Levi, Primo

Levi, Primo. The Periodic Table. New York Schocken Books, 1984. 

Levi, Primo.The periodic table translated by Raymond Rosenthal. Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York Schocken, 1984. 

Primo Levi, an Italian chemist and Auschwitz survivor, has pulled together additional examples in his inventive and amusing book The Periodic Table. Here are his thoughts about zinc ... 

Der italienische Chemiker Primo Levi (1919-1987) schrieb in seiner 1975 erschienenen Autobiographic Das periodische System" [2] ... 

Primo Levi Das periodische System, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Mun-chen, 1991, S. 68... 

False Witnesses Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi... 

A few words force themselves to our attention in regard to Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. 

Curiously, for several years now, Primo Levi has been posthumously elevated by the media to the rank of first importance among witnesses of the Auschwitz gas chambers. He is the author of Se questo e un uomon The first part of the book is the longest and the most important it comprises 180 pages... 

Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi are not the only ones to have thus enriched their recollections. 

Frederick A. Leuchter, An Engineering Report on the alleged execution gas chambers at Auschwitz, Birkenau and Majdanek, Poland, Samisdat Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 1988 Frederick A. Leuchter, The Leuchter Report, Focal Point Publications, London 1989 Frederick A. Leuchter, The Second Leuchter Report, Samisdat, Toronto 1989 Primo Levi, Si c est un homme, Julliard Press, pocket edition, Paris 1993 Lexikon Institut Bertelsmann (ed.), Ich sag dir alles, Bertelsmann, Gutersloh 1968 Heiner Lichtenstein, Im Namen des Volkes , Bund, Cologne 1984... 

Pierre Marais, En lisant de pres les ecrivains chantres de la Shoah - Primo Levi, Georges Wellers, Jean-Claude Pressac, La Vielle Taupe, Paris 1991 Pierre Marais, Les camions agaz en question, Polemiques, Paris 1994 Sonja Margolina, Das Ende derLugen, Siedler, Berlin 1992... 

Interestingly, the bottom-up approach to the construction of molecular level devices and machines was poetically anticipated by Primo Levi in his already-cited book The Monkey s Wrench [55] ... 

I greatly admire Primo Levi, and his suicide perplexes me. I suppose he was a typical survivor and felt guilty in surviving. The person who drew my attention to Primo Levi s book was Emilio Segre. The remark didn t upset me. 

Although you did not receive the Nobel Prize, and you could very well have, receiving this mention by Primo Levi is unique. Of course, your discovery of the preparation of Xe [PtF ], which you published in June 1962, makes you unambiguously the pioneer of the field. The paper is very brief, less than half a page long and cites only three references. You did not mention Linus Pauling s prediction of the possibility of noble gas compounds from the early 1930s. 

In Fig. 1.3, we presented a tmncated version of the Periodic Table in which elements have been colour-coded into nine families — respectively the alkali metals (often known as the alkali earth metals), the alkaline earth metals, the transition metals, the other metals, the metalloids, the nonmetals, the halogens, the noble gases, and finally, with just lanthanum as its sole example, the rare earths. Now in Fig. 1.4, we present an idiosyncratic view of the Periodic Table, highlighting a few characteristic facets of a selected number of elements, and in what follows, we have tried to illustrate some of these. Those elements that have been dealt with above, or will be dealt with specifically in later chapters, and will not be discussed in any detail here. The presentation follows their order by group and by row in the periodic table. An equally idiosyncratic view of the Periodic Table can be found in the wonderful and memorable book by Primo Levi (Levi, 1985). 

Science is human and human beings are a muddle. In his book The Periodic Table, Primo Levi referred to chemistry as a mess compounded of stenches, explosions, and small futile mysteries. There too he distinguished two conflicting philosophical conclusions. The one he called the praise of purity, which protects from evil like a coat of mail. The other he referred to as the praise of impurity, which gives rise to changes, in other words, to life. So, he continued, take the solution of copper sulfate which is in the shelf of reagents, add a drop of it to your sulfuric acid, and you ll... 

In these words, Primo Levi describes the central paradox of his life. Born in Turin,... 

Italy, in 1919, Primo Levi was trained as a chemist. In 1944, he was arrested as a member of the Italian Anti-Fascist resistance movement and deported to a concentration camp at Auschwitz, Poland. There, his knowledge of chemistry played a pivotal role in keeping his body as well as his spirit intact, as described in his memoirs. Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening. After the war, Levi continued to write until his death in Turin in April 1987. 

What two fields did Primo Levi combine in his life s work ... 

Understandably, writers of fiction want the poetic, not the mundane. That is to say, they have been led, like our culture as a whole, to expect to find the poetic in the so-called pure sciences, the sciences of how the world works in physics and biology. It has required a genuine insider, someone who knew chemistry intimately, to show that in fact there is plenty of poetry in chemistry too. That person was, of course, the Italian chemist and writer Primo Levi. 

Inevitably one must mention Primo Levi in the context of this chapter s topic. But I confess that I intend to say rather little about him, since I rather feel that to dwell on Levi would be to cheat on my aim here. He had a privileged perspective in that he was a chemist, whereas I want to look at how chemistry has impacted on writers who did not have that training, or indeed that specific focus in their oeuvre. But I do wish to point out that Levi s classic book The Periodic Table (published in Italian in 1975) grasps the essence of chemistry s allegories in a manner that is very much akin to the chemical philosophies of centuries earlier, where the transformations that are conducted in the chemical laboratory... 

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