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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.
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 