PRIMO LEVI�AND THE LANGUAGE
Primo Levi was born in one of the
most gorgeous city, of course Turin,
in 1919, where he lived until his death,
except for a couple of years.
He studied chemistry at Turin university during the time in which racial laws just began to exist.
The connection between Levi and the topic of today is of course his origin, as his parents belonged to jewish families coming from France and Spain.
For that reason he was, in
1943, arrested while fighting
fascists with partisans and, a
year later, deported to Auschwitz.
Primo was able to get through those terrible years, as he said himself, thanks to his knowledge and a big part of luck.
He spoke a bit of german, became friend with a couple of italians that gave him food at times … His biggest luck though, was to be a chemist, a job that nazis needed, and so he didn’t have to do that much hard work.
Once liberated by Russian army in 1945, Levi came back to Turin after months of travel. This exerience troubled him deeply, and haunted him all his life.
He started writing books about it as he saw
a lot of interest about it, especially between
young people, and so he also began to meet
students, to narrate directly his story.
He was found dead in 1987 on the stairs of his house, but it’s still unknown whether he committed suicide or his fall was due to dizziness, which he was known to suffer of.
He wrote mainly about his own experience, and his two most famous books are:
"Se questo è un uomo"
and
"Sistema periodico"
"Sistema periodico» (The periodic table) has 21
chapters, each of them named
after the name of a chemical
element.
Every chapter narrate a particular aspect of Levi’s life:
fortunately for you, we got
bored after the first, named
Argon, so we won’t analyse
each of them ☺
As you may realize from the
image, he talked firstly about
his childhood and his family.
Levi’s family
The synagogue in Turin
Moreover, he talked about the piedmontese Jewish community, which was quite large in Piedmont, and to do so he used also words coming a bit from the piedmontese dialect and the jewish language, as most of the funny stories were connected to these words.
Especially in winery,
but also in the textile industry
Levi tells us how the jewish came from Spain and France in the 16° century, and how they adopted the local dialect, to which they of course added some expressions from their dialect.
Sometimes they were doing it in order not to be understood,
but most of the time it happened in the shops,
where jewish taught their employee
some specific words that are still nowadays used, handed down from that time!
We will now give you a little vocabulary about some of the words we selected from the chapter Argon, and we suggest you to keep in mind at least some ‘cause we will play a little game.
WORDS
BARBA
GANAVE
SCOLA
PITO
PEGARTA
GOIA
TZARA
KHALTO
HASIR
PONALTA
DEFINITIONS
UNCLE
TO STEAL
SYNAGOGUE
TURKEY
DEAD
CHRISTIAN LADY
MISFORTUNE
THE ONE WHO BELIEVES IN A DULL WAY
PORK
PEASANT
s | K | U | K | H | A | B | I | B | M | D |
A | H | P | O | N | A | L | T | A | I | G |
M | A | A | E | D | Y | S | C | O | L | A |
O | L | Z | B | G | V | O | I | D | F | N |
C | T | Z | A | R | A | X | P | R | U | A |
A | O | O | R | E | C | R | I | O | S | V |
I | N | E | B | V | C | A | T | S | O | E |
G | O | I | A | E | A | I | O | A | S | K |