J’étais un homme
“For a long time I have given up trying to understand.”
First French edition of one of the major texts of concentration camp literature, of which no deluxe copies were printed.
A very fine copy in publisher's wrappers, as issued.
12mo of 187 pp., (2) ff.; copy preserved in original wrappers.
191 x 141 mm.
Levi, Primo. If This Is a Man.
Paris, Buchet, Chastel, 1961.
First French edition of one of the major texts of Holocaust literature, for which there was no deluxe paper printing.
Of remarkable rarity, this French translation of Primo Levi's first book went as unnoticed as the original Italian edition published in 1947. It would not be until the author's suicide in 1987 that a second French edition was published and this fundamental testimony on the Shoah became the emblematic work of concentrationary literature that it is today.
“Like its author, it too is a survivor, having gone through many trials before, decades later, becoming a major text of Holocaust literature, distributed in three and a half million copies in Italy, published in about sixty countries and forty languages.” (P. Broussard).
“We are readily convinced we have read a great deal about the Holocaust; we are certain we know at least as much. And let’s admit, with sincerity equal to our sense of shame, that sometimes, faced with the accumulation, we want to cry for mercy. The truth is that we have not yet heard Levi analyze the complex nature of the state of misfortune. Few have done it as well as Levi, who seems to hold us by the sleeve on the edge of the threatening abyss of oblivion: if literature is not written to bring the dead back to the living, it is sheer futility.” (Angelo Rinaldi).
“In 1946, with his internment in Auschwitz still fresh in his mind, the Italian scientist Primo Levi started writing down his memories of the death camp on the back of train tickets and piece of scrap paper. He wasn’t planning to write a book, he later explained; all he wanted to do was unburden himself, writing down his thoughts as an act of therapy. Yet soon the random recollections started to cohere into a larger testimony, one of the first autobiographical texts from a survivor of the Holocaust and one of the most powerful works of nonfiction published in the twentieth century: If this is a Man... Our moral obligation to remember the Holocaust, a responsibility that grows stronger as the number of survivors declines, has made Levi’s book a document of world-historical importance.” (J. Mustich).
