Shanghai

Yesterday there was an all-day Symposium on Shanghai, and the Jewish Refugees who lived there during WWII.  Since I was born there, and am one of those Refugees, Gabi and I spent an interesting day whose contents I'd like to share.

We arrived a bit late since the email we got had a good portion of the page assigned to the address of the organizing group in Royce Hall, and only after we got to Royce Hall did we discover that it was at Hillel.  In any case we missed and exhaustive and exhausting lecture on Aaron Avshalomov a Russian/American/Chinese composer. The information on Wikipedia contains all I was interested in in the 2 hour presentation.

"Aaron Avshalomov (Russian: Ааро́н Авшало́мов;^[1] 11 November 1894 in Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, Russia – 26 April 1965, New York) was a Russian-born Jewish composer.

Born into a Mountain Jewish family, he was sent for medical studies to Zürich.^[2] After the October Revolution, in 1917, which made further studies in Europe impossible, his family sent him to the United States. There he married a fellow Russian émigré in San Francisco.^[2]

Less than a year later, he chose to return to China,^[2] where he entered the world of Shanghai's academia and, together with other highly qualified Jewish musicians (i.e., Alfred Wittenberg, Walter Joachim, Arrigo Foa, etc.), who had fled the Russian pogroms and revolution, trained a number of young Chinese musicians in classical music, who in turn became leading musicians in contemporary China.^[3] Between 1918 and 1947, he worked to create a synthesis of Chinese musical elements and Western techniques of orchestral composition.^[4] In 1919, his son, Jacob Avshalomov was born, who became a composer and conductor, too.

In 1947, he moved to the USA, where he already had spent three years in the mid-1920s.^[2]"

A Chinese reader presented a very detailed Power Point description of his life and work with 30 second soundtracks of his music.  Her use of the term "imperialism" shows that her presentation was government engineered (as was the presence of the council general of China).  I left for a cup of coffee towards the end of the speech.

The first afternoon session had 4 erudite presentations on

1.     Film Representations of an urban society, and what we could derive from it.  (Yomi Braester)

This presentation showed clips of Shanghai in the 20’s and 30’s, they looked very much like clips from Chaplin’s “City lights.” 

It also showed clips of peasants looking at kinescopes to see the clips and discussed how the intelligentsia sow itself, and how the peasants who migrated to it saw it.

The presenter makes the point that City Lights inspired the Shanghai clip, and that the Jewish immigrants portrayed by Chaplin (“Sunrise”) and their hopes and expectations can be read onto the peasants looking at the kinescopes.

2.     Cosmopolitan Shanghai (Bryna Goodman)

Shanghai grew from a fishing village.  When foreigners arrived, the term Zha was applied to the city meaning mongrel, worldly, unruly. When foreign “quarters” or concessions were established after the Opium wars providing extra territorial rights to Germany, Britain and France, the asymmetry of power created an underclass composed of Chinese who talked incompatible dialects and had in migrated from various parts of China. In the “quarters,” the Chinese, French, British, and Germans led a wealthy life, under the protection of their “quarter’s” law even in their relationship with the underclass. This fracturing of governmental authority, frenetic and expensive lifestyles, and a downtrodden, oppressed poor was transformed romantically into “cosmopolitanism.”

Newspapers were international and multilingual as was society. Sun Yat-sen owned the English language Shanghai Gazette, his aid the camp was “Two Gun Cohen” a Canadian Jew who after fighting in WWI, married a Chinese and went to Shanghai to make his fortune (read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_Cohen_(adventurer)

This cosmopolitanism was devoid of national identity, while the underclass seethed with nationalism. The movies depicted the upper class, never the tensions with the lower class.

3.     Shanghai at war, violence and the making of a Chinese Metropolis (Weh-Hsin Yeh)

When the Japanese invaded China casualties in the 10s of millions occurred, poisoned gas was used (see the Two Gun Cohen hyperlink above), but the concessions remained in place.  Again, the frenetic “cosmopolitan” city seemed to flourish amidst the dead bodies on the street.

The 1937 war over Shanghai and the eventual defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s army destroyed the Chinese army, left hundreds of thousands dead in Shanghai, but mostly spared the international quarters.

When the Japanese finally conquered the city in 1941 after Perl Harbor, they did it without much opposition, and while imprisoning foreigners, did not significantly oppress them.

4.     Concluding Thoughts (David Myers)

Jews were always an adjunct to Cosmopolitan society.  They were neither outside it, nor inside it, but they were an integral part of the conversation between the rich and the poor.

In Berlin- Weiner, Hannah Arendt, and other progressives were an integral part of a Weimar republic where messianism and despair flourished.  That seems an indispensable requirement of a Cosmopolitan City.

Shanghai, Berlin, and now LA have this Cosmopolitan Character.

I was not overwhelmed by the presentations.  They were very careful not to touch on areas of sensitivity for the Chinese (I added a bit of the background for the war). The presentations were a thank you by the Jewish Community to a Government who had nothing to do with our deliverance, but controls the country where that deliverance happened.

It was stressed throughout the presentation that Jews were never mistreated by the Chinese, and while this is true, there were so few Jews there, and there was so little government there, that it is the local Chinese that should get our thanks for this fact, not a government that persecutes minorities, and holds Mongolia under colonial control.

The third part of the event, which related directly to the Jewish Refugees was much more interesting, and its formulation significant.

A great deal of emphasis was given to the fact that the Chinese welcomed the Jews.  That is not my family’s recollection.

Following the Battle of Shanghai in 1937, the city was occupied by the army of Imperial Japan, and the port began to allow entry without visa or passport. (Shanghai Ghetto). My mother tells the story of how they had a sewing machine and rented a small shop where her skills as a seamstress would earn her a living.  The place was almost immediately burgled and the machine stolen, leaving them completely destitute.

The speakers did refer to the “thieving” but they stressed its non-violent nature, and that it was cause by extreme need.  The speakers talked about the intervention of God’s images (humans) to help fellow humans in this world as a basic principle, and that the experience of the Jewish interaction with the Chinese shows this.  My family’s experience does not support this assumption.  The Chinese did not show any animosity to Jews in a way Jews would understand it.  The gap between the two societies was too large for meaningful communication, and no one who was a refugee from Shanghai came away with enough Chinese to interact effectively with these neighbors.

The Japanese were portrayed as the bad guy, and my Father relates how they had some sadistic small person who was a commandant and used to beat people with a whip.  But it was the Japanese that opened Shanghai to the Jews, not the Chinese.

The last speaker, a Shanghaier stated that the Chinese are not anti-Semitic because they are not Christian.  They do not see us as killers of their God.

I think that while he is right, it’s the wrong reasons.  The Chinese were not anti-Semitic because they didn’t care enough about us. We were too insignificant to matter.

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I found it significant that none of the speakers spoke of either the Baghdadi Jews who created schools (Kaduri), soup kitchens, and directly supported the immigrants and enabled them to survive. Also they never spoke of Sugihara who was a Japanese consul in Lithuania and provide many visas to Jews.  Lastly, they never spoke of the Jewish community of the US who supported us with food and clothing, and then provided, with other Jewish communities a means to escape from China.

These things were brought out by some now very old Shanghaiers in their personal statements which concluded the session.

On the whole, I approve of trying to keep the Jewish experience in Shanghai alive in our minds, and through our museums, even Chinese museums.  I am a bit worried about the quality of the information as it is filtered through the propaganda needs of a totalitarian state.