Archive for the ‘default’ Category

This Year in Beijing! Modern Jews in Modern China! And Book News!

Friday, March 26th, 2010

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No guest bloggers–it’s the author herself!

After a way too long absence, I’m back to the blog at an auspicious time: it’s almost Passover, when we use a Seder plate, which is the object of my protagonist’s search.  Okay, I’ve got relevance covered!  My husband and I are here in Beijing for Passover with our son and daughter-in-law here, the third time we’ve done Seder here.  Despite the super long winter they’ve had this year, with a few interspersed days of springlike dust storms, we’ve had a first day+ of sunny, 60-degree weather.

And why the long absence from blogging?  As is well known to many of my friends and family, I’ve been chair of “Jews in Modern China,” an exhibit running from February 24 to May 16 at the Presidio Officers’ Club Exhibition Hall in San Francisco. This exhibit depicts the three streams of Jewish settlement in Shanghai, Harbin, and other cities in China from the 1840s to 1949: Baghdadi Sephardim who came for commerce, Russians fleeing first czarist pogroms and later the Bolsheviks, and Central Europeans escaping the Holocaust. So far, this has been the Presidio’s most well attended exhibit, we’ve had great PR, docent tours, special lectures and events, and it’s consumed my life for months.  It’s a miracle–oh, wait, Chanukah is the miracle holiday–that we managed to get away for this trip.  But spending Passover with kids–priceless, especially when they live in China.  Fourteen people are coming to the Seder at Amy and Jonathan’s on Monday.

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The (Jewish Writer) Lady from Shanghai

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

My friend, Rena Krasno, died two weeks ago; she would have turned 86 in December.

There were many things I knew about Rena.  She was born in Shanghai to parents who had come there from Russia about the time my grandmother came to the US and for the same reason–to escape pogroms.  Her family, like most of the Russian community, lived in Shanghai’s French Concession, and she and her sister attended the French School, where she began to learn the seven languages she eventually spoke.  Their father was a writer, magazine editor, and active Zionist; the mother owned a children’s shop.  The family left China and went to Israel in 1949.  There Rena met and married Hannan, whose business led them to temporary homes in Korea, the Philippines, and Japan before retirement to the San Francisco Bay Area, where their daughters and their families had settled.

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Post from a Guest Blogger

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Linda told you that there would be guest contributors to this blog, and I’m honored to be the first. Let me introduce myself to you–Simon Rieger-as I did for the first time to Lily Kovner on that fateful afternoon at the Judaica auction when her family’s Seder plate showed up on the block.

Like everyone else at the auction, I was shocked by her outburst.  These auctions are sedate and refined.  Maybe not so fancy and formal as Sotheby’s or Christie’s–but low-key and dignified.  What shocked me most was how disgracefully everyone treated her, the people in the audience and the ones running the auction.  Sure, she interrupted the proceedings, but her charge was serious, at least serious enough for the Mosaica woman to withdraw the Seder plate and end the auction.  I couldn’t believe that no one talked to Lily or bothered to even ask about what she said; they just got up and left.  Totally shunned her on the way out. Without a glance her way.  Close to one hundred people.

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