Natan and the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil are thrilled to announce the Spring 2022 Natan Notable Book: Michael Frank’s One Hun­dred Sat­ur­days: Stel­la Levi and the Search for a Lost World (Avid Read­er Press/​Simon & Schus­ter, Sep­tem­ber 2022).

Natan Notable Books at the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil has pre­vi­ous­ly been award­ed to Bari Weiss’ How to Fight Anti-Semi­tism (2019), Susie Linfield’s The Lion’s Den (2019), Ilan Sta­vans’ The Sev­enth Heav­en (2020), Nan­cy Sinkoff’s From Left to Right (2020), and Dara Horn’s Peo­ple Love Dead Jews. Natan Notable Books is an evo­lu­tion of the Natan Book Award, which was pre­vi­ous­ly award­ed to Mat­ti Friedman’s Spies of No Coun­try (2018) and Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land (2013).

Twice a year, Natan Notable Books rec­og­nizes recent­ly pub­lished or about-to-be-pub­lished non-fic­tion books that promise to cat­alyze con­ver­sa­tions aligned with the themes of Natan’s grant­mak­ing: rein­vent­ing Jew­ish life and com­mu­ni­ty for the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, shift­ing notions of indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, the his­to­ry and future of Israel, under­stand­ing and con­fronting con­tem­po­rary forms of anti­semitism, and the evolv­ing rela­tion­ship between Israel and world Jewry.

In One Hun­dred Sat­ur­days, Michael Frank unearths and reveals – week by week, Sat­ur­day after Sat­ur­day — the lives, cul­ture and his­to­ry of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of Rhodes. Through the sto­ries and mem­o­ries of one of its mem­bers, Stel­la Levi, the vibran­cy of the Jud­e­ria — the Jew­ish neigh­bor­hood in Rhodes that had exist­ed for half a mil­len­ni­um until the Nazis deport­ed the entire com­mu­ni­ty to Auschwitz — and of Stel­la her­self jump off the page. Stel­la shines as a sto­ry­teller and as a char­ac­ter, as she relates her life in Rhodes, her com­mu­ni­ty and its his­to­ry, bring­ing the read­er into a Jew­ish world that few have knowl­edge of today.

As Tali Rosen­blatt-Cohen, a co-chair of the Natan Notable Books com­mit­tee, observed, ​“One Hun­dred Sat­ur­days recounts in stun­ning detail the Jew­ish cus­toms, folk­lore and habits of the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Rhodes who had lived in near iso­la­tion since the Span­ish Inqui­si­tion. In bring­ing this world to life, and in con­vey­ing the bru­tal swift­ness with which it was destroyed, Frank and Levi remind us of all that we will nev­er know about our his­to­ries — both per­son­al and col­lec­tive. Natan is eager to high­light that in addi­tion to this being the sto­ry of one woman’s tenac­i­ty in the face of the Holo­caust, the book is also an urgent reminder of the rich and var­ied worlds that were lost to us in the 20th century.”

The author will receive a $5,000 cash prize, as well as cus­tomized sup­port for pro­mot­ing the book and its ideas, draw­ing on Natan’s and Jew­ish Book Council’s exten­sive net­works through­out the Jew­ish phil­an­thropic and com­mu­nal worlds.

The dead­line for sub­mis­sion for Fall 2022 Natan Notable Books is Octo­ber 1, 2022, for non-fic­tion titles pub­lished for the first time between April 1, 2022 and March 31, 2023.

For more infor­ma­tion or to sub­mit a title, go to the Natan Notable Books page. Inquiries can be direct­ed to natannotable@​jewishbooks.​org.