By Kimberly Chun | Special to AsianWeek
They were penniless and jobless. They picked dirt, broken glass and garbage out of the noodles they bought from thieves. They suffered from disease and malnutrition, and lived on top of one another in small rooms in the most poverty-stricken part of town. Like the fabulously wealthy, grindingly poor and wartime occupational force all around them, they lived in Shanghai and they were European Jewish refugees.
Directors Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann’s documentary, Shanghai Ghetto, tells the little-known story of the Jews in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II. With ample contextual forays into the world the refugees left behind in Germany and other parts of Europe, as well as background on the Jewish community that existed in Shanghai before the thousands of exiles arrived in the early ’40s in search of country that would accept them without the almost-unattainable wartime entrance visas, Shanghai Ghetto tells a powerful tale, with essential details and anecdotes of everyday life, heartfelt reminisces of surviving refugees and a narrative finesse that ties it all together beautifully.
Shanghai Ghetto opens with the stories and the weathered faces of the German Jewish refugees who were children when their families fled to Shanghai. At the time, Japan controlled Shanghai, as European colonial powers had before it, and because visas were not needed to enter the area, it became the only recourse for the families of Alfred Kohn, a future boxer; Harold Janklowicz, father of director Dana Janklowicz-Mann, Betty Grebenschikoff, who raised a family in New Jersey; Sigmund Tobias, who later became a research scientist; and Evelyn Pike Rubin, an author.
New York professor David Kranzler, Israeli scholar Irene Eber and Chinese professor Xu Buxeng provide the historical backdrop as the former refugees tell of hastily arranged trips to Shanghai on whatever vessels were available: namely Japanese and Italian luxury liners, which gave the voyage a surreally fun and posh atmosphere. In any case, the travelers knew they faced only uncertainty at their destination. One remembers his mother telling him to eat as much as he could because they didn’t know when they would be able to enjoy such abundance again.
Shanghai was far from a pleasure cruise for the refugees. They deboarded in the poorest section of town, Hongkew, which was already home to the Japanese and the poorest Chinese, and they settled in either tiny alley apartments or in shelters run by charities funded by wealthy local Bagdadi/British Jewish families or American Jewish organizations. Established in 1943, this ghetto became home to 20,000 Jewish refugees, a “sanctuary” that was sweltering hot in the summer and awash with floods during monsoon season. Food was rationed, curfew was enforced, and everyone needed passes to enter or leave the unwalled ghetto.
The filmmakers also make a point of noting that many of Hongkew’s Chinese residents were even worse off. Tolerant of the newcomers in their midst, the Chinese, for instance, were viewed with empathy in the Yiddish section of a paper run by Russian Jews who arrived in Shanghai before the WWII refugees. Eber raves over the beauty of the poetry in the newspaper, observing, “Instead of saying, ‘Oy gevalt! Poor me, who did this to me?’ They said, ‘Oh no, the poor Chinese!’”
After Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, the wealthy British Jewish families were interned, U.S. funds ceased, and times got even harder for the refugees, who tried in vain to get their relatives to Shanghai, faced dire food shortages and eked out a living however they could, sorting bugs from their rice and smuggling goods into the ghetto to resell.
In the end, one is struck by the intimacy and care of Shanghai Ghetto, which manages to effectively translate the experience for a wide-ranging, multicultural audience. Next to the surviving exiles, Shanghai is an incidental player here — the kind of fluid, international, get-rich-and-sink-to-the-lowest-depths zone that was expansive and undefinable enough to easily absorb all comers, including the Jewish refugees. In the same way, directors Janklowicz-Mann and Mann maintain a balance, including input from Chinese historian Xu Buxeng, while keeping the focus on the refugees.
But the directors’ point really comes to bear when they follow Janklowicz and Grebenschikoff back to Shanghai, secretly and without permits, and film them revisiting their old quarters in the ghetto. True to form, the journey back is emotional yet honest, rejecting overt sentimentality.
In the end, watching the onetime refugees walk dreamily around their old living spaces, as the current Chinese residents look on, one realizes that Shanghai Ghetto not only belongs among Holocaust documentaries. This story can easily find a place as a companion to Shoah, giving voice to those that managed to get out in time and went on to deal with both hardship and survivors’ guilt. Yet strangely Shanghai Ghetto can also easily coexist, like a good neighbor, alongside a feature film such as Chinatown. Offering a positive, life-affirming, true-life rejoinder to Roman Polanski’s poetic and ultimately dour view of L.A. Chinatown’s mean, ever-shifting streets, the documentary provides a soulful, complex and frank but fair perspective on a “Yiddishtown” within a Chinese urban center. Perhaps everyone can get along after all.
Shanghai Ghetto opens Jan. 31 and runs through Feb. 6 at Opera Plaza Cinemas, S.F. with the filmmakers appearing at evening shows on Jan. 31 and Feb. 2. It also screens Jan. 31 through Feb. 6 at Shattuck Cinemas, Berkeley; filmmakers will appear there at evening shows on Feb. 1.
|
