Monday lecture with Michael Frank

Summer Lecture Series

August 28, 2023

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

With nearly a century of life behind her, Stella Levi had never before spoken in detail about her past. Then she met Michael Frank. He came to her Greenwich Village apartment one Saturday afternoon to ask her a question about the Juderia, the neighborhood on the Greek island of Rhodes where she’d grown up in a Jewish community that had thrived there for half a millennium.

Neither of them could know this was the first of one hundred Saturdays for six years that they would spend in each other’s company. During these meetings, Stella traveled back in time to conjure what it felt like to come of age on this luminous, legendary island in the eastern Aegean, which the Italians conquered in 1912, began governing as an official colonial possession in 1923, and continued to administer even after the Germans seized control in September 1943. The following July, the Germans rounded up all 1,700-plus residents of the Juderia and sent them first by boat and then by train to Auschwitz on what was the longest journey—measured by both time and distance—of any of the deportations. Ninety percent of them were murdered upon arrival.

The Mount’s general COVID-19 Health and Safety Guidelines can be found here.

The Mount is a Massachusetts Cultural Council UP designated organization welcoming participants of all disabilities. Please contact The Mount at 413-551-5100 or by email, info@edithwharton.org, to discuss accommodations needed to participate fully in this event.

Thanks to our sponsors:

  • This year, The Mount's annual Summer Lecture Series celebrates its 30th anniversary!
  • $25 Members, $30 General Admission; Free for graduate, undergraduate students & children 18 and under.
  • All lectures will take place in an outdoor, open-sided tent. We look forward to seeing you rain or shine!
  • Books are available for purchase through The Mount's Bookstore before and during the event.

Michael Frank has contributed essays, book reviews, and short stories to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, The TLS, and Tablet, among other publications. He is the author of What Is Missing, a novel, and The Mighty Franks, a memoir, awarded the 2018 JQ Wingate Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Telegraph and The New Statesman. His most recent publication, One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for the Lost World, received the Jewish Book Council’s Natan Notable Book Award; it was named one of the Wall Street Journal’s top ten books of 2022. A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Frank lives with his family in New York City and Camogli, Italy. 

Review

“Never underestimate the power of friendship at any stage in life. That’s one of the lessons from Michael Frank’s beautiful portrait of the wise and charming nonagenarian, Stella Levi, one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors from the vanished Sephardic community of the Juderia on the Greek island of Rhodes. In relaying her life story, Mr. Frank has pulled off something special: One Hundred Saturdays is a sobering yet heartening book about how friendship, remembrance, and being heard can help assuage profound dislocation and loss. It is also a reminder that the ability to listen thoughtfully is a rare and significant gift.”

Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal

  • One of Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Books of the Year
  • Winner of the National Jewish Book Awards for Holocaust Memoir and Sephardic Culture
  • Recipient of the Jewish Book Council’s Natan Notable Book Award