One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank

One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank

One of The Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year * Winner of the National Jewish Book Awards for Holocaust Memoir and Sephardic Culture * Recipient of the Jewish Book Council's Natan Notable Book Award * Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal

The remarkable story of ninety-nine-year-old Stella Levi whose conversations with the author over the course of six years bring to life the vibrant world of Jewish Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz that extinguished ninety percent of her community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman who lived to tell the tale.

With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood on the Greek island of Rhodes where she'd grown 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 the course of six years that they would spend in each other's company. During these meetings Stella traveled back in time to conjure what it felt like to come of age on this luminous, legendary island in the eastern Aegean, which the Italians conquered in 1912, began governing as an official colonial possession in 1923, and continued to administer even after the Germans seized control in September 1943. The following July, the Germans rounded up all 1,700-plus residents of the Juderia and sent them first by boat and then by train to Auschwitz on what was the longest journey--measured by both time and distance--of any of the deportations. Ninety percent of them were murdered upon arrival.

Probing and courageous, candid and sly, Stella is a magical modern-day Scheherazade whose stories reveal what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time--and to construct a life after that place has vanished. One Hundred Saturdays is a portrait of one of the last survivors drawn at nearly the last possible moment, as well as an account of a tender and transformative friendship between storyteller and listener, offering a powerful "reminder that the ability to listen thoughtfully is a rare and significant gift" (The Wall Street Journal).

His short fiction was included at Symphony Space's Selected Shorts: A Festival of the Short Story, and his travel writing was published in Italy: The Best Travel Writing from The New York Times. For nearly ten years, he contributed to the Los Angeles Times Book Review as a Contributing Writer. He splits his time between New York City and Liguria, Italy, with his family.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781982167233
ISBN 10	1982167238
Title	One Hundred Saturdays
Author	Michael Frank
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Simon & Schuster
Year published	2023-09-12
Number of pages	240
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.