When first published in Italy under the title Se qesto e un uomo (If This Is a Man, published in America as Survival in Auschwitz) in 1947, Levi's book received little attention from readers or critics. Sales were poor for the first printing of two thousand copies, six hundred of which were damaged by a warehouse flood. One of the concerns that initially dogged Levi was whether he was simply a witness to the Holocaust whose account had factual significance but little aesthetic merit, or whether he was indeed a writer of literary value. Levi did not see why the roles were mutually exclusive. At the time, only two reviewers paid special attention to Levi's unique accomplishment: Italo Calvino, himself a promising new writer at the time, and the critic Arrigo Cajumi. Biographer Ian Thomson, in Primo Levi: A Life, quotes Cajumi's La Stampa review of November...