Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter

Pri­mo Levi, who would have been 93 today, was an Ital­ian Jew­ish writer and chemist who pub­lished across a range of gen­res, includ­ing mem­oirs, short sto­ries, poems, and essays. He is is best known for his mem­oir If This Is a Man, his account of the year he spent in Auschwitz. To cel­e­brate his birth­day, we’ve com­piled JBC mate­r­i­al relat­ed to Levi’s life and work:

In 2010, JBC review­er Bob Gold­farb recapped the Inter­na­tion­al Writ­ers’ Fes­ti­val at Mishkenot Sha’anan­im, and, in a post about a pan­el on Holo­caust writ­ing, makes note of Pri­mo Lev­i’s influ­ence on the Span­ish nov­el­ist Adol­fo Gar­cia Ortega.

In 2009, we wrote about Project Aladdin, an ini­tia­tive to pub­lish key Holo­caust works in Far­si and Ara­bic. One of the first four titles pub­lished through the ini­tia­tive was If This Is a Man.


 

Orig­i­nal­ly from Lan­cast­er, Penn­syl­va­nia, Nao­mi is the CEO of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil. She grad­u­at­ed from Emory Uni­ver­si­ty with degrees in Eng­lish and Art His­to­ry and, in addi­tion, stud­ied at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don. Pri­or to her role as exec­u­tive direc­tor, Nao­mi served as the found­ing edi­tor of the JBC web­site and blog and man­ag­ing edi­tor of Jew­ish Book World. In addi­tion, she has over­seen JBC’s dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives, and also devel­oped the JBC’s Vis­it­ing Scribe series and Unpack­ing the Book: Jew­ish Writ­ers in Conversation.