The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai Into Post-World War II San Francisco

The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai into Post-World War II San Francisco

Sara Halpern

American Jewish History, Volume 104, Number 1, January 2020, pp. 87-114 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/ajh.2020.0000

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/755246

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai into Post-World War II San Francisco1

Sara Halpern

The transnational story of “Shanghai Jews” began in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria (Anschluss) and the November pogroms (Kristallnacht), when German and Austrian Jews sought to escape the inferno. Shanghai, which was one of the few places in the world that did not require an entry visa, offered one possible route out.2 In their quest to get there, more than 16,000 Jews rode on trains through the Brenner Pass on the Austrian-Italian border and embarked on ocean liners in Genoa. After that path closed in June 1940, they traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, where they boarded ships bound for Shanghai via Japan.3 Those trains and ships carried them to safety in Asia’s largest port, a city with over 5,000,000 Chinese and 50,000 foreigners. Over the next decade, as China experienced military and political turmoil, these German-speaking Jewish refugees formed a cohesive community of families and unaccompanied men, who were

1. The author expresses deep gratitude to present and past editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier drafts. She also wishes to thank Deborah Dash Moore and Michael Gelb for their steadfast mentorship throughout the whole process, and to the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michi- gan for providing research funds. 2. For more on entry visa policies in Shanghai, see Gao Bei, Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). On the journey to Shanghai, see also Ernest G. Heppner, Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 32; Ursula Bacon, Shanghai Diary: A Young Girl’s Journey from Hitler’s Hate to War-Torn China (Milwaukee: M Press, 2004), 21. 3. According to Yehuda Bauer, 18,124 people registered with the Nazis as leaving for Shanghai. By the end of 1939, some 15,000 Jewish refugees registered with the local relief agencies for support. Yehuda Bauer, Out of the Ashes: The Impact of American Jews on Post-Holocaust European Jewry (New York: Pergamon Press, 1988), 253. In addition to German and Austrian Jews, around 500 yeshiva students and rabbis with transit visas fled to Japan, and the Japanese subsequently sent them to Shanghai between 1941 and 1942. See David Avraham Mandelbom and Malky Heimowitz, From Lublin to Shanghai: The Miraculous Exile of Yeshivas Chachmei Lublin (Brooklyn: Me- sorah, 2012); Chaim U. Lipschitz, The Shanghai Connection, eds. Sonia Winter, Hallie Cantor and Judy Bendel (New York: Maznaim Publishing Corp, 1988); and Yecheskel Keitner, Operation Torah Rescue: The Escape of the Mirrer Yeshiva from War-Torn Poland to Shanghai, China (Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers, 1987).

© by American Jewish Historical Society 2020 88 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY either unmarried or had left their non-Jewish wives behind. The Chinese Civil War (1945–1949) and the refugees’ hope that Shanghai would serve only as a waystation led all but a few to emigrate from China after the collapse of the Axis powers in 1945. Approximately 7,000 refugees traveled to San Francisco. Unlike Canada and Australia, which ran selective labor schemes, the United States permitted corporate affidavits with no labor contracts.4 The US government also offered transit visas to those journeying onward to Canada, Europe, Palestine/State of Israel, or Latin America. The rest of the group traveled directly to Australia, Canada, and Europe.5 Little is known of Shanghai Jews’ post-World War II emigration and resettlement processes. After spending an anxious decade together, including twenty-eight months confined in a Japanese-sanctioned “designated area,” which the refugees called the “ghetto,” it is striking that so many refugees’ memoirs, diaries, and testimonies were silent about their transition to freedom outside of China.6 Their stories instead frequently conformed to the Holocaust survivor narrative of experiences under Nazism, flight, survival, and grief. Those who spent their childhood in Shanghai frequently employed this literary strategy and supplemented their stories with what they learned from their parents. The absence of Shanghai Jews’ post-Holocaust stories in memoirs, diaries, and testimonies raises questions concerning their postwar transition from Shanghai to their new homes in Australia, Europe, Israel, and the Americas. How did the refugees experience their first days of arrival? How did they interact with the local Jewish community and other Ho- locaust survivors? How did the former groups perceive Shanghai Jews while still reeling from the news in Europe? How did Shanghai Jews negotiate their refugee experiences as they attempted to find a place for themselves socially and economically in their new locales? In turn, how did the broader society treat these traumatized new migrants? These questions can be answered through the framework of diaspora: Shanghai Jews carved out their own space within the German-speaking

4. The Truman Directive of December 1945 permitted American Jewish organizations to sponsor potential immigrants without family or friends in the United States. 5. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) reported that “nearly 6,000” Shanghai Jews resettled in the United States, 1,500 to Israel, 1,000 to Austra- lia, 700 to Latin America, 285 to Europe, and 140 to Canada. One thousand and 540 repatriated to Austria and Germany respectively. “Evacuation from Shanghai,” JDC Review, January-February 1949. 6. Sources include the oral history collection at the Holocaust Center of Jewish Family and Children’s Services in San Francisco (SFJFCS-HC), family papers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), and published memoirs in English and German. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 89

Jewish diaspora of over 250,000 refugees from Nazism.7 They constructed a “microdiaspora,” grounded in their shared trauma of uprooting, and in experiences and memories of surviving in and emigrating from Shanghai during a catastrophic moment in Jewish history.8 While not a “home” in a literal sense, Shanghai served as a nexus for experiencing and remembering their Holocaust survival.9 As white Europeans, they grappled with cultural shocks; as impoverished and stateless residents, they struggled with hyperinflation, scarce goods, and uncertainty without consular protection; as Jews, they were confined in a “ghetto.” Amidst these difficulties, Shanghai’s transcolonial and cosmopolitan nature afforded new arrivals a chance to create economic, political, social, and cultural activities with German-Jewish flair. In “Little Vienna”—as English-language Shanghai newspapers described the German-Jewish community—they spoke German while learning English and “pidgin English,” a blend of Chinese and English.10 Compared to other tran- sient communities that had escaped Nazi persecution, Shanghai lasted the longest, from 1938 to 1950. This protracted wait for resettlement elsewhere contributed to formations of friendships and new families among Shanghai’s Jewish refugees.11 These charged moments laid the foundation for this “microdiaspora.” This article first explores these Shanghai years as formative, highlight- ing how the ghetto experience became the key to understanding how

7. On the concept of “victim diaspora,” see Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (New York: Routledge Press, 2008). On the German-Jewish diaspora, as opposed to exile, resulting from Nazism, see Atina Grossmann, “German Jews as Provincial Cosmopolitans: Reflections from the Upper West Side,” Leo Baeck Yearbook (2009): 157–168. 8. On memory changes in relation to migration and settlement, see Julia Creet and Andreas Kitzmann, eds., Memory and Migration: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Memory Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 8–10; Irial Glynn and J. Olaf Kleist, eds., History, Memory, and Migration: Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation (New York: Palgrave MacMillian, 2012), 4–5. 9. For a study that highlights the value of re-scaling when examining migration pat- terns and connection to a particular locale rather than a nation-state, see Rebecca Ko- brin, Jewish Bialystok and its Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 10. See James R. Ross, Escape to Shanghai: A Jewish Community in China (New York: Free Press, 1994), 70. 11. As points of comparison, see studies of Jewish refugee communities in India and the Dominican Republic: H.G. Reissner, “Indian-Jewish Statistics (1837–1941),” Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 4 (1950): 350; Anil Bhatti and Johannes H. Voigt, eds., Jewish Exile in India, 1933–1945 (New Delhi: Mandohar, Max Mueller Bhavan, 1999); Margit Franz, Gateway India: Deutschsprachiges Exil in Indien zwischen britischer Kolonialherrschaft, Maharadschas und Gandhi (Graz, Austria: CLIO, 2015); Marion A. Kaplan, Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosúa, 1940–1945 (New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage, 1998). 90 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

Shanghai Jews came to define their “survival” during the Holocaust. Then the article migrates to San Francisco where Shanghai Jews repeated survival and resettlement strategies first developed in Shanghai. As we will see, the refugees engaged their memories of flight and adaptation, social connections, and trauma as they arrived in San Francisco.12 As they sought integration, their different experiences as migrants from Asia mediated their experiences as survivors of the Holocaust. San Francisco became a key site for this emergent microdiaspora. With so many who sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and explored their first days on Fillmore and Market streets, this city rose as an important symbol for the Shanghai Jewish diaspora. Although a large German-Jewish refugee community existed in Washington Heights in New York City, many Shanghai Jews, weary of traveling, made San Francisco their home.13 The Shanghai Jews did not come to San Francisco alone: Hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese boarded the same ships to rejoin their families, pursue educational opportunities, or flee the communists.14 Chinatown’s population jumped from 17,782 in 1940 to 24,813 in 1950.15 Unlike Shanghai Jews, the Chinese encountered systematic discrimination upon disembarking. Although the days of gatekeeping on Angel Island ended in 1940 and the US repealed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943, the Chinese still faced intense scrutiny from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).16 Owing to the city’s continuing housing

12. Libby Garland observes the paradigmatic shift from nation-bound to the transnational and global in American Jewish migration history. Libby Garland, “State of the Field: New Directions for American Jewish Migration Histories,” American Jewish History 102, no. 3 (2018): 429. 13. Remarkably, the most recent comprehensive history of West Coast Jewry over- looks the plight of European Jewish refugees in the 1930s. Ellen Eisenberg, Ava F. Kahn and William Toll, Jews of the Pacific Coast: Reinventing Community on America’s Edge (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). On New York, see Steven M. Löwenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983, Its Structure and Culture (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). 14. Xiaojian Zhao, Remaking Chinese America: Immigration, Family, and Com- munity, 1940–1965 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Helen Zia, Last Boat out of Shanghai: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Fled Mao’s Revolution (New York: Ballantine Books, 2019). 15. Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population Characteristics of the Non-white Population by Race (Washington: U.S. Printing Office, 1943), 91; “San Francisco County—1950–1960 Census Data,” Bay Area Census (Metropolitan Trans- portation Commission [MTC] and Association of Bay Area Governments [ABAG]). accessed June 10, 2019, http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty50. htm. 16. Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 74–75. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 91 discrimination, the two groups parted ways after a decade of living in close proximity to one another. This separation symbolized Shanghai Jews’ “return” to the mainstream as they forged their new lives in over- whelmingly white San Francisco.17 San Francisco, as new immigrants soon learned, had peculiar challenges as a West Coast city.18 First, the city served as a military base and a center of wartime industry during World War II. After the war, the economy continued to boom as it shifted from producing war supplies to civilian goods. The city also welcomed thousands of soldiers from the Pacific theater seeking to settle in California, intensifying housing and employment competition that had begun during the war. The end of World War II also empowered African-Americans, Chinese-Americans, and Japanese-Americans to engage in civil rights movements, upending white San Franciscans’ expectations of residential segregation.19 The city served as an antithesis to Los Angeles, an explosive social and cultural mecca for German-speaking Jewish intellectual and artist émigrés in the 1930s and for American Jews after 1945.20 By focusing on San Francisco, we add a perspective that nuances the narrative of American Jewish response to the Holocaust.21 The city

17. In 1950, roughly 89% of residents identified as white. “San Francisco Coun- ty—1950–1960 Census Data,” Bay Area Census (MTC and ABAG), accessed June 10, 2019, http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty50.htm. 18. On San Francisco in the mid- to late-twentieth century, see William Issel, For Both Cross and Flag: Catholic Action, anti-Catholicism, and National Security Politics in World War II San Francisco (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010); Chris- topher Lowen Agee, The Streets of San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of Cos- mopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Eduardo A. Contreras, Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Fran- cisco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). 19. Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Hous- ing, and the Transformation of Urban California (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Paul T. Miller, The Postwar Struggle for Civil Rights: African Americans in San Francisco, 1945–1975 (New York: Routledge Press, 2010); Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy. 20. Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Deborah Dash Moore, To the Golden Cities: Pursuing the American Jewish Dream in Miami and L.A. (New York: Free Press, 1994); Max Vorspan and Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews of Los Angeles (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1970). 21. On regional responses to the Holocaust, see Rafael Medoff, “American Re- sponses to the Holocaust: New Research, New Controversies,” American Jewish His- tory 100, no. 3 (2016): 406; Beth Cohen, Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in Postwar America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Hasia R. Diner, We Remem- ber with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holo- caust, 1945–1962 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 92 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY had a well-integrated Jewish community of 55,000. Their distance from Europe, relatively low levels of Eastern European Jewish immigration, and generations of acculturation led to a sense of belonging in this city. Moreover, the intense regional antipathy toward Asians ironically enabled Jews to find acceptance in the city’s politics, economy, and society. Even at its peak in the 1930s, antisemitism stayed muted relative to other parts of the United States.22 Jewish San Franciscans linked their fight against antisemitism with their liberal crusade against social and racial discrimination.23 The destruction of European Jewry, however— even though few had close relatives in Europe—shattered Jewish San Franciscans’ sense of security. Shanghai Jews arrived in San Francisco at this atypical moment.

RECONSTRUCTING LIVES IN SHANGHAI If the Nazis had not turned Shanghai Jews’ world upside down enough, Shanghai certainly did. Although many Jewish refugees hailed from urban areas in Europe, the sight, smells, and sounds of Shanghai overwhelmed them. Memoirs and testimonies are dominated by accounts of cultural shock in the first days and months and descriptions of survival strategies adopted to cope with this new environment. As impoverished, accultur- ated Europeans banished by virtue of their Jewish race, relocation to a non-Western setting traumatized them. They had been accustomed to belonging to middle-class Mitteleuropa; now they found themselves adrift in the unfamiliar. Shanghai had two distinct Jewish communities prior to the Euro- pean refugees’ arrival: Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The Sephardim came from Baghdad as early as the 1840s, and the Russians entered in waves from the 1880s to the 1920s, peaking during the Russian Civil War in 1919–1921. These populations, however, numbered only in the few thousands, leaving them virtually unknown outside of China. The community of European Jewish refugees dwarfed these small communities, and refugees found themselves negotiating their new environment without significant help from more established Jews.24

22. On the triangular relationship among Jews, whites, and Asians on the West Coast, see Ellen M. Eisenberg, First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII (Langham: Lexington Books, 2008). 23. Fred Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans: A Social and Cultural History of the Jews of the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 24. See Ernest G. Heppner, “The Relations between the Western European Refugees and the Shanghai Resident Jews: A Personal Memoir,” The Jews of China, Jonathan Goldstein, ed. (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1999), 2, 57–69. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 93

First, refugees confronted public health issues associated with densely populated areas. Then they negotiated the extant colonial racial hierarchy that governed their new status quo. Finally, they were confined to a “designated area” between May 1943 and August 1945 by the Japanese.

Effects of Population Density on Basic Necessities and Dignity Shanghai’s population density shocked the newly arrived Europeans. Despite a population similar in size to that of Berlin, Shanghai’s streets, sidewalks, and lanes were littered with people, rickshaws, automobiles, and other objects. The presence of trash, feces, and discarded dead baby girls stunned the newcomers. The crowding of people and waste in the Western-controlled International Settlement, French Concession, and parts of Hongkew, allowed these places to serve as breeding grounds for tropical diseases that created anxiety within the population, although few refugees experienced these diseases firsthand. Many of them, however, cringed at the city’s appearance: “Coming from Germany, a country excessively concerned about cleanliness . . . the sanitary conditions were appalling, both inside and out.”25 Ernst Heppner recalled in his memoir of arriving in Shanghai as an eighteen-year-old with his mother, “As the Potsdam slowly eased into the muddy, winding Whangpoo River, total silence fell over the passengers. We were horror-stricken . . . as far as the eye could see, nothing but buildings in ruins. Strangely, those houses that were left standing did not look anything like the houses with the upturned eaves with dragons that we had found pictures of in the books we had read on China. Certainly, they were like nothing we had expected.”26 When they first encountered the camps (heime) in Hongkew, a bombed- out district, the refugees’ discomfort, and for some, despair, grew as they inspected their new “private” space. Despite the best efforts of the local Jewish communities to provide basic supplies, the sight of metal bunk beds and sheets hung to create “walls” between quarters in huge rooms astonished them. In their German-Jewish culture, discreetness equated with respectability. A five-year-old at the time, Ralph Harpruder recalled, “The sudden transition [from comfortable homes to the heime] . . . was for many too much to bear.”27 Eighteen-year-old Ellen Stern and her

25. Hans Cohn, Risen from the Ashes: Tales of a Musical Messenger (Lanham: Hamilton Books, 2006), 32. 26. Ernst G. Heppner, Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 37. 27. Ralph Harpruder, “Ralph Harpruder,” in Shanghai Remembered: Stories of Jews Who Escaped to Shanghai from Nazi Europe, ed. Beri Falbaum (Royal Oaks: Momentum Books, 2005), 66. 94 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY parents lived in “unpleasant” conditions in the camp, in a room with thirty to forty other refugees for about three months before her father found a job and the family moved into a two-room apartment. She ad- mitted in her 1990 interview that “[the transition] was very difficult . . . not as much for me than for my parents.”28 Like this family, many Jews soon rented rooms elsewhere, primarily in Hongkew, the International Settlement, and the French Concession. Nearly everyone eventually needed aid from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), which opened its Shanghai office in spring 1941. Obtaining relief grew into a shared, but unspoken, experience of being forcibly dispossessed. Although the JDC and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) archives provide rich statistics and commentaries, few refugees penned their memories or mentioned in interviews their experiences receiving aid. This may have been to protect what was left of their shattered dignity. Tobias Sigmund, then eleven years old, remembered watching a couple scurrying with food pails from the kitchen. At the time, he “wondered if people hurried . . . so that the food would not get cold or because they were ashamed of being forced to get their meals from the emergency kitchens.” Later in bed, he overheard his parents’ whispers about resorting to the JDC because they did not have enough money to feed themselves.29 By 1943, the heime reached maximum capacity of 2,800 individuals and the kitchen fed nearly 8,000 people with one meal a day.30

The Place of Colonial Hierarchy in Shaping the Refugees’ Status Quo Adapting to Shanghai’s colonial hierarchy unsettled Shanghai Jews as white Europeans fleeing anti-Jewish persecution. Placed in this hierarchy beneath the longtime American, European, Japanese, and Russian settlers, they lived among the poor and working-class Chinese. The proximity to the Chinese provoked a myriad of reactions from sympathy to disgust. On one end, Fred Linden, forty years old at the time, complained, “The Chinese are . . . very cruel people. And as a European . . . I felt strange and frightened.”31 On the other end, children tended to express more

28. Ellen Stern, interview by Barbara Harris and Burton Meyer, June 21, 1990, Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, JFCS-HC. 29. Tobias Sigmund, Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 86. 30. Laura Margolis, interview by Linda Kuzmack, July 11, 1990, RG-50.030*0149, USHMM. 31. Utah Oral History Institute, Fred Linden in Shanghai (Ithaca: Wells College Press, 1982), 13, RG-10.172, The Linden Family Papers, USHMM. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 95 positive views of the Chinese than did adults.32 Some, such as Walter Bergh, Fred Marcus, and Ursula Bacon and her father, even learned the Shanghai dialect.33 At the same time, the persecuted newcomers negotiated conflicting feelings toward riding on rickshaws drawn by rail-thin Chinese men; riding them was as much a way of life for foreigners as taking carriages in Europe.34 The colonial hierarchy also determined the refugees’ employment and the structure of their community. They sought income to cover expensive housing after selling off their valuables. While longtime white and Japa- nese residents dominated banking, municipal government, and law, as well as manufacturing, the Chinese performed menial labor. The refugees found their niche in entrepreneurship or skilled jobs. Some partnered with local English-speaking Chinese.35 As their businesses grew, some delighted in the diversity of their clientele. Fred Linden, a tailor, recalled his surprise, “Our best customers . . . were the Japanese women! . . . Russian women came from the International Settlement because we advertised in the English and German papers.”36 To satisfy the refugees’ need to escape the pressures of population density and colonial hierarchy, artists built a vibrant German-Jewish culture in Hongkew.37 Fred Linden reflected, “We lacked the one thing that would have gotten us into the inner circles of the foreign community, into the clubs, into the community organizations, into what might be called ‘society’—we had no money, at least not enough, as it was with most of our refugee contemporaries.”38 The refugees might have been materially impoverished but they found enormous “wealth in stage artists, singers, painters and authors, conductors and orchestra musicians, violinists and pianists is contained in [their] small community.” Shanghai Jews’ efforts to create “Little Vienna” belied any claim that the Nazis

32. Bacon, Shanghai Diary, 96–97; Walter C. Frank, People, Events, Stories: A Personal History, 1920–1946 (Berkeley: Regent Press, 1995), 159. 33. Warner Bergh, “Warner Bergh,” Shanghai Remembered, 24; Audrey Friedman Marcus and Rena Krasno, Survival in Shanghai: The Journals of Fred Marcus 1939–49 (Berkeley: Pacific View Press, 2008); Bacon, Shanghai Diary, 73, 247–248. 34. Horst “Peter” Eisfelder, Chinese Exile: My Years in Shanghai and Nanking (Victoria: Makor Jewish Community Library, 2003), 48–49; Cohn, Risen from the Ashes, 40. 35. Ingrid Wilmot, “Ingrid Wilmot,” in Shanghai Remembered, 220–221. 36. Fred Linden in Shanghai, 11. 37. See O. Lewis, ed., Shanghai Almanac, 1946/7 (Shanghai: Shanghai Echo, 1947), 47–82; “Selected Pamphlets from the Australian Jewish Historical Society, 1948–1947,” “Jews in China,” reel 1, files 296–359, RG-69.005M, USHMM. 38. Frank, People, Events, Stories, 157–158. 96 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY ended German-Jewish culture.39 As the Shanghai Almanac later recounted, “Not only was theater played, but really good stage performances were often offered, and the actors, only too often performed after heavy daily grind work in other professions . . . in the evening with empty pockets and hungry stomachs but with a rich and satisfying feeling.” It added that “opera and operetta, dramatics and comedy, dance and entertainment, concert and formative art—how successful were our exhibitions of the ‘Arts’—were industriously performed and each phase of art found its enthusiastic public . . . Operetta performances enjoyed far more popularity than concerts, which [was] easily understood, for after the daily grind, the emigrants partially devoid of higher musical education longed for humorous fare.”40

Hitler’s “Long Arm” in the Ghetto41 The refugees’ lives transformed again in May 1943, when the Japanese decreed that all “stateless” Jews who arrived after 1937 needed to reside in a “designated area” in Hongkew. Austrian and German-Jewish refugees were obliged to comply as the Nazis had revoked their citizenship in November 1941.42 Some 8,000 moved into this one square mile area, joining Hongkew’s roughly 8,000 Jewish and 50,000 Chinese residents.43 Increased overcrowding, worsening unsanitary conditions, harsh regulations, near collapse of the relief infrastructure, and a direct hit from an Allied bomb defined their Holocaust experience. What little privacy Shanghai Jews previously had disappeared as families moved into shared rooms; the camps’ population doubled in

39. Grossmann, “German Jews as Provincial Cosmopolitans,” 162–163. For argu- ments concerning the “beginning of the end” of German-Jewish life, see Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 338–350; Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–13. 40. “Cultural Life in Shanghai,” Shanghai Almanac, 1946/7, 64–66; “Selected Pam- phlets from the Australian Jewish Historical Society, 1948–1947,” “Jews in China,” reel 1, file328 , RG-69.005M, USHMM. 41. For reference to Hitler’s “long arm,” see Ross, Escape to Shanghai, 207–209. 42. Other Jewish communities, such as the Russians and the Sephardim, were exempted from the rules. Many Sephardim held British citizenship and were therefore interned with other British and American citizens in camps outside of Shanghai. Maisie J. Mayer, From the Rivers of Babylon to the Whangpoo: A Century of Sephardi Jewish Life in Shanghai (Lanham: University Press of America, Inc., 2003), 221–225; Mar- cia Reynders Ristaino, Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai, 214–241. 43. Felix Gruenberger, “The Jewish Refugees in Shanghai,” Jewish Social Studies 12, no. 4 (1950): 342. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 97 size. Ernst John Eick recalled his first memory of Shanghai as a five-year- old: “Our new home [in Hongkew] . . . was a converted, abandoned private schoolhouse . . . The living conditions were a far cry from the luxury apartments that we enjoyed in Berlin. The new apartments had four families living in each room. There was no kitchen and only one bathroom shared by fourteen people on the first floor.”44 Trading homes with the Chinese was not unusual but not without expenses. Families such as those of Eva (Kantorowsky) Angress and Sigmund Tobias had to trade their quarters for smaller ones while paying sky-rocketing “key money” (similar to a security deposit) to the Chinese occupants.45 The refugees also found themselves unable to organize meetings without the requisite Japanese police presence.46 The heightened levels of density and starvation in Hongkew aggravated poor public health. Rising costs forced two refugee hospitals to shutter their doors in 1942.47 Lice appeared everywhere, as few had soap for bathing or enough clean underwear. Delousing stations proved ineffec- tive. At one point, those infested with lice were given overalls made of jute-bag, which one physician, Felix Gruenberger, observed, “only served to break down further their sense of self-respect and make them feel like outcasts.”48 Some women resorted to prostitution for material goods, and at least twenty mothers sold their babies. While mortality among the refugees peaked in 1942 because of a blazing summer that killed the elderly and those with heart conditions, the death rate remained high from 1943 to 1945.49 The Japanese instituted border regulations. Evidence of school atten- dance and employment allowed children and some adults to leave. Adults experienced anxiety as they stood in lines for entry and exit passes. The sadistic, eccentric Japanese commander, Kanoh Ghoya, loved children but resented adults for standing taller than him. The self-proclaimed “King of the Jews” frequently humiliated them. If turned away, they

44. Ernest John Eick, “Ernst John Eick” in Shanghai Remembered, 36. 45. Eva Angress, interview by Lani Silver and Ruth Tanner, 28 October 1991, Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, JFCS- HC; Tobias, Strange Haven, 50. 46. Gruenberger, “The Jewish Refugees in Shanghai,” 341. 47. Gruenberger, “The Jewish Refugees in Shanghai,” 337–338. 48. Gruenberger, “The Jewish Refugees in Shanghai,” 340. 49. “Vital Statistics of Refugees,” YIVO Catalog, 9–10, in David Kranzler, Japa- nese, Nazis, and Jews: The Jewish Community of Shanghai, 1938–1945 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976), 605; Simon Bergman, Director of Medical Department, JDC Shanghai Office, “Report on Jewish DP’s in China (a decade of efforts to reha- bilitate a Community, 1939–1949), July 6, 1949, Records of the New York Office of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, folder 502, file 398–399, JDC Archives. 98 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY tried again on another day hoping that “Mr. Ghoya” might be in better mood.50 Based on what Shanghai Jews learned of ghettoization in Europe through the Soviet radio, they worried that the Nazis might encourage the Japanese to begin deporting internees.51 Along with border regulations, the declining economy and runaway inflation limited the ability of Shanghai Jews to remain self-supporting, driving many more to seek JDC relief. In 1942, moreover, Japanese occupiers froze all Allied bank accounts, including those of the JDC, and of wealthy Sephardic Jews with British citizenship. Although JDC funding resumed when the US government intervened in mid-1944, it still barely ameliorated critical living conditions.52 Twelve thousand were dependent on this relief by July 1945.53 The refugees barely escaped a different threat to their survival on July 17, 1945. While US planes conducted air raids in the city’s outskirts, one plane accidently dropped a bomb on Hongkew. This explosion flat- tened buildings and shocked the refugees and their Chinese neighbors. According to Felix Gruenberger, “[Jewish refugees] who had previously been frightened at the sight of blood rushed to the emergency stations to offer their help [to Chinese and Jewish victims alike].”54 They “hast- ily organized” a guard service to prevent looting. Gruenberger saw the Jewish-Chinese effort as a moment of gratitude for one another.55 Jewish refugee doctors treated 600 Chinese and refugee patients in makeshift aid stations within the refugee camps, without regard for the Chinese custom of waiting for treatment until the immediate family could pay.56 Chinese doctors assisted with some of the surgeries at the Municipal Police Hospital. The Jewish and Russian auxiliary police (pao chia)

50. Rubin, Ghetto Schanghai, 49–50. 51. Deutsch, interview; Bacon, Shanghai Diary, 118; Ernst Glaser, interview by author, May 24, 2010; Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews; Pamela Rotner Sakamoto, Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma (Westport: Praeger Press, 1998); Gao Bei: Shanghai Sanctuary. 52. Laura Margolis, interview. 53. Bacon, Shanghai Diary, 113–114. 54. On the limits put on Red Cross activities in Shanghai, see George Reinisch, Shanghai Haven (1985), 71, Jewish Holocaust Centre of Melbourne Library; Edouard Egle, “Report on the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Problem,” September 24, 1945, reel 1, RG-19.045M, Selected Records from the International Committee of the Red Cross Commission for Prisoners, Internees and Civilians, Jews (Israélites), 1939–1961, folder G-59/3.01, USHMM; Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross and its activities during the Second World War (September 1, 1939-June 30, 1947) (Geneva: May 1948), 1:479. 55. Gruenberger, “The Jewish Refugees in Shanghai,” 373–374. 56. Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews, 553. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 99 quickly assisted their Chinese counterparts in attending to the injured and putting out fires.57 Altogether, some 32 refugees were killed and 250 wounded, while an unknown number of Chinese perished.58 This bombing served as a reckoning for the white Europeans: They shared the tragedy of losing friends, neighbors, and family while serving unwillingly as human shields for the Japanese. They were victims of a brutal military conflict that was encroaching upon their hoped-for refuge from violence. Although JDC-sponsored cultural activities and schools closed because of the refugees’ overwhelming need for material relief, Shanghai Jews continued to maintain their German-Jewish culture. Rabbi Theodore Alexander and his wife Gertrude recalled, “[We] kept up our cultural [life] to keep our minds all together. We had theater, we had cultural lectures, we even had coffee houses . . . with nothing but water and some coffee.”59 A child refugee credits her parents for maintaining cheer in their home: “My mother always said: ‘Here we are in this hellhole, but we are alive and so we must live decently.’”60 Poor and vulnerable compared to their established Western and Jewish counterparts in Shanghai, these Jews carved a niche in the city. Relying upon entrepreneurial skills and a commitment to their distinct German-Jewish culture, they were able to navigate their deteriorating living conditions and status quo. And, as we will see, their experiences of colonial hierarchy, ghettoization, and bombing shaped the Shanghai Jewish community as a diaspora community in the postwar period.

SAN FRANCISCO: A NEW DIASPORA COMMUNITY When the first Shanghai Jewish refugees arrived in San Francisco in late 1946, they were struck by the contrast between the two cities. Unlike Shanghai, San Francisco delighted their senses with clean streets, fresh air, and a moderate climate without humid, hot summers or freezing winters. The sudden appearance of personal space thrilled the newcomers: San Francisco’s population of 700,000 was a fraction of Shanghai’s six million in 1947—and was even considerably smaller than those of Berlin

57. Edouard Egle, “Shanghai Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,” report, July 20, 1945 in to Saly Mayer, letter, June 20, 1946, reel 1, RG-19.045M, Selected Records from the International Committee of the Red Cross Commission for Prisoners, Intern- ees and Civilians, Jews (Israélites), 1939–1961, folder G-59/3.01, USHMM. 58. Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews, 553, 43ff.; Edouard Egle, “Shanghai Jew- ish Joint Distribution Committee,” report, July 20, 1945, reel 1RG-19.045M, Selected Records from the International Committee of the Red Cross Commission for Prisoners, Internees and Civilians. Jews (Israélites), 1939–1961, Folder G-59/3.01, USHMM. 59. Rabbi Theodore Alexander, interview by author, August 19, 2009. 60. Ingrid Gallin, “Ingrid Gallin,” Shanghai Remembered, 47. 100 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY and Vienna in the 1930s. In addition, the refugees returned to a largely white environment, which, remarkably and yet unremarkably, was not noted in memoirs, diaries, or oral testimonies, perhaps a testament to their ready feeling of belonging in white-majority America. San Francisco was Shanghai Jews’ first direct encounter with America, and it became the final destination for many. Others faced pressure to rejoin family members who had settled on the east coast. Some intended to continue on to Europe or South America with their transit visas in hand. And after July 1947, a great many encountered a group of Ameri- can Jewish social workers from the United Service for New Americans (USNA), who urged them to settle in the Midwest to avoid creating a new Jewish enclave in San Francisco.61 After arriving at San Francisco’s Embarcadero and disembarking on American soil, the refugees quickly had the rude awakening of resettling as impoverished and traumatized migrants in a new city with its own established Jewish community again. In this process, they recollected their survival strategies for locating homes and jobs, and undertaking social and cultural activities from their first days in Shanghai. Shanghai Jews also had to cope with the magnitude of their Holocaust experiences: Not only did they absorb material and personal losses in Europe, but hyperinflation in Shanghai had further depleted any savings they had managed to preserve. These adults now depended on their grow- ing children, another change since their arrival in Shanghai. The role reversal of dependency emerged within the first days in San Francisco, testing relationships and reshaping family—and communal—dynamics. As Shanghai Jews reconstructed their lives together, their memories of daily life in Shanghai guided their decisions.

Finding Welcome Mats on San Francisco’s Streets In Shanghai Jews’ imaginations, America represented stability and security. Here, they could obtain citizenship, white-collar employment, and home ownership, all free from discrimination. America nurtured opportunities for renewal, redemption, and a new departure: to begin living as ordinary and free people again.62 The surprisingly difficult start in the United States motivated the refugees to come together informally to support one another.

61. USNA was a merger of the National Council of Jewish Women’s Department of Service to the Foreign Born, and the National Refugee Service. Despite the name, it remained a Jewish agency, funded by the United Jewish Appeal. See Lyman Cromwell White, 300,000 New Americans: The Epic of a Modern Immigrant Aid Service (New York: United HIAS Service, 1957), 77–110, 148–151. 62. Heppner, Shanghai Refuge, 157; Bacon, Shanghai Diary, 265; Henry S. Con- ston, “Henry S. Conston,” Shanghai Remembered, 34. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 101

Beginning in late 1946, the former troop ships SS General Meigs and SS General Gordon ferried Shanghai Jews on a biweekly basis to the Embarcadero docks. At first, San Francisco and Jewish newspapers noted the ready assistance of American Jewish representatives from San Francisco’s Committee for Service for Émigrés (CSE). Families and friends appeared for those expecting them. Many refugees, however, only had each other for support, as the CSE’s funding from San Francisco’s Jewish National Welfare Fund chapter was initially quite low.63 When the USNA and the HIAS took over primary responsibility for the immigrants in July 1947, they developed a systematic approach to the immigration process. The organizations divided the reception into four stages: meeting refugees at the docks, providing temporary housing in downtown hotels, interviewing to determine best fit for final resettlement in the United States, and offering immediate aid such as food, cash, and medical care. Shanghai Jews often pointed out that this process took several weeks, more time than it had taken them to resettle in Shang- hai.64 The USNA workers strongly encouraged Shanghai Jews to move to smaller cities throughout the United States with Jewish communities “who want to have immigrants and take care of them . . . They will give you a job and bring you to the American way of life.”65 One employee told Fred Linden, “Well you can’t stay in San Francisco, you won’t get any help from us. You have to go to a city where there is a committee to take care of you.”66 This contrast between San Francisco and Shanghai left Jewish refugees disappointed with the American Jewish community. When pressed to recall their memories of disembarking in an interview, Rabbi Theodore and Gertrude Alexander exclaimed, “Waiting for us [at the docks]?! Nobody!”67 The couple explained that at the end of Yom Kippur in September 1947, they joined forty or fifty people coming off the ship with no place to go. The wife bristled at the memory, “We got very poor reception.”68 The couple went to see a Jewish organizational represen-

63. The Committee’s budget tripled between 1946–1947 and 1948–1949. Jewish Welfare Fund of San Francisco, Budget Manual (1948), box 75, folder 3, BANC MSS 2010/720, Congregation Sherith Israel records, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (BL-UCB). 64. Jackie Krentzman, JFCS: Centuries of Pioneering (San Francisco: Jewish Family and Children’s Services, 2011), 95–101; Cohen, Case Closed, 18–22; Mark Wischnitzer, Visas to Freedom: A History of HIAS (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1956), 260–261. 65. Fred Linden in Shanghai, 17. 66. After turning down many suggestions, Fred Linden accepted his placement in Salt Lake City, Utah, where the “mountains beckoned.” Fred Linden in Shanghai, 18. 67. Alexander interview. 68. Alexander interview. 102 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY tative who they said responded to their inquiry for assistance: “If you paid for the passage yourself, then you can take care of yourself. We have nothing to do with you.”69 The insulted couple had to find a hotel room on their own along with thousands of returning servicemen and hundreds of Chinese fleeing the civil war in China. The “poor” reception in San Francisco stunned the Alexanders and their friends. The USNA placed Shanghai Jews who accepted its assistance in re- served blocks in downtown hotels but left them on their own with three US dollars daily allowance until they could be resettled elsewhere. After almost a decade of uninterrupted support from overseas American Jew- ish organizations such as the JDC, Shanghai Jews expected to receive as much material assistance and interpersonal support from San Fran- cisco organizations as they had in Shanghai. One refugee specified the generosity of American GIs as a cause for her illusion that abundance awaited her in America.70 Minimizing these difficult moments in oral histories and memoirs allowed many Shanghai Jews to “forget” their disillusionment and construct a more positive transition from Shanghai to America. As one explained, “America enabled me to move beyond the horrors of Nazi Germany and the Shanghai ghetto and to live in a peaceful life, without fearing for my family.”71 With no free “rooms” in heime with communal kitchens, housing immediately become a priority. Shanghai Jews’ informal contacts directed them to the ethnically diverse Fillmore and Western Addition neighborhoods. The Fillmore-McAllister neighborhood housed the prewar Jewish community and German-Americans.72 African-Americans and some Japanese-American families lived in the Western Addition.73 A few Shanghai Jews, such as Ruth Callmann, moved into the Emanu-El Residence Club of San Francisco (not affiliated with the Reform syna- gogue) a residence for single working Jewish women in Lower Haight, or into other boarding houses.74 Other refugees from Shanghai lived in Richmond, where many San Francisco Jews relocated after the war because of high real estate costs.75 A number of Shanghai Jews settled in the new, cheap homes in the primarily white Sunset, further to the west.76

69. Alexander interview. 70. Ursula Bacon, interview by author, October 10, 2009. 71. Curt Walter Hort, “Curt Walter Hort,” Shanghai Remembered, 87. 72. Brian J. Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition: Making of San Francisco’s Eth- nic and Nonconformist Communities (Berkeley, University of California, 1984), 79. 73. Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends, 170–174. 74. Ruth Callmann, interview by author, August 13, 2009. 75. Godfrey, Neighborhoods in Transition, 79. 76. Heinz Frankelstein, interview by author, August 20, 2009; Mrs. Deutsch, interview by author, August 20, 2009; Callmann interview. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 103

Living together once again—as families and a community—provided for communal continuity, and enabled the refugees to share resources. Living in detached homes also symbolized middle-class mobility for refugees, giving them more privacy and better sanitary conditions, especially because they had flush toilets instead of chamber pots. The Frankelstein family exemplified this resettlement pattern. After declining assistance from the USNA, Heinz Frankelstein paid a “few dollars” for a down payment in 1948 and moved his new wife, his parents, his in-laws, and his sister and her husband and new daughter into a two-bedroom home in the Sunset. As in Shanghai, all adults worked and contributed to the household.77 Heinz Frankelstein explained his decision to turn down aid from the USNA: Everyone in the family wanted to stay in San Francisco, not only because of the beautiful scenery, but because all their friends from Shanghai were settling there, providing them with an instant social and employment network.78

A Decade Older: Changing Family Dynamics and Employment The experiences of obtaining employment varied among Shanghai Jews due to age, professional skills, and proficiency in English. In 1948, the city employment report noted a high demand for well-educated, skilled professionals with—unsurprisingly—English proficiency.79 These qualifications, coupled with discrimination against foreigners in general, constituted obstacles that the refugees had not encountered upon arriving in Shanghai. The absolute necessity of fluency in English to obtain a job in San Francisco required that older Shanghai Jews negotiate with their now- grown children. Adults and children learned English in their own spheres in Shanghai, contributing to differing levels of proficiency. Adults survived primarily on their mother tongue while listening casually to English-language programs on the radio and watching American films. Meanwhile, their children learned the language in school and spontane- ously conversed with American GIs.80 Once in the United States, parents depended on their children until they improved their English and found jobs, which sometimes took weeks or months. No longer able to use German to conduct business or to rely on racial privilege alone, the parents struggled with this new role-reversal.81

77. Pooling resources was not uncommon among Jewish refugees. See Eva Angress interview. 78. Frankelstein interview. 79. San Francisco Employers Council Department of Research and Analysis, Em- ployment and Earnings Bulletin (April 15, 1948, August 1, 1948). 80. Rubin, Ghetto Schanghai, 33; Ross, Escape to Shanghai, 150–152. 81. Compensation from Germany did not arrive until after 1952. 104 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

In turn, adult children stood at the crossroads between their aging parents’ needs and their own desires to marry and raise families. Unlike Jewish survivors in Europe, Shanghai’s young adults did not experience a baby boom in Shanghai.82 A number of couples deliberately postponed childrearing and some women opted for abortions, knowing they would leave soon for a place with better sanitary conditions.83 Numerous newlyweds came to San Francisco without children, or with only one very young child, and hoped to expand their families while achieving their American dream. Eva Angress recalled that she and her husband, Henry, had hoped to buy a car and a home when they arrived in May 1949 with what little savings they successfully transferred from Shanghai. Facing financial and family realities, they reconsidered these luxuries. Not only were they expecting a baby, they also had to care for their ill parents, already in their late sixties. Eva Angress worried that Henry, who had been unable to continue his studies at the Sorbonne in 1933 for lack of money, “was at that point maybe too old to be a beginner and everybody wanted a little experience, which he didn’t have.” Upon their arrival, her husband immediately enrolled in courses to earn his certification in public accounting. In the meantime, they lived on their savings and what Henry made from part-time work, while twenty-eight- year-old Eva took care of their son at home.84 Other adults faced daunting expenses of reunifying with family members from abroad. One mother in her mid-thirties, Edith Wertheimer, planned to reclaim her two children from Sweden, where she and her first husband had placed them before the war. She encountered financial obstacles when she arrived in San Francisco in 1947. Although her second husband found employment to support them, Edith Wertheimer needed to work to earn additional money to send for her children. She described her job search: “I went to the telephone company because I thought I was such a good operator but they didn’t want me because I

82. On family reconstruction for Eastern European Jewish survivors, see Cohen, Case Closed, 122–125; Atina Grossmann, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encoun- ters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 184–236. On pregnancies and births in Shanghai, see “Statement of All Kinds of Relief Granted by Shanghai Jewish Joint Distribution Committee During June 1945,” report, June 1945, S-528–0035/S-1121/118, United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, United Nations Archives; Medical Department (Shanghai Refugee Medical Board), American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Far Eastern Office, “Annual Report 1.I. – 31. XII. 1946),” April 22, 1947, folder 502, file 536, Records of the New York Office of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee,1933 –44, JDC Archives. 83. Ross, Escape to Shanghai, 73, 81; Theodore Alexander, interview by author, August 20, 2009. 84. Angress, interview. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 105 had an accent.”85 Unlike Shanghai, where a white person’s imperfect, ac- cented English was enough to get a non-menial job, American employers preferred native speakers. Soon, however, a labor shortage enabled Edith Wertheimer to get multiple short-term operator positions. The following year, the USNA helped her to retrieve her children.86 Many older Shanghai Jews hoped to work even as they had passed their prime earning years. They represented an anomaly for Holocaust survivors, who appeared in newspapers and fundraising advertisements as young, healthy, and in need of vocational training.87 Already skilled and educated, older Shanghai Jews learned to adapt to diverse and unknown environments. As they had in Shanghai, they quickly turned to their friends and family in the city’s German émigré network for jobs.88 This strategy also helped them avoid overt discrimination by American employers against non-native speakers and immigrants. Some older refugees possessed insatiable energy to rebuild their careers after being uprooted multiple times. Mrs. Deutsch (as she asked to be called) arrived in the United States in 1950 with her husband, siblings and their families, and her parents, after detours in Israel and Australia. Her sister offered to aid their parents find housing in San Francisco, but the father wanted to support his wife. Mrs. Deutsch remarked on his resiliency: “He was a tailor downtown. He had a little store and he made alterations. He helped himself. There was nobody who helped him. We were here and nobody helped him.” She added that her family—including her husband—took pride in helping themselves, even disregarding the USNA’s offer of business loans.89 Similarly, Ernst Glaser described his father as a “born salesman,” who went into business selling twine. After discovering that no hardware store sold small quantities of twine for personal use when he needed to mail a package, he had an idea. He negotiated with wholesalers and peddled from store to store with a suitcase filled with twine that he had cut and tied up himself. His business grew into a substantial enterprise.90 Other older Shanghai Jews despaired, and sought comfort and purpose from their adult children. The flight from Germany and Austria, and life as impoverished refugees in unsanitary conditions, took a toll on their

85. Edith Wertheimer, interview by Sylvia Prozan and Gail Kurtz, July 15, 1992, Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, JFCS-HC. 86. Wertheimer interview. 87. Cohen, Case Closed, 26. 88. Callmann interview; Bacon interview. 89. Deutsch interview. 90. Ernst Glaser, interview, May 24, 2010, and Ernie Glaser, interview, February 21, 1991, Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, JFCS-HC. 106 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY health, making finding permanent jobs all the more difficult. Already burdened with numerous responsibilities, adult children pleaded with local Jewish organizations to provide their parents with employment and financial assistance. Max Knight, in his early forties, was one of these Shanghai Jews writing to the East Bay Jewish Federation. He outlined the challenges of keeping his marriage together and raising two young sons while supporting his parents. His parents had arrived from Lon- don, where they had stayed during the war, including eight months in an internment camp. Max Knight anticipated losing his present position at the Office of War Information due to demobilization, and claimed to be pursuing opportunities at his dream employer, the University of California Press.91 He hoped that the Federation would help his family during these transitions. Providing his father with a job was a top priority, Max Knight wrote: I am afraid, it is not simply a matter of finding a “job” for him. Father went through Hitler and the London [b]ombing after he was 65. He will be 70 next March. He is not too healthy and his real working days are over. He really wants to do something, quite apart from the salary angle. But what he will not say, when he applies for a job, and what somebody else has to say for him, is, that he has to find some charitable person (or organization) to whom 150 dollars or so a month don’t matter and who will give him some desk work, disguised as a “job,” in a friendly atmosphere and if possible, with some semblance of responsibility.92 Max Knight received an unfavorable reply. The director responded that employers preferred to hire younger people returning from the war at that salary. Offering cautious optimism, he wrote, “I hope I am wrong in this, but I nevertheless feel that it is not going to be easy to find the sort of thing that your father can do in the light of his age and the state of his health.”93

Reconstructing Social Life after the Holocaust Resettling in San Francisco provided an opportunity for Jewish refugees to finally reconstruct their lives and integrate into American society.

91. Max Knight, interview by Peggy Koster, February 28, 1991, Bay Area Holo- caust Oral History Project, Bay Area Holocaust Oral History Project, JFCS-HC. 92. Max Knight to Harry J. Sapper, October 9,1945, folder “Knight, Max,” box 24, Jewish Welfare Fund of East Bay, 1994.016, Western Jewish Americana Archives (WJAA), BL-UCB. 93. There is no record of what happened to his father after this exchange. Harry J. Sapper to Max Knight, October 11, 1945, folder “Knight, Max,” box 24, Jewish Welfare Fund of East Bay, 1994.016, Western Jewish Americana Archives (WJAA), BL-UCB. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 107

On both individual and collective levels, Shanghai Jews found carving out niches for themselves unexpectedly trying, particularly within San Francisco’s Jewish communities. They explored different social spaces: the established Jewish community, a group of prewar German-Jewish refugees, and their own circle. Each space informed Shanghai Jews of their transnational identity and forced them to develop strategies to cope with their recent traumatic experiences of forced displacement and persecution. Taken together, the spaces complicated Shanghai Jews’ ability to seamlessly integrate in post-World War II America. The San Franciscan Jew, claimed an East Coast Jewish visitor in 1950, “is a first-class citizen. It may well be that he can live in San Francisco with a greater degree of personal dignity than in any other city in the country.”94 With a relatively small number of Eastern European Jews who settled in the city in the early twentieth century, and after decades of acculturation, the established San Francisco Jewish community avoided particularistic Jewish movements and ideologies, such as Zionism or Yiddishism, and instead focused on the universal.95 Philanthropic and social contributions to the city enabled San Francisco Jews to act on their universalism.96 The rise of Nazism and the Holocaust disrupted that belief. At the behest of its rabbis and its youth, the San Francisco Jew- ish community banded together to assist 3,000 German-Jewish refugees in the 1930s.97 But Shanghai Jews did not experience the same level of welcome after the war and the Holocaust. The San Francisco Jewish Community Center (JCC) long served as a major hub for Jews of all backgrounds seeking secular activities. It extended its services to German-Jewish refugees in the 1930s with Americanization programs, including partnership with the local chapter of National Council of Jewish Women to create the informational guide, The Newcomers Bulletin.98 During World War II, the JCC hosted numer-

94. Earl Raab, “There’s No City like San Francisco,” Commentary (January 1950): 369–378. 95. Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans, 198. 96. Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans, 298–299. Some records cite the number of assisted Jews as closer to 3,500. See Louis Blumenthal to Herman Jacobs, letter, April 6, 1943, folder 7, “Emigres, 1939–1947,” carton 23, San Francisco Jewish Community Center Records (SFJCC), WJAA, BL-UCB. 97. Rosenbaum, Cosmopolitans, 302–303. 98. Louis Blumenthal to Herman Jacobs, letter, April 6, 1943, folder 7, “Emigres, 1939–1947,” carton 23, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB; The Newcomers’ Bulletin 2, Septem- ber 18, 1939, folder 7, “Emigres, 1939–1947,” carton 23, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB; “A Suggested Plan for the Coordination of Social and Educational Activities for the Émigré in San Francisco,” June 1939, folder 7, “Emigres, 1939–1947,” carton 23, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB. 108 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY ous dances and other entertainment for servicemen and contributed to Red Cross drives.99 By 1945, the JCC expanded its space to make room for 4,000 members, including 500 returning veterans. Though plagued with budget deficits since the war, the JCC continued its programming of lectures, dances, youth activities, and summer camps for children.100 It hoped to recruit large numbers of returning servicemen, with money lining their pockets, to close the deficits.101 When the Jewish Family Service Agency (JFSA) suggested in Febru- ary 1947 that the JCC open its doors to Shanghai Jews for a limited free membership, the JCC balked. The JFSA reassured the community center that these newcomers intended to move out of the city within a month. To avoid losing money through free memberships, the JCC adopted discriminatory and ill-informed policies. It limited eligibility for these free short-term passes to “Polish Jewish refugees . . . who landed in Shanghai and recently arrived in San Francisco.” To be fair, Polish rabbinical students and their families were among the first arrivals from Shanghai, starting in March 1946, en route to New York and Montreal to continue their studies.102 Still, approximately 370 German and Aus- trian Jews passed through during the same period. The archives do not show any revisions to this policy.103 On their membership applications, refugees had to report their physical health, length of stay in the United States thus far, “personality,” and English proficiency. These “Polish Jew- ish refugees” had to pay for towels and bathing suits. The JCC did not hesitate to report abuses of its policies to the JFSA. The JSFA attempted to remedy these inequities by providing “scholarships” to those who

99. Minutes, November 4, 1945, folder 20, War Services Committee, 1944–1946,” carton 22, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB. 100. “Membership Report for the Year 1946,” folders 1–5, “Executive Committee Meetings, 1941–1966,” carton 2, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB; “San Francisco Jewish Com- munity Center Comparative Financial Statement 1935–1946,” folders 1–5, “Executive Committee Meetings, 1941–1966,” carton 2, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB. 101. Minutes, June 4, 1944, folder 20, “War Services Committee, 1944–1946,” carton 22, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB; Minutes, October 7, 1948 and August 4, 1949, folders 1–5, “Executive Committee Meetings, 1941–1966,” carton 2, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB. 102. Study visas enabled quicker immigration to the United States than did regular visas. 103. 471 Jews under Polish quota arrived in the United States between March 1946 and January 1947 while 276 Germans and ninety-four Austrians did so. Table, January 31, 1947, folder 490, file 1061, Records of the New York Office of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1933–44, JDC Archives; Charles H. Jordan to Moses A. Leavitt, letter, October 29, 1946, folder 489, file 1061, Records of the New York Office of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1933–44, JDC Archives. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 109 wished to continue their JCC membership.104 The JCC’s discriminatory approach mirrored that of other American institutions suspicious of foreigners, yet archives show that the German-Jewish refugees in the 1930s did not encounter such policies.105 The overall attitude of the JCC stunned and angered Shanghai Jews, who hoped to find a meaningful way to become part of the Jewish community, as they had in both Shanghai and Central Europe. Ruth Callmann walked into the JCC to swim as soon as she heard that the JCC was giving away free short-term memberships. The staff promptly stopped her and inquired about her employment. Callmann recalled her shock, “I didn’t think they were fair to me. When we came [to San Francisco], everybody could go to the Jewish Community Center for free.” She explained to them at the time that she needed a few more weeks of free membership, as she had just gotten her job as a US Army secretary. The staff still refused. To ease the pain of feeling unwanted, she comforted herself that “there wasn’t much I liked in it, to do, anyhow, in this Center. They are much too expensive.” She never returned.106 Other Shanghai Jews shared her sentiments concerning the JCC’s ex- clusiveness during this critical time of adjustment. Ernst Glaser and his Shanghai friends tried one of its dances and decided afterwards that the city itself felt more open to them than did its Jewish institutions. They began driving around to explore the Bay Area.107 Shanghai Jews drew the conclusion that San Francisco offered much more than did its Jew- ish community, just as Shanghai had when the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jewish communities’ cultural and social norms and institutions did not meet German-Jews’ needs. A group did exist to meet their needs as German-speaking Jewish refugees in San Francisco: the Jewish Council of 1933. Made up of 1,400 members, or roughly fifty percent of the total refugee population that had settled in the city before the war, the Council sought a variety of ways to renew lost connections.108 Beginning in the summer of 1947,

104. “Guest passes for Émigré Children and Adults,” February 7, 1947, folder 7, “Emigres, 1939–1947,” carton 23, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB. 105. The JCC officially welcomed African Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Japanese but struggled to implement this welcome in practice. See folder 10, “Negro Membership, 1947–1953,” carton 7, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB. 106. Callmann interview. 107. Glaser interview, May 24, 2010. 108. “A Word from Our Membership Committee Chairman,” Jewish Council Bul- letin (February 1944), 2, folder 7, “Emigres, 1939–1947,” carton 23, SFJCC, WJAA, BL-UCB; “1947 membership count,” Jewish Council of 1933 Bulletin 3, nos. 9–10 (June-July 1947), 1, box 1, Jewish Council of 1933 records, BANC MSS 2010/618, the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, BL-UCB. 110 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY just as Shanghai Jews shied away from the JCC, the Council implored its members to welcome the new arrivals with genuine warmth, not just out of obligation. In an open letter in its English-language newsletter, The Bulletin, the leaders wrote: We trust that now, as in the past, our members, although often too much concerned with their own affairs and therefore not remembering any more their own feeling of loneliness and abandonment of years ago, will only need a revival of their memories to awake their conscience and come back to their sense of obligation, contributing to our cause in a way which in most cases cannot even be called a sacrifice for them, but which brings such substantial help and comfort to our needy brethren.109 Feeling kinship with Shanghai Jews, the leaders also solicited suggestions for better coordination of assistance within the community.110 With large numbers of new “destitute” refugees arriving bi-weekly, the leadership saw no excuse for the Council’s members not to be involved. The Council had sent 300 food packages, forty to fifty clothing parcels, and medical supplies to Shanghai as well as to Germany’s displaced persons camps. The Bulletin urged members to help in any way possible, whether by meeting at the docks and interviewing new arrivals in German, calling on them and taking them around town, or inviting them to their homes. Though this group of Jewish survivors of Nazism was coming from the “Far East,” members ought not to distinguish between them and those in Europe’s displaced persons camps.111 Since, historically, Jews had arrived in San Francisco from the East Coast, the Bulletin spotlighted ship arrivals from Shanghai to remind readers that Jews were coming from Asia too.112 Ellen Stern, who was twenty-three years old upon her arrival in San Francisco in 1947, recalled the difference this prewar group of refugees made in helping the newer arrivals feel welcome in the United States: “People who arrived in ’33, and they were helpful. They showed us around. Showed us some pointers, where to look for apartments.”113

109. Jewish Council of 1933, Bulletin 3 No. 9–10 (June-July 1947), 1, box 1, Jew- ish Council of 1933 records, BANC MSS 2010/618, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, BL-UCB. 110. Jewish Council of 1933, Bulletin 3 No. 9–10 (June-July 1947), 4, box 1, Jew- ish Council of 1933 records, BANC MSS 2010/618, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, BL-UCB. 111. Author’s emphasis. Jewish Council of 1933, Bulletin 3, no. 11 (August 1947), 1, box 1, Jewish Council of 1933 records, BANC MSS 2010/618, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, BL-UCB. 112. Jewish Council of 1933, “Shanghai Arrivals,” Bulletin 4, no. 4 (March 1948), 3, box 1, Jewish Council of 1933 records, BANC MSS 2010/618, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, BL-UCB. 113. Stern interview. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 111

The Council organized regular social activities to help Shanghai Jews find their niche in San Francisco’s German-Jewish refugee community, just as Shanghai Jews had helped their peers who arrived later in prewar Shanghai. After each ship arrived, the Council organized a social gathering to introduce the Shanghai Jews to the German-speaking refugee community and help them network to find employment.114 On Mondays, many men and a few women gathered for a Kaffeeklatsch (coffee hour) that catered to the “Shanghai group.” At the same time, women rum- maged through donated “suits, dresses and toys” in the Kleiderkammer (clothing closet). 115 The Council also organized its first “reunion” of all German-Jewish refugees in San Francisco, a community now doubled in size, on November 18, 1948, a decade after Kristallnacht. The Bul- letin reported a “packed” room, with everyone having a “good time.” After this success, the council moved the Shanghai group meetings to weeknights instead of Monday afternoons to better accommodate the employed. By continuing to promote these meetings, the leaders hoped to thaw any tensions between the two cohorts with emphasis on “re- creat[ing] something of the ambience of ‘back home.’”116 In addition, German-language advertisements and articles appeared in the Bulletin more frequently to better cater to the older Shanghai Jews. Within the pages of the Bulletin, editors and writers frequently reflected on the Holocaust experiences of both groups. On the one hand, the newsletter stressed similarities in experiences of escaping Nazi Germany and Austria. In addition to sharing German-Jewish culture and language, few members of either group had close relatives in the United States upon arrival and most therefore had to be self-reliant. On the other hand, the Bulletin marveled at the fact that this group survived Shanghai, one of the last places many wanted to escape to in 1938–1940. Meanwhile San Francisco’s prewar German-Jewish refugees lived in relative safety during the war. In February 1949, the Bulletin claimed that initial tensions over recent Holocaust experiences had diminished owing to mutual respect and exchanges of stories: By now we already felt like old friends ourselves. We learned what had happened to people we had often wondered about and found that their fates, like

114. Author’s emphasis. Jewish Council of 1933, Bulletin 3 No. 11 (August 1947), 1, box 1, Jewish Council of 1933 records, BANC MSS 2010/618, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, BL-UCB. 115. Jewish Council of 1933, “Welfare Report,” Bulletin 4, no. 9 (June 1948), 2 and Jewish Council of 1933, Bulletin 4 (September 1948), 1, box 1, Jewish Council of 1933 records, BANC MSS 2010/618, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, BL- UCB. 116. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love, 207. 112 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

our own, had been as turbulent as none of us had ever dreamed of before it all happened. Our new friends themselves had spent nine years in Shanghai, the nine years we ourselves had the good fortune to be in the United States.117 With time, the two cohorts of refugees found common ground in their experiences of life under Nazism and flight from Europe. They also formed friendships. Shanghai Jews still sensed that they had missed a piece of their lives. The decade-long Shanghai experience dominated their memories, emotions, and identities, and this differentiated them from Jews in San Francisco. While San Francisco’s Jews feared Japanese aerial attacks, Shanghai’s Jews fled for their lives during American air raids. While German-Jewish refugees found security in San Francisco before the war, German-Jewish refugees in Shanghai found disease, starvation, and state- lessness. While news of the Nazi death machine traveled slowly to San Francisco during the war, refugees in Shanghai had heard rumors and lived in fear of deportations throughout the war. These yawning differences in refugee experiences were ultimately impossible to bridge. The only place Shanghai Jews found solidarity—aside from within families—was with each other in a communal space in Congregation B’nai Emunah. In May 1949, sixty-five-year-old Rabbi Georg Kantorowsky of Berlin disembarked in San Francisco with his wife, Frieda, and his daughter Eva Angress and her husband. He wondered how he would find a job as a non-English speaking rabbi. As a man and as a spiritual leader, Rabbi Kantorowsky desired a purpose. Frieda Kantorowsky and Eva Angress encouraged him to start a new congregation. The women frequently chided him that “the congregation is [more] important than your family . . . this is a special kind of work.” 118 Seeing no other option after six months of looking for employment, Rabbi Kantorowsky and twenty- two other Shanghai Jews opened Congregation B’nai Emunah in time for Hanukkah in December 1949.119 Shanghai Jews poured in because other congregations did not fit their ritual needs, nor did they offer programming to welcome new arrivals.120

117. Jewish Council of 1933, “Shanghai Group,” Bulletin 5, no. 5 (February 1949), 1, box 1, Jewish Council of 1933 records, BANC MSS 2010/618, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, BL-UCB. 118. Angress interview. 119. “S.F. congregation celebrates its 60th,” The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, December 11, 2009, 10. 120. For Temple Emanu-El’s involvement with the 1930s émigrés, see Fred Rosen- baum, Architects of Reform: Congregational and Community Leadership: Emanu-El of San Francisco, 1849–1980 (Berkeley: Judah L. Magnes Museum, 1980), 131–146. S. Halpern | The Integration of Jewish Refugees from Shanghai 113

This congregation, on the other hand, was deeply committed to maintaining a sense of familiarity. For a decade, Rabbi Kantorowsky rented halls until enough money was raised to purchase a building on Geary Avenue in the Outer Sunset district. Ten years of fundraising reflected refugees’ commitment to transnational ties and memories, stretching from Europe to Shanghai to San Francisco. The congregants fingered prayer books that they had carried with them from Shanghai and Europe as they spoke and read in German and Hebrew. The local German-Jewish newspaper observed B’nai Emunah’s significance: “[Closely] connected through hard years of their exile, they want to maintain a religious bond and to perform regular services in keeping with the religious customs of their native countries.”121 As they recited the mourner’s Kaddish and discussed their Shanghai experiences, the space provided an opportunity to consider their own survival and to remember those they had left behind in Shanghai, Germany, and Austria who did not survive the Holocaust. Only in 1967, after Rabbi Kantorowsky retired and Rabbi Theodore Alexander took over, did English begin to appear in the services. For their first two decades in the Shanghai Jewish diaspora, the congregation was the only formal institution to provide Shanghai Jews in San Francisco with their own intimate space.122

CONCLUSION The combination of surviving a turbulent decade in Shanghai and arriving in changing postwar San Francisco brought more anxieties than Shanghai Jews expected. The refugees experienced a mix of success and disappointment in their new city, the established American Jewish community, and the extant German-Jewish refugee group. While San Fran- cisco’s beauty and freedom from danger cheered them, they navigated the demands of landing employment in a city that had not experienced a tremendous influx of foreigners in recent years. While refugees had become accustomed to the generosity of the JDC and American Jewish soldiers in Shanghai, San Francisco’s Jewish community devoted more time and energy to restoring its depleted funds. The familiarity of the German language and memories of life in Central Europe comforted Shanghai Jews in their interactions with prewar German-Jewish refugees, but these conversations met their limit at the point of their respective departures from Europe.

121. Jewish Council of 1933, “A New Congregation: B’nai Emunah,” Bulletin 6, no. 4 (January 1950), 3, box 1, Jewish Council of 1933 records, BANC MSS 2010/618, Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, BL-UCB. 122. Callmann interview; Deutsch interview; Congregation B’nai Emunah, B’nai Emunah: The Early Years (San Francisco). 114 AMERICAN JEWISH HISTORY

This case study highlights Shanghai Jews’ decision to turn inward as they faced discrimination, insensitivity, and cultural disconnect from their fellow Jews in San Francisco, thus shaping a distinctive Shanghai Jewish diaspora. The study illuminates the ways in which American Jews remained unprepared to greet the trickle of Holocaust survivors before the Displaced Persons Act of 1948. By mid-1949, more than seventy- five percent of Shanghai Jews had left Shanghai for the United States, Israel, and other destinations. In Western clothing and with bags in hand, Shanghai Jews looked like any other white tourists on the Embarcadero. Neither San Francisco Jews nor USNA workers considered Shanghai Jews’ protracted traumatic experiences of displacement, poverty, and stateless- ness in China. Shanghai Jews had to find support from within and, to a limited extent, from the extant German Jewish refugee community. Acknowledging the existence of the diaspora of Shanghai Jews, sug- gests avenues for further research on Holocaust survivors’ encounters with local Jewish communities. The Shanghai Jewish refugees’ experience in San Francisco demonstrates a need for deeper analysis of how the Eurocentric narrative of the Holocaust shaped American Jewry’s understanding of Jewish flight to Latin America, Africa, and Asia (including Central Asia, where 200,000 Polish Jews sought haven). Shanghai Jews had few outlets to speak about their experiences, which were so different from prewar German-Jewish refugees. Jewish refugees from Shanghai had stories that did not conform to the American propaganda depicting Nazi atrocities, utter starvation, and illness of survivors. Any news at the time related to the Pacific theater centered on national reconstruction and American occupation of Japan and the civil war in China. The article also sheds light on the importance of regionalism. During the war, attention on the West Coast focused on the Pacific, while the rest of America looked eastward to Nazi Germany. The diverse, and sometimes fractured, home-front experience extended to the postwar American Jewish response and recovery from the horrors of the Holo- caust and World War II. The experience of Shanghai’s Jewish refugees demonstrates how vested American Jews were in their own domestic concerns and the genocide and reconstruction of Jewish life in Europe after World War II. Shanghai Jews built great expectations for America, but the fog of reality once they arrived in San Francisco left them in search for bright spots. They often found these in families and friendships bound by transpacific memories.