Weltliteratur in der Shanghaier jüdischen Exilpresse (1939–1947) ed. by Ruoyu Zhang

Abstract

Reviewed by: Weltliteratur in der Shanghaier jüdischen Exilpresse (1939–1947) ed. by Ruoyu Zhang Samuel Kessler Ruoyu Zhang, ed., Weltliteratur in der Shanghaier jüdischen Exilpresse (1939–1947). Munich: Iudicum Verlag, 2022. 282 pp. The coming-into-existence of the Jewish exile community in Shanghai was one of the most fascinating consequences of the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany and the subsequent dislocation (for those who would or could escape) of Jews from Central and Eastern Europe. Its creation is a story whose reality feels as fantastical as any movie, and its short-lived existence has lent its memory an air of magical realism: a world of German and East European Jewry arising whole cloth in the Far East, only to vanish entirely within a decade. Yet there it was, an island of European Judaism in an ancient Chinese city, complete with newspapers, yeshivas, and a Yiddish-speaking underworld. [End Page 125] How did this most peculiar of Ashkenazic cultures end up in Shanghai, and what did it feel like to live there? While most nations had officially closed their borders to Jewish immigration by the late 1930s (a policy made condescendingly clear at the now-notorious Evian Conference of July 1938), a handful—often because of the actions of just one or two diplomats or politicians, in this case, chief among them those of Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese consul in Lithuania—became unexpected destinations for Jews desperately seeking to leave Europe. One of these places was Shanghai, the Chinese port city at the mouth of the Yangtze River. Divided among various colonial trading concessions since the mid-nineteenth century, the city after 1932 was under partial, then full Japanese occupation. Yet throughout the war it remained home to an international community of Europeans, Russians, and Central and East Asians. And because in the 1930s Shanghai did not require entry visas, this wealthy, cosmopolitan, deeply contested city, occupied by an ally of Nazi Germany and located on the farthest coast of the Eurasian continent, became home to a quixotic Jewish community of, at its height, some twenty thousand souls, from urban former German and Austrian citizens—trained as physicians, artists, musicians, journalists, and engineers—to the four hundred rabbis and students of the Mir Yeshiva, one of the most famous in Eastern Europe. In Weltliteratur in der Shanghaier jüdischen Exilpresse (1939–1947), Ruoyu Zhang gives us a sense of just what those German-educated Jews living in exile in Shanghai were reading and thinking about. Culling extracts from the German-Jewish newspapers printed in the city, this anthology presents the wide variety of international journalism, speeches, and political documents published so that the community could stay abreast of world events and the opinions of important persons. Zhang includes writings by Jews and non-Jews living around the world, from the most famous—Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Sigrid Undset, Albert Einstein—to the less familiar though still widely respected—Max Eitingon, Max Nordau, Emil Ludwig. As Zhang writes, much of what appeared in these periodicals directly represented the experiences of the community in Shanghai: "Die […] Werke standen alle mehr oder weniger in Übereinstimmung mit den Anliegen, Exilerfahrungen, Erwartungen, dem seelischen Verlust und den sozialen Problemen der jüdischen Emigranten in Shanghai" (10). Yet this was by no means a parochial press, and while the content might have reflected the present situation (which is, of course, the primary purpose of journalism and popular periodicals), [End Page 126] the range of authorship and geography was perhaps surprising, suggesting a community that, though marooned far from home, was anything but disconnected from world events: "der vorliegende Band [ist] ein guter Beleg dafür, dass die jüdischen Exilperiodika in Shanghai im Zeitraum von 1939 bis 1949 keineswegs von der Außenwelt isoliert blieben, sondern stets in enger Verbindung mit den weltweiten Medien standen" (10). This book is the follow-up to Zhang's first edited volume, "Wir in Shanghai": Pressetexte deutscher und österreichischer Journalisten im Exil (1939–1949) (Iudicum 2021), which, together with this new work, contain the selection of the primary sources that formed the basis for Zhang's monograph on the subject, "Orient und Okzident/Sind nicht mehr zu...