In the Crook of the Rock: Jewish Refuge in a World Gone Mad ― The Chaya Leah Walkin Story (Jewish Identities in Post-Modern Society) - Softcover

Schwarcz, Vera

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1618117866 ISBN 13: 9781618117861

Publisher: Academic Studies Press, 2018

Synopsis

Focusing upon the life of Chaya Walkin―one little girl from a distinguished Torah lineage in Poland―this book illustrates the inner resources of the refugee community that made possible survival with dignity. Based on a wide variety of sources and languages, this book is crafted around the voice of a child who was five years old when she was forced to flee her home in Poland and start the terrifying journey to Vilna, Kobe, and Shanghai. The Song of Songs is used to provide an unexpected and poetic angle of vision upon strategies for creating meaning in times of historical trauma.

About this title

About the Author

Vera Schwarcz was born in Romania and became an historian of China and a poet in the United States. For the past four decades she taught at Wesleyan University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her work was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fullbright Fellowship, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Lady Davis Fellowship. Schwarcz is the author of nine books about Chinese and Jewish history, including "Bridge Across Broken Time: Chinese and Jewish Cultural Memory" (Yale University Press, 1989) which was nominated for the National Jewish Book Award and "Colors of Veracity: A Quest for Truth in China and Beyond" (University of Hawai'i Press, 2014). She has also written six books of poetry, including most recently "The Physics of Wrinkle Formation" (Antrim House, 2015). For more information about her work, visit between2walls.com.

Review

“A variety of personal memoirs about the Jewish experience in Shanghai during World War II have been published in recent years, always presenting an interesting yet subjective experience of the authors. In The Crook of the Rock, Professor Vera Schwarcz masterfully transforms Chaya Leah Walkin’s vivid memories of a young girl experiencing a world gone mad into a powerful historical-cultural document enriched with theological insights. In telling this important story, Schwarcz also offers poignant observations about her own journeys―both in developing a relationship with the subject that changed both their lives and recalling her own childhood diaspora.

Chaya Leah’s is a unique voice shedding a bright light on the little discussed stories of the Polish refugee experience in Shanghai and the Yeshivah families’ indifference to the plight of the majority of German/Austrian Jewish refugees in wartime Shanghai. This book, however, is a song sung by two harmonic voices―the subject, who offers us memories weaved by experience and emotions, and the author, who offers analytical understanding of these memories based on her vast knowledge of both Chinese and Jewish cultures.”

― Dvir Bar-Gal, Expert in Shanghai's Jewish History

“Schwarcz’s sensitive biography of Chaya Leah Walkin serves as a useful counterpart to Bostoner Rebbetzin Raichel Horowitz’s account of the challenges she faced in transplanting the traditions of Polish Jewish Orthodoxy onto American soil. Unlike Horowitz, Schwarcz details a critically important middle passage between Poland and America. Schwarcz builds upon a cornucopia of Shanghai Jewish studies, especially those of David Kranzler and Irene Eber, to profile a religiously-observant woman within a city of approximately 18,000 other Central and Eastern European Jewish refugees. Shanghai Jews embraced ideologies which ranged from the ultra-Orthodox to the purely secular. Rebbezin Walkin stands distinct as an individual from the Pohost, Lukatch, and Pinsk rabbinic traditions.”

― Jonathan Goldstein, Harvard University Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies/University of West Georgia

“Professor Schwarcz’s eloquent and profound new book is part Holocaust memoir, part Shanghai history, and much more. She goes so deeply into the narrative of Rebbetzin Chaya Leah Small that the story becomes a ‘rabbit’s hole’, a ‘portal’ into ‘the theme of Jewish resilience,’ a phenomenon that has baffled much of the world for centuries. How did we manage to survive, the Dalai Lama asked us, what is the source of your resilience? Schwarcz beautifully ‘juxtaposes global madness and the inner resources of refugees in catastrophic time.’ Sinologist, poet, and theologian, Professor Schwarcz edifies us with her deep analysis and moving prose.”

― Nathan Katz, Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Florida International University

Edition details

• Publisher: Academic Studies Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1618117866
• ISBN 13: 9781618117861
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 340