Scholars of Primo Levi, and particularly his biographers, have long struggled to discover precise personal information in his oeuvre. As many critics have noted, even his testimonial works engage more with biography, in their frequent descriptions of the people Levi encountered in Auschwitz, than with the autobiography of the writer himself. Nancy Harrowitz’s new book has the merit of placing the figure of Primo Levi in the foreground of its inquiry by presenting readers with a thorough study of his manifold cultural identities. Refusing narrow categorisations of ‘Levi the writer’, ‘the scientist’, or ‘the assimilated Jew’, Harrowitz offers an all-encompassing account of Levi’s multifaceted ‘set of identities’ (p. 4). She does so by following a path that has been advocated by many but followed by few in the last 20 years: the close interpretation of a wide range of Levi’s literary texts – including, but not limited to, his Holocaust testimony.

The aim of Harrowitz’s book, in her own words, is to contribute to an ‘understanding of the relationship of [Levi’s] complicated cultural identities to his textual production and to the literariness of his work’ (p. 4). In doing so, the concentration camp experience and its recounting in classics from If This Is a Man to The Drowned and the Saved remain central – indeed, a prison guard tower looms on the front cover of the monograph, significantly titled Primo Levi and the Identity of a Survivor. However, Harrowitz aptly juxtaposes such sources with other pieces from Levi’s prolific writing career, drawing from a constellation of texts, including poems and short stories.

The book partially reproduces notable essays from Harrowitz’s long engagement with Levi and his work, along with a methodological introduction, new research, and a somewhat open conclusion in that it both summarises the study and suggests further lines of inquiry). Its four main chapters are devoted to questions of Jewishness, authoriality, autobiography, and shame in Levi. In chapter 2, Harrowitz rejects the binary opposition between Levi’s Italianness and his Jewishness, criticising the notion of ‘assimilated Jew’ (terms like integration or acculturation, she maintains, would be more accurate than assimilation) and describing the various layers in the formation of Levi’s Jewish identity as something specific to ‘a post-Holocaust crisis of identity’ of Italian Jews (p. 15). Chapter 3 deals with Levi’s ‘writerly identity’, addressing the fundamental issue of truth claims in the literary rendering of his Holocaust writings (‘His identity as a survivor centres on the mandate of telling the story’, but ‘his authorial identity is concerned with something else: the task of telling the best story possible, narrating as an end in itself’, p. 66). Far from limiting his power as witness, his use of literary strategies strengthens Levi’s testimony, according to Harrowitz, for metaphors succeed better than mimetic language in enhancing the profound vividness of the representation. In chapter 4, the guiding question concerns the possible coexistence of autobiography and testimony in a single text, in response to which Harrowitz offers a peculiar ‘theory of autobiography’: for Levi, she maintains, autobiography ‘can never be direct, it must pass through a series of filters and displacements. Its claim to authority comes from its very displacement’ (p. 100). Finally, chapter 5 is dedicated to ‘Levi’s own typology of shame’ (p. 112), investigated through an analysis of two key figures in his works: the Muselmänner (the most despairing of concentration camp prisoners), and the Medusa. Revisiting seminal studies on these figures, including Giorgio Agamben’s, Harrowitz shows Levi’s twofold approach to these figural representations of shame, which embody at once the need for testimony and the need for silence.

In the ever-growing field of Levi scholarship (which can now rely on the new Italian edition of the Opere complete, published by Einaudi in 2016), every new work must stand the test of a primary question: what does it bring to the debate? Thanks to a clear mastery of Levi’s corpus and thought-provoking literary analyses, Harrowitz’s book sheds light on Levi’s complicated cultural identities by drawing compelling connections between stylistic and philosophical elements of his work, especially when discussing key issues of reliability and shame. She also presents some relevant lessons for Levi scholarship at large. Almost two decades after the seminal works of Marco Belpoliti and Robert Gordon, the invitation to consider Levi’s complexity remains crucial, as does the need to ‘look beyond Levi’s own statements’ (p. 5) by inserting even close textual interpretations in larger cultural discourses and engaging with his work through the prism of multiple disciplines. Moreover, Harrowitz’s book confirms the significance of the diachronic dimension in the study of a body of works spanning more than 40 years: the Levi of the 1947 If This Is a Man is appreciably different from the Levi of the final essays of 1986, though this is all too often overlooked.

Few Italian writers have attracted the degree of attention that Primo Levi enjoys in North America today. With the publication of the full English translation of his Complete Works in 2015 and a dedicated Centro Primo Levi in New York City, it is an excellent moment to approach or return to Levi’s multiform corpus of writings. To first-time readers no less than those more acquainted with Levi’s oeuvre – especially in the anglophone world – Primo Levi and the Identity of a Survivor will be a useful compass, offering a sound critical introduction and stimulation for further investigations.