SOURCE: “The Varnish-Maker's Dreams,” in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 98, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 506-14.

In the following essay, Motola offers a thematic survey of Levi's memoirs, essays, poems, and short fiction.

A scientific humanist before as well as after Auschwitz, Primo Levi insisted on upholding the Judeo-Christian ideals that we in the West inherit. Whether working as a chemist in a paint factory, or writing poetry or prose, or speaking to a colleague or to an interviewer, Levi never wavered in his belief that only through the objective reality provided by science, mediated by the ethical and moral values of an evolved tradition, can a responsible and just society exist. And the language of poetry, he believed, most succinctly and eloquently expresses the values of a society.

In “The Canto of Ulysses” from Se questo è un uomo (translated literally in England as If This Is a Man but in...