“Survival in Auschwitz” Book Talk with Professor Lina Insana

Classrooms Without Borders, in partnership with Rodef Shalom Congregation, the University of Pittsburgh Jewish Studies Program, The Jack Buncher Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University and JFCS Holocaust Center of Northern California, is honored to bring Professor Lina Insana to our community of educators and learners. Dr. Insana, with CWB educator Kate Lukaszewicz, will speak about Primo Levi’s biographical novel, Survival In Auschwitz.
The Italian republication in 1958 of Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man was at the forefront of Europe’s emergent understanding of the Holocaust as a radically new kind of event—one whose survivors and their stories were not simply military prisoners of war or political prisoners, and necessitating new narrative strategies and essentially a new representational language. Less well known in the US than in Europe, Primo Levi and his memoir (published as Survival in Auschwitz in the US) indeed had a central role in defining the ethical and representational stakes of Holocaust testimony with fundamental notions such as the “grey zone” and the “Musselman.” In this book talk, Lina Insana and Kate Lukaszewicz will discuss the importance of Levi’s book; Levi’s strategies for conveying his experience as an Italian Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz; and the enduring power of Levi’s challenge to his readers.

In January, CWB will host four Primo Levi programs. Don’t miss these:

January 6 at 4pm: A workshop for secondary teachers to teach about Primo Levi.

January 14 at 4pm: A concert by Shulamit Ottolenghi, an Italian-Israeli vocalist who worked with composers to set Levi’s poetry to original music. The performance, excerpts from Shema: Primo Levi from Poem to Song, will be contextualized by Dr. Lina Insana.

January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day: A CWB global TEACH-IN for all educators to bring Primo Levi to their students on this day of remembrance.

Professor Lina Insana

Lina Insana is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of Pittsburgh [faculty profile]. A native Pittsburgher, she earned her BA and MA from Pitt and holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research and teaching focuses on modern and contemporary Italian cultural production. Most of her work on Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi is concerned with textual mediation, translation, and adaptation and their relationship to testimony and memory. Newer research, instead, seeks to interrogate formations of transnational and regional identity at the margins of conventionally-accepted definitions of Italianness.

Her first book, Arduous Tasks: Primo Levi, Translation, and the Transmission of Holocaust Testimony (U of Toronto Press, 2009) examines Primo Levi’s testimonial work through the lens of translation, broadly understood as a mediating and interpretive mode that creates spaces of testimonial agency for the survivor-author. This work was recognized both by the MLA (Scaglione Italian Manuscript Prize, 2007) and the American Association of Italian Studies (20th c. Prize, 2009). She is currently completing a book entitled “Charting the Island: Sicilian Position and Belonging from Unification to the European Union,” which is a geocritical cultural history of Sicilian belonging under the modern Italian State (1861-present).

She is also engaged in a third book-length project that explores expressions of italianità in North American Italian “colonies” between the first and second World Wars through institutions and cultural icons that helped immigrant communities to negotiate complex and often competing civic identities.

Prof. Insana has served two terms (2013-2019) as Chair of the Department of French & Italian and has been Director of Graduate Studies in Italian since 2010. From 2016-2018 she was Chair of Pitt’s Humanities Council. Since 2012 she has been the lead organizer of Pittsburgh’s Italian Film Festival USA, a curated festival of contemporary Italian Cinema that takes place every spring on Pitt’s campus.