I really loved how he chose specific moments to represent his own experiences and how it reflected the lives of others.

A fascinating collection of vignettes focused on individuals (characters?) that Levi met in Auschwitz. Having read this before any of his other work, I feel I missed some of the counterbalancing despair and narrative that I know features heavily in his other accounts of Auschwitz. However, taken by itself it is still an excellent exploration of people in the most damned of places - and the fact that Levi finds so many moments of reprieve in those dark memories is heartening and disturbing.

True accounts of a Jewish Italian living in Nazi concentration camps. Not a pleasant book, but if read, will help the reader to understand why WWII happened, and how to prevent another.

Again, beautiful prose, yet proves the hope and resilience of humanity even in the most brutal brutal times. Only gave 3 because i didn’t enjoy it as much as his other stuff, still incredible.

נפלא. סיפורים נהדרים ודמויות מופלאות ואנושיות
אחד הטובים של השנה האחרונה בטוח
הכל מסופר עם הרבה חכמה וחמלה

If there was ever a writer who should be read by everybody it is Primo Levi, and although this is not his finest work (I'd have to go for either 'If this is a Man' or 'The Truce'), it still says more about the Holocaust than anything written by practically anyone else. I personally believe Levi to have been one of the greatest people ever to have lived. To have emerged from Auschwitz, to have described his loss of hope and humanity, and his return, all without rancour, rage, or remorse is miraculous; but then to have lived an honourable by insignificant life for many years, before revealing the profound beauty of his spirit, is beyond my comprehension.

When I first read him, I was expecting, in a rather voyeuristic way, graphic detail, and polarised characters. Instead, I saw a decent man trying to make sense of the madness in which he found himself, as insightful and detached as any good scientist should be. Here, he goes a stage further, and amidst the horrors of Auschwitz, he finds some brief anecdotal moments of respite from the suffering. He describes how those who would kill one another over a scrap of bread could just occasionally rediscover some atavistic essential decency - the sharing of a mushroom, of a soup bowl - anything. And in 'The Quiet City', in 6 taut pages, he describes better than I have ever seen how the Germans allowed this to happen, 'trying not to see and keeping silent about what they did see'. I don't believe that anyone has ever put this any better.

This is compulsive reading.

Sono racconti brevi, articolati in tre sezioni, la prima riprende i racconti del campo di concentramento e del ritorno, la seconda i racconti del sistema periodico, la terza racconti sparsi. La lettura di questi racconti diverte, incuriosisce e lascia un senso di grande pace interiore, anche nei racconti più tristi o tragici. O anche nelle storie naturali e di fantasia.

A short book in the series of chronicles that Levi left us of his experiences in Auschwitz. Rather than documenting the horrors documented in 'If This is a Man', 'Moments of Reprieve' recalls in fifteen brief sketches of memory, glimpses of humanity in the grotesque inhumanity of the death camp.
I do wonder if Primo Levi suffered from a survivor's guilt. I found his most haunting prose on the final page, 'we too are so dazzled by power and money as to forget our essential fragility, forget that all of us are in the ghetto, that the ghetto is fenced in, that beyond the fence stand the lords of death, and not far away the train is waiting.'

My first completed read of the year, Moments of Reprieve, aptly described in its missive as a discovery of 'bizarre, marginal, moments of reprieve' charts the stories of a myriad variety of people, mostly Jews who Primo Levi had come across during his stay at Auschwitz. Among many others, a juggler, an almost mute worker, a mirror chemist, a helpful SS officer, are all bound in a conflict, both that ravaged their internal beings as well as the external world they inhabited in times where sense failed. Primo Levi, like what he is well known for in his holocaust works, tells the tales of harrowing times in quiet, unaffected prose, and thus sharing an intimate experience with the reader than just a book.

Η μεγάλη αξία του «Λίλιθ» βρίσκεται στις ιστορίες του πρώτου μέρους, όπου ο Λέβι κλείνει τις ιστορίες κάποιων συγκρατούμενων του, οι οποίες είχαν μείνει ανοιχτές και ατελείς, στα προηγούμενα βιβλία του «Εάν αυτό είναι ο άνθρωπος», «Αυτοί που βούλιαξαν και αυτοί που σώθηκαν» και «Ανακωχή». Ο Λέβι σημειώνει πως ήταν σωστότερο, να τις ολοκληρώσει όταν αυτοί δεν θα είναι πια εν ζωή, διότι διαφορετικά όπως γράφει «ακόμα και όταν επιχειρείται με τις καλύτερες προθέσεις, αγγίζει τα όρια της παραβίασης της ιδιωτικής ζωής και δεν ελιναι ποτέ ανώδυνο για το πρόσωπο για το οποίο το αφορά» πόσο μάλλον όταν το πρόσωπο είναι ένας επιβιώσας των στρατοπέδων. Συγκλονιστική η ιστορία και η τύχη του Λορέντζου, του ανθρώπου που σφράγισε τη μοίρα του Λέβι, σώζοντάς τον με 2 λίτρα σούπα την ημέρα.

Excellent little book. Full of memorable characters and stories, thoroughly humane.

Lorenzo的结局大概意味着，邪恶面前，终究需要文化和思想来保护我们自己，良心和勇气只够保护别人。