Fountaindale Public Library

One hundred Saturdays, Stella Levi and the search for a lost world, Michael Frank ; [artwork by Maira Kalman]

eng

Includes bibliographical references

illustrations

no index present

non fiction

One hundred Saturdays

1334494393

Michael Frank ; [artwork by Maira Kalman]

Stella Levi and the search for a lost world

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 in Rhodes where she'd grown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millenium. 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 began governing as an official possession in 1923 and transformed over the next two decades until the Germans seized control in September 1943. The following July they rounded up all 1,650 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. Stella was born into the mysterious world of Jewish Rhodes, witnessed its destruction, and lived to tell the tale. Probing and courageous, elegant and sly, she is a modern-day Scheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to be formed by an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time - and to construct a life after that place has vanished. This book is a portrait of one of the last survivors, drawn at nearly the last possible moment; it is also an account of a tender and transformative friendship that develops between storyteller and listener as they explore the fundamental mystery of what it means to collect, share, and interpret the deepest truths of a life deeply lived

adult

100 SaturdaysStella Levi and the search for a lost world