One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank

I found this in an unusual way--I am not a big fan of the Wall Street Journal, though I know that it is a much esteemed paper, just not my cup of tea. This year, the third year in a row that I have been reading at an accelerated rate, I decided to read their Best Books of 2022 and this (and several other unusual choices) was on it. It is a memoir written not by the person herself, but rather someone who met her and became fascinated by her story. The book is about Stella Levi, a 99-year-old Jewish woman living in New York City. He met her by chance when he rushed in late to attend a lecture, and the elegant older woman in the chair next to him struck up a conversation. The following Saturday, he found himself in Levi’s Greenwich Village apartment, the first of 100 Saturdays that he would spend with her over the following six years. Stella lived in Juderia, the main Jewish quarter on the island of Rhodes, where Levi was born in 1923, and where he ancestors had lived since 1492 when they were exiled from Spain during the Inquisition. She was a teenager when the Holocaust reached the Juderia in the last months of World War II and scattered Levi’s parents, family, friends and community. She ended up in Auschwitz, and her stories about what it took to survive, how easy it was to die, and what she learned are at once fascinating and horrifying, but also different than other WWII memoirs that I have read. It is the story of that time and place, but it is also much more: a story of friendship, survival, reinvention and courage.