Word: levying
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...insular world of these fathers ended with World War II. In 1943 Levi joined a band of partisans to fight Italy's Fascists and the Germans. He was captured and sent to Auschwitz, where his skills as a chemist kept him alive. He worked as a slave at a privately owned I.G. Farben laboratory, which was part of the death-camp complex...
That free enterprise can be free of all restraint is only one of the facts of life thrown out for consideration in The Drowned and the Saved. Levi's last writings about the unspeakable quietly fill in the blanks of a subject that is in danger of becoming an abstraction. "For the young people of the 1950s and 1960s," he observes, "these were events connected with their fathers: they were spoken about in the family; memories of them still preserved the freshness of things seen. For the young people of the 1980s, they are matters associated with their grandfathers: distant...
...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...