Strange Haven: A JEWISH CHILDHOOD IN WARTIME SHANGHAI - Hardcover

Tobias, Sigmund

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0252024532 ISBN 13: 9780252024535

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 1999

Synopsis

In the wake of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, Sigmund Tobias and his parents fled their home in Germany and relocated to one of the few cities in the world that offered shelter without requiring a visa: the notorious pleasure capital, Shanghai. Seventeen thousand Jewish refugees flocked to Hongkew, a section of Shanghai ruled by the Japanese, and they created an active community that continued to exist through the end of the war.

Tobias's coming-of-age story unfolds within his descriptions of Jewish life in the exotic sanctuary of Shanghai. Depleted by disease and hunger, constantly struggling with primitive and crowded conditions, the refugees faced shortages of food, clothing, and medicine. Tobias also observes the underlife of Shanghai: the prostitution and black market profiteering, the brutal lives of the Chinese workers, the tensions between Chinese and Japanese during the war, and the paralyzing inflation and the approach of the communist "liberators" afterward.

Richly detailed, Strange Haven opens a little-documented chapter of the Holocaust and provides a fascinating glimpse of life for these foreigners in a foreign land. An epilogue describes the changes Tobias observed when he returned to Shanghai forty years later as a visiting professor.

About this title

Reviews

The history in this memoir is astonishing. Driven from Germany by the Nazis, Tobias was six years old in 1938 when he and his family found refuge with 17,000 other European Jews in a part of Shanghai under Japanese occupation. His quiet personal recollection describes how they got there and what their daily life was like during the next nine years, until at the age of 15, he left for the U.S. Most bizarre is the account of being a religious yeshiva seminary student, no different from if he were living in a Polish shtetl. Without being cute, Tobias (now an eminent professor of educational pyschology) stays true to the refugee child's experience. The Chinese are just background color--ill-treated by the Japanese but in a world apart. There are no heroics. What's important is Tobias' bar mitzvah. Daily prayers and rituals and scholarly discussion order his life--until the news of the Holocaust reaches Shanghai, and he has a crisis of faith. An affecting memoir of rescue and survival. Hazel Rochman

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252024532
• ISBN 13: 9780252024535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208