One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World

Written by Michael Frank

Narrated by Michael Frank

A 2022 Audible Editor's Selection

One of 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).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Sep 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781797147611

Michael Frank

Michael Frank's short fiction and essays have appeared in the Yale Review, Salmagundi, Glimmer Train, the New York Times Magazine, and Tablet, among other publications, and they have been anthologized in Mother Knows: 24 Tales of Motherhood and Not For Bread Alone: Writers on Food, Wine, and the Art of Eating. 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. As a Los Angeles Times book critic for nearly 10 years, Frank covered literary fiction and biography, Jewish and Italian history, gastronomy and art history. He has written frequently for the New York Times on architecture and culture.

Reviews for One Hundred Saturdays

[juanita · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It is a breathtaking book that makes you feel you are traveling in time and somehow part of the story. It inspired you to hold on to your traditions closer.

[Shelley Swift · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed the author's voice as he conveyed this story, and I found the recordings of Stella's songs and reflections to be a valuable gift to me as a listener.

[Suzanne Prouty · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A reflection of StellaLevi’s life that is defined by the Balinese saying: man is a god; man is a demon…