Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (review)

This masterful work makes a significant contribution to three disparate fields of study: diaspora studies, history of refugees in the twentieth century, and Jewish studies. No other scholar has brought so many different parts of wartime Shanghai within the purview of one work. Ristaino herself understates the implications of her book in the conclusion when she states, "the subject of this study seems quite modest—the experiences of several thousand refugees who found themselves in a far corner of the world" (273). The numbers, in fact, come close to 50,000, and the ethnic groups discussed by Ristaino include Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews from Poland, Russia, Germany, Austria, India, and Iraq—just to mention the most prominent foci of research. The first three communities form the core of this multilayered analysis, which is unrivaled in its depth despite many other recent publications on World War II, the Holocaust, and Jews in China.

Before Ristaino, the field was limited to inquiry into the fate of specific ethnic groups: Krantzler had done the most comprehensive previous study of the Jewish experience in the Far East, whereas less well-known scholars probed limited aspects of the White Russian experience in China.¹ The United States Holocaust Museum recently published an impressively comprehensive pictorial history, Flight and Rescue (Washington, D.C., 2001), but it, too, focused mostly on the Jewish refugees in China. Ristaino's work, by contrast, develops a scrupulously detailed chronology of many different communities, based on a comprehensive exploration of archival evidence ranging from the League of Nations in Geneva to the United States Congressional archives and the Shanghai municipal archives, as well as unique oral-history materials published for the first time in this work.

The result is a nuanced, vivid evocation of different communities that overlapped and clashed in Shanghai during the war. It is rare for such an exhaustively researched study to contain compelling narrative passages summarizing the actual experiences of refugees. Ristaino manages to evoke the muddy color of the Yangtze river as the refugees first saw it when they came in from bluer waters. She captures the cacophony of impoverished Ashkenazi Jews praying alongside wealthy Sephardim, as well as the ideological undertones of infighting between pro-Nazi Ukrainians and White Russian youth fired up with new patriotism after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Discrete details are always put to analytical use, including the specific number of German and Austrian refugees who came to Shanghai (ranging from 1,374 in 1938 to only 33 in 1941) and the index of former and current street names in twentieth-century Shanghai.

Throughout this book, the author manages to maintain a sympathetic yet critical perspective on the dilemmas of victim diasporas. To be sure, refugees in Shanghai fared much better than the millions who perished in the fires of Europe. With the darker fate of these kin much in mind, Ristaino nonetheless describes the suffering inside the Hongkou ghetto (properly identified by its Japanese name Shitei chiku—"enclosed settlement"). But she does not overlook the complexities of refugee life and the Japanese passion for order and control that often helped maintain some semblance of normalcy during the worst years of the war. Ristaino's book brings Shanghai to life in all its gritty detail, including the prostitution practiced by middle-class housewives with no other source of income.

The book's greatest contribution lies in its careful documentation of the intracommunal conflict among the various aid agencies founded by Russian, Ukrainian, and Jewish refugees. Ristaino's conclusion is that Jews fared better than the fractious Slavs because Judaism itself provided a framework for identity and mutual aid. One moment may be most telling: In August 1943 when Rabbi Meir Ashkenazi, the Hassidic leader of Shanghai, pleaded with various Zionist organizations—both fiercely secular and somewhat religious—to adopt a common purpose (211). [End Page...