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Welcome home - return of a Shanghai Jew
By Adam Minter (LA Times)
Updated: 2006-01-17 10:43
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-shanghai3jan15,0,1838881.story?page=1&coll=la-home-magazine
After decades of trying to forget the miseries of his refugee childhood
during World War II, a Southern Californian circles back to China to embrace the
people who saved his life.
At the market, Gaoyang Road widens and hooks toward a set of encroaching
Shanghai high-rises. Below, in their shadows, is a gray, run-down, two-story
building that holds a tobacco shop, a beauty parlor and a noodle restaurant on
its first floor. The top level is residential, and it juts over the first,
creating a covered lane hung with laundry. Just south of the building, Jerry
Moses, a retired Southern California businessman, squints and looks up, hands
clasped behind his back. "I don't know, I don't know," he says with long vowels
stretched by his German accent. "This isn't right." He takes a deep breath and
walks slowly toward the lane, brow furrowed. "All this is new. I can't recognize
it."
Moses last walked on Gaoyang Road in 1947. It was called Chaoufoong Road
then, and it was home to many of the 18,000 European Jewish refugees who had
sought refuge from Nazi Germany in Shanghai's Hongkew District (today known as
Hongkou) during the run-up to World War II. He casts his gaze at the lane, his
brow loosens and he begins to nod. "This is it, this is it," he says softly. "I
know this is it." One week into his first visit to Shanghai in almost 60 years,
Moses has found his third home in an exile that lasted from 1941 to 1947.
He strides into the space, his manner now much closer to that of the
12-year-old boy who had left than the 70-year-old man who has returned. "I used
to ride a bike up and down here," he declares, pointing toward the weathered
bricks. A single red door colors the building facade. Moses runs his hand across
the wood and sits on the step below it. "I have to think," he sighs. "Give me a
second." That second scarcely passes before he sings a faint melody. "It's a
Chinese song I knew as a kid," he says. "I don't remember the words. It just
came back to me." One word, however, is very clear: ZuGaNin, the name for a
local in Shanghai dialect.
Moses stands and skips a hand along the bricks. From 1945 to 1947 he lived
inside with his mother, father, older sister and younger brother. He walks to
the end of the alley, where a middle-aged man suddenly emerges pushing a
bicycle. "Nong ho!" Moses says, greeting the man in the dialect he learned as a
boy. "Ala ZongGoNin," he says, stabbing his chest with a finger. Then, pointing
to the building, "Ala YouTaNin!"
We are Chinese. We are Jewish.
The man with the bicycle is startled: A white foreigner in this back alley
who speaks the notoriously difficult dialect? He looks at Moses, then at me—a
white man in his 30s—and finally at a Japanese woman, a photographer with a
large camera. "YouTaNin?"
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