Strangers Always: A Jewish Family in Wartime Shanghai - Hardcover

Krasno, Rena

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1881896021 ISBN 13: 9781881896029

Publisher: Pacific View Pr, 1992

Synopsis

This is a story of coming of age in chaotic times during the war in the Pacific, from the unique perspective of a young woman in the Jewish community of Shanghai. We learn how events were perceived by people entrapped by war who endeavored to seek the truth through smuggled info., jammed radio broadcasts, & reading between the lines of Japanese censorship. The heroic efforts of people in the Jewish community in Shanghai to help refugees from the Holocaust are perhaps the most inspiring part of the narrative. Many details of the history of that community are brought to light for the first time. Black & white photos.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

In the early years of the century, Shanghai was famous not only for its spies and intrigues but as a refuge for the world's persecuted. Among the latter were Jews fleeing Russian pogroms, White Russians running from the Revolution of 1917 and, later, Jews escaping the Holocaust. By 1942, the city's predominantly Russian Jewish community numbered an estimated 4000. The author's father, a 1921 arrival, was one of that community's influential intellectual figures. His newspaper helped to knit outsiders together and to preserve their culture; his daughter (who now lives in Northern California) grew up in a vibrant atmosphere engendered, in part, by the paper. But between 1933 and 1945, the Japanese occupied the city, establishing Thought Police, dispossessing the most recent of the stateless (largely refugees from Hitler) and creating new ghettos. This rare personal record of the years 1942-1945, assembled from journals kept while Krasno was a college student, recalls in homely telling detail the history and experience of the Jewish community in old Shanghai, and life as it became under the repressive Japanese rule.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The author's family, Russian emigres, were part of a large Jewish community in Shanghai that also included refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. While both groups suffered much persecution from the Japanese--and even the Chinese--the former lived relatively less restricted lives (Krasno even attended medical school during the war!). Still, the plight of the Jewish community is the focus of her journal, a remarkable combination of personal experiences and short essays on the history of Jews in Shanghai, life under foreign occupation, and cultural encounters. Although the explanatory notes are directed to the lay reader, there is much substance here for Jewish, East Asian, and World War II studies collections. Recommended for most libraries.
- Kenneth W. Berger, Duke Univ. Lib., Durham, N.C.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pacific View Pr
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 1881896021
• ISBN 13: 9781881896029
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 218