Despite its old ways, the younger members of the community crossed cultural lines, though.

My father had Turkish business partners, my mother Greek friends, my sisters studied French at school. I grew up in a multicultural world before anyone used that word.

You also grew up in a world that had recently undergone a dramatic opening up toward the west. In 1912 the Italians won Rhodes from the Turks after the Balkan Wars. They introduced their language and, eventually, their government. They brought music, cuisine, books, cinema, fashion and ideas.

From one generation to the next, younger people began to think more boldly about their futures. My older siblings left to seek their fortunes abroad — my brother Victor set off for the Belgian Congo before I was even born; my sister Selma went to America. Other people changed the way they thought about their lives. My sister Felicie, the intellectual of the family, devoured every book she could put her hands on. She rarely came swimming with the rest of us. “If you are swimming,” she said, “you must concentrate on your strokes. You cannot talk about Kant!”

You were the baby of the family.

I was also a young woman, excuse me, with a dream: I was going to work hard in school and leave the confines of the island to attend university in Italy. I saw my future laid out like the chapters in a book.

Only the story unfolded differently. In 1938 Mussolini’s racial laws extended even to Rhodes.

I was kicked out of school — me! Overnight I felt like I’d gone from being a person to a nonperson. You do not recover from that easily. Or ever.