Hubris, Language, and Oppression: Recreating Babel in Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and the Midrash

Abstract

The essay explores Primo Levi’s description of the Buna tower in If This is a Man as his indirect Midrashic commentary on the Tower of Babel. It shows how the Midrash helps to bridge between the two texts, with Primo Levi’s memoir both drawing on and reinterpreting the Biblical story.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 3 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.