His will to bear witness, and record the hellish particularity of the Holocaust, helped save his life in Auschwitz. It also inspired the writing he will be remembered for. William Dereziewicz. Three volumes, 3,000 pages: The Complete Works of Primo Levi, in…
James Marcus. Primo Levi’s literary conquest of America has been slow, sketchy, almost diffident. The English translation of his first book, If This Is a Man, appeared in this country in 1959, twelve years after the publication of the original in Italy,…
Michael Frank “This book is entirely the work of my hands, for I copied it for my own use. I am Nachman, son of Rabbi Samuel Foa. I copied it in the year 5315, when I was 15 years of…
Edward Mendelson. Primo Levi studied chemistry at Turin and worked as a chemist until, at 24, he joined the Italian “partisans” resisting the Nazi occupation of northern Italy in 1943. He was arrested by Italian Fascists and turned over to the…
Gavin Jacobson. Levi's experience as a partisan—and the execution of two teenage boys—showed him humans' capacity for extreme violence. In September 1943, Primo Levi took to the mountains in northwest Italy to escape the Nazis. A keen mountaineer since the…
James Wood. Primo Levi did not consider it heroic to have survived eleven months in Auschwitz. Like other witnesses of the concentration camps, he lamented that the best had perished and the worst had survived. But we who have survived…
Steven G. Kellman What would Primo Levi say? Though he died in 1987, the question persists. Last year, in a New York Times column recounting shock and revulsion over ISIS’s beheading American journalists and a British aid worker, Roger Cohen recalled a passage…
Parla Alessandro Cassin, che riapre la storica libreria fondata nel 1884 da un immigrato siciliano. Il successivo proprietario ebbe l’intuizione di vendere per corrispondenza i volumi fatti arrivare dal nostro Paese Giuseppe Culicchia. C’era una volta una piccola libreria italiana…
Alek Wilkinson. “Countless times I walked past these windows with the curtains drawn,” Alessandro Cassin said. “It seemed so unlikely that there would be anything behind them anymore.” Cassin is the director of publishing for Centro Primo Levi, which promotes…
Andrey Slivka I've always had an affinity for the Italian language (even if I don't understand Italians themselves, who represent a culture so different from ours as to be from a planet that whips around a lonely sun a million…
Anneliese Cooper. Anyone who spent much time in the West Village in the last decade probably walked by the storefront at 30 West 12th Street, and wondered at its display of sun-faded books with Italian titles gathering dust against a…
Alain Elkann Centro Primo Levi recently launched CPL Editions, a new publishing enterprise at the historical New York Italian bookstore and publisher S.F. Vanni. The interview with Alessandro Cassin, Director of Publishing, took place at the recently reopened S.F. Vanni…
ALESSANDRO CASSIN. The bookstore, in business from 1884 to 2004, reopens as a pop-up bookstore, cultural space and headquarters for our own CPL Editions. In a city in constant transformation, we believe in the symbolic value of the…
S.F. Vanni, the legendary Italian bookstore that operated in New York City from 1884 to 2004, is reopening this month as "a pop-up bookstore and cultural space" under the auspices of Centro Primo Levi at the store's longtime home at 30 W.…
Riapre, per ora solo come libreria temporanea, nello stesso edificio che aveva occupato dal 1931 al 2004 e con lo stesso spirito che l'aveva resa un punto di incontro per gli amanti dell'Italia a New York. S.F. Vanni Bookstore inaugura…
Alessandra Baldini For independent bookstores, New York is a cemetery scattered with crosses: Gotham and Coliseum were gone in the first decade of this century, casualties of the big bookstore chains, which eventually succumbed themselves to the rise of Amazon.…
Becky Zeferino S.F. Vanni, the oldest running Italian bookstore in the United States, has released news of its end-of-January reopening in New York City. The bookstore was first founded in 1884 by the Sicilian (Caltagirone) Sante Fortunato Vanni in Greenwich…
@italyheritage. "In a bold move against the trend, in January 2015 "Centro Primo Levi" will reopen S.F. VANNI, the first Italian bookstore in America (active from 1884 to 2004), at its historic location at 30 West 12th Street in…
SF Vanni. La grande mela, per i libri, da un po' di tempo a questa parte sembra essere piuttosto una mela avvelenata. Coliseum e Gotham, mitiche mete dei lettori newyorchesi, hanno dovuto alzare bandiera bianca già agli inizi del decennio…
Gioia Sgarlata UN'OPERAZIONE controcorrente nel quartiere della cultura bohémiene delle avanguardie newyorkesi diventato oggi meta di benestanti agé che qui cercano casa. E dove, un po' per le pressioni del mercato immobiliare un po' per la crisi molti luoghi simbolo…
Steve Sipporin Leo Levi-The Man with the Nagra. 2011. By Yaala Levi Zimmerman. 90 min. DVD. In He- brew and Italian, subtitles in English. (Jerusa- lem, Israel: Ruth Diskin, Ltd.) Leo Levi-The Man with the Nagra is a film that…
Mark Swed The 16th/17th century composer Salomone Rossi is the focus of a Chamber Music in Historic Sites performance by Profeti della Quinta. The quintet is sophisticated; the music lovely if not lingering. Even for a city in which architectural…
Alexis Herr Every age needs its heroes, so it seems. And in post-war Italy, a low level official named Giovanni Palatucci seemed to fit the bill. But recent reports challenge Palatucci’s legacy as the “Italian Schindler” and in so doing…
Patricia Cohen. He has been called the Italian Schindler, credited with helping to save 5,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Giovanni Palatucci, a wartime police official, has been honored in Israel, in New York and in Italy, where squares and promenades…
