First Look: One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World
This excerpt is part of our First Look column, where you’ll find exclusive sneak peeks of new and forthcoming books across all genres!
Michael Frank is the author of the novel What is Missing, which he has adapted into a screenplay for a feature film being produced by Morning Moon Productions. His memoir, The Mighty Franks, was published in 2017 and featured on Telegraph’s 50 best books of the year.
His latest novel, One Hundred Saturdays, was published September 6th. To learn more about Stella and the making of the book, watch a brief documentary here.
Listen to Zibby’s interview with Michael here.
The sea isn’t wine-dark so much as a blue so bottomless and transparent that it hurts to look into it, the way it can hurt to look into another person’s eyes. I am gazing at this bottomless, transparent blue and I am listening to a ninety-two-year-old woman describe what happened by its shore, at this spot where we are standing, seventy-one years ago nearly to the day.
July 23, 1944: A Sunday. The Germans deliberately chose a Sunday, she tells me, because on Sunday all the shops were closed. And they sounded the air-raid sirens, even though no planes flew overhead, even though no bombs fell out of the sky that day, because the sirens kept everyone indoors—everyone else. In all the hours—six, maybe more— that it took them, more than 1,700 of them, to walk down to the port, not a single civilian bore witness, or objected, or came to say good-bye.
It was like a funeral cortege, she says, of people in mourning for themselves.
At this spot where we are standing, the entire Jewish community of the island of Rhodes—her community, on her island, the place she considered her own little piece of the earth—was loaded onto three boats that would take these 1,700-plus human beings to the port at Piraeus, and from there to the prison at Haidari, and from there to the trains that would deliver them to Auschwitz two weeks later, cumulatively the longest journey, measured by time and geography, of any of the deportations and in many ways one of the most, if not the most, absurd.
“We were old people and young women and children,” she says. “Most of us had never been off the island in our entire lives, and that included me. It would have been simpler to murder us all here and let us, at least, be buried with our own kind.”
Now the ninety-two-year-old—Stella Levi—looks at the water, at the horizon. She stares at the clean, sharp line that separates water from sky, one blue from another. Then she turns back toward me. Her face is shadowed, her eyes remote, seeing what I am unable to imagine.
For a long moment she is silent. Then she says, “Maybe after a certain point you can no longer come back in person. Maybe you can only go back in your mind.”
Stella has come, not for the first time but possibly the last, to the Juderia of Rhodes—to connect, or reconnect, or try to connect, once again, to the neighborhood in which she was born and grew up, like her parents and grandparents before her, and generations before them, all the way back to the late fifteenth century, when these Sephardic Jews were banished from Spain and scattered across Europe and the Mediterranean. Because she has come here, I have too, even though I don’t yet know her even a fraction as well as I will. Having learned, while I was in Rome, that she was planning to make a late-in-life return visit to Rhodes, I booked a ticket and more or less invited myself. Later she will tell me this was one of the reasons why she decided to trust me with her story. Later I will understand that I went, in part, to earn her trust.
The two of us had met just a few months earlier at Casa Italiana, the Greenwich Village home of the Department of Italian Studies at NYU, where one evening in February 2015, late for a lecture, I hastily dropped into a chair, the only open seat remaining at a long rectangular wooden table. As I was catching my breath, a question came floating over my shoulder, posed in a thick Italian accent: “Where are you coming from that you’re in such a hurry?”
The woman asking this question was older, elegant. Her features were emphatic, her hair tinted brown and immaculately shaped to frame her face. She was wearing a dark skirt, a cardigan, silver rings with stones on alternating long fingers.
I told her that I was coming from a French lesson. She nodded thoughtfully.
I had come to Casa Italiana, as she had, to listen to a talk about the relationship among museums, memory, and Nazi Fascism. The speakers would discuss memorials, the challenges of marking the actual settings where abhorrent events have taken place or of marking, or commemorating, these abhorrent events in unrelated places.
She had a second question now: “Might I ask why you are studying French?”
Her brown eyes were sharpened, honed with curiosity. I sensed her wanting, expecting, an incisive or at least an interesting answer. I only had the answer that I had. I explained that French was the first foreign language I ever learned, beginning in junior high school; after years of speaking more Italian, I told her, I was trying to bring it back. I didn’t want to embarrass myself when I traveled, I said. I would like to read Proust in his own language one day.
Somehow, under her fierce gaze, I feared that all this came out as baguette-croissant-beret—as in, I would like to be able to ask for such items in a Parisian shop.
She nodded again. “Are you interested in knowing how French served me in my life?
Having discovered that I spoke Italian, she switched languages, as now so did I. Certamente.”
“When I arrived in Auschwitz,” she said, “they didn’t know what to do with us. Jews who don’t speak Yiddish? What kind of Jews are those? Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardic Italian Jews from the island of Rhodes, I tried to explain, with no success. They asked us if we spoke German. No. Polish? No. French? ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘French I speak . . .’ ”
She paused. “I spoke French, some French, because my sisters attended the Alliance Israélite Universelle. What they studied, they shared at home. Also I went on to study the language in school. Many of us girls from Rhodes did. Because we spoke French, at Auschwitz they put us with the French and Belgian women, who spoke French and Yiddish, and a little German too, enough so that they could translate and they could communicate. And they understood. Because they understood what was going on, they managed to survive—and therefore so did we.”
She sat back in her chair. “C’est comme ça que le français m’a servi dans ma vie.”
The following morning, I received a call from Natalia Indrimi, the director of Centro Primo Levi, a New York–based organization dedicated to exploring the Italian Jewish past that had organized the lecture. I knew Natalia because I had asked her for help researching a story set in Italy during the war years, a subject that had interested me ever since I lived in Italy for a time in my twenties.
Stella Levi, Natalia said, the woman I’d sat next to the previous night, had enjoyed her visit with me. When I said that I had too, she went on to say that Stella had a little something she had written about her childhood and youth in Rhodes for a brief talk to give at one of Centro Primo Levi’s upcoming evenings, and as she was unsure of her written English, she wondered if I would meet with her to help adjust those few pages.
Two days later, as I passed under a green awning on University Place, I had no way of knowing that this was the first of one hundred Saturdays spread out over the next six years that I would spend in the company of a woman I would come to think of as a Scheherazade, a witness, a conjurer, a time traveler who would invite me to travel with her.
Maybe you can only go back in your mind?
Maybe.
From One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World © 2022 by Michael Frank. Reprinted by permission of Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster.
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Michael Frank’s essays, articles, and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Slate, The Yale Review, Salmagundi, The TLS, and Tablet, among other publications. His fiction has been presented at Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story, and his travel writing has been collected in Italy: The Best Travel Writing from The New York Times. He served as a Contributing Writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review for nearly ten years. A recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives with his family in New York City and Liguria, Italy.