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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.
