The Memorializing Power of a Name
By Michael Frank
One cold February evening nearly eight years ago, I hurried into the library at Casa Italiana, home to the Department of Italian Studies at NYU. I had decided at the last minute to attend a lecture about the generally tricky endeavor of making memorials, with a specific focus on memorials to the Holocaust, whose purpose is to encourage viewers to slow down and think. Think and learn; think and reflect; think and, ideally, remember.
I dropped into the only open seat at the table, shed my jacket, and unpacked my pen and notebook. Next to me was an elegant older woman whose wry smile seemed to comment on the fact that I had hurried into a lecture that was, at least in part, about the importance of slowing down.
She asked me where I was coming from in such a rush.
“My weekly French lesson,” I answered.
“French?” she repeated, nodding thoughtfully. Then she added, “Are you interested in knowing how French served me in my life?”
“Sure,” I answered.
And that was how it began
The woman’s name was Stella Levi, and she had been born ninety-two years earlier into the Sephardic Jewish community of Rhodes, an island in the eastern Mediterranean off the coast of Turkey that Italy had seized as the Ottoman empire was disintegrating and made an official Italian colony in 1923. Unlike the majority of the Jews who were deported to and murdered in Nazi concentration camps—as the island’s entire Jewish community was, in July of 1944—the Jews of Rhodes didn’t speak Yiddish but a form of Ladino known as Judeo Spanish, which posed a problem. Yiddish was not merely the lingua franca of the camps; most Yiddish speakers could also understand enough German to be able to follow the instructions of their captors, and following instructions was key to making it through a day—or even an hour—in this context. When the Blockälteste (barracks leader) learned that Stella and the other newly arrived young women from Rhodes also spoke French, she did them a great service by grouping them with a handful of (Yiddish-speaking) French and Belgian women.
“Because they understood what was going on,” Stella said to me that evening, “So could we. And because we understood, we were able to survive.”
Several uncanny things took place that evening. In this lecture about Holocaust memorials, I happened to sit next to a survivor. She and I both happened to speak French; we also both happened to speak Italian, the language in which Stella had been educated and one I had been working hard to master over the years (pushing aside the French I had lately been trying to retrieve).
“Too many coincidences,” Stella said as we said goodbye.
The following morning, I received a call from someone Stella and I knew in common—yet another coincidence. She said Stella had written a few pages about her childhood in Rhodes but was uncertain of her English (language again!) and wondered if I might help her polish them. The following Saturday, I found myself walking under the green awning in front of Stella’s apartment building for the first of what would turn out to be more than one hundred Saturdays, over the course of six years, that I would spend in Stella’s company.
The pages Stella had written told the story of an enserradura, an exotic practice that was common in the Jewish Rhodes of her youth. During an enserradura, an old woman in the community, a healer, used to put anxious or unhappy young girls to bed and sit by their side for an entire week, murmuring prayers and circling their faces with a handful of ashes of Jewish saints until they were cured. This one taste of Jewish Rhodes captivated me, and it made me curious to know more.
When I returned the following week with Stella’s reminiscence polished—it didn’t need much help—she and I sat together in thoughtful silence for a moment. And then I asked her if she’d ever told her story before. She said she hadn’t, not fully. I asked if she would tell me, and she said no. She wasn’t interested, she said, in being defined by what happened to her during the Holocaust.
“I am about that,” she said, “and I am about much more than that.”
I asked if she would tell me about her childhood instead.
“Yes,” she said. “That I’ll do.”
Names have a formidable memorializing power of their own. You collect them; you do important (and often sobering) math with them; you engrave them on lockets and chisel them into marble or granite; and you say them aloud—at the dinner table, in synagogue, in prayers.
Stella had a memory like none I had ever encountered; she was a conjurer, a storyteller, a modern-day Scheherazade. Week after week, she began a story that she left hanging; week after week I returned to hear more. She brought to life the lost world of her childhood and youth on this Edenic Mediterranean island, a world where Turks, Greeks, and Jews had lived in relative harmony for millennia, where old-world customs and superstitions held on well into the twentieth century, where a dynamic young woman like Stella developed ambitions and hopes for her future that history would put to a significant test.
Eventually, and only after she had begun to trust me—after we had begun to trust each other—Stella did tell me about her experience in the camps: how she survived (language was only part of the story) and how she has come to make sense of (or, in many ways, failed to make sense of) this experience as the rest of her long life unfolded.
From the moment I first sat down next to Stella, language, words, and names were central to the way she told—and I absorbed, metabolized, and retold—her story. Names of food, places, customs, cures, traditions, and above all the names of people she has known, loved, and lost.
Names have a formidable memorializing power of their own. You collect them; you do important (and often sobering) math with them; you engrave them on lockets and chisel them into marble or granite; and you say them aloud—at the dinner table, in synagogue, in prayers. Names are the centerpiece of a special ceremony held in New York City every year on International Holocaust Memorial Day, which marks the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27th. From 9 a.m. through mid-afternoon, people gather in front of the Italian Consulate on Park Avenue, where they take turns stepping up to one of four lecterns and reading, at random, from one of four open binders that contain the names of all 10,000 Jewish citizens who were deported from Italy and the Italian territories. Passersby stop and listen, or sometimes they just pass by; sometimes no one is there to listen at all. What matters is that the names are said, the hours unfold, the dead remembered.
Three years ago, I attended the reading of the names, as I have ever since Stella and I met. When it was my turn to step up to a lectern, I noticed that the page was open to the letter L. At first I didn’t think anything. But then I looked more closely and realized it was open to families by the name of Levi. I looked more closely still. These were the Levis of Rhodes, among them: Levi, Yehuda—Stella’s father—and Levi, Miriam—her mother.
How was such a thing possible? I could not say then, and I cannot now. To me it’s as mysterious as my last-minute decision to attend that lecture in 2015. It’s as mysterious as the fact that there was only one particular seat open at that table and that I had been hurrying from my French lesson, a detail, shared with a stranger, that opened up a remarkable human life to me and ended up transforming mine at the same time.
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Michael Frank is the author of What Is Missing, a novel, and The Mighty Franks, a memoir. One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World was named one of the Wall Street Journal’s top ten books of 2022, received the Natan Notable Book Award and two national book awards from the Jewish Book Council.