J'étais un homme

12mo of 187 pp., (2) ll ; publisher’s wrappers, as issued.

191 x 141 mm.

Levi, Primo. J’étais un homme.

Paris, Buchet, Chastel, 1961.

First French edition of one of the major books on concentration camps literature.

No large paper were printed.

This very rare first French edition of Primo Lévi’s first book will go as unnoticed as the first Italian edition published in 1947. It was not until the suicide of its author in 1987 that a second French edition was published and this fundamental testimony on the Holocaust became this emblematic work of the concentration camp literature.

“Like its author, it is also a survivor, passed through many trials before becoming, decades later, a major text of the concentration camp literature, distributed to three and a half million copies in Italy, Used in some 60 countries and 40 languages.” (P. Broussard).

“One is readily convinced that one has read much about the Holocaust, one is convinced to know at least as much. And, let us agree with a sincerity equal to the feeling of shame, sometimes, in front of the accumulation, we want to shout grace. It’s just that we haven’t yet heard Levi analyze the complex nature of the state of unhappiness. Few have proved it as well as Levi, who seems to hold us by the Basques on the brink of the menacing forgetfulness: if literature is not written to remind the dead to the living, it is only 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 his 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).

“Primo Levi gives us on this subject a magnificent book (...) which is not only a testimony of great scope, but contains pages of a true narrative power, pages that will remain in our memories among the finest of World War II literature” (Italo Calvino).

A beautiful copy preserved in publisher’s wrappers, as issued.