One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank

Stella Levi had never spoken about her past, until she met Michael Frank. One Saturday, Michael stopped by her apartment to ask a question about the Jewish Community of Rhodes, the Juderia, a neighborhood in the old city of this faraway, then Italian, now Greek island. Michael would continue to visit Stella for 6 years, over one hundred Saturdays, where Stella would slowly begin to tell her story. 

Stella paints a vivid picture of her then thriving community; one that was grappling with a transition to modernity. She describes the Juderia as “such an alive place… alive with scent, color, taste, movement, sound.” Her most animated story describes how she would wake up in the morning to sounds of a call to prayer for the mosque nearby, the gurgle of coffee being made downstairs, and her mother’s kneading, mixing and whisking. Next, she says, the housemaids (for those that had them) would come and sing while they worked in a call-and-response in Judeo-Spanish. Then the men would gather in the courtyard of the synagogue, and finally the children would walk to school. 

Stella grapples with the question of identity, having grown up on an island always changing hands from Ottoman, to Greek, to Italian to German-occupied. When she arrived in Auschwitz, she says that they did not know what to do with the Rhodesli community. “Jews who don’t speak Yiddish? What kind of Jews are those? Judeo-Spanish speaking Sephardic Italian Jews from the Island of Rhodes,” with some French, she tries to explain. 

Stella’s book is a gift, not only to the Sephardic community of Rhodes, but to all people who understand intimately what it means when Stella says, “leshos de mosotros,” meaning, far from us, or when she dreams about “dislocation, relocation, a confusion about where home was, what home was.” Stella gives all those who have lost their world the strength to be themselves, when they see themselves in her. 

What We Read in 2022 

By the Sephardic Young Professionals Book Club 

• Sephardi Lives: A Documentary History, 1700–1950 by Julia Philips Cohen and Sarah Abrevaya Stein (January 2022)

• French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israelite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey 1860-1925 by Aron Rodrigue (March 2022)

• Forging Ties, Forging Passports by Devi Mays (May/June 2022)

• An Ode to Salonika: The Ladino Verses of Bouena Sarfatty (July/August 2022)

• Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine by Michelle Campos (September/October 2022)

• One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank (Dec 2022)