But for a chance meeting with author Michael Franks (at a New York-based organization researching Italian- Jewish history) Stella Levi would remain unknown as would the indelible saga of her life--- a Ladino speaking Sephardic-Italian, Jewish, wonder woman.
Now captured in a compelling memoir (colorfully enlivened with illustrations by the inimitable Maira Kalman) One Hundred Saturdays, reveals why Stella Levi then 92 refused to be pigeonholed “as a story-teller of the Shoah,” nor identified as its victim.
A sole survivor of a large family, Levi nimbly portrays “old Rhodes” where she spent her youth in the ‘Juderia’, a walled Jewish Quarter located on an Island on the Aegean Sea. She speaks with pride about her seven siblings and her Jewish ancestors who, years before she was born, lived peacefully within the Ottoman Empire and after 1912 under Italian governance.
Though her neighbors in Rhodes were Turks, Greeks and Italians, her identity remained Jewish. She vividly recalls her community of “Rhodeslis” (Jews in Rhodes) their customs and traditions. She remembers their unique Sephardic cuisine, their Kahal Shalom Synagogue (built in 1527) and their expressions of mourning for the dead, eating hard boiled eggs at the shivah just as did her predecessors generations before.
In the early 1930s few Rhodeslis felt the winds of WWll in Europe. However, with the promulgation of dictator Mussolini’s racial laws in 1938, Stella’s idyllic life evaporated.
Several of her siblings fled to America. Stella was immediately banished from high school. Her father lost his business. The remnant of Jews who remained in Rhodes, in hope of better times, adjusted themselves to the German occupiers who arrived in September 1943. Nobody suspected that ten months later, the entire community of 1,650 Jews would be rounded up and deported to Auschwitz, Stella and her sister Renee among them. Most of the Jews were murdered upon arrival, as were Levi’s parents.
Reluctant to tell her “story about the camps” Levi spent six years being interviewed by author Michael Franks after which he earned her trust to write her memoir. She spoke openly about her private high school education, her love of Italian music, its language, opera and theatre. She schmoozed about the three men who had a profound influence over her, revealed why her marriage failed and her disappointment over the ruptured relationship with her only son. But she hesitatingly shared the time she became “unrecognizable” after only a single week at Auschwitz where she robbed and cheated and did “things that were no longer human.” To survive, Stella Levi implemented two weapons that sustained her life ---detachment from the past and adaptation to the “perpetual present.” A remarkable story of an astonishing woman, Levi hopes to celebrate her 100th birthday in 2023.
