Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai

Rating:
Summary: Excellent description of life in the Shanghai Jewish Ghetto
Review: As some one who lived as a youngster in the wartime Shanghai Jewish Ghetto during the same time as the author, the book provides a very poignant, detailed and accurate description of what it was like, for impoverished European Jews to cope under the Japanese occupation, while living with equally poor Chinese families in over crowded slum like quarters. The author alluded numerous times to the horn-of-plenty the small orthodox community seemed to enjoyed and of which he personally benefited as well, while every one else had barely enough to prevent starvation. How the Yeshiva could have smuggled in enough US currency, (inviting a death penalty if caught by the Japanese) and distribute $30 US dollars a month, ( fortune at that time) to each family has always been a mystery to me. The hypocracy of a Jewish religious community stuffing themselves with fresh kosher meat, milk, butter and vegetable while the rest of us suffered from malnutrition, needs some further explaining. It has left a permanent bad taste in my mouth. Aside from this, Tobias has written a well balanced and touching account of his own personal, his family's and that of 18,000 other Jewish refugees' struggle to survive in the war time ghetto of Shanghai under Japanese bayonettes. We who lived through it will always have a feeling of gratitude to the equally suffering Chinese people. Claude Spingarn, [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: An intelligent and sensitive account of wartime Shanghai
Review: I first heard about this book when the author and I appeared on the same radio program to discuss our books about Shanghai. (My book is "Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, 1842-1949.") In the course of my research I read nearly all of the memoirs published by members of Shanghai's refugee Jewish community. All have their virtues, but Tobias' is one of the more thoughtful and reflective. It also has a novelistic flavor, especially the beginning when he recounts-sadly and movingly-his family's departure from Germany. The story he tells us is indeed strange, on so many levels, yet there is an all-pervading sense of the events the author describes as being all too urgent and real. "Strange Haven" captures Shanghai's details, its look, sounds and, above all, smells, wonderfully well. He goes into great detail, as well, about the experiences of the Jewish refugees in Hongkew, the area the Japanese turned into their version of a Jewish ghetto. Above all, "Strange Haven" is a story of survival in an extraordinary time and place.

Rating:
Summary: An intelligent and sensitive account of wartime Shanghai
Review: I first heard about this book when the author and I appeared on the same radio program to discuss our books about Shanghai. (My book is "Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, 1842-1949.") In the course of my research I read nearly all of the memoirs published by members of Shanghai's refugee Jewish community. All have their virtues, but Tobias' is one of the more thoughtful and reflective. It also has a novelistic flavor, especially the beginning when he recounts-sadly and movingly-his family's departure from Germany. The story he tells us is indeed strange, on so many levels, yet there is an all-pervading sense of the events the author describes as being all too urgent and real. "Strange Haven" captures Shanghai's details, its look, sounds and, above all, smells, wonderfully well. He goes into great detail, as well, about the experiences of the Jewish refugees in Hongkew, the area the Japanese turned into their version of a Jewish ghetto. Above all, "Strange Haven" is a story of survival in an extraordinary time and place.