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  • Jüdische Kultur im chinesischen Exil: Eine Studie zu Rose Shoshana Kahans jiddischem Tagebuch "In Fajer un Flamen"
  • Irene Eber (bio)
Chang Shoou-Huey Jüdische Kultur im chinesischen Exil: Eine Studie zu Rose Shoshana Kahans jiddischem Tagebuch "In Fajer un Flamen" (Mit einer Teiledition) (Jewish culture in Chinese exile: A study of Rose Shoshana Kahan's Yiddish diary "In Fire and Flames," with a partial translation) Taiwan: Kaun Tang International Publications, Ltd., n.d. [2010], glossary and index.

This unique publication by a Chinese professor of Yiddish and Jewish culture at the Ursuline College in Taiwan deals with a Yiddish diary by a Jewish actress from Poland who arrived in Shanghai as a refugee in 1941. Rose Shoshana Kahan (1895-1968) was not only an actress; she was also a gifted writer whose diary is a rare document of time and place.

Although Jewish autobiographies and memoirs about Shanghai are appearing with increasing frequency, we have scarcely any diaries written there during World War II—daily or weekly records of reactions to the grim reality of refugee life.1 Professor Chang, who has devoted years to the study of Jewish cultural life in China and particularly to the uses of Yiddish in Shanghai, is preeminently qualified to deal with this diary and its subject. She handles Yiddish with great facility and is a deft writer and translator. The present study, written in German, is a scholarly, thoroughly documented work. Yet Rose Shoshana emerges from the pages as a real person, glorying in small successes, suffering real and threatened misfortunes.

Jewish settlement in Shanghai began in the mid-nineteenth century, shortly after the British set up trade relations with the city, with the arrival of the "Baghdadis." These were Jewish merchants from Iraq, among them such well-known families as the Sassoons. They were followed after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905 by a trickle of Russian Jews, whose numbers swelled after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. During [End Page 206] these early years of the twentieth century, the Bagdhadi community numbered around 1,000 souls, while the Ashkenazi Russian community grew to around 7,000.

German Jewish refugees—mainly professionals who had lost their livelihoods upon the Nazi ascent to power—began arriving as early as 1933. Thousands more came between the Anschluss, the incorporation of Austria into Germany in March 1938, and the start of World War II in September 1939. By the time Italy joined Germany's war in September 1940, approximately 20,000 German-speaking Jews had found a refuge in Shanghai.

The Polish Jewish contingent, including Rose Shoshana and her husband Layzer (1885-1946), arrived in 1941. Whereas most of the German and Austrian Jews had come by sea, the Polish group, consisting largely of Yiddish-speaking intelligentsia and parts of several yeshivas, took the laborious overland route to Japan. With the German invasion of Poland, they had fled to Lithuania, which was neutral in 1939. When the Soviet army arrived there in the summer of 1940, they fled again on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok and from there to Kobe, Japan. Their stay in Kobe, pleasant though it was, ended abruptly in mid-1941 when the Japanese authorities decided to ship them to Shanghai.2 At that point, then, there were four distinct Jewish communities in Shanghai: English-speaking Baghdadis, the Russian and German Jews, and the Yiddish speakers from Poland.

The first entry in Rose Shoshana's diary was written on September 5, 1939, as the German armies advanced on Warsaw, and the last on October 22, 1946, as she awaited her flight from Shanghai to the United States. The greater part of the diary is taken up with her escape from Warsaw to Bialystok, and then to Vilna and on to Japan, until she finally arrived in Shanghai October 23, 1941. Although only the last 117 pages of the diary deal with Shanghai, this is nonetheless the crucial portion. As Chang Shoou-Huey perceptively remarks, "She is a direct witness about herself and her environment, and that is the reason why this private diary can be an important source for historians," (p. xlix).

The refugees had been received...

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