If This Is a Man / Primo Levi 205 pp.

If This Is a Man is the first item in this massive, 3-volume, 3,000 page new Complete Works.  Because it was originally published as a stand-alone piece, I think it's fair to get credit for it as one item translated from Italian.  Levi wrote this shortly after his return from Auschwitz to Turin.

At this point I've read quite a few personal narratives of the Holocaust, and I now wonder how many of those writers weren't directly or unconsciously influenced by Levi.  It seems to me almost an alpha narrative, to which all the others are a sort of response.  Although Levi's experience was not particularly representative -  'only' one year in Auschwitz as an Italian Jew who was 'fortunate' to wind up assigned  to an indoor chemistry lab - it is so beautifully, intelligently, written, so free of melodrama, so carefully observed, that he seems to have laid the groundwork for the entire discussion of events that took place during the period.  He is especially astute regarding what it took to survive, and how, or whether, it was possible to remain a man throughout.

Stuart Woolf's  translation is fluid and unobtrusive.