If This Is a Man

With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a 20th-century Titan, this slightly built, dutiful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human events and with the most contemptible. What has survived in Levi’s writing isn’t just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in ‘The Periodic Table’ and ‘The Wrench’, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. Philip Roth called him a ‘magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I’ve ever known.’