Massimo Giuliani

In A Centaur in Auschwitz, Massimo Giuliani sheds new light on Primo Levi's rational, demythologizing approach to suffering and survival. Whether working in narrative or poetic form, Levi grappled with the ambiguities and complexities of innocence and guilt, triumph and loss. Giuliani presents a powerful new means to understand Levi's thought: employing the neologism of salvaction (conveying 'salvation' through one's own 'action'), Giuliani has developed a 'star of salvaction'—a diagram in the shape of a star of David, in which each of the six points leads to a strategy Levi learned for seeking meaning, and thereby salvation, in the misery of Auschwitz. This unique book, with its concise overview of Levi's expression and development as a writer, reveals Primo Levi for what he was: scientist, intellectual, Jew, and dedicated seeker of the roots of human dignity.

In A Centaur in Auschwitz, Massimo Giuliani sheds new light on Primo Levi's rational, demythologizing approach to suffering and survival. Whether working in narrative or poetic form, Levi grappled with the ambiguities and complexities of innocence and guilt, triumph and loss. Giuliani presents a powerful new means to understand Levi's thought: employing the neologism of salvaction (conveying "salvation" through one's own "action"), Giuliani has developed a "star of salvaction"—a diagram in the shape of a star of David, in which each of the six points leads to a strategy Levi learned for seeking meaning, and thereby salvation, in the misery of Auschwitz. This unique book, with its concise overview of Levi's expression and development as a writer, reveals Primo Levi for what he was: scientist, intellectual, Jew, and dedicated seeker of the roots of human dignity.

The Shoah - the Hebrew term for Holocaust - has continued to pervade theological thought, religious practice, and the contemporary identity of Judaism. Using the title of Franz Rosenzweig's masterpiece, the Shoah could - and perhaps should - be called the star of irredemption because of the struggling implications of its radical evil. In Auschwitz, God is at stake because the very existence of the Jews is threatened, but the Jewish identity is also at stake because the justice and reliability of God is questioned. The Shoah poses a double problem of caesura and continuum - it is both a break in the continuity of the tradition and continuity inside of the break of modernity. The intersecting of these two dimensions constitutes the basic hermeneutic conflict of the Jewish consciousness at the beginning of the twenty-first century.