With the moral stamina and intellectual pose of a twentieth-century Titan,
this slightly built, duitful, unassuming chemist set out systematically to
remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and
then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose. He was
profoundly in touch with the minutest workings of the most endearing human
events and with the most contempible. What has survived in Levi's writing
isn't just his memory of the unbearable, but also, in THE PERIODIC TABLE
and THE WRENCH, his delight in what made the world exquisite to him. He was
himself a magically endearing man, the most delicately forceful enchanter
I've ever known - PHILIP ROTH