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TBA Book Club-“one Hundred Saturdays” by Michael Frank
October 16 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Thursday,October 16, at 7:30, to discuss the nonfiction book, One HundredSaturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World, by MichaelFrank (Author), andillustrated by Maira Kalman. The book is available in a hardbackedition, is 222 pages, and was published in 2022. It may be found at theOakland and Berkeley libraries, as well as viaLink+:
FromAmazon:
Oneof Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Books of the Year * Winnerof the National Jewish Book Awards for Holocaust Memoir and SephardicCulture * Recipient of the Jewish Book Council’s Natan Notable BookAward * Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal
The remarkable story of ninety-nine-year-old Stella Levi whose conversationswith the author over the course of six years bring to life the vibrant world ofJewish Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz that extinguished ninety percent ofher community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman who lived to tell thetale. With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had neverbefore spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came toher Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a questionabout the Juderia, the neighborhood on the Greek island of Rhodes where she’dgrown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium.
Neither of them could know this was the first of one hundred Saturdays over thecourse of six years that they would spend in each other’s company. During thesemeetings Stella traveled back in time to conjure what it felt like to come ofage on this luminous, legendary island in the eastern Aegean, which theItalians conquered in 1912, began governing as an official colonial possessionin 1923, and continued to administer even after the Germans seized control inSeptember 1943. The following July, the Germans rounded up all 1,700-plusresidents of the Juderia and sent them first by boat and then by train toAuschwitz on what was the longest journey—measured by both time and distance—ofany of the deportations. Ninety percent of them were murdered upon arrival.
Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella is a magical modern-dayScheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to grow up in anextraordinary place in an extraordinary time—and to construct a life after thatplace has vanished. One Hundred Saturdays is a portraitof one of the last survivors drawn at nearly the last possible moment, as wellas an account of a tender and transformative friendship between storyteller andlistener, offering a powerful “reminder that the ability to listen thoughtfullyis a rare and significant gift” (The Wall Street Journal).
