Rhodeslis of London Luncheon
September 18, 2022
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About the book:
One of Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Books of the Year * Winner of the National Jewish Book Awards for Holocaust Memoir and Sephardic Culture * Recipient of the Jewish Book Council’s Natan Notable Book Award * Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal
The remarkable story of ninety-nine-year-old Stella Levi whose conversations with the author over the course of six years bring to life the vibrant world of Jewish Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz that extinguished ninety percent of her community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman who lived to tell the tale.
With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood on the Greek island of Rhodes where she’d grown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium.
Neither of them could know this was the first of one hundred Saturdays over the course of six years that they would spend in each other’s company. During these meetings Stella traveled back in time to conjure what it felt like to come of age on this luminous, legendary island in the eastern Aegean, which the Italians conquered in 1912, began governing as an official colonial possession in 1923, and continued to administer even after the Germans seized control in September 1943. The following July, the Germans rounded up all 1,700-plus residents of the Juderia and sent them first by boat and then by train to Auschwitz on what was the longest journey—measured by both time and distance—of any of the deportations. Ninety percent of them were murdered upon arrival.
Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella is a magical modern-day Scheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time—and to construct a life after that place has vanished. One Hundred Saturdays is a portrait of one of the last survivors drawn at nearly the last possible moment, as well as an account of a tender and transformative friendship between storyteller and listener, offering a powerful “reminder that the ability to listen thoughtfully is a rare and significant gift” (The Wall Street Journal).
The book is available on Amazon
About Stella Levi:
On July 23, 1944, along with the entire Jewish community of Rhodes, she was deported to Auschwitz. Stella and her sister were the only survivors of their immediate family. Even though they were Italian, they had never seen Italy where they landed in 1945 on a truck of the American army and through the assistance of the Joint Distribution Committee. They decided to continue her journey to the United States where some of her family had settled before the war. Stella has long been involved with the reconstruction and preservation of Sephardic and Italian Jewish life and traditions, offering her knowledge, guidance, and dedication to the Jewish Museum of Athens, the Jewish Museum of Rhodes, the Museum of Kehilah Kedoshah Janina, and the American Sephardi Federation. Stella appears in several films, including The Longest Journey by Ruggero Gabbai, The Island of Roses by Rebecca Samonà, and Redemption Blues by Peter Stastny. A flow of programs, publications, and projects have their source in her imagination and questions. The multimedia exhibition Los Corassones Avlan presented in 2019 in New York, was based on her recollections.
Source: Centro Primo Levi New York
About Michael Frank:
About Maira Kalman:
Rhodes Jewish Historical Foundation
