Wednesday, August 18, 2010

A Shanghai Jewish Microcosm

Goodbye Shanghai

A Memoir
by Sam Moshinsky
Mind Publishing, 219pp.
Reviewed: 17 July, 2010

It can be refreshing for a reader to spend a few hours in the microcosm of an unpretentious personal memoir.

Sam Moshinsky is a member of a small community of Jews whose family histories over the 20th Century took them from pre-revolutionary Russia, to the Russian Far East, to China, and finally to Australia.
Sam was born in 1934 in Shanghai, and this memoir is his recollections to the point that his family settled in Melbourne in the early 1950s. 
Sam's perspective on Shanghai is both intimate and somewhat detached. The family's social life was almost exclusively within the Jewish community of Shanghai, which included synagogue, an active and prosperous Jewish Club (later the Shanghai Conservatorium), school, and even a militantly Zionist youth association, the Betar, where Sam dressed in paramilitary uniform and practised martial arts for the prospective war to create an exclusively Jewish Israel.
Sam seems to have been keen to fit in wherever he found himself. His best friend for life was Alex Vinogradov, a Shanghai neighbour whose family were of the traditionally anti-Semitic White Russian community. At St Francis Xavier's College young Sam, the only Jew in the school, topped his final year in Catholic Catechism (to his parents' bemusement).
The Moshinskys had an unusually easy time in Shanghai during the Second World War. Because they had never taken up Soviet citizenship they were officially stateless. Shanghai was one of the few places stateless persons were welcome. Neither the Allies nor the occupying Japanese identified them as enemy aliens. Their family business, the Shanghai Cardboard Box Factory, just kept on supplying their ice-cream containers to Chinese, Japanese or American customers as control of Shanghai alternated during and following the War.
Life continued without major interruption until the Communist takeover. In due course, communist officials imposed a retrospective “income tax” to cover all the years that the factory had operated, during which there had never been any income tax in Shanghai. They could not get exit visas until the entirety of the family property had been signed over to “the people” in payment of this fictional tax debt.
On his first trip back to Shanghai, in 1986, Sam found the Cardboard Box Factory still operating, after 40 years as a “people's collective”, with exactly the same machinery they had left behind, and even his father's managerial desk in exactly the same position.
Richard Thwaites has followed developments in China since the 1960s.

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