One Hundred Saturdays

April 1, 2022

After meeting 99-year-old Stella Levi at her Greenwich Village apartment to discuss the Juderia, the 500-year-old Jewish neighborhood in Rhodes where she lived until Germans deported the entire community to Auschwitz, the JQ Wingate Prize-winning Frank ended up spending One Hundred Saturdays visiting Levi to discuss her community and her resilience in the face of the Holocaust (125,000-copy first printing). Among the youngest survivors of Auschwitz still alive, 83-year-old Friedman, a retired therapist who actively campaigns against antisemitism, recounts her Holocaust experiences and the unerring instinct for survival that kept her alive in The Daughter of Auschwitz. In Bridge to the Sun, the New York Times best-selling Henderson (Sons and Soldiers) lays bare the plight of Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater even as their families back home faced racial hatred and imprisonment in concentration camps. Directly after World War II, four tough-minded Wise Gals--Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier--were instrumental in forging the CIA, and the New York Times best-selling Holt (Rise of the Rocket Girls) finally tells their story. Author of theNew York Times best-selling, multi-best-booked Agent Sonya, Macintyre relies on declassified archives, private papers, and previously unseen photos to introduce readers to the Prisoners of the Castle, that is, Colditz Castle, the high-security POW camp run by the Wehrmacht during World War II and, says Macintyre, organized according to its own officer-class structure. In Black Snow, Pulitzer Prize finalist Scott (Target Tokyo) chronicles the March 9, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo by nearly 300 U.S. B-29s, which left 16 square miles in ruins and 100,000 residents dead.

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May 30, 2022
Frank (The Mighty Franks) revisits the life of nonagenarian and Holocaust survivor Stella Levi in his incandescent latest. The two struck up a friendship after meeting in New York City in 2015, and, over six years, Frank writes that Levi became to him “a time traveler who would invite me to travel with her.” Born in 1923, Levi grew up on the Grecian island of Rhodes, in an enclave of “Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardic Italian Jews,” who, in 1944, were rounded up by German soldiers and sent to Auschwitz. Distilled through Frank’s intelligent prose and enlivened with eye-catching illustrations from Kalman, Levi’s recollections bring to vivid life the unique culture of the Juderia, its complicated colonial history, and her colorful, multilingual family as she describes how, under Italian Fascist rule in the 1920s and ’30s, all traces of Judaism vanished from the public eye. One of few Rhodeslis to survive the horrors of Auschwitz, Levi fashioned a new life in America but would eventually return to Rhodes to find its once vibrant Jewish culture decimated by years of war. Even with its sobering revelations, Frank’s narrative shines with an ebullience, thanks to the “unusually rich, textured, and evolving” life of his utterly enchanting muse. The result provides an essential, humanist look into a dark chapter of 20th-century history.

July 15, 2022
At 99, a Holocaust survivor describes her harrowing experience. In 2015, Frank met Stella Levi when they attended a lecture on Nazi Fascism at NYU's Department of Italian Studies. Levi grew up in the Juderia (Jewish quarter) of the island of Rhodes among "Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardic Italian Jews." The day after the lecture, the director of the Centro Primo Levi called Frank to ask if he wanted to help Levi (no relation to Primo) with the English in her upcoming talk. He went to her Greenwich Village apartment shortly thereafter for their first meeting. The next week, he told her he wanted to write about her life. Thus began 100 Saturday conversations spanning six years, during which Levi described her upbringing and wartime experience. At first, she refused to discuss the camps to which she and 1,650 other Rhodeslis, wedged onto "three dilapidated cargo boats," were sent. In Frank's elegant rendering, Levi restricts herself to family stories--her father's successful coal and wood business, the sibling who was the first among her sisters to be educated at the Italian high school for girls--before discussing the Fascists who introduced racial laws, disinterred Jewish cemeteries, and "set in motion a series of events that would in time lead to the destruction of this same community, which had lived in relative peace in Rhodes for nearly half a millennium." The narrative, interspersed with Kalman's color paintings of scenes from Levi's life, is an evocative and heartbreaking work. Readers only intermittently get a sense of the connection between Levi and Frank, and based on the evidence presented here, it doesn't transcend far beyond that of reporter and subject. The story Levi tells, however, is gut-wrenching in its horrifying familiarity, and Frank presents it well--even if the concept of 100 Saturdays comes across as a storytelling gimmick. A brutal yet ultimately hopeful account from one of history's darkest episodes.

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Starred review from July 1, 2022

Frank (The Mighty Franks) provides a compelling and unique story of genocide and loss. The central figure, Stella Levi, is intensely captivating and a woman with remarkable insight. In her 90s when Frank encounters her, she is cautious about sharing her story. Over the course of 100 Saturdays and several years, however, she unspools a remarkable life, starting in a vanished Old World enclave of Jews on the island of Rhodes, a time in Auschwitz, and a chapter in New York City. While her story includes the Holocaust, for Stella it is about the overwhelming force of modernity and push to discover oneself. Stella and Frank's conversations evoke a remarkable relationship, and Stella herself is a model for constant reinvention, even at her age. While memory is fallible after so long, the author always includes relevant historical context and research to fill in and fact-check Stella's stories, but it's done in a way that still honors her version. Illustrations by Kalman also bring this world to life. VERDICT An essential read for Jewish history and memoir fans. Stella is a compelling character for anyone to meet.--Margaret Heller

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2022
In 1937, at age 14, Stella Levi dreamed of leaving her island home to pursue her love of learning. Growing up, Stella rarely ventured beyond the walls of the Juderia, home to a thriving Jewish community on the island of Rhodes. But as her siblings left for the world outside, Stella began to yearn for more adventure and education than the island could provide. Seven years later, in 1944, Stella would leave the island, but under very different circumstances: German troops rounded up her entire Jewish community and transported them to Auschwitz. In her nineties, Stella met author Frank in 2015. Over the course of six years, she and the author built an unlikely friendship as Stella shared her most beloved and horrific memories, from her idyllic childhood with her grandmothers to her adolescent friendships and adventures on the island to her most traumatic experiences of deportation and surviving the war. Accompanied by illustrations from Maira Kalman, Frank writes Stella's harrowing journey with care, and the result is this beautifully crafted true story of friendship, love, survival, and redemption.

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