9/12/2023 0 Comments Ig grid ideasFrank, born after World War II, came to the lecture out of interest. The program that drew them both to the Casa Italiana that evening was a discussion of museums, memory, and the atrocities committed under what Italians call nazifascismo, that infernal partnership between Benito Mussolini’s puppet Republic of Salò and the German occupation of Italy between 19. Jews who don’t speak Yiddish? What kind of Jews are those? Judeo-Spanish-speaking Sephardic Italian Jews from the island of Rhodes, I tried to explain, with no success. “When I arrived in Auschwitz,” she said, “they didn’t know what to do with us. Knowing French, she revealed, had not only served her but saved her: Stella Levi had a more complicated story to tell. She followed with two more questions: “Might I ask why you are studying French?” and then, “Are you interested in knowing how French served me in my life?” (Evidently the Casa Italiana observed a properly Italian sense of timing for starting its lectures.) Frank told her he was studying French to reacquaint himself with a language he’d learned in school but had since buried under layers of Italian. As he plopped into the sole remaining seat around a long table, the elegant older woman next to him asked, in a thick Italian accent, “Where are you coming from that you’re in such a hurry?” A French lesson, he replied. One evening in 2015, the writer Michael Frank rushed in late to a lecture at the Casa Italiana, the home of New York University’s Department of Italian Studies in Greenwich Village. Stella Levi (front row center) with members of her family and friends outside the Juderia, Rhodes, late 1920s illustration by Maira Kalman
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