More in ‘Primo Levi’

Like the majority of those who grow up in Muslim countries, Boualem Sansal didn’t think about the Holocaust much. It just wasn’t an issue in his native Algeria, and when it came up, it was presented more as a subject for debate than as a monumental historical event. “We’ve been brought up not to really ...

Sam Magavern, a writer and public interest lawyer, is the author of the recently released Primo Levi’s Universe: A Writer’s Journey, which was published with a foreword by Nextbook Press editorial director Jonathan Rosen. The two recently corresponded over email about Levi’s Jewishness, his work’s enduring relevance, and the lingering questions over whether or not the writer-chemist took his own life. Magavern will be discussing his book with Tablet contributing editor Adam Kirsch at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage tomorrow evening.

Writing in Hebrew in the United States was never a particularly sensible way to reach a large audience. In his Yankee Talmud, published in Hebrew in New York in 1907, the satirist Gershon Rosenzweig noted wryly that “He who writes a Hebrew book in America. . .is a madman.”The sense that American Hebrew writers had of themselves as a tiny minority even within the American Jewish minority might help to explain why they devoted so much energy to their marginalized and dispossessed compatriots, particularly Native Americans and African-Americans. Stephen Katz recovers this fascinating body of literature in Red, Black, and Jew: New Frontiers in Hebrew Literature (Texas, July).