Word: levi
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Eight months ago, Primo Levi leaped into the stairwell outside the fourth- floor Turin apartment where his family had lived for three generations. There was little question that he killed himself intentionally. Renzo Levi said that his 67-year-old father had been depressed; friends spoke of Levi's dark moods. Yet despair was not what the outside world detected last year after Philip Roth climbed those stairs to interview Levi in his study. "He seemed to me," wrote the American novelist, "inwardly animated more in the manner of some little quicksilver woodland creature empowered by the forest's most...
...Nazi evils, this retired chemist at a Turin paint factory was the most discriminating. His books Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening and Moments of Reprieve read as if revenge (a dish best eaten cold, advises the proverb) were a matter of patient qualitative analysis. In The Periodic Table (1984), Levi even used the known basic elements as metaphors for human characteristics. His Jewish ancestors from the Piedmont, for example, resembled argon: "Inert in their inner spirits, inclined to disinterested speculation, witty discourses, elegant, sophisticated, and gratuitous discussion...
...kind of men, and women, who use Boraxo to get their hands clean after a hard day's work. Often they work at physically demanding jobs, and they only appreciate sports that are physically demanding, like arm wrestling. They are big-bellied, long-haul truck drivers in dark blue Levi's and cowboy boots; gym owners in muscle T shirts; car mechanics in soiled khaki uniforms; skinny blond boys who work as bag boys at Publix; and occasionally they are pretty, olive-skinned women, like Teresa Taglione, with dangling gold earrings, blow-dried hair and lots of eyeliner. Teresa...
These, in turn, are represented by the requisite Shepard blatant symbolism: a giant mobile of model warplanes, an ominous yellow-green moon on the backdrop, rifles, a deer carcass, an American flag, and lots of people wearing plaid flannel shirts, Levi's button-fly jeans, and shitkickers...
Currently Atlas is researching a piece on the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago for the New York Times Magazine and has just completed a story about Italian author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi...