by Alec 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 the historical study of Italian Jews.

He is from Florence and moved to New York in 1979. He was standing outside a storefront at 30 West Twelfth Street. Gold letters on the window said "S. F. Vanni," and behind them were pale-blue curtains. Between 1884 and 2004, S. F. Vanni was a bookstore that sold books in Italian.

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Source: http://www.newyorker.com/