Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
Loading next page...
/lp/university-of-hawai-i-press/voices-from-shanghai-jewish-exiles-in-wartime-china-review-SAnAxsO9pP
References
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
- Publisher
- University of Hawai'I Press
- Copyright
- Copyright © University of Hawai'i Press.
- ISSN
- 1527-9367
Abstract
226 China Review International: Vol. 17, No. 2, 2010 Prosperity, Region and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Patterns, 946–1368 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000). 2. A good survey of major East Asian shipwrecks and scholarly studies associated with them is in Geoff Wade, “e Th Pre-Modern East Asian Maritime Realm: An Overview of European-Language Studies,” working paper, Asia Research Institute Working Paper Series no. 16, National University of Singapore, December 2003. Available at http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/docs/ wps/wps03_016.pdf. Irene Eber, editor and translator. Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China. Introduction by Irene Eber. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 142 pp. $29.00, £15.00, isbn 978-0-226-18166-0. Since the demise of Harvard University professor Benjamin I. Schwartz over a decade ago, Irene Eber, the Louis Frieberg Professor Emerita of East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has emerged as the preeminent Sino-Judaic scholar educating us about both ancient and modern Chinese-Jewish communi- ties. Eber is of Galician Jewish stock, was educated in sinology at the Claremont Graduate School, and has both the linguistic and analytical tools to describe this complex historical interaction in a nuanced and scholarly way. She isuen fl t in Yiddish (her mother tongue), as well as biblical and modern Hebrew, classical and modern Chinese, English, German, Polish, and other languages. She delivered papers about Harbin, Kaifeng, Shanghai, and Tianjin Jewry at Harvard University’s 1992 Jewish Diasporas in China conference, at which Professor Schwartz was the senior scholar. She contributed to both published volumes of essays that emerged from that symposium. She also wrote the introduction to the exhibition catalog of rare Sino-Judaica, which Harvard showcased at that conference. A major com- memorative volume of the works of other sinologists was published in Eber’s honor on her eightieth birthday, December 29, 2009. Eber remains vigorously productive. One expression of that vitality is her 2008 anthology Voices from Shanghai: Jewish Exiles in Wartime China. A scholar of lesser abilities might have shied away from as daunting a task as translating, editing, and commenting on German, Polish, and Yiddish writers in China before, during, and aer ft World War II. Hopefully, the next edition of this sourcebook will © 2011 by University include the originals of these valuable but arcane documents. of Hawai‘i Press For this volume, Eber has selected twenty-five vignettes.e Th y include pub- lished and unpublished poems, letters, extracts from diaries, and short stories Reviews 227 written between 1935 and 1947. Her selections fall into four categories, each with a slightly different perspective on Jewish cultural self-perception and perception of the other. e Th first category of memoir is the refugee perspective on his or her flight from Hitler. German emigrant Michael W. Blumenthal has noted elsewhere that Shanghai was “the very last choice to escape Nazi terror . . . never the first choice.” A journey to this port of last resort involved an arduous overland trip or a some- what easier passage by sea, both of which became almost impossible aer ft Ger - many’s invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Nevertheless, by a variety of means, thousands of Central and Eastern European Jews managed to reach Shang- hai.e Th city admitted these refugees not because of a self-conscious policy of Holocaust rescue but rather because of bureaucratic inertia. Although technically Chinese, much of Shanghai was in a precarious state of governance or non- governance un der various administrations, which included a committee of foreign consuls. Until the Japanese seizure of Shanghai, visas were not required for enter - ing this place. Breslau refugee Ernest Heppner, also not represented in this volume, marveled as he passed through a deserted Shanghai embarkation hall that “no one asked for our papers . . . here Jews could just walk ashore.” Most of the world at this time barred Jewish immigration. e Th first category of memoir included in Eber’s volume explains personal flight from adversity and fear of perpetual exile with minimal reference to China itself, or even, in most cases, to Judaism. Polish rabbi Simha Elberg (1915–1955) sees Shanghai simply as another port in a storm, aer ft Poland, Lithuania, and Japan had successively “spat” him out. An anonymous and presumably non-Jewish poet bemoans the generic plight of the Polish refugee without ever mentioning Shang- hai. Journalist Kurt Lewin (1908–1950) writes a generalized paean to anti-Fascism and another to the postwar refugee experience. Neither piece refers to China or Judaism. From the safety of her bedroom, Lotte Margot observes a Chinese beggar child on the street at four o’clock in the morning. Margot’s reality, however, is more grounded in the Shanghai dance hall known as the “Majestic” than in the poverty in front of her own home. Yosl Mlotek’s “e Th Lament of My Mother” (1941) and “A Letter” (1943) and Mordechai Rotenberg’s “Sun in a Net” (1942) dwell on the theme of despondency. Neither poet mentions China or Judaism. Annie F. Witting (1904–1971), a middle-class German, arrives happily in Shanghai in 1939 and thereaer ft feels no adversity other than her husband’s ill health. She is supported by her brother in South Africa and enjoys what Annette Eberly, an historian of Jewish life in Manila, calls “the good life out there.” Shoshana Kagan (1895–1968), a Yiddish actress from Poland, is overcome with feelings of loss and depression. es Th e feelings deepen (as with Witting) at a time of personal loss, namely her husband’s death in 1945. In summation, this first category of memoir says nothing substantial about either the impoverished host culture in which these refugees were immersed or about Judaism. 228 China Review International: Vol. 17, No. 2, 2010 A second category of memoir deals exclusively with Jewish life in Shanghai. Alfred Friedlander describes a festive Chanukah celebration. Yehoshua Rapoport laments the difficulties of reestablishing Yiddish culture in Shanghai and his disappointment when auen ffl t permanent residents of Shanghai are not generous enough to impoverished refugees. Yoni Fayn and Herbert Zernik lament the suffering of Jews in the Shanghai ghetto. Zernik, an actor, satirizes Kanoh Ghoya, the Japanese commandant of the ghetto. Both Fayn and Zernik, like Rapoport, make scant reference to the suffering of the Chinese population. Hermann Gold- farb (1942) invokes the theme of the “wandering Jew” and makes no reference to China. A third category of memoir does attempt to say something meaningful about the life of Shanghai’s Chinese, rather than its Jewish, population. In “Shanghai” (1942) Yosl Mlotek contrasts Shanghai’s decadent auen ffl ce with its poverty, both clearly visible along Nanjing Road. Poet Karl Heinz Wolff describes the peasant wisdom of a Chinese bricklayer, who shrewdly stretches out his workday in order to gain a little more income, even though he could work faster and more efficiently. Willy Tonn, a sinologist by training, describes the daily life of the Chinese and their interactions with Westerners, although he never mentions Jews. Meylekh Ravitch, a Polish-Jewish tourist passing through Shanghai in 1935, feels and com-
Journal
China Review International – University of Hawai'I Press
Published: Mar 1, 2012