With nearly a century behind her, Stella Levi never spoke in detail about her past, until essayist Michael Frank visited her Greenwich Village apartment to ask about the Juderia in Rhodes, where she was part of a Sephardic Jewish community that was deported in its entirety to Auschwitz.

In the resulting book, a Wall Street Journal Top 10 of 2022, Stella reveals what it was like to grow up in an extraordinary place at an extraordinary time—and to construct a life after that place vanished. She joins The Mighty Franks author to discuss her story and their transformative friendship.

Please note booking and registration for this event closes 10 minutes prior to the advertised start time.

In Association with the Rabin Chair Forum of The George Washington University and Jewish Book Council.

Michael Frank is the author of the memoir The Mighty Franks and the novel What is Missing. His essays, articles, and short stories have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic and The TLS, among other publications. He served as a Contributing Writer to the Los Angeles Times Book Review for nearly ten years. A recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives with his family in New York City and Liguria, Italy.

Stella Levi was born on the Island of Rhodes and on 23rd July 1944, when Stella was aged 14, she and the entire Jewish community of Rhodes were deported to Auschwitz. Stella and her sister were the only survivors of their immediate family. Following the war, she and her sister moved to the United States where some of her family had settled before the war. Stella has long been involved with the reconstruction and preservation of Sephardic and Italian Jewish life and traditions, offering her knowledge, guidance, and dedication to the Jewish Museum of Athens, the Jewish Museum of Rhodes, the Museum of Kehilah Kedoshah Janina, and the American Sephardi Federation. Stella appears in several films, including The Longest Journey by Ruggero Gabbai, The Island of Roses by Rebecca Samonà, and Redemption Blues by Peter Stastny.

The daughter of Iraqi-Jewish refugees, Lyn Julius is a journalist, blogger, speaker and author of Uprooted: How 3,000 years of Jewish Civilisation in the Arab World Vanished Overnight (Vallentine Mitchell, 2018). She is a co-founder of Harif, the UK Association of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa.