"no listing of Italian Sephardic authors would be complete without Primo Levi, who, along with Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, Paul Celan, and Aharon Appelfeld, is one of the most acclaimed chroniclers of the Holocaust. A chemist born into a secular, assimilated family in Turin, Levi is best known for If This Is a Man, a straightforward but at the same time heartrending chronicle of his years as a prisoner in Auschwitz, to which he was deported in 1943. When the autobiography was first published in Italian in 1947, it received almost no attention, perhaps because it was too soon after the Holocaust for readers to fully comprehend what had just occurred. But upon its reissue in 1958 under the title Survival in Auschwitz, the volume quickly became recognized as a classic of Holocaust literature."