By any measure, Jewish American writer-cum-Shanghai-based salonnière Bernardine Szold Fritz (1896-1982) led an extraordinary life. Whether on familiar terms with American writers of the Lost Generation (Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway) and French modernist masters (Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso) in and around Paris, or influential Chinese writers and intellectuals during 1930s Shanghai (Lin Yutang, Hu Shi), or even A-list celebrities from Hollywood’s Golden Age (Gary Cooper, Frank Capra), Fritz was remarkably well-connected.
Yet Bernardine Szold Fritz’s importance for 20th-century cultural history—a history that spanned three continents and almost as many World Wars—has been a story untold for far too long, which is why Susan Blumberg-Kason’s admirably researched and attentive biography Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China is by turns enlightening, enjoyable, and indeed necessary.
Blumberg-Kason navigates the intricacies of Bernardine Szold Fritz’s biography with great sensitivity.
Born in 1896 to Hungarian Jews who emigrated to Peoria, Illinois, Fritz acted in Chicago’s Little Theater and worked as a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post. She also eloped at eighteen (the first of four marriages that would end in divorce) and gave birth to her only child Rosemary the following year. Her third marriage prompted a move to New York City, where she wrote for the Daily News, but the marriage’s dissolution led her to Paris. Her fourth and final marriage brought her to Shanghai—and finally Los Angeles.
While her first three husbands were variously older, overbearing, odd, selfish, adulterous, and, to a certain extent, cruel, her fourth husband, Chester Fritz, an American precious metals expert whom she had met at a polo match in Shanghai in 1928, seems to have provided a degree of stability and normality during the ensuing years. After a brief visit to Paris, Bernardine returned to China in 1929 at the age of thirty-three to accept Chester’s marriage proposal, a fortuitous decision that would see her cross paths with a who’s who of influential artists, writers, actors, political figures, and businessmen moving in and through 1930s Shanghai.
If the weight of patriarchal marital expectations had assailed her sense of self, the cultural and intellectual exchanges of salon life in Shanghai offered Fritz an emancipatory alternative not unlike the experiences of Jewish salonnières of 18th- and 19th-century Paris and Berlin. The apogee was arguably her collaboration with Aaron Avshalomoff, a Russian composer, and the Chinese writer and socialite Sinmay Zau (Shao Xunmei), which resulted in the founding of the International Arts Theatre in 1933 and the performance of the ballet The Soul of the Ch’in. Under Fritz’s acute cultural direction, the IAT would expand its offerings to include plays, ballets, lectures, and fine arts exhibitions. She had hoped to make it an annual event, but the outbreak of war hastened her departure from Shanghai and the IAT’s subsequent demise.
Part of the pleasure of reading Blumberg-Kason’s thorough study of Fritz’s enviable position as a cultural nexus of Shanghai life are the many wonderful historical curios that mushroom throughout the book (for example, her friendships with Lin Yutang and Anna May Wong, among countless others). In fact, these historical intersections are so profuse that two supplementary appendices, a timeline and an alphabetical list of personages, are especially useful.
But beyond the many fascinating friendships, the chance encounters, the missed connections, and unrealized plans, how does the overlap of history and biography yield insights into Bernardine Szold Fritz as a 20th-century Jewish American woman, mother, and wife? As Blumberg-Kason concludes,
[…] she broke into acting and journalism at a time when women couldn’t vote. She had the courage to divorce when her marriages fell apart, even if it meant living without financial security. She was a romantic and an arts aficionado, an adventurer and a loyal friend. And she felt most content bringing talented and extraordinary people together during a time of incredible innovation and accomplishment in the arts. Throughout all of this, Bernardine dared to take risks and tried her best not to care what others thought. Yet to say Bernardine was a woman ahead of her time would be to minimize the hope and free spirit of the early twentieth century in the United States, Europe, and China, and her role in all of that.
Just like skilled portrait painters, though, an attentive biographer does well not to dwell entirely on surface details, which can be retouched in order to flatter or obscure. For all of Fritz’s many accomplishments, there were low points—the abandonment of her biological father, the failed marriages, a cancer scare, the suicide of her daughter. Blumberg-Kason navigates the intricacies of Bernardine Szold Fritz’s biography with great sensitivity, sidestepping gendered tropes and reductionist explanations in favor of presenting a compelling portrait of complicated individual and collected lives in an endlessly fascinating period of Shanghai’s history.