News at Eleven: At the same time,

he [Primo Levi] understood that you cannot build a new cosmos from scratch. Thus, he based his most important poem, the "if this is a man" poem, on the Shema, wrote another poem called "Passover," titled a novel If Not Now, When?, after a saying from Rabbi Hillel, and began his anthology of favorite texts with the Book of Job. As in almost everything, Levi is a hybrid, a man not equal to himself, both a Jewish and a non-Jewish writer.

from Tablet: Exceptional Spiritedness

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