Stella Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, recalls the vibrant, long-established Jewish community that existed in the Dodecanese before the Nazi deportations in 1944
Janet Malcolm’s formulation that a ‘journalist is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse’ comes to mind on page two of the darkly refulgent One Hundred Saturdays. That’s when the author Michael Frank mentions it was his idea to accompany his new friend, Stella Levi, on a journey back to her native Rhodes. Readers feel protective of old women, and all the more so if, like Levi, they are Holocaust survivors. As if to allay readers’ apprehensions, Frank writes: ‘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.’
Though it seems a bit soon to be talking about trust, we’ll take Frank’s word on the matter. Given that Levi is 92 when the book opens and nearly 100 when it ends, he hasn’t got a second to lose. Granted, she is an amazingly youthful near-centenarian. Early in their acquaintance she springs up out of her seat to get something. Unnerved by the sight of an aged woman in mid-air, Frank remarks: ‘It’s as if a tightly wound coil is set free.’
Read the review by Laurel Berger in The Spectator.