To Be or Not: Considering Primo Levi’s Death

Organized by the Primo Levi Center in collaboration with the Center for Fiction: A lecture by Uri S. Cohen (University of Tel Aviv).

We will never know what exactly took place thirty years ago when Primo Levi fell to his death in the stairwell of his ancestral home. The moment is sealed, retaining its silent mystery, a deafening lacuna at the end of a life. Meaningless in terms of reality the nature of his death is of no real importance, while having enormous implications for interpretation. If this survivor willed his barely saved life away, matters not in Primo Levi’s world, but in the world into which Levi survived. Guided by the counter\factual of suicide, this talk will gauge the implications for the interpretation of Levi’s work, revealing a surprisingly rich and sustained contemplation of suicide and its complex place in the survivor’s world, that is or is not therein rejected.

This program is made possible through the generous support of the Cahnman Foundation

In ENGLISH.