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Welcome home - return of a Shanghai Jew
By Adam Minter (LA Times)
Updated: 2006-01-17 10:43
Moses nods excitedly. "Jewish. YouTaNin. Ala YouTaNin! Shanghai YouTaNin!"
The men launch into a loud mash of Mandarin, Shanghainese and English,
interrupted by laughter and handshakes. They really don't understand each other,
but after a few minutes (and translation help), the Shanghainese man, whose
first name is Yide, understands that Moses is one of the celebrated Shanghai
Jews, and that he used to live in his building. Yide invites Jerry into his
home.
The low door leads into a dank space. "That's where we lived," Moses says,
pointing at locals hovering over steaming noodle bowls. "It was a single room
and it used to have a raised Japanese floor," he adds. "Now it's a restaurant!"
Beside the restaurant is a staircase at an 80-degree angle. With Yide's help,
Moses climbs to a dim apartment filled with two beds and a small table. A pretty
middle-aged Chinese woman named Xiaomei takes Moses' arm and escorts him to the
most comfortable chair. When he speaks in dialect, she looks at Yide and
giggles. Soon, the three are laughing and talking like old friends catching up
on the last 60 years.
"YouTaNin, Ho!" declares Yide. Jews are very good.
"ZongGoNin, Ho!" replies Moses. Chinese are very good.
They laugh and Moses says, "Come here." Yide does, and they embrace. "Tell
them I am so grateful. That the Chinese people were so nice to us," he says,
asking me for a precise translation. "Tell them I would be dead without this
country." He looks away and says softly to himself: "Shanghai."
On a clear autumn day, Moses leans over a railing on Shanghai's Waibaidu
Bridge and looks across the Huangpu River at the futuristic skyline. "When I was
a boy there was nothing there," he recalls, as he walks north across Suzhou
Creek into the teeming Hongkou District. Ahead is a worn, working-class
neighborhood of two- and three-story buildings. Open doors reveal old men
smoking and playing cards around wooden tables; women work on the steps, washing
clothes and carrots in red plastic tubs; tight, muscular men commute on foot
with shovels swung across their shoulders. "This is how they lived when we were
here," he says. "This is my Shanghai." He leans over a man selling live crabs
out of a cardboard box and announces "Ala ZongGoNin," somehow forgetting
"YouTaNin." As he walks away the man shakes his head and smiles a crooked smile.
No, you're not.
In July 1947, Moses and his family left Shanghai on a ship bound for San
Francisco, en route to their postwar home in Chile. "I remember the river water
turning from brown to blue as we entered the ocean," he says. "And that's really
when my life began."
Until this three-week trip last fall, he had never returned to his wartime
refuge, despite a restless nature that kept him moving between Southern
California and Germany throughout his adult life. Even now, with marriage,
divorce, child-rearing and a career running his own clothing shop in the Fairfax
District behind him, he cannot stay in one place for long. "I'm not sure what
kept me from coming back," he says. "I guess I didn't want to dwell on the
past." He shrugs. "I didn't want to be a victim. I mean, I lived and most other
German Jews didn't."
He stops in the middle of the street and raises his voice for emphasis. "But
at this point in my life, you know, why not come back? The plane ride isn't so
long." With that, he sets off again through old Hongkou. The streets are crowded
with young men, but Moses is drawn to the clusters of old people who favor the
sidewalks. "Some of them might have been here when I was a kid," he says. And so
as he greets them and shakes hands. It is a natural impulse, often felt late in
life, to thank those who made a successful life possible. But Moses was a
refugee, and so his gratitude is expressed to strangers who, in their own way,
represent the culture that embraced him at his most vulnerable. "I love these
people," he says. "I feel like I've come home." Shanghai's lure for
entrepreneurs and refugees dates to mid-19th century treaties that granted
colonial powers the right to govern designated areas, or concessions, in certain
Chinese cities. Visas to enter the concessions usually were unnecessary or
perfunctory. Traveling to Shanghai was the greatest challenge.
Like most of the Jews who fled to eastern China in the 1930s and early 1940s,
the Moses family was German Jewish, with the German half as important as the
Jewish. Originally from Breslau, they belonged to a 20,000-member Jewish
community that strongly influenced the city's cultural life. Jerry's father, Max
Moses, was a fabric buyer for a Jewish-owned department store chain. At an
employee holiday party, he met Frida Koritofsky. They were married in 1932.
Jerry, born in 1934, was the second of three children.
His childhood memories are vague and impressionistic until the infamous
Kristallnacht in November 1938. Two days of Nazi-organized riots destroyed
hundreds of Jewish businesses, homes and synagogues. Max was among the more than
25,000 Jewish men imprisoned. According to Moses, his father would have died in
a concentration camp if not for Frida's determination to free him, and Nazi
Germany's determination to expel its Jews. "Like a lot of wives, she wanted to
get her husband out of jail. And she was told that if my father left Germany in,
like, 48 hours, they would let him go." But few countries would accept fleeing
European Jews. "Somehow, my mother found out that the only place he could go
without a permit was Shanghai."
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