Primo Levi and The Periodic Table: Teaching Chemistry Using a Literary Text

摘要

The Periodic Table (1) is one of the autobiographical books written by Primo Levi (1919–1987), an Italian chemist and writer. Levi was born in Turin, Italy, into a middleclass family of assimilated, nonreligious Jews. In 1941, he graduated in chemistry as the first in his class at the University of Turin—in spite of Fascist Italy’s racial law of 1938 that forbade Jews access to higher education. He worked in a pharmaceutical laboratory until 1943, when—after Mussolini’s fall and the invasion of Italy by German troops—he joined a partisan group. Arrested by the German army, Levi was eventually identified as a Jew and deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. He survived because he was sent to work in an I. G. Farben laboratory, which produced synthetic rubber at the labor section of the camp.