Illustrations by Maira Kalman
(Nonfiction, 227 pp. 2022)
With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank in a chance encounter conducted entirely in Italian. He followed up one Saturday afternoon, visiting her Greenwich Village apartment to ask Stella about the Juderia, the Rhodes neighborhood where she’d grown up in a thriving Sephardic community whose rituals contributed to its vibrant identity for half a millennium. It initiated a poignantly honest and evocative dialogue in which Levi recounts her spirited youth in the eastern Aegean, continuing through the Rhodes Jewish community’s unanticipated deportation to Auschwitz. Winner of two 2022 National Jewish Book Awards, the American Library Association’s 2022 Sophie Brody Award for best Jewish book of the year, and named one of the ten best books of 2022 by the Wall Street Journal.
Review by Kyra Lisse (plus Holocaust Memoir Award and Sephardic Culture Award judges’ remarks), Jewish Book Council, September 8, 2022
Review by Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal [reproduced in Centro Primo Levi New York], September 8, 2022
Review by Diane Cole, Hadassah Magazine, September 2022
Review, by Hannah E. Gadway, The Harvard Crimson, November 8, 2022
Review by Deborah Mason, Book Page, September 2022
Review by Evelyn Frick, “A Sephardic Holocaust Survivor Shares Her Lost World in ‘One Hundred Saturdays,” HeyAlma, September 13, 2022
Reflection by Michael Frank, “When Writing a Book Means Learning to Listen,” LitHub, September 6, 2022
Interview at Casa Italia New York University, YouTube, September 2022
Interview in Rhodes with Aaron Hassan, “Stella Levi & La Juderia of Rhodes: Part 1,” YouTube, 2000
Interview with Judith Rosenbaum, Jewish Women’s Archive, November 2022
Publisher’s page (includes short video and podcast narrated by the author)
