The lost world of Jewish Rhodes

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.’

That’s a pretty good metaphor for the recollections and observations that issue from Levi’s brain over the next six years, on Saturdays, when she and Frank work together at her Greenwich Village flat. Divided into 100 chapters, their exchanges about her life, ‘in Rhodes, and in the camps, and after the camps’ as he puts it on one such visit, form the substance of the book. The two address each other in Italian, a language of the heart for both author and subject.

Slowly, slowly, in response to such prompts as ‘When did you realise you were different?’, a lost self and a shredded world are reconstructed in imagination.