primo levi

In his memoir of his time in Auschwitz, Primo Levi describes Jewish prisoners bathing in freezing water without soap--not because they thought it would make them cleaner, but because it helped them hold on to their dignity. For poet and author Dwayne Betts, Levi's description of his fellow inmates' suffering, much like the novelist Ralph Ellison's portrayal of early twentieth-century black life in America, is much more than bearing witness to the darkest impulses of mankind. Rather, Betts tells EconTalk host Russ Roberts, both authors' writing turns experiences of inhumanity into lessons on what it means to be a human being.

Episode Topic: The Reawakening

One of the meanings contained in the title of the novel is the idea of suspension of moral judgment. This is not to say that The Truce is a novel of forgiveness: rather these questions of guilt, retribution, expiation and so on are put temporarily to one side to allow other ideas and feelings to flourish. The first task after an interruption to life, the novel suggests, is a form of accounting. Basic facts must be established and accounted for. The next task is re-enchantment: fitting these facts, without denying or trying to mitigate their brutality, into a world that is fit for living in.

The world after the War must be reinvented, from the ground up. Narration is the key to this process. Throughout the novel, Levi is interested in the way external material realities and experiences take on internal, symbolic forms: literal hunger and psychological hunger, bartering and empathic exchange, bodily and spiritual forms of death. The novel is filled with small, apparently insignificant or humorous narratives, which play out, in miniature, the work of restoration and rebuilding which is required of survivors.

Featured Speakers: 

• Barry McCrea, Professor of English, Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies, Concurrent Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Concurrent Professor of Irish Language and Literature, University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: go.nd.edu/5714b0. 

This podcast is a part of the Rome Book Club ThinkND Series titled “Primo Levi's ‘The Truce’”.

Thanks for listening! The ThinkND Podcast is brought to you by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame's online learning community. We connect you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on topics that matter to you — everything from faith and politics, to science, technology, and your career.

• Learn more about ThinkND and register for upcoming live events at think.nd.edu.
• Join our LinkedIn community for updates, episode clips, and more.

Episode Topic: The Journey

The Truce operates on several different levels. It is a richly detailed account of an actual journey of nine months, on trains, on foot, on horse drawn cart, across mountains, rivers, and plains, through Poland, the USSR, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Germany, and finally Italy; it gives realistic descriptions of the temporary communities that spring up in the various refugee camps and other provisional “homes” Levi lived in on the way. But it is also a symbolic odyssey of a wounded human spirit gradually bringing itself back to life and learning to love the world again. Levi does not shy away from the privation and violence which haunts the war-ravaged landscape, but he manages simultaneously to present it to us as a land of marvels and wondrous encounters with extraordinary beings and phenomena. The vivid portraits of the people he meets along the way – “the Greek”, one the few survivors amongst the Jews of Salonika, or Cesare, a canny merchant from the Roman ghetto – are historical testaments to a cultural world obliterated by the Holocaust, pragmatic allies in dire straits, and spiritual guides out of static desolation into the realm of joy and action.

Featured Speakers: 

• Barry McCrea, Professor of English, Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies, Concurrent Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Concurrent Professor of Irish Language and Literature, University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: go.nd.edu/4a8aa4. 

This podcast is a part of the Rome Book Club ThinkND Series titled “Primo Levi's ‘The Truce’”.

Thanks for listening! The ThinkND Podcast is brought to you by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame's online learning community. We connect you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on topics that matter to you — everything from faith and politics, to science, technology, and your career.

• Learn more about ThinkND and register for upcoming live events at think.nd.edu.
• Join our LinkedIn community for updates, episode clips, and more.

Episode Topic: The Thaw: The Many Meanings of 'Truce'

The Truce, written in 1962, takes up where If This is a Man left off, recounting Primo Levi’s epic journey on trains, on foot, and on horse-and-cart, as he makes his way across war-scarred Europe from liberated Auschwitz back to Turin. But it is also a psychological journey from disenchantment to re-enchantment, from imprisonment to freedom, from the Nazi “cult of emptiness” to a celebration of human difference and vitality. The “Truce” of the title has several meanings: the literal end of the war, the strange in-between world after the horror has ended but ordinary life has yet begun, and the temporary suspension of moral judgement required to move forward.

Featured Speakers: 

• Barry McCrea, Professor of English, Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies, Concurrent Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Concurrent Professor of Irish Language and Literature, University of Notre Dame

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: go.nd.edu/0c27bd.

This podcast is a part of the Rome Book Club ThinkND Series titled “Primo Levi's ‘The Truce’”.

Thanks for listening! The ThinkND Podcast is brought to you by ThinkND, the University of Notre Dame's online learning community. We connect you with videos, podcasts, articles, courses, and other resources to inspire minds and spark conversations on topics that matter to you — everything from faith and politics, to science, technology, and your career.

• Learn more about ThinkND and register for upcoming live events at think.nd.edu.
• Join our LinkedIn community for updates, episode clips, and more.

Since Interpreter of Maladies was published in 1999, Jhumpa Lahiri has written three works of fiction in English, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and the Booker shortlisted, The Lowland. She has also written a work of nonfiction, In Other Words, which was the first book she wrote in Italian, translated into English by Ann Goldstein. In addition Jhumpa edited The Penguin Book of Short Italian Stories, highlighting a thrilling selection of Italian writers, some of whom hadn’t been seen in English before. She has also translated various books from Italian including Domenico Starnone’s Trick. 

Jhumpa received the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies and numerous other awards for her writing including the PEN/Hemingway Award; the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award; and a National Humanities Medal, awarded by Barak Obama. She has been inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received Commander of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic. Whereabouts is Jhumpa’s new book, her first novel written in Italian and this time, she also translated it into English. There’s a grace and a gentle precision to her pared back style as she looks at every day moments in specific places, and the solitude, frustrations and intimacies of being human. 

Confira os destaques do caderno Na Quarentena desta quinta-feira (16/04/20)

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En esta sesión del formato Seminarios de filosofía, el filósofo, sociólogo, ensayista y escritor, José María González García, analiza la recuperación de la idea de fortuna en el siglo XX y su natural secularización. 

En esta sesión del formato Seminarios de filosofía, el filósofo Reyes Mate, responde a la pregunta ¿se puede pensar de espaldas a Auschwitz? Cita la relación entre la filosofía y el holocausto establecida por Theodor Adorno en su imperativo categórico: "Hay que orientar el pensamiento y la acción de modo de que Auschwitz no se repitiera".