Book Recommendation, One Hundred Saturdays, by Michael Frank

I just finished reading a quite extraordinary book, One Hundred Saturdays, by Michael Frank. The author spent seven years of Saturdays interviewing a woman named Stella Levi, who grew up in the Sephardic community of Rhodes before it was obliterated by the Nazis. Stella was among the ten percent of people who survived. She’s an extraordinary figure, complex, articulate and full of life well into her nineties.

For me, this book also felt deeply personal in how it intersects with my forthcoming novel, one inspired by my maternal grandmother, a Sephardic Jewish woman from Turkey. Both stories evoke the multilingual and cosmopolitan nature of Eastern Sephardic culture, the place of song, food, adages and healing rituals, as well as the strong pull of the modern world for a young woman. But my particular obsessions aside, this is just an incredible story. The relationship between the author and his subject is rendered in beautiful ways so that the book is, among other things, a meditation on slow listening and long friendship.

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