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. Some of the Jewish inhabitants of prewar Rhodes came from families who had been there forever. Others, like Levi’s ancestors, arrived in the 15th century when they fled the Spanish Inquisition. These latecomers brought with them a culture and a language, Ladino (essentially old Spanish with borrowings from Hebrew, Turkish and Portuguese), that had been handed on to successive generations of exiles. The chain of transmission was broken in 1944 when the Germans occupied Rhodes and, with vital help from the fastidious carabinieri, located and deported 1,650 Jews to Nazi death camps. Of the 151 who survived, Levi is among the few who are still living.

She was born in 1923 at a liminal moment in the island’s history. Italy had seized Rhodes and the Dodecanese islands from the Turks in 1912 as part of an attempt to join the colonial power game. With the ratification of the Second Treaty of Lausanne 11 years later, the Italians moved in, paving roads and lopping minarets in the name of modernity. Levi belonged to the Jewish quarter, though her education (at the scuola femminile, where the nuns were devoted to God, Dante and Mussolini), intellectual affinities and personal ties with Greeks and Italians placed her beyond its stone walls. 

You may ask: what of the ghastly sea voyage and the train journey to Auschwitz and the unfathomable camps? As Levi doesn’t go along with the notion of a single self, she’s always been reluctant to tell of that aspect of her experience: ‘I didn’t want my identity to be fixed in that way. I didn’t want that number tattooed on my arm. I didn’t want them to look at me and gasp “poverina”,’ she explains to Frank. There follows a long contest of wills between author and subject that ends in a draw. Eventually she talks, but at times she also holds back brilliantly, getting at truths through epigrammatic ironies. (Of a cousin with whom she was at Auschwitz, she remarks: ‘Sara’s mistrustfulness was part of her courage. She had the courage to remain a wary human being.’)

The book could have been a mere pasticcio, to use one of Levi’s favourite words, of scattered impressions and remembered things, and it still would have been enjoyable. But Frank and Levi, it seems, are up to something more interesting: a record of a life, and also of their own deepening intimacy as a woman at the far edge of life gamely considers and reconsiders primordial questions that haven’t any definitive answers. Occasionally one wishes for a bit more historical context. Then again, as the writer-survivor Aharon Appelfeld once told Philip Roth in an interview:

The Jewish experience in the second world war was not ‘historical’. We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious, the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day.