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The Reawakening : The Companion Volume to Survival in Auschwitz

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Like Survival in Auschwitz and The Periodic Table, The Reawakening is populated with Levi's brilliant language and fascination with character. In Survival, Table and Reawakening, Levi is careful not to force facts into a satisfyingly explanatory story. The Reawakening is a picaresque without the moral center. Levi travels home through a carnival world, a Europe simultaneously stunned and ecstatic, a landscape of displaced characters, Greek villagers in Polish refugee camps, complicit Germans sitting down to the first course of horrific recent history and guilt, cadaverous lager inmates staggering into a world forever altered. It is a world populated with impresarios, rakes, opportunists, suicides, daredevils and rubes. But, more than anything else, The Reawakening is brimming with life; Levi makes his way home eyes forward.

I found myself thinking of two other books while reading Reawakening--Kosinski's The Painted Bird and Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel. Like Kosinski, Levi reminds us that much of rural eastern Europe was cruel and primitive before the Nazi's made a virtue of these qualities. And, like Wolfe's Gant family, the characters in Levi's account are often exuberant to the point of mania.

I think that Levi is one of the great writers and thinkers of our time. In this way, I'm not a reliable critic. Reviewing The Reawakening is akin to reviewing Hamlet for me.

Published in 1963, "The Reawakening" is a narrative of Primo Levi's tortuous journey back to Turin after liberation from Auschwitz. In fact, it is a follow-up of "Survival in Auschwitz." As stated by Primo Levi, "after Auschwitz, I had an absolute need to write, not only as a moral duty, but as psychological need, to free myself from anguish." Out of 650 Italian Jews who journeyed to Auschwitz, with Primo Levi, only 20 left the camp alive.

Levi assumes the calm, sober language of the witness, with no manifested hate and purpose of revenge, devoid of bitterness. His prose is precise, clear, with no embellishment, lively transmitting his bewilderment of the simple fact that he had survived.

The reader cannot help be amazed by the details recorded in Levi's memory, places, names, characters, personalities, it is as though he wrote everything in locus. His memory was a blessing... but might have also been his tormenter... After a long period of depression, Levi died after falling from a stairwell in his Turin home. The question will always remain whether it was or not suicide. Levi, through his writings, symbolizes the triumph of reasoning and humanity over madness and cruelty.

The Reawakening opens in January 1945, when author Primo Levi is released from a Nazi concnetration camp by Russian troops. His health almost ruined, suffering from unbearable knowledge of the crimes committed in the camps, Levi re-enters the world to find that it has been turned upside down by the war. Improbably - he explains in an afterword that it is not in his nature to hate - he finds in himself a capacity to see the world afresh, almost as a child would.

In the rest of the book, we accompany Levi and his companions on a picaresque through postwar Europe and Russia as they try to make their way back to their native Italy. While their sufferings are legion, Levi takes great pleasure in food, in his fellow man, and in nature. In particular, he displays a fine appreciation for the absurdities visited on the refugees by their well-intentioned but inept Russian rescuers.

This book is an entertaining read. Beyond that, it is an important document of the Holocaust. And beyond that, it is an important resource for modern readers who are finding their own way through an often absurd world. Highly recommended.

This is just one of the many brilliant writings of Primo Levi but it tells a tale of Holocaust survival that is often overlooked. Most narratives seem to end at liberation and this one gives us a detailed view of what happened afterwards. This is the book that the movie "The Truce" (which is also the title of this book in Italy)is loosely based on. I don't think the movie did the book justice at all and so I would especially recommend this book to anyone that has seen the movie. Like all of Levi's works it is written in a sparse yet fantastic style and it really is a great follow up to "Survival In Auschwitz".

Primo Levi again shows the magic of his writing in this tale of the purgatory he experienced after his liberation from Auschwitz. His memories of the people he meets along the way and the way he describes them are amazing, whether you hate them or love them they all seem ... human, something one couldn't exactly tell from his account of the camp itself. Truly a brilliant book.

It's almost as if Primo Levi didn't know what kind of a point he wanted to make with this book. Else the whole tone of Survival at Auschwitz must be subverted. In Survival Levi had a very set time and experience to relate. In The Reawakening there is travelling and motion. Levi goes all over the place trying to get back home and the people he encounters on the way are wonderfully alive. There is exhilaration and there is the pain of knowing that things will never be the same. At the end you are left with several conflicting emotions, as Levi knows that part of him died in Auschwitz and isn't sure which parts are still alive

I was surprised to see so few reviews for this book on Amazon. "The Reawakening" is one of the great works of literature of the 20th century - and one of the most enjoyable. Levi's "Survival in Auschwitz" is a good book, and obviously a very important historical document. But with "The Reawakening," Levi becomes a truly great writer. His writerly gifts are impressive on so many levels -- but it is his uncanny, Chekhov-like ability to sketch characters and situations with astonishing vividness that is most impressive. And what characters, what situations. After his release from Auschwitz, Levi was faced with an epic, roundabout journey through the Soviet Union before he was finally able to return to his Italian homeland. Although fraught with difficulties on every side, Levi was free -- and the book reflects the joie de vivre of his suddenly newfound freedom. There are astonishing, unforgettable characters on these pages - rogues and saints. I envy the reader encountering the pleasures of this book for the first time.

An really good book. I read it immediately after his previous book (Survival in Auschwitz : The Nazi Assault on Humanity) and where the first one is extremely sad and depressing this second one is an incredible insight into the mixture of characters that Levi encounters on his way back from Auschwitz. Although set in a completely ruined Eastern Europe I found the book positive and intriguing to read. His friends the Greek, Cesare, il Moro etc. are all amazing characters to read about and his whole journey through the Russian bureaucracy is just as fascinating to experience as well.

This work tends to be overshadowed by Levi's earlier Survival in Auschwitz even though this is a very important book as well. Too often when people study WWII they tend to stop their research at the end of the war in 45. The problem with this is that the war is really only one chapter in the story. The same is true of the Holocaust as well. For the victims "liberation" was often anything but, and many times the road of liberation could be just as cruel and merciless as the camps themselves.

This is the importance of The Reawakening. It tells the rest of the story. This book gives readers a first hand look at the world of post hostilities Europe, and shows readers the difficulties faced by those few to survive the horrors of Auschwitz. Levi gives us a personal account of what life was like trying to pick up the pieces of shattered lives in the chaotic and sometimes anarchic world in which survivors found themselves after their "liberation". Readers are left to understand that the world did not magically revert back to sanity when the Nazis were pushed back from territories formerly under their control. Instead with cruel irony thousands succumbed to the deprivations of the camps in the days and weeks that followed their liberation so that liberation cruelly came too late.

Primo Levi does an exquisite job detailing life after liberation and the long, tortuous journey home. His eloquence in describing the mundane, while at the same time opening a window to the psychological aspects of his experiences, makes the reading experience both enlightening and entertaining. There are thousands of studies that have been done detailing the experiences of survivors, but in little more than 200 pages Levi does as much to enlighten as many of these. His ability to describe the boredom and monotony of post liberation life for a survivor while at the same time enthralling his reader is a unique gift possessed by few writers. This is what makes his story so powerful. He brings readers into his world effortlessly, and it is so natural to find the humanness in his story and his characters that one does not have to put forth any effort whatsoever to empathize with him and his characters.

A person can read hundreds of thousands of pages detailing the history of these events, yet they will still lack a fundamental understanding of these events if they neglect these two books. These are essential books for understanding this history.

Not nearly as compelling as Survival in Auschwitz, but Levi still comes through in using his stories as vehicles to highlight the bigger issues of human life. What really sold me on the book was the last chapter and the addition. The latter is a series of short answers to questions which have been posed to Levi since first publishing SinA. He addresses such issues as "what did the Germans know", "do you hate the Germans", etc. Really worth the price of the book just for this.