Sephardic Stories - Elizabeth Graver & Michael Frank

For this year’s Al Finci Memorial Lecture two award-winning authors gather to discuss their writing and what drew them to Sephardic stories. Elizabeth Graver’s fifth novel, Kantika (Metropolitan Books/Holt, 2023), is a dazzling multi-generational saga that moves from Istanbul to Barcelona, Havana, and New York, exploring themes of displacement, endurance, family, and home. Inspired by the life story of Elizabeth’s grandmother Rebecca, Kantika won a National Jewish Book Award for Sephardic Culture, an Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award, and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction. She teaches at Boston College.

Michael Frank’s One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World (Avid Reader Press, 2022), tells the remarkable story of the now hundred-year-old Stella Levi whose conversations with the author over the course of six years bring to life the vibrant world of Sephardic Jewish Rhodes, the deportation to Auschwitz that extinguished ninety percent of her community, and the resilience and wisdom of the woman who lived to tell the tale. Named one of the ten best books of the year by The Wall Street Journal, One Hundred Saturdays won National Jewish Book Awards in the categories of Holocaust Memoir and Sephardic Culture, the Jewish Book Council’s Natan Notable Book Award, and the Sophie Brody Medal for outstanding achievement in Jewish literature.

In conversation with Frank and Graver is Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at UCLA. Stein’s Family Papers: A Sephardic Journey Through the Twentieth Century (FSG/Macmillan, 2019) was named a Best Book of the Year by The Economist and an Editor’s Choice Book by the New York Times Book Review; she is also recipient of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and multiple National Jewish Book Awards.

Thursday, May 16, 2024 • UCLA Faculty Center • 4 PM

Sephardic Stories
Al Finci Distinguished Lecture in Jewish Studies

Elizabeth Graver (Author) & Michael Frank (Author)
In Conversation with Sarah Abrevaya Stein (UCLA)