Reading One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank is like watching an artist piece collectively a mosaic. A splash of blue sea right here. A mom’s track over there. The odor of Purim pastries. The flash of old flame. But the mosaic is rarely accomplished. Instead, a horrible wind descends, leaving the artist to choose up the items as finest she will and start a brand new picture.
Here, the artist is Stella Levi, a 99-year-old Jewish lady residing in New York City. The mosaic is the Juderia, the principle Jewish quarter on the island of Rhodes, the place Levi was born in 1923. And the wind is the Holocaust, which reached the Juderia within the final months of World War II and scattered Levi’s dad and mom, household, pals and group. One Hundred Saturdays is the story of that point and place, however it’s also rather more: a narrative of friendship, survival, reinvention and braveness.
Frank, writer of The Mighty Franks and What Is Missing and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, met Levi by probability—or maybe serendipity—when he rushed in late to attend a lecture, and the elegant older lady within the chair subsequent to him struck up a dialog. The following Saturday, he discovered himself in Levi’s Greenwich Village condo, the primary of 100 Saturdays that he would spend together with her over the next six years. Over the course of these visits, Levi turned each a good friend and muse as she recounted the minutest particulars of her life, from its wealthy starting to its outstanding current.
Maira Kalman’s illustrations, closely influenced by Matisse with their misleading simplicity, wealthy colours and delicate textures, are good enhances to Levi’s story, portraying vanished scenes from life on Rhodes earlier than the Holocaust. Together with the textual content of Frank’s stunning guide, they create a delicate portrait of a rare lady. Fiercely impartial, keenly clever and remorselessly trustworthy, Levi refuses to be outlined solely by the tragedy of her youth. Her life has been a relentless evolution, and her remaining years are being lived with the identical vitality as her earliest ones.
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