SOURCE: “Letter from Paris: Ten Years Without Primo Levi,” in Salmagundi, Fall-Winter, 1997, pp. 3-18.

In the following essay, Todorov discusses the central themes of Levi's work—memory and offense—and reflects on his legacy.

With the passing of time, Primo Levi has become one of the authors who has influenced me most, and to whom I feel closest. This simple fact never ceases to amaze me, because the reasons for the closeness are by no means clear to me. I am too young to have had a direct experience of Nazism, so no shared experience can explain how I feel. Still, I grew up in a totalitarian country, and this fact, through a mechanism that I can no more analyze than ignore, has brought about in me a visceral concern with the question of good and evil, in particular in its political guise. This need led me, in...