US novelist Philip Roth on Wednesday paid tribute to Primo Levi, recalling a brief but intense friendship in the year before the great Holocaust witness's suicide 20 years ago this month.
"We wrote each other for months after I visited him in Turin a year before he died," the Pulitzer-prize winning novelist told Columbia University's Italian Academy.
"The three days I spent with him convinced me I had had the great, good fortune of finding an extraordinary new friend, a friend for life".
Roth, regarded by many as America's foremost living writer, said he had immediately felt he had made a new friend when he first met Levi in London in January 1986.
This impression was reinforced, he said, when Levi showed Roth around his native Turin in the spring of 1986.
"The Primo Levi I met gave every indication of being destined for a long, healthy and productive life," he said.
Roth, who called Levi "a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter I ever met," said nothing had given him an inkling that he might take his life.
At the commemoration of Levi here, Roth - two-time National Book Award winner and three-time PEN/Faulkner winner - received a new international prize from the organisers of premier Italian literary award the Grinzane-Cavour.
Grinzane-Cavour President Giuliano Soria recalled that Levi was the first winner of the prize in 1982 with the Periodic Table.
Roth's Grinzane-Cavour Master's Award "is also in recognition of those who made Levi's work known around the world," Soria said.
Levi, who took his life on April 11, 1987, was also commemorated at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York.
Corriere della Sera book critic Giorgio De Rienzo said:
"No one committed suicide in the death camps because suicide is a choice and at Auschwitz there was no choice.
"When he decided to end his life in that way Levi carried out the act of a free man, more like an ancient philosopher than a man destroyed by reality".
Turin, too, is celebrating Levi this month.
Turin's new Civic Library has been named after him and a plaque has been unveiled in front of his old chemistry faculty at Turin University.
There have also been book readings, the premiere of a Levi-inspired orchestral piece by top Spanish composer Luis de Pablo, broadcast live on RAI state radio, and a show at Turin's Resistance and Deportation Museum.
Einaudi has published two new books on Levi and RAI radio has run a series of programmes on his life and work called I Am A Centaur (the mythological half-horse, half-man he imagined himself as).
Levi is the most widely translated Italian writer in the world.
His Holocaust masterpieces, If This Is A Man and The Truce (US: The Reawakening), have been translated into most of the world's languages.
In 1997, If This Is A Man placed 30th in a British list of The Hundred Best Books Of The 20th Century.
A film version of The Truce, starring John Turturro, was a hit at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.
A few intellectuals in Italy and abroad insisted that Levi's scientific mind would have prevented him from committing suicide in good health at only 67.
They blame a drug-induced depression from medicines he was taking after surgery.
But his latest biographer, Carole Angier, revealed that he suffered recurrent bouts of depression throughout his life.
LIFE AND WORK.
Levi was born in Turin in 1919 into a largely assimilated Jewish family. "Religion didn't count for much in my family," he once said.
But in 1938 his Judaism became a liability when Mussolini's government enacted a series of anti-Semitic regulations that outlawed mixed marriages, expelled Jews from the universities, and barred them even from owning certain kinds of property.
Despite the racial laws, Levi managed to complete his degree in chemistry from the University of Turin in 1942.
But in 1943, when the Germans invaded northern Italy, seeking a job was not an option for him and Levi joined a ragtag band of partisans in the mountains.
Soon captured by Fascist militia, Levi found himself crossing the Brenner Pass in a cattle car, en route to a location whose name had no resonance yet: Auschwitz.
Out of the 650 Italian Jews in his shipment, Levi was one of the 20 who left the camps alive.
He attributed his survival to luck, to his skills as a chemist (which the Germans used in the synthetic-rubber factory attached to the camp), and to the care packages he received from an interned Italian bricklayer.
Levi returned to Turin, married, and resumed his career as a chemist. Yet he felt driven to record his wartime ordeal, and in his spare time composed If This Is A Man.
"I returned from the camp with an absolute, pathological narrative charge," he recalled.
But the memoir was rejected by several publishers, and when a small press brought it out in 1947, the book disappeared without a trace. Only in 1958, when it was reissued by Einaudi, did it receive the acclaim it deserved.
