Shalama: An Epic Story of Family, Community, and Survival in Republican-era China
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Hello and welcome to another edition of Barbarians at the Gate. This is Jeremiah Jenny broadcasting from the shores of Lakhlaman in Geneva and joining me, as always, from Bangkok. One night, many nights, it seems like a few weeks. David, how are things down in the Thai capital? They're great, beautiful. This is wintertime, which means it's basically summertime. It means there's the sweat...

ratio is you know is a little bit better and but yeah uh i by the way i am going to be my muting myself uh when i'm not talking because uh bangkok has horrible traffic even this time of night there's lots of honking and accidents and stuff happening outside my room here so if i forget to to turn my mic on sometimes it's because i'm muting the the traffic chaos from from can you hear that

Oh, yeah. A motorcycle. Very clear, right? Yeah. That's what it's like. It kind of soothes me to sleep every night, the sort of droning and groaning of the traffic. I'm sort of used to it by now. And how are you doing in Geneva? We have traffic, but mostly it's like cows and very entitled aid workers. So, I mean, it's a different kind of vibe for sure. Noise. Yeah, right. Right.

With us today, too, joining us from the United States is Jean Hoffman Lawanda. We're welcoming her back. Three years ago, we spoke to her about her father's remarkable memoir, Witness to History, which chronicled his escape from Nazi Austria to Shanghai. Today, Jean returns with Shalama, 96 Seasons in China, a captivating work of historical fiction based on a true story that illuminates another fascinating chapter of her family's storytelling.

I really like this book. It was the story of one family, but I really feel it also makes some important contributions to what is an ongoing research into the Jewish diaspora communities who made China their home in the 20th century. So really excited.

to welcome you to our show. How are you, Jean? Very well, thank you. Great to see you again. Well, Jean, I wanted to kind of start off because this is a different book than the one that you published or put together, which was your father's memoir, Witness to History. In this case, this is the story of your mother. But rather than write it as a biography, you chose to write it as historical fiction. And I thought that's a really interesting idea and one I really appreciate. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more

about why you chose to do it that way.

Well, first of all, I had no manuscript this time. My father had left a very detailed manuscript, and basically the first book was an editing job that was enhanced with documents and photographs and some minor changes, but it was predominantly dad's work. Mom never wrote anything, but she was a persistent storyteller in her own quiet way, in that, you know,

As I start the story, as you know, just in conversation, stories would come out. There were also literally hundreds and hundreds of photographs, some of which I have donated to Dan Ben-Kanan, who's the Harbin archivist, validating and documenting photographs.

events that he had heard about but he had not seen, such as the matzah factory that the community built every spring to have a kosher facility. It was outdoors under a canopy. I had actual photographs of this. And then I found within our family archives

Documents, wedding certificates, death certificates, circumcision certificates, anything you could imagine that was immigration certificates. And those were extremely valuable and extremely fun to read because it said things like, I know she was born here because I'm her aunt and I was there.

And then the next official Israeli document says, and I'm married to her aunt. So it's true. So fun stuff like that, that really does lend itself more to storytelling than fiction, nonfiction writing, I think. And I have to say, I really like that because I'm a historian and you've done research, you know how hard it is to kind of verify information in a way to make it nonfiction. And

I don't want to seem, I don't know how to put this. I don't want to seem petty here, but I kind of wish there were more historians or people who have written nonfiction chose to do it as historical fiction. There are some books out there that are actually not nonfiction books I thought would be better off as historical fiction because by allowing us to be creative about what is the probable conversation or the possible outcome, all of these things,

That's a freedom that we have when we write historical fiction, but one that is sort of out of bounds for us if we're putting together an actual work of history. If I may...

What were some of the areas where you felt like you had to take maybe the most creative license? Like the, you know, you had the documents, you had the photographs, you had the stories, but you had to fill in some gaps or fill in some plot holes, if you will. Were there any sections where you felt you had to be really, really be creative of what was the probability or possibility of what actually happened here underneath the pictures, underneath the letters, underneath the documents you were able to compile? Yeah.

Well, the mystery of my grandfather was totally unknown. What I say about how my mother knew absolutely nothing about her father, other than that he walked across Russia, hitchhiked over the course of a year, and that there were babies at home. There were some letters supposedly between the families, but

She knew nothing of the content of these letters and the fact that I didn't even know my great-grandmother's name until this cousin popped up. But I knew my great-grandfather's name because of the patronomic naming, Afram Solomnovich. That's how I knew that he, but her name appeared nowhere.

And the name of all these siblings. And then the other, I'd say, hard part was the courting between my father and mother. How do you imagine that? I mean... Yeah, there was some great line where you're like, and then for the next week, we kind of did what, you know, newlyweds do. I wasn't going to get any deeper into that. I do know that my father said they were in the Park Hotel for 10 days.

Not coming out often. Well, I know David has some questions too, but before we get to David, I just wanted to kind of ask, and I don't want to give away the whole story, of course, because it's such a fascinating book, but maybe you could tell us a little bit, just a kind of a short summary of your mother's journey. Then we'll kind of talk a little bit about some of the specific aspects of that so that our listeners who maybe haven't read the book have an idea of the context of

of this remarkable tale. So the story starts in Harbin in somewhere between 1917 and 1919 when my great-grandparents on my mother's side arrived with three or four of their children. They've left three older daughters behind.

And my grandfather arrives all by himself. And the Harbin community was a growing community due to the Chinese Eastern Railroad development. And Jews living in the pale of settlement were told that, you know, life could be a little bit better. You know, you can, less pogroms, less army inductions. You know, they were actually, that community thrived. And some people became fairly wealthy.

Not my family, but that community thrived. And it was a very robust Jewish life. And then, you know, Japanese occupation, of course,

impacted everything. And they eventually moved to Shanghai in 1940, where again, community was thriving. And even during the war years, the Russian Jewish community did so much better than the refugees. They were living in the French concession. They were working. They were going to school until 1944. But then after the war was over, they went back to work

They went back to school. My father, who was a refugee, found my mother at a swim meet at the YMCA in September of 1949 and fell in love and was like, you have to come with me to America.

and put her on his Austrian passport because she was stateless. The only documentation she had was a passport back to the Soviet Union, which was good for nothing else but to go back to the Soviet Union. And the people who took advantage of that ended up in the gulags. The head of the Harbin Jewish community was imprisoned for 10 years. So that was clearly not a good option.

My mother's parents went to Israel. My father's family went to America. And then here I am to tell the story. Yeah, amazing. The diaspora. I mean, there wasn't really any really safe place anywhere in the world, it seems. Because I think this, I don't know if this came up the last time we talked about the book about your father, but how did you be able to sort of juggle these different ethnicities and nationalities in the same place? You're in a Chinese environment, but

But you've got mixtures of Jewish, American, Russian, different kinds of nationalities all in this place. Did your mother talk about this? And did she have nostalgia for those Chinese days? Good feelings, bad feelings? You know, what was the feeling of being in such a multi-ethnic world?

And it's such a swirl of eminent danger and hardship at any moment. I mean, that's an amazing environment for a child to grow up in. I think the hardship and the danger was in the background and was considered a part of normal existence, as I think it is maybe in Israel and in Gaza today. It's just...

It is just your life. I think my parents loved the cultural exposure. We were, you know, I was taught to eat with chopsticks when I was five years old. It was something to be proud of that they had lived

in this different culture, that they were successful in this culture. And if the communists had not taken over, I am absolutely certain I would have been born in China. I'm sure the colonial lifestyle that they had was...

My father enjoyed being a part of society and what he was able to do there. And he was being paid American dollars even after the war. And it was a good place to be. His line was,

We hoped the Chinese would be more Chinese than communist, and that didn't work out. Yeah, no, we would have, I think, I'm certain I would have grown up in Shanghai if it hadn't been for all the changes that came. I found this to be one of the most interesting parts of the book because there are a lot of memoirs of foreigners living in China during the 1930s and into the 1940s, and they paint a very fascinating picture of China

China at war or China during the revolution, but there were not. And your parents in the book, they expressed this through your writing that they were one of the last to leave. In fact, your father's story closing up his law office is a cautionary tale to not be the guy who volunteers to turn out the lights because you don't want to be the last one left.

And I just wanted to know, I want to talk to you a little bit more about that, because I really found that to be interesting, a very interesting insight into what it was like to be one of the last foreign...

families in Shanghai at a time when the revolution is successful and the new government is picking up steam. And of course, your mother was at the time pregnant with your older brother. And so there was a little bit, there was also a little bit of that tension too. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that section of the book, because I found it utterly fascinating.

You know, it went from this could be a good decision because they're guaranteeing us first class passage to the United States to, oh my God, did we make a mistake? And, you know, it because I don't think they anticipated the danger. I haven't actively thought about this till you've asked, but I don't think they really anticipated it. And it obviously became extremely dangerous. You know, my father died.

The story of him throwing up when my mother came to get him out of the office, the whole thing of, you know, we have a system, you call the office, I don't pick up the phone, you go to the police station, you come with it. This was all true, you know, and him having, you know,

attacks of AFib and panic attacks. The letters saying, you know, oh my God, did I make a mistake? This is really what happened. What happened to the Chinese lawyer? What happened to Dr. Ai? I guess the naivete of when my dad said, I didn't think asking someone to translate the

documents that were in the public domain would be illegal. And this became a potential, they were going to charge him, you know, with some kind of espionage because documents that were readily available in the public domain, he was having them translated to send them back. And as you know, Judge Ullman, his boss, he was a pretty brash guy. He was like, you know, there are letters that say, Paul, how'd you let my books go? You know?

I want my books. Send them. And it's like, hey, we don't have much money here. You want me to save books? And you don't want me to cancel your newspaper subscriptions? Are you kidding? You know, the letters get, you know, kind of dicey.

I think what's sort of eerie is that the situation your father was in, being the representative of a company that owes money and that was not being allowed to leave, or being charged with espionage for translating documents or translating something, having something translated as public knowledge, actually, it still happens. There are still examples of this happening in the PRC, especially in the last few years under the new security laws. So it's a little bit

eerie that in some ways, some of the, well, it's obviously a very different time and a very different situation. Some of the dangers or some of the challenges that your parents faced are still real and present for those who are working in the PRC.

And I think that's probably why I won't be visiting anytime soon again, which I am really sad about because, you know, having visited in 2019 before everything went downhill, this really was very exciting to be able to see everything firsthand. And, you know, I've spent so much time learning about what a beautiful country it is and how much there is to see that. Your family made some donations to the museum in Shanghai, is that right? Yeah.

Before we came in 2019, my contact with the museum was their traveling exhibit was coming to... And if you could remind me, which museum is this? This is the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum. Their traveling exhibit was coming to my community in West Hartford, Connecticut. And when the organizers found out that...

I had a connection. They said, wouldn't that be cool to have a local people? And so they put me in touch with the museum and with the Confucius Institute at our local university, Central Connecticut State University.

And they were so excited. They were like, whoa. And I, you know, photographs and there's a panel now in the traveling exhibit where I don't know where it is today. But so they knew about me. They translated the information for the story. And then I told them I had another story. My father's brother-in-law came from Berlin and married my father's sister. And

The exhibit was next going to the Confucius Institute in Washington, D.C. So there are two family panels in the exhibit. And so before I arrived in 2019, there was somebody ready to meet me. And he was like, do you have anything? Can you? And so I brought two pieces of silver to wedding presents, which the funny part about that is that they received a lot of pieces of silver at the wedding in March 1950 and

One of the letters said, oh, everyone says silver is cheap. So, you know, that's why we got so much silver, because silver is cheap now. But anyway, there's still a lot of silver. I have chests full of silver. Two serving pieces are in the exhibit. They're labeled silver.

very strangely. They're labeled from the Lawanda family, which they're not. Eventually, they said, the picture that's in the book was the picture that the head of the museum sent me. And it was hard to explain to her that she's labeled this pretty strangely. I was curious about the parts where you have this dialogue between Kara, her granddaughter, and her. What is the basis of that? That's

like a sort of a...

What's the word? Another link to a yet another generation. And it's sort of an interesting device. It really happened. It really happened. So those are all based on actual conversations? I have the tape. I recorded the transcript, 21 pages, to give to Dan Ben-Kanan. So that was another resource for me. No, she came. My daughter is a communications major out of Northwestern in Syracuse. It was like, take that tape recorder and go talk to your grandmother.

And she did. And they had a fabulous relationship. Both my parents and my children had a fabulous relationship. So did you hear things from your mother that you wouldn't have heard if it wasn't her granddaughter versing with her?

I wouldn't say it as much because I had heard all the stories before for the most part. But the fun part for me was to see a young person's reaction. Like, where was that brooch? What do you mean? This, you know, brooch with all these diamonds in it, you know, where is it today? Who has it? You know, and no, Papa didn't go to the soccer game.

Are you kidding me? How could Papa go to the soccer game? He just had a baby. Well, you know, yeah, Papa went to the soccer game. That was the fun part for me. My daughter really hasn't read the books word for word yet because I don't know if it's hard emotionally, but some of the things that I wrote, she says, yeah, that's so Ama. They called her Ama, which the reason, you know, you know Ama as a Chinese nanny, but it was how my son was.

he was the first grandchild, said, Grandma, Alma, Alma. And she actually took that with pride. She was happy to be an Alma. There's probably some kind of linguistic scholarship that could be done on the way grandparents get named.

and the way certain names get perpetuated through families, I can only imagine. I wanted to talk a little bit, you mentioned Dan Ben-Kanin a couple of times. I wanted to ask you about your collaboration with him and the role that some of the archives, as you've mentioned in your acknowledgements, how did they help you to fill in some of the gaps in the family story? And if you could maybe introduce our listeners a little bit to the work that Dan Ben-Kanin's been doing in Harbin and in China.

Through Lillian Willans, I heard about Dan about 2016, 17.

And I communicated with him. He is married to a Chinese woman. I believe they met at a conference. She works for the government. And they married. And he's been in Harbin for many, many years now. And he discovered the history of the Jewish community. And he collaborated with the government to restore the old synagogue, what's called

the new synagogue and the Harbin Jewish School. The Harbin Jewish School now is a music conservatory. The new synagogue is a museum, and the old synagogue is a concert hall. And it looks exactly like a synagogue and a very authentic renovation. Actually, they've exposed one area and covered it with plexiglass to show how accurate the restoration has been. And he has made it his

life's work to contact people like me and to pick our brains. And he's written a book called Tombstone Histories, which are mostly letters of people who lived in the community. I don't know if you have heard of the book People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn. She's a local Judaic scholar here, and she happens to live in New Jersey. And she was the person who always got

contacted when there were awful acts of anti-Semitism, you know, killings in synagogues and stuff. She's written a book about how that people loved their Jews. And the second chapter of the book is called The Frozen Jews. And it's about Harbin, the entire chapter, and about why was this very remote, cold place a haven? And the answer is, is because it was better than other places.

I think the idea of statelessness is important, too, because, you know, we all remember the movie Casablanca. That was the place you would go if you didn't if you needed papers or you didn't have passports. Right. That's the premise of that movie. But the reality was much more so than Casablanca. It was places like Shanghai and Harbin, China, China.

Because of all the political instability was one of the few places in the world where if you didn't have a passport, if you were stateless, if you were a refugee, you could go at a time when many other countries around the world were either shutting their borders or not welcoming refugees, whether it's from Russia or from Central Europe. I didn't talk about the Brehm archives. I knew nothing about that until...

I was on a historic Shanghai book club meeting with Tina and Patrick. They said, do you know Katya Kaneshiye? And I said, no. And she is at a university in Italy. And she said, there is a file of the Bureau of Russian Emigres in Manchuria. And there's 11 pages about your grandfather. And it was like, holy moly. I mean, this is incredible.

And I have a, through the cousin that discovered us in 2017, I have a relative in St. Petersburg, Russia. And she is in academia and she accessed the archive and sent me copies in Russian and my Russian friends here translated. And what's interesting about that is my Russian friends are Soviet Jews who came to this country in early 1990s. They said this archive

What he said in his answers to these questions, he was applying for actually transit from Harbin to Shanghai at that time. This archive is mostly from 1939, was basically covering his tracks. He answered in the most...

clandestine way he could. He said he was a marnicus. He didn't want to ruffle anyone's feathers. It was minimalist answers covering his tracks, which I know now from my research, the Soviets came into Harbin as late as 1945 looking for deserters. So you could still get arrested by Russians, but they were in Shanghai by 1945. Even your parents, when they were traveling around Europe, because the Soviets were still...

In control of some area sectors in Austria. Mm-hmm.

where they were, and there was a fear that the Soviet authorities would not recognize your mother as anything other than a Soviet citizen simply because her parents were from Russia. So that Russian last name and the name, her last name, Frolov, or Frolov, is a Russian name. It is not a Jewish name, which we believe the family adopted the name through the Canton system where, you know, in the Russian Empire, every family

town had to provide 50 young recruits, boys as young as 12, for each canton. Very often it was Jewish boys who were poor, orphaned, kidnapped. There was a quota system that the town had to provide. And so that's where we think the Russian name was adopted. But if you look into the archive of

of Jews who served in the Soviet army in World War II. Every Frolov is a relative, according to my cousin. Yeah, that's why I follow up on that too. I kind of want to ask about this, but it's such a great part of the book. I don't want you to give away too much, but you've mentioned the cousin a few times. And I thought maybe, could you give our listeners a tease of the role that your cousin plays towards the end of this story?

Two years after my mother's death, my brother, who's a lawyer, gets a phone call from a man with a very heavy Russian accent saying, I am your mother's first cousin. And I live in...

in the town of Farmington, which is the town I lived in in Connecticut. And I've lived there for 34 years. And my brother is like totally blown away. So I meet the man a couple of weeks later. And, you know, we have no documentation. You know, it all sounds good, right? He says, and then he comes to my house and I have all these photographs. And he says, my uncle, my aunt, my aunt, my uncle, my grandfather, my father on my dining room table.

There were seven siblings left behind. Some, and as my mother knew, some were babies. It's an amazing way to fill, at the end of this long story, to kind of fill in a bit of the mystery. That's the part of the book that really hits me the hardest. While I'm

A lot of my readers have talked about my mother's journey and the strength of my mother and her bravery. And it was like she was such a low-key, unassuming individual that, and she was my mom. So that is like the easy part for me.

the part about my grandfather and if the fact that how did this my cousin George find us was he said well if he had come to America he would have changed Avram to Abraham and Frolov would become Frolov so he googles that name and the very first thing it was my mother's obituary two years earlier and she goes he goes you know reads the obituary survived by son Abraham Hoffman or

It says daughter of Abraham and Fania Frolov. So he says this has got to be. And it was. A passage struck me in the book. Papa, I guess you'd call him, your grandfather, became animated when talking about, you know, returning to Israel, saying, you know...

This is why we are Zionists. Palestine, they're starting to build the kibbutzim and moshavim and the desert is blooming and we should go there. Then, of course, fate turned out in a different way. And America was the, I guess, the obvious sort of haven.

But what was that transition like for all your family? How did you adapt to U.S. life? And were there some uncomfortable realities there facing you as well, given that it was the 1950s and it was the McCarthy era? Well, once my parents got here, it was pretty much they came with a one-year-old. I was born the following year.

My dad went to work. My dad went to, my memories are living in a two-bedroom apartment and dad going to law school. You know, that be quiet, daddy's studying, be quiet, daddy's studying. And a lot of weekends, contact with the Austrian family. And the decision not to go to Israel turned out was probably for the best, at least in the short term, because life

Life in Israel was extremely hard after it became a state. You know, the stories of my grandmother getting pulled off the bus because they thought she was hiding a chicken under her coat, you know, because food was so scarce and living. And then my grandmother came from Israel. Well, there was family who stayed in Israel on my mother's side. Some of my mother's family went to California.

But in terms of having a good life, those who came to America, it happened more quickly. I mean, by the time my grandmother joined us when I was six years old, we had a co-op apartment with three bedrooms.

And I shared my bedroom with my grandmother for four years. And then she moved out with my uncle. My uncle came from Israel the following year. He was trained in the IDF as an airplane mechanic. He worked for Pan American Airlines. And so life in my father's career, as you know, was phenomenal.

He just, you know, what he learned in China working for Almond Copson Lee was so valuable and propelled him forward until he became trademark counsel for General Electric. And he had a fantastic

A fabulous career and economically life improved. We are a true American success story in terms of if you look at where the family is, where the grandchildren are today. Everyone has a beautiful house with property and kids doing whatever they want in terms of music lessons and sports and everything. We are it.

One last question, Jean. The subtitle of your book is My 96 Seasons in China. That's a very specific number. What does that refer to in your mother's story? Well, my mother was just 24 when she left China. I have to say the hardest thing for both books was choosing a title. I mean, that took the longest. It almost took longer than writing the book. So it

both cases to find an approach and I wanted to make it made in China because that was my mother's joke like we would go into restaurants and she'd say to the waitress waitress I

I think I'm more Chinese than you are. And then she'd say, well, I was born in China. But my friends thought it was politically incorrect to say made in China. And it's funny because this week, Graham released a book called Made in China. And so, you know, and if you look at the events that happened in 24 years, it clearly was much more than most people experience in a lifetime. So that's where it came from.

that they've multiplied 24 by the seasons and got 96. Yeah, preach about the choosing the title. It's one of the hardest things. I've given talks where you spend like all this time on the content and then the first three questions like, why did you choose that title? I'm like, um...

I don't know. I just needed something to put on the form. Jean, thank you so much for joining us again. The book, which is out from Earnshaw Press, is Shalama, My 96 Seasons in China. And are you working on something right now as well? Yes, I am. And this is, you know, for someone who has fallen into writing totally by accident.

If I hadn't met Lillian Willans, if COVID hadn't happened, I probably would not have been doing what I'm doing. So in my research, Laura Kuduri has become a fascination with me. As I'm sure you know, she was known as the most independent woman in Shanghai, the wife of Ellie Kuduri. And I've started and I'm researching, which is the...

You know, all about the Anglo-Portuguese Jews and the wealth that was in that family and the connections to all the famous, you know, the Rothschilds and the Montefiores. And they built synagogues and schools in India and London. So that's my rabbit hole right now. That's great. We look forward to seeing the book. We look forward to having you back on the podcast. Thank you very much for taking time from joining us from Connecticut. David. No, not Connecticut.

Pennsylvania now. Pennsylvania. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were still in Connecticut. No, five years now. Yardley, PA. Yardley, PA. Okay. Keep warm there. I understand there's a little bit of a storm coming. 23 degrees this morning. David, and what is it in Bangkok right now, David? I may go swimming after this, if that gives you any hint. Yeah. Winter in Bangkok. You only need to change your shirt three times a day as opposed to five times a day. David, thank you once again for staying up late and joining us.

Thank you again, everyone, for listening. Join us again on another episode of Barbarians at the Gate. I can't even say the name of our own podcast. I think it's appropriately time now, as they say in these parts, to cue the drums. Thank you all, everyone.