A Man of Few Words

The Bricklayer of Auschwitz Who Saved Primo Levi

Carlo Greppi (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

256 Seiten

2025
The Westbourne Press (Verlag)
978-1-908906-61-8 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Januar 2025)
Portofrei ab CHF 40
Auch auf Rechnung

Artikel merken

‘Nobody knows how much I owe that man’, Primo Levi said of his Italian compatriot Lorenzo Perrone, who saved his life at Auschwitz. ‘I could never repay him’. Each day for a period of six months, Perrone, who worked beside Auschwitz in desperate conditions, risked his own life to smuggle part of his own soup ration to Levi, quietly leaving the mess tin by a half-constructed brick wall. Without those extra five hundred calories, Levi could not have survived, and would probably not have written If This Is a Man, the first published account by a Holocaust survivor.

In A Man of Few Words, Carlo Greppi pieces together the life of Lorenzo Perrone, a bricklayer from the Piedmontese town of Fossano, not far from Levi’s native Turin. Near-destitute and with minimal formal education, Perrone left very few traces of himself. Yet despite their stark differences – Levi was a middle-class chemist – their friendship survived the Holocaust and continued until Perrone’s tragic death. Levi never forgot Perrone. In every book he wrote, he mentions that he owes his life to a man named Lorenzo, and he returned persistently, in the last years of his life, to the man of few words who saved his life.

Compassionate, worldly and prescient, Greppi brings us a story that has much to say about the world we live in today, about an individual who kept hope alive in one of the darkest times and places known to humankind.

Carlo Greppi (1982) is a historian at the University of Turin and author of numerous essays on the history of the twentieth century. For Laterza, he is the editor of the series ‘Fact Checking: History Under the Test of Facts’. His latest book is Il Buon Tedesco (2021, Fiuggi History Award 2021; Giacomo Matteotti Award 2022) which sold 10,000+ copies. Howard Curtis (1949) is a British translator of French, Italian and Spanish fiction. He has translated works by the likes of Gianrico Carofiglio, Lluís Quintana-Murci, Beppe Fenoglio and Georges Simenon. His translations have won the John Florio Prize, Premio Campiello Europa, the Marsh Award for Children’s Literature in Translation, and been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and Best Translated Book Award among many others.

Erscheint lt. Verlag	23.1.2025
Übersetzer	Howard Curtis
Sprache	englisch
Maße	135 x 216 mm
Gewicht	480 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
ISBN-10	1-908906-61-8 / 1908906618
ISBN-13	978-1-908906-61-8 / 9781908906618
Zustand	Neuware