in the dark quality of matter, telling the stories of a profession “which is a special case, a more strenuous version of the profession of living”.
This is the gigantic tiny game that links observation, memory, writing: the story of an education that matured in the years of fascism, then in the dramatic events of the war emerges: of those who, starting from the concreteness of work, learn to understand things and men, to take a stand, to compete with irony and self-irony.
And Nature metaphor of existence, in which, as the story unfolds, oddities, failures and unpredictable successes emerge.
A different way to learn about the Shoah
We are used to reading the terrible events of the Shoah through horrifying stories of exterminated families, of lives torn from their roots, of men, women and children crushed by ravenous and unmotivated violence.
Reading works that talk about the Shaoah and that teach us the value of Remembrance Day is important to ensure that nothing that has already happened continues to happen. The reading experience is strong, painful, traumatic. It puts us face to face with uncomfortable truths that lead us to reflect on current events, and which hurt us deeply.
However, there are books that, while telling the story of the Shoah, leave glimmers of hope. “The periodic system” is one of them.
Not only because Primo Levi, author of the work, is saved in the end, but also because the book is built with an original structure, different from the usual, which talks about evil and condemns it forcefully, but which at the same time does not forget to talk about the positive things life has to offer.
Primo Levi was a chemist. Thanks to his profession, in fact, he came out of the German extermination camps alive. And it is precisely from chemistry that “The Periodic System” takes its inspiration, a collection of stories in which each title is dedicated to an element of the periodic table.
Primo Levi’s private story, between childhood, adolescence and adulthood, proceeds by intertwining with History with a capital “S”, so that by reading the work we truly meet its author. We seem to be able to touch him, to understand his thoughts, his fears, his dreams.
In short, the most touching feature of “The Periodic Table” lies in its being a work which, while telling a tragedy of inhumanity, is imbued with the humanity of its author and of all the victims of the Holocaust.
Primo Levi
Primo Levi born to Torino on July 31, 1919, from a family of origins Sephardic Jews. His father, an electrical engineer, works far from home but, despite being practically absent in his son’s life, instills in him a passion for science and literature. He spent a peaceful childhood, except for the health problems that arose frequently.
He enrolled in high school and then at university, completing his studies in chemistry and graduating in 1941.
At this point, History forcefully enters the existence of Primo Levi, a young man with his whole life ahead of him. Like many other innocent people, he too is deported to one of the concentration camps designed by Hitler.
First he was sent to Fossoli, one of the two camps in Italy. Then, he is transferred to Buna-Monowitz-Auschwitzwhere he remained until February 26, 1945, the day on which the surviving prisoners from the camp were liberated.
What allows the author of “The Periodic System” to survive the suffering – physical and moral – which he witnesses every day, is precisely the Chemistry degree. The young man, in fact, is used as a “specialist” in a rubber factory.
At the end of this terrible experience, the man returns to Italy after an exhausting journey – told in the book “Truce” – and feels the urgency of having to communicate to everyone what he has seen and felt during the years of detention.
Thus, from the pen of Primo Levi came “If this is a man”, a masterpiece of world literature that has been translated into many languages and has moved everyone who has read it.
Levi continued to write and write, recounting his experiences but making them universal. “Truce”, “The periodic system”, “The drowned and the saved”, “Ad uncertain time” are just some of the works he wrote, always successfully exploring different literary genres but never managing to completely overcome the terrible suffering he experienced in Auschwitz.
He died on April 11, 1987, in the atrium of the building where he had always lived.
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2024-01-25 05:30:26
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