One Hundred Saturdays
The title of One Hundred Saturdays (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2023, $19.99) refers to all the days that author Michael Frank sat with ninety- two-year-old Stella Levi and heard her reminisce about her childhood in the Juderia—the Jewish quarter of Rhodes— and the tragic and devastating fate her community met in the Holocaust. The result is the book that I picked up, in part because during this wartime, Israelis have been coming back and forth through places like Cyprus and Greece, which provoked my interest in the history of Jewish communities elsewhere in the Mediterranean.
Levi grew up in a warm extended family as the youngest of seven siblings, though by 1940—when she was seventeen—all but the sister closest to her in age had left the island. Her family lived across the street from the synagogue, attended the Turkish baths once a week before Shabbat, cooked their meals in communal ovens, and spoke to one another in Judeo-Spanish. But they were also a part of a broader diverse community, where Jews lived in harmony alongside Italians, Greeks, and Turks.
Stella attended an Italian-speaking Catholic school outside the Juderia and dreamed of attending university in Italy; when she was fourteen, she packed a suitcase, and told her parents that one day she would set off there on her own. The wider world did come close for Stella Levi, but not in the way she hoped or planned. Jews had been living in Rhodes for half a millennium, and under Italian control for twenty-five years, when, in 1938, Mussolini’s racial laws were promulgated, barring Jews from schools and from all public employment. Stella’s father was forced to sell his wood and coal business, and Stella and her friends, barred from school, began studying in secret with a group of professors, including one who promised her, “This war will end soon and all this antisemitism will go away, and then you will go to university, I know it.”
But alas, it was not to be. In 1943 Mussolini was overthrown and the Germans invaded Italy seizing control of Rhodes. The British began bombing the island in an attempt to seize control from the Germans, and Stella’s family fled the Juderia to live with their Greek friends in a nearby village. But this proved short-lived; in the summer of 1944, the Germans rounded up nearly all of the 1700 Jews in Rhodes, locked them up for two days in the former headquarters of the Italian airforce, and then forced them to march several hours to the port, where they boarded three dilapidated cargo boats bound for Athens. From there they were deported in cattle cars to Auschwitz. It makes little sense why the Nazis— who by that summer had already lost much of Italy—spent so much effort and energy to round up and deport the Jews of Rhodes, only to murder them elsewhere. What is clear, though, is that Stella’s survival instinct kicked in immediately; the moment the train pulled up, she rushed in to stake out a space for her parents and her sister Renee next to one of the only high windows, which enabled them to breathe in spite of the intense heat and increasingly toxic air. Stella was unable to save her parents—she was separated from them upon arrival in Auschwitz— but she and Renee survived due to their resourcefulness, intuition, and solidarity with other women. “The women, you know, seemed to do better in the camps than the men,” Stella told Michael Frank, explaining that the men thought too much and were incapable of detaching themselves from the reality around them; the women, in contrast, robbed, bartered, bargained, and did whatever it took to survive another day.
Michael Frank documents not just how Stella and Renee survived the war, but also how they reinvented themselves from the moment of liberation: “The minute the Americans came we started making our beds, combing our hair as best we could. Just by being there they gave us a taste of the outside world.” Stella and her sister traveled by Jeep across the Alps to Italy, finding their way to Bologna, where they were taken in by a Jewish family that had just emerged from hiding in Switzerland. It took several months before the sisters obtained the visas that enabled them to travel to America to be reunited with their older siblings; even then, Stella remained uncertain about where her future lay, ultimately making her home in New York, where, many years later, she met Michael Frank by chance at a lecture on Nazi Fascism at NYU. Early in the book, Stella asks Frank if perhaps she ought to see a psychiatrist if she is to revisit the trauma of her past; towards the end of their one hundred Saturdays, she realizes how much she has gained from their encounters: “Our talking, it seems like it’s kept me alive.”
Ilana Kurshan’s newest book is Children of the Book (excerpted in this issue).
