A World Remembered: The Story Behind The Girl in the Oil Painting

The Ladino-speaking Jewish community of Rhodes was once a world of vibrant color and intimate tradition. Moving between pre-war La Juderia and the present, The Girl in the Oil Painting follows a mother’s fragmented memories and a son who slowly uncovers the trauma she never spoke aloud. Through family kitchens rich with familiar aromas, sea light over Mandraki Harbor, Shabbat songs, and recipes passed down like treasures, the book brings back to life a community whose world was almost entirely destroyed in 1944. At its heart, it is a story about memory, silence, and the way art sometimes reveals what words cannot.

The novel is inspired by the life of my mother, Dora, who was born and raised in the Jewish community of Rhodes. There are stories we inherit through language—and others we inherit through silence. My mother rarely spoke about the war, but the atmosphere of her childhood home in La Juderia lived within her: the Ladino phrases that slipped into her speech, the smells of holiday cooking, the closeness of neighbors who felt like extended family. These impressions shaped my childhood even though the details of her past remained unspoken.

As an artist, I spent years creating layered works that explore memory, identity, and the hidden traces of history. It took me decades to understand that the story I was truly circling—behind the colors and layers—was hers.

Writing this novel became a way to enter that world. The book travels back to the streets of Rhodes before the war, filled with their rhythm, warmth, and traditions. It then moves to the present day, where a son tries to understand the emotional truth behind a single oil painting and the silence it represents.

Although fiction, the novel is rooted in deep affection and respect for the Sephardic world of Rhodes. Many readers have told me it reminds them of their own parents or grandparents—their Ladino expressions, their stories of the island, their memories of family kitchens and songs. Hearing this has been deeply meaningful to me; it affirms the novel’s purpose as both a personal journey and a communal remembrance.

As we work to preserve the memory of Sephardic life, I hope this story contributes in some small way to keeping alive the voices, the courage, and the spirit of Rhodes—la luz del mar, the warmth of its people, and the cultural world that continues to live in all of us.