La tregua (The Truce, also published in English as The Reawakening) was published by Einaudi in 1963 and won the Premio Campiello. Where If This Is a Man ends with liberation, The Truce begins there — and discovers that liberation does not mean homecoming. Levi spent nine months traveling from Auschwitz back to Turin: a vast, chaotic, picaresque journey through Poland, Russia, Romania, Hungary, and Austria, managed (barely) by the Soviet army.
The tone is utterly different from the first book: where If This Is a Man is grave and precise, The Truce is comic, expansive, and populated with extraordinary characters. The survivors — Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russians — improvise their way across a devastated continent, trading, stealing, seducing, and performing the thousand small acts of cunning and cooperation that survival requires. Cesare, an Italian wheeler-dealer of extraordinary resourcefulness, is one of the great comic characters in postwar literature.
But beneath the comedy runs a deeper current: the difficulty of returning to normal life after absolute extremity. Levi’s “truce” is the pause between the camp and the resumption of ordinary existence — a liminal period when the survivors are neither prisoners nor free people, suspended between the world of death and the world of the living. The book’s final pages — Levi’s arrival in Turin, his reunion with family — are haunted by the knowledge that the camp will never leave him entirely.
Collecting The Truce
First edition (Einaudi, Turin, 1963): Cloth with dust jacket.
First English edition (Bodley Head, London, 1965): As The Truce.
US edition (Little, Brown, 1965): As The Reawakening.
Market values:
- Einaudi first (1963): $200–$500
- English first (Bodley Head, 1965): $100–$300
- US first (Little, Brown, 1965): $75–$200
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Truce about? The sequel to If This Is a Man, The Truce (1963) — also published as The Reawakening — narrates Levi’s nine-month journey home from Auschwitz to Turin through the chaos of liberated Europe. Where the first book is a descent into hell, The Truce is a picaresque comedy of survival — vivid, often funny, and populated by unforgettable characters encountered on the road.