When defenders of the British royal family scrounged around for dirt on Wallis Simpson, the divorced US-born fiancée of King Edward VIII, they often highlighted her year spent in China—often sharing scurrilous, and poorly-sourced, if not entirely unfounded, details of her time there.
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Back in the day, everyone went to China, some already famous—Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Eugene O’Neill, Langston Hughes, Mary Pickford—and some who later would be famous, such as Wallis Spencer, the woman who, a marriage or two later as Wallis Simpson, caused the King of England to abdicate. Her time in Shanghai was the subject of later scurrilous (and it would appear, entirely fabricated) rumors about pornographic photographs, bordellos and something called the “Shanghai grip” (best left to the imagination).
The ’30s and ’40s were some of the first instances of aerial bombardment of civilian populations—and an indication of their destructive power. We often point to the Nazi bombing in Guernica, Spain in 1937—immortalized by Pablo Picasso—as the first instance of what happens when “the bomber gets through”, to paraphrase then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. But just a few months later, across a continent, the world got a glimpse of what bombardment would look like in one of the world’s most built-up and international cities of the time: Shanghai, and “Bloody Saturday”: 14 August 1937.
The mass aerial bombing that so characterized World War II and the wars that followed didn’t start with the blitz, Dresden or Tokyo, but was instead prefigured by the lethal bombing of Shanghai on 14 August 1937, preceded only by the bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War earlier that year.
While the Second World War may have concluded more than seventy years ago, new stories from that era continue to pop up, even now. Paul French’s new book, Strangers on the Praia: A Tale of Refugees and Resistance in Wartime Macao, tells the little-known history of Jewish refugees in Shanghai that fled to the neutral Portuguese enclave.
To imagine the Shanghai of the 1930s is to frame art-deco frontages on chiaroscuro streets, behind which noirish figures from a polyglot demi-monde sip whiskies and soda. The city in this era has an imaginative power in the Western mind beyond that of any other place in China, fuelled by an intoxicating cocktail of equal measures myth and reality. Paul French, a long-time resident of the city, now returned to London, offers two complimentary portraits of the place and those westerners pulled inexorably toward it in his new books, City of Devils and Destination Shanghai.
Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, originally published in German in the fall of 2020, was an early—one might even say premature—response to the anxiety caused not only by COVID-19, but also government lockdown policies implemented worldwide. The novel is narrated in the third-person by Patrik, a literary researcher who most frequently refers to himself as “the Patient”. COVID lockdown seems to have inspired some truly debilitating fears for Patrik, including agoraphobia, and obsessive compulsive behaviors.
Eric Arthur Blair once wrote that he was born into the “lower-upper-middle class”, having cachet but no capital. His father had been a sub-deputy opium agent in India, where Blair was born in 1903; his French mother was the daughter of a Burmese teak merchant.
Harbin was a new city around the end of both the Qing dynasty and the Russian Empire. It was built to support the Chinese Eastern Railway and also became home to a sizable Jewish community numbering around twenty thousand. That community has long vanished and all that remains are the old synagogues and other buildings constructed by Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs. Why the Jews left Harbin is the most lasting consequence of the events recounted in Scott Seligman’s new book, Murder in Manchuria, a true crime narrative along the lines of Paul French’s Midnight in Peking and James M Zimmerman’s The Peking Express.
In his new (but posthumous) memoir, Shanghai Jewish refugee Paul Hoffmann writes about his three most tumultuous experiences. One was enduring six months of Nazi Vienna, the other the terror inflicted by Sargent Kano Ghoya in the Shanghai Jewish Ghetto, and the third life under the new Chinese regime from 1949-1952. Much has been written about the first two, but Witness to History sheds light on the lives of the Jews that stayed behind in Shanghai after 1949.
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