Creating hope in a wartime city

A new novel explores life in Shanghai's Jewish settlement in the 1940s, Jocelyn Eikenburg reports.

A photo of three teenage Jewish boys on a table tennis team, wearing matching T-shirts with their school logo, are among some images of children at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum that American author Rachel DeWoskin saw one summer, inspiring her new historical novel set in the 1940s in Shanghai's Hongkou Jewish settlement.

"There was so much evidence of how devoted these kids' community was to creating a sense of normalcy, giving the children a childhood, even though the context of an occupied city at war was excruciating," says DeWoskin.