In January of 1940, just prior to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in the international settlement of Shanghai, everyone felt relatively calm and safe. That was despite the fact that the Japanese army was camped across the Huangpo river. This past May 21, I traveled to visit Beijing and Shanghai; it was my third trip to Shanghai and my second to Beijing. Shanghai was the city of my birth.
I was born to Russian-Jewish parents who had gone there as children in the 1920s, escaping the persecution of Jews in Russia and Europe. At the time, there were about 25,000 to 30,000 Jewish refugees in Shanghai, predominantly Russians, who managed to escape in the 1920s.
My mother was born in Harbin, Manchuria, of parents born in Odessa. This was the final stop of the Trans-Siberian railroad. My father was born in the Ukraine in 1918. My grandfather, on my father’s side, had fought in World War I; on my mother’s side, both her grandparents were rabbis. They had sent their young children, age 14 and 15, now married, to Manchuria with the hope that they would survive both anti-Semitism and famine.
This time, unlike my past visits, I decided to see several of the places that had been a part of my childhood that I had not been able to see on previous occasions.
The Shanghai of today is obviously a different city. The enormous economic boom has brought architects from all over the world to build extraordinary monuments, with lightning speed. Gone were the dead bodies on the street filled with rickshaws and pedicabs, replaced by Western designer clothes, brand-new cars and freeways.
My host, Jonathan Shen, and his wife, Iris, introduced me to Dr. Pan Guang (right), a professor from Nanjing University, whose main study was the history of the Jewish people in China. He seemed to know every detail of their lives in Shanghai.
I had come to Shanghai 12 years earlier as an adviser to the first Shanghai Film Festival. At the time, I was able to bring my parents, who got a chance to see it after an absence of nearly 50 years. They got to visit the places of their youth.
By the ‘30s, my dad had started as an apprentice garage mechanic and became the head of a division of ITT. My mother had a dress shop catering to Chinese actresses. Upon arrival in Shanghai’s airport, I noticed my father’s tears. I asked him why he was crying, and he replied, “Son, this is the place that saved our lives. These are the people who made sure all of us are alive today.”
This time, I would try to go back and see what that their experience had been. Dr. Pan Guang and his delegation of researchers took me to my former school, the Shanghai Jewish Public School.
